Sofia Nelson is a public defender in Detroit. They are also transgender. They became close friends with JD Vance when they entered law school together in 2010 and kept in touch with him and followed his career and even attended his wedding. They say that while Vance was always conservative, he used to be thoughtful and compassionate and respectful of other people’s views and they were shocked by the dark turn that he took when ran for the US senate in Ohio in 2022, when he adopted Trump’s cruel and dismissive tone when talking about people, and that ended their friendship. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Nelson gave more details about how Vance changed around the time he was considering running for the Ohio senate in 2018.
There was no path forward for him as a never-Trumper. He essentially turned his back on his values and reconstituted himself, not only changing his position on every imaginable issue, but also his tone. The decency, the thoughtfulness and the desire to understand disappeared, and now he mimics Donald Trump with this cruelty and name calling.
I think that is well captured in the “cat lady” controversy. … That was just never present in him. I mean, he was sarcastic and contemptuous of some elitism, for sure, as am I. But he never exhibited the kind of cruelty that he exhibits now in his public persona. That really changed when he decided to reconstitute himself as a MAGA Republican. So it wasn’t just his position on LGBTQ+ issues or immigration or police brutality that’s completely changed — I mean, this is a man who was incredibly sympathetic and understanding about the overpolicing and the brutality of policing against Black Americans, and that’s reflected in our email exchanges. … Every conceivable issue he’s changed his position on, but he’s also changed the way he talks about people.
…In April of 2021, when his Twitter started being quite anti-trans, I reached out to him and that was our last substantive conversation. I did reach out when he announced when it came to light that Peter Thiel had given him $15 million and we had a brief exchange. I find Peter Thiel to be a terrifying figure … and that’s who’s bankrolling JD’s rise.
…I don’t wish JD or his wife any ill. I have a lot of fond memories of the man that I knew for over a decade. But he’s now advancing a political agenda that’s trying to strip me, and the people that I love and have built community with, of our civil rights, and I felt a duty to speak out as a result. Once you try to take power and control over other people’s bodies is where I draw the line as far as friendship is concerned.
…What I think is key, and why I released those emails, is two reasons. One, we all evolve our thinking on certain issues with new information. But to change your position, to flipflop on every conceivable issue, whether it be Donald Trump or LGBTQ+ rights … shows a lack of core values or a willingness to turn your back on core values to advance your career and amass money. I think that hypocrisy is deeply concerning, and the American people have a right to know where he used to stand on the issues compared to where he stands today so they can evaluate for themselves whether he’s trustworthy.
Nelson has released communications that Vance had with them from 2014 through 2017 to show the change and talked about this in an NPR interview.
Vance is known these days for being a far-right politician. He’s expressed his opposition to marriage equality. He’s opposed abortion, including in cases of rape and incest. He’s aimed to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. All of that is in stark contrast to the JD Vance who Sofia Nelson knew for more than a decade – JD Vance, the friend who was at Nelson’s bedside with homemade baked goods after they went through a gender-transition-related surgery, the friend who called Donald Trump a racist and a, quote, “morally reprehensible human being.”
…“The JD that I knew, while we did disagree on many political issues, it’s not that – he’s certainly always been a conservative. He spoke about people different from him with kindness and respect. And now he uses derision and name-calling. And that is something that he adopted when he decided to run for Senate in 2022, so it was a rather sudden and truly heartbreaking, for me, change.
“I miss the person that was thoughtful, that really took time to try to understand issues. I remember, when he made the cat ladies comment – I followed his career – and this dismissiveness of people without children as if they are not full citizens is just mean-spirited. And that’s not the person that I believed JD would be, and it’s sad to see him turn his back on those values in order to advance his political career.”
You can see a CNN interview that Nelson gave to CNN where the host reads out some of the emails that Vance wrote to them, and Nelson tries to understand what made Vance become such a hateful and weird Trump acolyte.
People changing their political ideology as they age is not at all unusual. My views have changed over time too. What is unusual is for someone, after they have become an adult and barring some traumatic, life-changing event, to change so drastically their basic values which are usually formed early in life and is reflected in the way they treat others. If someone is mean and cruel towards others, they were usually that way as children and adolescents. If they are kind and generous, that was likely how they were brought up. When someone changes as dramatically as Vance seems to have done, it shows that they were always a hollow person, lacking a solid moral core, and merely adopting the values and behavior of those around them in order to gain acceptance. So when Vance was in Yale law school, he behaved in a way that made him acceptable to his peer group there, but when he ran for the US senate and needed the support of the MAGA crowd, he changed accordingly. Nelson’s description of Vance as a ‘chameleon’ seems very apropos, in his case changing his attitudes and values on in order to accumulate political power and wealth.
Is it any wonder that he is so disliked?
Vance’s net negative favorability rating was a major topic of discussion during a Tuesday night CNN roundtable. According to this week’s ABC News/IPSOS polling, Donald Trump’s running mate is polling at a staggeringly low minus 15 points.
…“It’s the worst vice presidential pick of my lifetime,” said CNN’s Harry Enten. Last week, coming out of the Republican National Convention, Vance had a negative six-point favorability rating that has more than doubled this week. According to the Enten, the senator is the first vice presidential candidate to average a net negative favorability rating.
…During the CNN segment, former South Carolina state Representative Bakari Sellers called Vance “the Sarah Palin of Dan Quayles.” But as Enten pointed out last week, both former vice presidential picks began with positive favorability ratings: Quayle with 15 points and Palin with 26 points.
…Vance also won’t be saved by his home state or by the Rust Belt, where last week he polled even worse at minus 16 points, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, with 44 percent of people saying they have an unfavorable view of the senator.
Possible Harris vice-presidential pick Josh Shapiro was asked about Vance’s charge that the way Shapiro speaks is a really bad impression of Barack Obama and he hit back hard, making pretty much the same point I made above about how Vance is inauthentic and lacks any core beliefs. I really dislike Shapiro’s policy on Israel but I have to hand it to him: he looks like he would be a formidable debater and campaigner. The vice-presidential nominee is often assigned to be an attack dog, allowing the presidential nominee to take the high road and talk more about policy. Shapiro looks like he would relish that role.
Reporter: Vance compared you to a really bad impression of Obama
Shapiro: Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so that’s kind of a weird insult. I’ll say this about JD Vance: it’s really hard being honest with the American people when you’re not being… pic.twitter.com/0UY8T7KGJw
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 2, 2024
Yes, a lot of discussion about this.
Another take:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/08/jd-vance-trump-devil-soul-faust-book.html
Closing paragraph:
Wow, this resonates with me so much. I have been ASTONISHED to see even former FtB bloggers, and also commenters who STILL TO THIS DAY comment here, go from being rational, sensible people to embracing utterly unhinged bigotry with no basis in reality and just revelling in it.
So you ask yourself: was this a previously sane person who suddenly transformed into a bigoted idiot? Or were they always a bigoted idiot but but pretending not to be to fit in?
And ultimately you have to accept the latter. There’s just no explanation for a person who has a moral conscience suddenly “unlearning” it. It has to be they were always a bigot -- just good at pretending not to be.
There are people to this day I can’t understand what happened to them. I’m thinking particularly of course about the insane transphobia we’re living through at the moment. It’s the unhinged moral panic of the day.
It’s just so unarguably morally correct that the tiny minority who are trans are worthy of the same rights, respect, dignity and recognition as anyone else -- and yet we have the insane situation where an Algerian boxer at the olympics is being vilified in the press, and she’s NOT EVEN TRANS.
This is how unhinged the moral panic has become. And it’s amazing to me the number of seemingly rational people who have happily abandoned all reason and joined in -- including commenters right here I know I don’t need to name.
A moral panic is a hell of a drug.
The why is easy -- political gain.
A lot of people have noticed that Vance has flip flopped on every issue.
Most likely he doesn’t believe anything or care about anything.
Except gaining more power and money for himself.
Politics is just a means to an end and a good one at that.
There are a lot of words that describe Vance.
Opportunist is one of them.
He is being well paid to be a pet Senator, who will have any opinion his tech-bro venture capitalist owners tell him to have. Gee, I wonder why Americans hate him?
I wonder if Thiel can actually rely on Vance to continue as his minion if he gets to the Oval Office (which must be a very real possibility if Trump wins, or “wins” and is installed by SCOTUS). There can after all only be one autocrat, and it is by no means unknown in history for the puppet to turn on the puppeteer.
J. D. Vance showing us how he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, which just happen to be on his fascist jackboots.
I did a bit of reading about Usha Vance, the wife of John Don Vance. Not at all surprising that they are both Yale lawyers, which are currently working to trash Democracy.
.
Huh, what an interesting coincidence that she has personally clerked for two hateful bigots that lack any sort of ethical values.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2024/07/15/usha-chilukuri-vance-j-d-vances-wife-vice-president-donald-trump-republicanfuture-second-lady-meet/74414719007/
The Ugly is strong on this one.
@2 Silentbob:
Brain damage can do that sort of thing to a person. Conditions that cause internal brain damage usually do more general memory loss, emotional disturbance and attention problems but narrow effects are possible. Strokes are known to sometimes reduce peoples sense of empathy.
A pretty damning thing about Vance is, he has not been stronger in condemning the idiots who have “issues” with his wife’s ethnicity.
I guess his version of family values do not extend to the wife…
.
Also, after getting out of Appalachia he seems to perpetuate the negative stereotype of its inhabitants, if the summaries of his book are to be believed.
Lie with the dogs, get up with fleas.
Okay, I’m not defending Vance and his views, but this once again suggests to me one of my pet theories which says that people’s personalities are not entirely internal.
I’m not going to claim I have good evidence for this thought; only years of observation of my own behavior and others, readings in behavioral psychology, reading case histories of addiction and recovery, and studying the nature of consciousness. None of this proves that I am right, but I think the idea is worth considering.
My idea is that while the feeling we have of consciousness and self are contained within our heads, three inches behind our eyes as the saying goes, our personality is defined as much as by outside influences as inner ones. Anyone who has had non-intersecting groups of friends might find that one group of friends would describe them differently than the other. A single person may engage in separate hobbies, say board gaming and mountain biking. If asked , the board gaming group might say that the person is intelligent, deliberate, thinks prior to each move, etc., in those situations they are perceived as a studious and detail-oriented person. But that same person may be described by their mountain biking group as reckless and fearless. There is no real dichotomy here, the same person exhibits different traits under different environmental circumstances.
In a related psychological study a few years ago a series of blind dates were set up. The same person had dates with a number of different people. The study, however, was looking at how a person can be primed to expect certain behaviors from their date. While the same person, call them A, went on a number of blind dates, the people who were meeting them were primed in different ways. In some cases the person going to meet person A for the first time was told they were introverted (not specifically, but by giving examples of A’s introverted personality). In other cases the person meeting person A on a blind date was primed to expect more extroverted behavior, like an enthusiasm for contact sports. Clearly, almost all people can have both introverted behaviors and extroverted behaviors, but the people in the study were primed to focus on one of them for person A. The result of the study wasn’t all the surprising in that it confirmed what most of us knew all along. When a person was primed to meet an introvert the conversations they started explored introverted behavior, and when at the end of the date they were interviewed about their experience, they described person A in terms which suggested person A was an introvert. The people who were primed to think person A was an extrovert, conversely, raised topics of conversation which they thought an extrovert would find interesting and reported at the post-date interview that person A was an extrovert.
Well, you can read a lot into that study, and I don’t know that it really reveals anything about priming, human personality, or even expectations for blind dates. But, in my opinion, it adds some strength to my opinion that a person’s personality is not entirely contained within their skull.
The classical argument is that different facets of the person’s internal personality are brought to the fore in different situations. I’m not certain that is true. I think it is also possible that the situation generates the personality displayed, and both external and internal influences are involved. it’s not that different facets of an internal personality is revealed under different situations, but that the situation itself is part of the personality. We regularly read newspaper stories (well, internet click-bait these days) of some person doing something idiotic. The common refrain is that, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
So let’s take that at face value. When Pamala Kreimeyer was killed because people thought that filling a steel umbrella stand with gunpower for a gender reveal party would be a fun, sparkling, firework, they thought it would be a good idea, not a pipe bomb. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Please note; this is exactly equivalent to the intention parodied by the phrase, “Hold my beer”.
If we take the idea that sometimes the stupidest things (in retrospect) seem like a good idea at the time, where does that leave us? It leaves us with the idea that we are all idiots sometimes. So why is a nominally rational person an idiot sometimes? Do we just forget how to think? Are there parts of our brains which simply shut down at times (I think yes, but that topic is for a different time)? Or, are we not always the intelligent, rational, cautious, people we think we are?
I think we have all noticed that a chance meeting with someone from work in another setting can be disconcerting, “Why Eric, I knew you worked on scheduled tests, but I didn’t know you were interested in ballroom dancing.” Meeting someone outside of the workplace environment often reveals parts of their personalities they don’t exhibit at the workplace. That can be interesting, weird, or alarming (So… you think Jeffery Dahmer had the right idea, eh? And what are you going to do with that knife?) Usually I find those differences very interesting, and it is not uncommon that the person reveals a slightly different personality than they do at work (Are those Hello Kitty socks part of your normal non-work attire?). The point is that people are different depending on their surroundings. My prolix writing style here in an internet comment section is quite a bit different than my usual taciturnity when meeting someone face to face. My personality is different.
It’s a hard thing to swallow, the idea while you may have the continuity of memories stretching back many years, that you may not only exhibit different behaviors with different groups of people, you may also, literally, have a different personality with different groups of people. You may be a different person, even a dramatically different person, depending on the environment you find yourself in. That is, frankly, rather scary. But it lines up with our experiences with out co-workers, acquaintances, friends, family, and even ourselves if we are willing to admit it.
So, what’s up with Vance? Ten years ago he was, according to an old class-mate, more forgiving, accepting, and open. There are a number of options. He could be an opportunist, saying anything necessary to gain power. He could have seriously considered the issues and between his religion and personal predilections, decided to dramatically change his opinions on many issues.
He also could have immersed himself in a culture which he thought would help give him power without having to change his opinions/personality, but found that the environment he was in provided arguments (which he thought were strong) which re-enforced the cultural bias of his surrounding environment. If a person only associates with people who firmly believe that a zygote is a person, and they provides arguments to prove this, regardless of how rational those arguments are that person will start to accept that position. In Vance’s case he took it to the logical conclusion, that a zygote should be protected at all costs. I don’t fault Vance for reaching that conclusion. It is an incorrect one, but based on the premises he is working with, it is a rational one. (Why is it incorrect? Would you call an acorn an oak tree? Reason through that conundrum and you’ll see why a zygote isn’t a person.)
I’m not saying Vance isn’t an odious person with malicious views. Nor am I saying that the changes in Vance which resulted in those views are not Vance’s responsibility. What I am saying is that we have less control over our opinions, ideas, and personality than we think. Vance probably doesn’t think he has changed much, he doesn’t appear to be a very reflective person. The articles in the Detroit News probably did give him some pain, but also would be seen as special pleading and not relevant to him today. Has Vance changed in the last ten years? Yes. We all have. It is unfortunate that Vance appears to have changed in the direction of authoritarianism rather than toward acceptance and trust.
Once again, a wall-o-text. I have no expectations that anyone will read this screed, and those who do will probably not agree with it. Mea culpa.
flex, you do make some good points, but I still reckon it’s basically political ambition; he follows the path that is working well, and did since that speech in 2021 that brought him to Tucker Carlson’s attention.
And he could still well be. To his personal friends and to his family.
People are complicated.
I for one read everything everyone posts (generally, I sometimes miss the odd thing).
I reckon Mano also appreciates thoughtful comments such as yours.
flex@12: Fascinating, and dovetails with my own thinking on the topic of “personal identity”.
As for Vance, perhaps this is apropos:
P.S. Something is really borked with comment submission today. When I tried to send this it kept saying “Error” and “Required fields missing: name, email”. There were no name or email fields on the comment form. I hit back and tried again; even closed and control-shift-T’d the tab back and tried again. Then I closed the tab and made a whole new one and navigated all the way back here and somehow doing so logged me out, so I also had to bloody log back in again. If you’re reading this, then that finally worked. If not, well, I don’t know what else to try …
@13, John Morales,
Sure. That is certainly a factor. But if it’s the only reason for the positions Vance takes, it isn’t enough. A person who’s sole goal is political ambition tends to be very careful to pick viewpoints which appeal to the most people, some of Vance’s positions seem extreme to other republicans. Now, cynically, Vance could be espousing those views simply to gain attention. And attention, name recognition, goes a long ways in politics toward being elected.
So, either Vance is exceedingly cynical and only espouses the idea, for example, that trans-genderism doesn’t exist, in order to gain headlines and votes. Or Vance actually believes, at least in some circumstances, what he is saying. Both can certainly be contributors to his statements, but we have some evidence in the OP that a decade ago he accepted and acknowledged that trans-people not only existed but that Vance was friends with one. Can his current rhetoric be explained as just pandering to votes, or is there a change in personality? I certainly don’t know, but when someone tells me they believe something I tend to accept their statements. What could cause a change in personality?
We are not privy to Vance’s inner thoughts, so it’s possible that he did change his opinions in only a few years. It’s also possible that personality, as we know it, is not quite as static as our sense of self would like us to believe. That the personality of a person isn’t solely driven by an inner self, but is strongly influenced by a person’s surroundings. This doesn’t make Vance’s views any less abhorrent to me, it’s simply that Vance is a very good example of the fluidity of personality. This is why cognitive behavioral therapy works, the environment the person operating in changes. This is why the psychologists say the best time to break a bad habit or start a good one is to do it at the same time you move to a new residence. This is why one of the keys to stopping addiction, any addiction, is to remove a person from the environment which enabled it. This is why one of the most successful ways to eradicate homelessness is to give people homes; that may sound like a tautology, but giving people a place to live really does (generally) change their behavior. This is why a parent who only gets their information from FoxNews has a shift in personality to the point where they can no longer speak with their children.
Understanding that these shifts in personality can be created by a person’s environment can help a person be more aware of their environment. It can help a person improve their relationship with others. And, as we are self-programming machines, it can help us improve ourselves.
For the record, I am not saying that the inner self has no influence on personality, only that the external environment has a greater impact on our personality than we generally give it credit. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why internet conversations tend to be more argumentative than face-to-face conversations. The only part of the environment each person shares is the screen, the rest of every person’s surrounding environment was chosen by them and might help to reinforce their personal views. That suggests a possible study question: Are people who read/respond to social media from a coffee shop or other public venue more or less argumentative than people who always respond from their residence?
Absolutely. Vance might even be willing to pay for abortions for family. It may be hypocritical, but we are all hypocrites sometimes. We absolutely agree that,
@flex:
A tamping rod through the eye will do it.
Likely anything that causes brain damage in a certain pattern. The most likely such to afflict a Republican male, given their a) typical educational attainment in relevant subject matter and b) proclivities, is probably syphils, with taking a significant blow to the head perhaps a close second. Did Vance ever play football?
As for the construction of personality, I expect we “contain multitudes”, each of them a person with a pattern of beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes suited to particular circumstances, all of them sharing a common underlying cognitive infrastructure and set of episodic memories but with different degrees of activation and deactivation of these … like looking at the same landscape from distant vantages, with a tree looming large in one view but being small and far and a watering hole much closer in another view, etc.
This fits with other evolved systems: have a bunch of diverse thingys that can try to solve the puzzle of the moment, from different personality-variations of a person down to cells that can differentiate into lots of different types with different abilities, depending on patterns of gene (in)activation and influenced by context, up to populations and whole species with internal genetic diversity. Being a monoculture is extremely hazardous if anything unexpected changes or some bug or predator figures out your pattern and stunlocks you like an easy-to-cheese video game boss.
So, we contain multitudes. DID is not a freakish occurrence, it’s just an extreme endpoint of a spectrum and everyone has it to some (normally subclinical) extent. Not having it even to the “normal”, nonpathological extent, would itself be pathological (and probably present as an autistic savant, or some similar one-note-symphony or one-trick-pony sort of tendency; in particular, profoundly disabled).
Furthermore, we evolve inside ourselves. These personality-variants undergo variation and selection, iteratively, and it is how you develop a “persona” who is strongly skilled at a task. If you quit doing that task forever one day, that part of you dies … goes to sleep and never wakes up again, unless it surfaces on occasion while you are sleeping, if you dream of doing that task. And “task” here doesn’t just mean “job or hobby” … anything you do, including “relating to person X” or “going out clubbing or to a party” or even “vegging in front of the TV” also generates its own persona in you.
They also inform one another, since they have access to each others’ memories and declarative knowledge. That also evolves them — lateral meme transfer! — and all this evolving will change you over time. Whoever you were ten years ago is dead. Whoever is reading this will be dead ten years from now, even if there’s someone alive who remembers being them. We all die a little, and are reborn a little, each day, and the only way to stop dying is to die fully, all at once, once and for all.
The same goes for every living system, person, tree, species, ecosystem, city, civilization. If it’s resilient and adaptable and able to learn from experience, it has this internal diversity and iterations of variation and selection, and if it has those, it is in a constant state of self-renovation. It can’t be preserved exactly as it was at some fixed moment in time without killing it, like pressing a butterfly in a book. This is one of the gravest errors the fascists, and many conservatives, make, thinking you or your city or country can be both alive and unchanging. Preserved things are dead things.
This also points to the folly of copyrights and other so-called “intellectual property” that forbids (or erects a tollbooth to) building on or making variations of a work. The works so “protected” are culturally dead. They can’t be updated, reinterpreted, tweaked, adapted, etc. to stay relevant or whatever. They are so many museum pieces collecting dust, and the only thing actually protected is a business monopoly somewhere. (But without it how do artists get paid? Artists don’t get paid by copyright and never have. They have always mostly been unpaid — amateurs — and the pros have had wealthy patrons, whether that patron was William of Orange or Warner Music. Artist pay is a labor issue, and when rank and file artists get paid well it’s because they unionized, like Hollywood actors and writers both did, not because of copyright.)
Living, organic things are resilient. Anything preserved in fixative is brittle and won’t make it through a big enough upheaval or a bad enough downturn.
In the case of Vance, I think we can put aside the idea of brain injuries; whether from football, infection, or the comedy classic of a cast-iron pan to the head from a jealous wife for cause, because with all the attention this has gotten I suspect someone would have mentioned it by now.
As for your conception of the nature of personality, I’ll have to consider it. I see nothing wrong with it at first glance, although historically copyright has been beneficial to some artists, more writers and composers prior to the rise o today’s media conglomerates. By default I’ll assume you probably already know this and are speaking more of the present day than when copyrights were harder to establish and creators who did live on their work needed protection (Writers and composers primarily. Painters didn’t need protection until photography came along and it was easy to copy images. But when rapid printing and bindery occurred, there was a rise of unauthorized printings of novels and music which did impact the incomes of individual creators.)
But back to personality. On first consideration I do not know where the Venn diagrams of our two thoughts overlap. There is certainly overlap, but it is possible that my thought is entire subsumed within your circle. Or that there are facets of my thought which are not included in my understanding of your concept.
I do not disagree with the concept that we contain many personalities. There are two ways to take that concept, either that these personalities are distinct, or overlap. From the way you describe your conception of them, I’ll assume you mean they are overlapping, which is my conception as well. My mental image of how the personalities adjust may be different than yours however. I picture several thousand action loops within the brain, modules which perform primitive functions. I do not have a clearer definition of these functions and I don’t think it’s necessary. These functions are integrated, or not integrated, into the larger process which we call consciousness. These functions also determine personality. In my view, at large part of the mechanism which triggers these functions to be integrated is the external environment. I would not assume all of them are, some functions may be developed/created by other functions, or multiple functions may combine for a specific task. And, of course, which modules/functions are integrated in a personality does change over time. Evolving inside ourselves, as you say. I’m not going to assert that my mental model accurately reflects how brain functions actually operate. It’s close to my understanding of neural activity, but I only a dilettante in neuroscience. In other words, I acknowledge that my mental model is probably wrong.
In any event, I believe I understand your concept. It smells like it has it’s origin from contemplation of modern evolutionary theory and population variation statistics. Yet, I’ll need to consider it, and the implications. I appreciate having this idea to contemplate. Thanks.
Well, topic has moved, so… why not.
I do disagree; and you aren’t exhausting the universe of possibility.
For example, if our functional ‘personality’ is constructed moment by moment but ephemeral, there is not some enumerable set of personae, but rather a set of memories, of proclivities, of goals, of instincts, of past history that is tapped as appropriate. That would still fit the stated conjecture.
(And, of course, our brains are swimming in a bath of hormones and chemicals and whatnot; they are not simple state-machines)
I would add that we are indubitably entangled with our outside environment, as anything that evolves and adapts to an environment necessarily must be. And certainly humans, in particular, explicitly store some of their “state” externally (e.g., in a diary). Entanglement with other people you have a relationship to, especially, is important. Bereavement, and even the seeming perception of ghosts, could have something to do with these entanglements: cognitive/emotional “phantom limb syndrome”. Part of you is lost with them, and part of them lives on in you.
As for copyright, I don’t think it was ever the right tool for the “helping artists get an income” job. Signed originals and tours were always available as a naturally-scarce sellable, whereas artificial scarcity is exclusionary by its nature and therefore at best always suspect, however noble the motive. I am reminded of what a certain road allegedly is paved with.
I’m not sure how better to serve the needs of artists who don’t have a commercial outlet (and a union to protect them from that outlet). The usual suggestions have been crowdfunding, state patronage perhaps based on popularity or some other measure of merit, or a universal basic income, which would let people whose best ways of contributing to society are difficult to monetize (or, at least, difficult to monetize in non-exclusionary ways) focus on that without starving and in a way that didn’t require a state bureaucracy and/or a popularity contest pick winners and losers.
I’m wondering if we ought to go further and actually fork the money system in two. The existing money would be “luxuries money”: you’d generally have to work to get it, and you could buy almost anything with it. Then there’d be a “social money” that everyone received in a constant stream (think “pass go, collect two hundred”), which could be spent on all basic necessities, including staple foods, utilities, housing, and (public) transportation. There’d be a large pool of social housing that could be rented with social money but was not for rent or sale with “regular” money, as well as stores with basic essential items. Utility companies would be required to provide basic household service for social money. The providers of goods and services for social money would either be state agencies or private businesses given the ability to return used social money to the government for “real” money, at some periodically-renegotiated exchange rate. Prices in social money would be highly regulated.
In effect, this would create an almost “soviet” economy existing in parallel with the “normal” (capitalist) economy, and which would provide a floor you couldn’t fall below in terms of access to the essentials, in an attempt to get the best of both systems while avoiding their failings (abject poverty under capitalism, “can’t make a refrigerator anyone would want” under communism). The “soviet” component would also likely operate on a local (municipal) scale, with coordination with higher levels of government, but the social money being local (maybe interconvertible at a bank or exchange). There’d be a bunch of transfer payments and machinery behind the scenes to make that work, but it would also prop up local economies from being completely hollowed out, given that working for service providers that took social money would still get you wages in “real” money that could be spent on luxuries: nicer stuff, vacations and travel, luxury food items … The subdivision into local areas of management of this system would be needed to avoid the scaling problems attendant centralized planned economies.
One can also think of the “social money” as a vast expansion of EBT: first, everyone’s eligible on a uniform basis (with parents getting their kids’ allowances, but expected to spend it on their kids’ needs, and on the shared ones of housing, utilities, and transportation) and second it covers every basic necessity: if it’s housing, found in a typical grocery store and not a non-staple food, residential utility including internet, public transit or taxi, or a government service like renewals and permits for individual noncommercial use, it would be available for social money. One could live a somewhat no-frills existence on only social money, and an artist with a small and unpredictable income stream of “real money” would be able to use that entirely for art supplies, related matters, and improving their standard of living above that baseline. No exclusionary artificial scarcity required.
People with disabilities or chronic medical needs would need to be able to get their needs met at no extra cost, so this “social money” scheme (or a plain basic income scheme if used instead) would still need to be combined with universal health/drug/dental/K-12-education and certain aspects of disability assistance programs (e.g., wheelchairs or other special devices or accommodations, and perhaps special transportation alternatives; these last would remain “needs-tested” to get them at state expense). Social security/retirement funds would shrink in importance to providing a luxury-income stream to replace that from work, rather than having to cover basic needs too. Private schooling would require “real money”, but postsecondary schooling might be provided for social money at some institutions, along with vocational training.
For the above scheme to work, though, it is vitally important that the social housing, and certain set-aside quotas of food staples (and their precursors in the supply chain) and some other necessities (and likewise), be partitioned off from the regular market, so that people with large amounts of “regular” money could not bid up their prices to unaffordability or buy them out of the social pool entirely. This would require regulation of prices and an especial focus on enforcing antitrust in certain supply chains (but this seems wise anyway, as these are the supply chains that are most critical to national security, food and fuel in particular: letting any single actor have the capacity to hold them hostage is as bad as having an undefended piece of your border).
It would also require the social housing supply not be for sale for “normal” money at any price, to insulate it from real estate and rental shocks. (The land it sat on would have to be municipal or otherwise government land, taken by use of eminent domain if need by, like the land for roads and other critical infrastructure: no private landlord collecting a rent from the government for its use, and no taxes owed on it.) Renting social housing would be limited to a certain amount of square feet per person (families, or groups of people in general, could get nx that amount if they consisted of n people, for a higher monthly rental). But the rent would never go up and you could only ever be evicted for cause, for sufficiently egregious damage or disruption, or the use of the premises to commit serious crime. Small scale commercial use (home office, art studio, small scale mail order) would be allowed but operating a walk-in storefront or other more substantial business use would require renting normal business premises for normal money.
The internet provided for social money would likewise allow a decent bandwidth for personal use (similar to existing consumer fiber and cable offerings) and allow standing up lowish traffic servers or web sites (if self-hosted on your own hardware) but large enough traffic volumes would necessitate renting commercial services for real money or the traffic throttling on the home connection (and likely the capacity of consumer hardware) would lead to slow and balky service. That internet service also could not be terminated except for cause, mainly overtly criminal misuse (wire fraud, spamming, intentionally spreading malware, etc). Indeed these “terminations for cause” would mostly be matters that would typically lead to arrest and trial anyway, so might be rendered moot, also in the housing case aside from noise or hygiene issues that were sufficiently serious.
Um, topic drift is dramatic.
I have sympathy for your speculations, BB, but of course the actual goal would be a post-scarcity society.
Utopian, but certainly conceivable.
cf. Banks’ Culture.
@19, As John wrote, the topic shift is a little jolting, but no worries.
It is clear that you’ve given a good deal of thought about a two-currency economic system. Unfortunately, I think there is a pretty major flaw in the idea. There will be a desire by people to exchange those currencies. Making a currency exchange of that nature illegal won’t stop it, that will just mean doing so would be illegal, but it would still happen because there will be a desire for it to happen.
One of George Orwell’s insights, paraphrased, is that people will forgo necessities in order to occasionally have luxuries. I have to paraphrase it because when I’ve gone back looking for the exact quote I’ve been unable to find it. People who are not earning enough luxury money (which is the term I will use for what you call “regular” money) will want to spend their social money to purchase luxury money in order to buy goods/services which they couldn’t spend social money on. We see this today in welfare distributions, and Orwell noted the same phenomenon in the 1930’s in England. let me be very clear, THIS IS NOT WRONG!
A large number of moralists, both liberal and conservative, deplore the fact that people will spend money given to them in charity, or through government largesse, on things like alcohol and cigarettes rather than bread and milk. A great deal of effort has been made over the centuries by moralists to find ways to stop people from doing that, from providing food directly (which is promptly sold at a lower price by the recipient in order to get their luxuries), to requiring attendance in specific locations in order to eat meals (food is smuggled out and sold), to lectures, assisted shopping, all sorts of tricks are tried. Including giving them nothing because the poor are not teachable and will only waste it. What these moralists are missing are that people are people, once a moralist decides that the people need to change rather than the system, the moralist loses all moral authority.
Now, I’m not suggesting you are doing this, but I am suggesting that your two-currency system would founder on this rock. People will find a way, legally or illegally, to trade social currency for luxury currency in order to enjoy an occasional luxury and be willing to forgo necessities to do so. Any method employed to suppress this activity will only further encourage illegal profiteering.
I could, at this point, go into a long aside about the nature of currency; as a method of measuring/transferring value, but also as a limited-resource, speculative, good. With undoubtedly insightful comments on the origin of currency; both the capitalist and Marxist versions, and how they are both right (“insightful” may be an overly optimistic statement). As well as observations on the reason why crypto-currencies aren’t, but could be, and how they are effectively a return to the obsolete “gold” standard, which has been rejected as insufficiently fluid for modern economies. I will refrain this time, out of respect for our host, and to avoid giving Mr. Morales further topic whiplash.
As an alternative to your suggestion, I would simply propose the UBI plus a review of all desired goods and services within our society to determine which would be better served by being socialized and which would be better served by partial socialized (subsidies and regulations) and which can be allowed to be fully managed by capitalism. Imagine a graph with the x-axis being social needs/goods/services and socialization percentage on the y-axis.
At the far left part of the x-axis there are things like medical care, justice, education. These should be entirely funded by the government and free to all. At the other end of the x-axis are things like jewelry, boats, and churches. Those should be entirely funded by individuals, and receive no government assistance. There are a lot of things in between, which can (and often are) partially socialized. Lodging; even today, with Section 8 housing or rent-control, it is partially socialized, i.e. the government has a stake in helping everyone to have a roof over their heads. This can be expanded, but that requires a social change to be willing to expand those programs or create others. I would argue that roads and utilities (power, water, sewer, trash collection, and internet) should all be on the far left side of the graph. Things like food should be highly regulated for safety and the staples subsidized enough so that the UBI can covers basic needs. Municipalities could own non-subsidized items, for the recreational needs for the residents.
I don’t see much need for two currencies in order to eradicate poverty and ensure everyone has the opportunity to have food, shelter, education, justice, utilities, and medical care. We need to socialize those areas of the economy that everyone in society uses, subsidize/regulate those areas which people need but includes both basic and luxury versions, and regulate capitalism to promote as close to a free market as possible. Free markets in the economic sense can only exist under regulation, it is in the nature of capitalism to destroy free markets.
A couple more thoughts. A post-scarcity society is not really possible. First, a true post-scarcity society means that there is effectively an infinite supply of goods/services. That is, all demand is met, whatever good/service is desired is available as soon as someone asks for it. Some goods simply do not work like that. Land, for instance. If I want to live in London, there has to be space for me to live in London. There is a limited amount of space in London, which means there is scarcity of space in London. That good, living space in London, would not be available for everyone as soon as they desire it.
Another good which is limited, and thus scarce, are historical artifacts. The unauthorized ACE edition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is scare. There is never going to be another printing. Similarly, a violin used by Sarasate, or a whistle used by Knute Rockne, are scare items and all desired by someone.
Other goods which are limited, and thus scarce, are innovative, new, goods. These can be deliberately designed to be scare (limited editions), or intended to be ubiquitous in the future but scarce at the present time. A lot of fashion depends on early adopters promoting a scarce item to drive demand, but when that style is finally available at the chain stores, it is no longer in considered the height of fashion.
Now desire for scarce goods/services means they are valued, and if you have value you need a method to measure that value, which is one of the reason currency exists. The closer we get to a post-scarcity world, the more goods/services will have zero value and cost nothing, but there will always be scarcity in some goods/services and thus a need for currency to measure it and sell/purchase it. Roddenberry was inspired by Galbraith’s writings in the 1950’s and as much as I admire Galbraith, I think he was incorrect on this detail.
Addictive substances. Figuring out how to solve substance abuse was outside the scope of my previous comment; it will take some different, orthogonal approach to deal with that problem (though universal healthcare provides an obvious delivery vehicle for that help).
That much is certainly true. A pragmatist must necessarily look for a way to make the system meet the needs of the people, not the other way around. (The other way around is also a common error in utopian thinking. Name one proposed or attempted utopia that didn’t suffer from taking a “one size fits all” approach. Attempted communist ones have tended to treat everyone as interchangeable labor units with uniform desires and needs, and every attempt at instantiating Galt’s Gulch has tried to make a society of all-entrepreneurs: who sweeps the floors or hammers in the nails or inserts tabs A into slots B on some assembly line or even just tots up the accounting ledgers? The venture capital cancer presently eating Silicon Valley alive is the latest such failure. The “all con artists” variations fail even more spectacularly: all con artists and no marks is like all wolves and no sheep: not a basis for a thriving ecosystem.)
This is true, and is a massive problem with any system that makes people choose between getting either social currency or luxury currency, which includes pretty much all means-tested welfare programs (and, inexplicably, even disability pensions in many places). I am proposing the social currency be a right of all residents, regardless of luxury-currency income. So if you use your social currency on essentials, work a shift here and there for a bit of spending cash, and use that on occasional luxury items, you won’t be kicked off benefits or have some of the social currency clawed back because you got some paid work.
I expect most people will prefer mowing a lawn for a supplemental $20 to selling $100 worth of their social currency for $20, especially if the latter also incurs legal risks and/or interactions with shady, possibly dangerous people in some dubious alley or park after dark.
Basically, I’m hoping such a scheme would keep the black market exchanges down to a manageably minor scale, not eliminate them entirely.
A simple guaranteed basic income obviates that issue entirely, but brings in the problem that for some things (especially housing) either it’s vulnerable to bidding wars by rich speculators (and repeatedly jacking up the basic income to compensate is then inflationary) or else you need additional means-tested programs. In particular means-tested social housing, which always has two giant problems: one, it will be undersupplied, with ridiculous waiting lists and often onerous extra conditions imposed on the tenants (up to and including invasive drug testing and even inspections — privacy made a privilege you must pay for instead of a right!) and two, it will bring back the employment-discouragement problem because if you get a job you have to move house! Ack!
Oh, he’s a big boy. He can take it. 🙂
I know a fair bit about currency, including its roles as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. I actually have an arguably-kooky theory that all those McMansions are actually huge, funny-looking coins, like the giant stone coins some ancient cultures made. During the pre-2008 boom, houses were heavily used as a store of value and a medium of exchange by speculators and their ilk — which meant some of them were, in effect, funny-looking money. Add in the phenomenon of “bad money drives out good”, where if a currency also has use-value, the pool being exchanged comes to be dominated by debased coins (e.g. silver coins more valuable as silver than as coins of their face value get melted down and turned into forks and spoons, while 80%-lead-alloy coins of the same face value remain in circulation as coins), and Bob’s your uncle. Houses built for use as funny-looking coins rather than for living in will have the large square footage needed to “justify” their face value, with the shoddiest materials and construction that the builder can get away with and still close the sale. It’s weird, but it explains everything you will find at McMansion Hell, which otherwise fnord is very hard to explain without Ia! Ia! resorting fnord to even more outlandish hypotheses ph’nglui mglw’nafh, such as the Illuminati, or things even stranger and, frankly, fnord beyond human comprehension Cthulhu fhtagn!
(Admittedly, many of the, erm, “structures” featured at McMansion Hell would likely fit right in along a residential cul-de-sac in R’lyeh. So, I wouldn’t wholly discount the alternative hypothesis that their builders and inhabitants might be from there…)
That might work, but real estate, especially, at least residential real estate, would have to be quite tightly regulated to avoid price gouging, concentrated ownership, or foreign speculator ownership, with the ever-present danger of regulatory capture.
But it might be that the only way, in the long run, to avoid private power eventually corroding and corrupting the system might be a full-on socialism of some sort that eliminates the very existence of private power, while somehow also limiting public power and yet still delivering everything that will be asked of public power. Tall order. Maybe with enough decentralization and strong participatory mechanisms (plebiscites, recalls, etc.) to give the public a check on state power. The centralized Soviet model is eminently corruptible in its own ways, as was demonstrated rapidly by every state that has ever tried it.
It might be that a full solution requires addressing the underlying problem of boom-bust cycles. That means limiting reproduction to replacement rates (setting a quota on births and immigration combined to balance deaths and emigration) and getting much better at recycling, plus energy self-sufficiency, for any state that tries it. Otherwise one gets an eventual resource crunch, the wealthy convert some of their money into power that they use to make sure poorer people have to tighten their belts first, and you get soaring inequality and increasingly bitter politics — it’s no coincidence that Reagan came to power and the US started to slide downhill with wage stagnation, union busting, and uglifying politics right after the energy crisis. A quick look at history shows that, at least among nominally-democratic states, it almost doesn’t matter what political system is used: presidential, parliamentary, proportional voting, ranked choice, first past the post, you name the variation. When times are good everyone finds a way to make the system work to deliver broad prosperity to, at least, the white, male part of the population, and there’s general upward mobility within any fixed group with respect to the non-class part of the hierarchy of privileges, plus there is growing support for eroding those other privileges. When times get lean, the wealthy find ways to throw sand in the gears of some public functions and to outright corrupt others to “pull the ladders up” and end upward mobility, and then those of precarious class status (especially lower middle class) who are privileged on other axes turn against any further erosion of their non-class privileges, leading to the rise of the far right.
Any “New New Deal”, even if it’s a huge improvement over FDR’s original, will still likely be susceptible to this, unless the underlying trigger (lean times) can be avoided outright, and that means keeping the per-capita resource base constant. That, in turn, appears to require capping “capita” as well as making a floor to “resource base”, and the former implies birth/immigration constraints (a combined quota) and the latter good recycling and (renewable!) energy self-sufficiency.
If you don’t constrain population maximum, yes. Also if you’re bad at recycling or rely overly upon nonrenewable energy.
Population can only safely grow when there’s a new frontier. Which given the current state of space technology won’t likely be any time soon.
We already have ways to socialize time-share enjoyment of such objects; they’re called “museums”. 🙂
Limited edition things and fashion faddy things are luxuries; I say leave those to market forces, within whatever constraints prove necessary in the long term regarding energy and recycling sustainability. If a limited edition thing or faddy thing becomes culturally significant enough, the state can buy a few instances and sock them away in museums as well, and perhaps should do so with any significant thing liable to someday go “out of print”.
Are you sure? Star Trek‘s Federation seemed to be post-scarcity — people didn’t apparently pay for basic necessities and such, and both Kirk (IV) and Picard (VIII) alluded to money no longer being used on Earth — but there were things like “credits” and “gold-pressed latinum” being used as currency for exotic items and luxuries, particularly at the fringes of civilization. Remember Cyrano Jones haggling over the price of a tribble? 🙂
[I don’t mind rambling discussions; but then I do think topicality is a virtue]
Still.
re: “I actually have an arguably-kooky theory that all those McMansions are actually huge, funny-looking coins, like the giant stone coins some ancient cultures made.”
Here in Oz, for the longest time,there’s been negative gearing for property.
Basically, whatever expenses you incur in maintaining it are tax-deductible.
(That includes the interest on the loan — that’s effectively an expense, right?)
Anyway. Not as simple as you try to make it.
Yes, products which are linked with addiction, but there are also people who use these substances for pleasure who are not addicted. If you would like me to replace these examples with substances which are not currently deemed addictive, then cheap romance novels and potato chips.
The point is not that people with addictions will ruin themselves over their addictions, but that people will seek those things which give them pleasure. Even if it means denying themselves things which other people would call necessities. You might say that is irrational, or those things should then be classified as addictive for that person. As soon as you do that, however, you are making a claim that there is something wrong with the person. Something about that person which should be changed to meet your conception of what a person should be.
Don’t get me wrong, addiction is a terrible thing and should be treated as a medical problem. But where a person crosses from being a person gaining pleasure from an activity to a person allowing that activity to interfere with other aspects of their life (e.g. job performance, personal relationships, etc.), is not a clear-cut line. There are a lot of people who have a couple drinks a night, and might even be willing to trade social currency for luxury currency in order to get those two drinks, and who are not alcoholics. But these two drinks do not impact their job, their relationships, or their health. Dismissing these people as addicts suggests there is something wrong with these people which should be changed.
As an aside, there was an interesting profile in the New Yorker a few years ago about a man who shoots up heroin every Friday night. He worked in the financial sector, and was apparently well liked and good at his job. But every Friday, to unwind for the weekend, he spent a few hours zoned out on heroin. There was no evidence that he was an addict, he apparently didn’t crave his hit, he claimed that he could have walked away from it at any time, but he enjoyed it and didn’t see a reason to stop. Yes, he was breaking the law. He knew that. If he was caught he would lose his well-paid job and be sent to jail. But he still did it, because it gave him pleasure.
If luxuries are only available by spending luxury currency, and a person only has social currency, that person will find a way to exchange social currency for luxury currency.
That is another interesting topic, with a large number of facets. First, let’s assume this is true, people would be willing to mow someone’s lawn for $20 luxury money. Who’s lawn is he mowing? It has to be someone with both luxury money and someone willing to give away that luxury money. There are going to be a limited number of those people.
Imagine you live in this society, and you like your luxuries, so you work hard and you have your state-provided social currency, and your earned luxury currency. Someone comes to the door and offers to mow your lawn. Since you are using your luxury currency to pay for the things you like, the house with a lawn, the better food, etc., you are likely to have an excess of social currency, and a desire to retain as much of your luxury currency as possible. So you tell the person who wants to mow your lawn, “I’ll give you $100 of social currency.” The job seeker says’, “No, I will only work for luxury currency.” So what do you do? You wait for the next person to approach the house. Because the next person who offers to mow your lawn, knowing that he can exchange $100 of social currency for $20 of luxury currency takes the social currency. You are happy, because you found a use for the extra social currency which you didn’t need, and the person mowing the lawn was happy because they will eventually get $20 luxury currency. The person who is unhappy is the person who would only do the odd job for luxury currency.
On to the second facet. There was a time, in the USA’s peak of prosperity, where a person could walk into a place and get a menial job they only expected to hold for a few shifts. Those days are gone. But they are worth reflecting on. In the late 1940’s the USA economy was booming, the post-war recession had ended, jobs were plentiful, and people who wanted better jobs could find them easily. This is the time when Jack Kerouac went On the Road.
Kerouac describes pulling into various towns with his friends, hungry, out of gas, and tired. They then find a friend, or a friend of a friend, who lives in the area to flop at, and then going to diners to work as a busboys or dishwashers for a few days or a week or two to get enough food and gas money to move on. An idyllic life with no worries about the future or baggage from the past.
Now, let’s take a look at that from the point of view of the owner of the diner. A guy comes in and says he’ll take the dishwashing job. Great! For the next couple days the workload is lighter, the owner doesn’t have to wash dishes themselves. Every night the owner hands the guy $40, and everyone is happy. Until the guy moves on and the owner has to put the help-wanted sign back into the window, wash dishes themselves, or keep the kids home from school to wash the dishes.
But can this happen today? No. These days the owner will hire high school students who live in the area. The students are working to save for college, and while they hate the job it’s their only hope to save enough for the first year. They are dedicated, because they know that if they perform too poorly there is another student waiting to take over their job. Tips are shared among the staff, but paychecks are deposited directly into a banking account and every year the kids get their W-2.
Part of the reason Kerouac could get short-time jobs was because the country was so wealthy, i.e. there was less scarcity than there is today. Education was cheap, every high-school student could attend college if they wanted, or go to a trade school if they preferred working in a skilled-trade. A degree was not required for most jobs, so people right out of high school could choose a moderately well-paying job. (At least if you were a white male, white women and people of color still had problems finding good work. However, a strong case can be made that the increase in wealth among the black communities in the 1950’s had a huge influence on the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Rights movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Economic power leads to social change, and both groups gained economic power in the 1950’s.)
I know. Both examples above do not describe the society that you imagine would develop. The future I imagine which would develop with a two-tier currency system, one social currency provided by the state, and one luxury currency earned through capitalist institutions, is not one of equality. The same incentives for corruption would be present, possibly even stronger. Luxury currency would be valued more than social currency, and those who managed to gain a lot of luxury currency would soon find ways to both protect it and grow it without effort.
One of the things we have not touched on is that there is an upper limit to currency. Even in today’s fractional currency banking system there is a limit to how many dollars are out there. This is one reason why fortunes in finance are always suspect, blown up like the story of the Toad and the Ox, because the very act of transferring those fortunes into currency or real property deflates them tremendously. Monte Cristo once remarks to Baron Danglar that every financiers’ fortune is 4-5 times smaller than the notes they hold suggest. If Musk tried to cash out of the stock market, as soon as it became known he was doing so the value of his stocks (and the money he could realize on them) would drop. But aside from the vagaries of the stock market, currency itself has an upper limit. It has to. Infinite currency available would result in infinite inflation. In fact one of the most powerful tools of the Federal Reserve isn’t setting interest rates, but setting the reserve requirements. This is how the Federal Reserve can manage the amount of currency available in the USA. I’m not particularly happy that since 2020 the Fed has kept the reserve rate at 0%, because that puts the power to set currency levels into the hands of the banks not the feds. Which means that if the banks want to, they could issue infinite currency. They won’t, it would destroy them too, but it’s a little scary that the fed has trusted the banks as much as they have.
Regardless, with your two-tier currency system there would also be two limits to the amount of currency available. The social currency would be, frankly, simple to calculate. It’s the allowance level times the number of people getting the allowance, or if there are difference in the costs of living in different regions (note: this is scarcity popping it’s head up again), the sum of all the distributions. The limit of luxury currency would, almost certainly, lead to unequal distributions of that currency. When the distributions become disparate enough we get the situation we have today where a really wealthy person can, without any effort, see their currency increase on it’s own. Without other measures, like progressive taxation (which is extortion from the wealthy to pay for a system to allow them to keep the rest of their wealth), the luxury currency would simply accumulate into larger and large piles controlled by the oligarchs. As an aside, one SF author suggested that currency should be made of fissile material so that if too much of an accumulation occurred, the entire mass would explode. A fun idea, but the collateral damage might be disheartening. I, for one, like my planet.
Actually, that problem has been solved. There is no will to implement the solution, but it’s really fairly simple.
The boom-bust cycle is driven by capitalism’s short-sightedness. From a starting point currency flows into the market, growing it at a rate larger than the level of currency flowing in as discussed above. This happens because people who are investing later in the market see the growth before they jumped in, and are willing to pay even more than the current level of currency in the market to put their own money in. This happens until there are no more investors, then people start realizing that with no more investors there will be no more growth, so they pull out. Which deflates the market and a lot of people who thought they were onto a good thing when they invested at the peak have now lost a lot of money. That money which would have been flowing in the economy is then lost and things go bust.
How do you fix it? By using a non-capitalist actor which as the ability to add/remove currency from the economy. That is, the state. To balance out the boom-bust cycle, the state needs to add currency during the bust cycles, which prevents the economy from tanking. We do that, and it works very well. The trick is, that in order to maintain a stable economy the government needs to remove currency from the economy during a boom cycle. That is, when the economy is booming, taxes need to rise. There is no political will for that to happen. But doing this would dampen the boom-bust cycle. What we have now is a boom with the current level of currency, then when a bust happens more currency is injected into the system. This results in inflation, and the injected currency makes it’s way to the oligarchs who get richer. We don’t crash all that often, but we experience other evils.
It may be even less of a coincidence that all these things occurred after Reagan dropped the top marginal personal income tax rate from the mid-70% range to the mid-30% range. All of a sudden private individuals with power could adjust their remuneration to a level where they could accumulate enough wealth to rig the system to start accumulating more. Which included campaigns to demonize unions, raid pension funds, retain earning for executives, etc. Under the 90% top marginal income tax bracket, from the late 1930’s to the late 1960’s the USA saw the greatest economic expansion ever. I believe the 90% top marginal rate had a large impact on this. Corporate executives had a choice, give a lot of their profits to the government, or invest those profits in their business. They usually chose the latter. So corporations raised their employee’s salaries, stopped suppressing the unions and met union demands, paid for employee health care for not only the employee but for their families, invested in research and development, all to avoid giving Uncle Sam 90% of their paycheck. And since they paid people more, and spread the money around, the government got a lot of that money anyway, so the government could invest in large projects like the interstate highway system. That all stopped when the top marginal income tax rate dropped to the mid-30% under Reagan and ‘trickle-down’ economics.
By the way, for your consideration, I have a theory that a large part of the inflation in the 1970’s was not caused by the oil embargos, but by the relaxation of banking laws by Nixon to allow banks more discretion in issuing credit cards. I haven’t really seen it discussed, but while inflation can be caused by price shocks, it can also be caused by a large influx of money into the economic system. Credit cards are, in effect, the ability to spend today money you expect to earn tomorrow. Which, effectively caused a large influx of money into the USA economy in the early 1970’s. Classical economic principles would predict that doing this would cause inflation. I haven’t really researched this, so it’s simply an idea at this time, but I find the idea intriguing.
I’m going to stop now, even though I haven’t even touched on McMansions, or as I like to think of them, tacky offerings to Mammon.
Most of that seems to be either a) agreeing with me, but from a different angle or b) covered by the part where I pointed out that long term sustainability requires material and energy self-sufficiency and ZPG.
I’m not really certain how we get there. There is a great article on another blog about how to get the self-sufficiency part, but the ZPG part is going to be tricky. Right now there seem to be two different situations in that regard, in different parts of the world.
a) Where women have near-equal legal rights, and in particular can live and thrive independently of men rather than having legally mandated male chaperones for, at least, big-ticket financial decisions like homebuying, the birth rate tends to plunge to way below replacement rates. Net immigration is then needed just to prop up the labor force and avoid a geriopocalypse. Which means countries with reactionary immigration laws but progressive gender laws, such as Japan, are heading into trouble.
b) Everywhere else, women tend to be made into baby factories and the population doubles every couple of decades, leading to a very crowded, very poor country. China was one until recently, and India. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is still in this state.
Obviously we don’t want either a geriopocalypse or the Malthusian catastrophe. The norm for most of history was Malthusian catastrophe, at least once and wherever misogyny became widespread. The ideal would seem to be full equality for women and a general respect for individual autonomy and agency. But the data suggests that should this be achieved worldwide the population would start to collapse soon after. I am not really sure how to deal with this.
It may be that there are added complicating factors. For one thing, capitalism. The countries with near gender parity are also all capitalist, with varying levels of social safety net. Everyone is incentivized to get a job, compete, and build a career of some kind, and for women doing that tends to require delaying or foregoing childbirth, so if women have that option, they take it. It’s possible that a gender-egalitarian society without this emphasis on careerism and competition would have higher birthrates, and if that put them near replacement rates that would solve the problem. Slightly above and you institute a birth lottery which most entrants can expect to win; slightly below and you pay people near the bottom of the income distribution to become parents to incentivize a small increase. (Both require state intervention, as does getting rid of capitalism’s inherent emphasis on careerism and competition.)
Another possibility is that radical life extension is around the corner, despite the dubious politics and rationality of its main proponents, the TESCREAL crowd. In that event, replacement rate might drop down to around the birth rate you get in a careerist-competitive society where women have life trajectory autonomy. That would also solve the problem.
I am not worried about a population collapse, the world could operate just fine with 1/10th, or even 1/100th of the people we have right now.
There would be dramatic changes in society, but that’s happened before. I tend to think a population reduction would probably be a fairly good thing, and achieving it through reduced birth rate has far less of an impact than it occurring through other mechanisms, war as an example. A reduced birth rate would be the easiest way to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe, where the human species runs out of resources and collapses because of it. For what it’s worth, I do not think that patriarchy is responsible for Malthusian societal collapses historically, There is no reason to suppose that matriarchy would avoid a Malthusian collapse. Giving women control over their own pregnancies does tend to reduce the population growth rate (as well as acknowledges them as equal human beings), but I don’t know if result would track over all conditions of society. I see no reason to suppose a society couldn’t exist where childbirth results in few complications, child-rearing is seen as a profession, and no financial penalty occurs due to children, and where women may choose to have 3-4 children as a matter of course. It would be a different society than our own, but I don’t see why it couldn’t exist.
Japan’s trouble is a cultural one, and at some point they will have to acknowledge that and relax their immigration laws. You mention above that part of being alive is changing. A culture which does not change is not alive. I was at the Alhambra last year and it struck me that the Alhambra is a tomb for a dead culture. I’ve considered writing a novel set in late thirteenth century Granada, and in preparation for that I’ve read what I can find about that culture. And by extension medieval Arabic culture, medieval Berber culture, and medieval Catholic culture. I’ve enjoyed myself immensely and have a couple shelves of books devoted to this little project. Some of them quite hard to find. But when visiting Grenada, I realized how little we really know about the culture which existed during the late Nasrid dynasty. Washington Irving just made stuff up, but a lot of future writers followed Irving’s lead. Contemporary sources are limited, because the Spanish burned the documents in Granada so we are left with records which managed to make their way to Egypt or Arabia. A lot of those records have been edited to conform with the changes in Muslim teachings over the centuries. We have scraps of knowledge about the culture of the city of Grenada during the late Nasrid rule, no more. A lot of what is told as gospel to tourists is guesswork. Educated guesswork by historians steeped in that knowledge, but guesswork just the same. My point is that a culture which was vibrant only five centuries ago is dead and gone. I am all for recording cultures, because the variety of human experience is wide and fascinating (at least to other humans). But preserving them, unchanging, over centuries? Well, that just can’t be done. A culture which refuses to change is dead, even if there are some people who practice that culture alive.
I know a lot of people would read the above and say, “That’s not true, look at the culture of the (insert culture here), before Western civilization reached them they had the same culture for hundreds of generations.” That’s just not true. While I’ve only studied the late Nasrid culture in any depth, when you take a more than cursory notice of history you find that every culture changes every generation. The change may not be great, but they are not static. I was taught in school that the Chinese culture was unchanging for thousands of years. When I finally got around to reading Chinese history I learned how wrong that claim was. It’s difficult to get good information about African history, but what I’ve been able to find also points to continuous change as opposed to a static society. We are even taught that Western culture may have started with the Greeks, but skipped over the medieval times. I was taught that for eight centuries nothing really happened other than the three-crop rotation system and the horse-collar (I am being a bit facetious, but that’s generally what people might remember). And yet, digging into actual medieval European history reveals a myriad of events, changes, adoptions and adjustments to the multiple cultures in Europe at that time. At least some cultural change happened every generation.
Which leads to your second point, the dangers of gerontocracy. I see this as a larger issue, and it will get worse as lifespans increase. If, as I postulated above, every generation makes changes to their culture to conform to the changes in the environment they grew up in, then the previous generations are going to resist it. The more generations which are alive at one time, the greater the difference between the oldest generation and the youngest generation. Further, power accumulates over time, so the oldest generation which are active, functional members of society tend to have the most power. We see this today in our USA governments. To a lot of government officials, the period they would like to replicate is the 1950’s, when the USA was a booming economy and apparently culturally stable. Leaving aside the fact that the culture was fermenting like a beer vat, that was four generations ago. The issues, the problems, the concerns these people are expected to resolve are very different than what they expect, or even what can be done to direct society back to those times. In fact, it would be impossible to get back to those times and most people would hate them anyway. None of these people are evil, they are just unable to grasp that our culture has changed since then, and the problems facing today’s world are not the same (although just as scary) as they were seventy years ago.
There has always been cultural change as older generations die off and newer generations take the reins of power. But as active life-span increases, that may become more and more difficult. Eventually violent change becomes an option if non-violent transfers of power do not occur.
Studiers of Norse culture and mythology have a very similar problem: the Christians burned a lot of heretical pagan books, and one of the main sources on Viking shit, Snorri Sturluson, apparently just made stuff up — including an entire one of the Nine Realms, as he replaced Nidavelir with Svartalfheimr, I guess to balance the angelic elves with demonic counterparts or something. (Marvel then featured both of them, Svartalfheimr in Thor: The Dark World and Nidavelir in Avengers: Infinity War. And yes, they are completely distinct locations. Which means there are ten realms in the MCU. Despite which Thor and other Asgardians in the MCU make repeated references to “the Nine Realms” … the head acheth. (Okay, there are two realms we definitely don’t see, Alfheimr and Niflheimr, and two more we maybe see briefly, Muspellheimr (Surtr’s domain at the start of Thor: Ragnarok might be there) and Helheimr (perhaps the dark region on the other side of the portal Hela steps out of not long afterward in the same film). So perhaps they dropped one of those quietly from the list.)
On gerontocracy: perhaps there should be an upper age limit to voting. Although, that runs into its own problems, if it means a “kill all the old people” measure could pass with insufficient opposition. Of course we already have had a “kill all the old poor people” measure, when the old rich people forced premature reopening of economies during COVID and nursing homes across the world were decimated by unchecked spread of the virus.
Of course, one could just jump right there, with some Logan’s Run or Half a Life type of deal … nah, bad idea.
Which leaves repurposing the bicameral legislature. People have questioned the need for a senate; I have the answer. We permit citizens (or even residents) aged 18 to 55 to vote in lower chamber and, where applicable, presidential elections; over-55s who pass a cognitive test (something basic that rules out dementia, like the one Trump bragged about passing) are eligible to vote for senators. The senate acts here as a veto chamber, with a 2/3 supermajority needed to block legislation passed by the lower house. Essentially the inverse of the current US senate, where you de facto need a 2/3 supermajority to bloody pass anything. The senate would also appoint various advisory positions to the executive, whether that be a president or a prime minister type of deal. The officials elected by the young would thus have old, experienced advisors, whether they themselves might be or not. (Whither the judiciary? Let the lower chamber appoint trial judges, while appelate judges up to and including the supremes get appointed 1/3 by the lower chamber, 1/3 by the upper, and 1/3 by the executive where separate, on each separate panel of three or nine judges (so, each panel has 1/3 of the “seats” appointed upon vacancy by a particular chamber); or else in a parliamentary system just split such panels 5-4 or otherwise such that the lower chamber appoints one more of its seats than the upper. Or, what about letting the bar, which already has to deal with ethics matters, appoint a portion, or at least hold a veto? While also giving it impeachment powers, explicitly including for ethics violations. With the bar expected to be a nonpartisan body, as it is now most places. Let them oust the likes of Thomas and Alito, explicitly citing their improper relationships with Harlan Crow, and dare anyone to call that a partisan decision.)
Another option: I’m not really sure there’s any way to run elections without them being easily corruptible. Campaigns need money to reach potential voters. Publicly funding them has been suggested, but the funding is then controlled by civil servants who, at least in theory, report to partisan elected ones. What if the incumbent party tells them to put a thumb on the scale against the opposition heading into a reelection campaign, with a strong hint that anyone who doesn’t toe the line gets moved to the front of the layoff queue?
So, maybe we should ensure a truly representative legislature. Pick representatives by lottery, with a lower House of Labor selected from the ranks of working Joes in the various districts, and a senate selected from the ranks of the disabled, retirees, and other chronically unemployed adults (including anyone who’s theoretically “working” but has assets such that they make more from capital gains than any salary). This gets rid of the biggest source of corruption (it’s pretty easy to make sure a lottery is fair and transparent) and, simultaneously, ensures labor interests will always be well represented (one whole chamber!) while the old and the wealthy continue to have representation as well. Those selected get paid a decent, white collar income for their term and must be preferenced for rehiring at their old jobs over other applicants once that term ends. To avoid selecting for people who crave power, it’s compulsory, like jury duty. It also exempts you from military conscription, if applicable, for your term.
That results in a lawmaking chamber full of non-lawyers, obviously, but once again advisors to the rescue. The advisors would be subject to an ethics rule that they should advise only about ways and means, and exact implementation language, without trying to sway legislators’ goals, or subtly undermine those goals when advising on wording of the bills. The people’s representatives are to tell the advisors what the people want done, and the advisors are to accept their choice and give them the best possible honest assistance in actually getting it done, within the strictures of the Constitution of course. Advising against a goal should only be done if said goal simply cannot be achieved within those bounds (e.g., “re-enslave half the population”) or else it would be a foreign policy disaster and likely lead to crippling the economy or even to war (e.g., “block all imports from China, they’re stealing our jobs!” or “Energy shortage? What energy shortage? Let’s just invade Iraq and take their oil.”).
Put another way, the same ethics rules that presently apply to lawyers representing a client (and in particular drafting a contract on behalf of a client) would apply to lawyers advising a legislator (and in particular drafting a bill on behalf of a legislator). The legal profession already has all of the necessary social, technical, and educational machinery in place to deal with this scenario, so it should be an easy fit.
Bekenstein Bound @28
Nothing about Marvels version of Norse Mythology is accurate, starting with the facts that Thor and Loki aren’t brothers, and Hel is Loki’s daughter. She has always ruled the land of the dead, which is located down and north. I don’t care about remixed mythos, but I do hate the horned helmets and Marvels version of Hel. She looks like the Evil Queen in Disneys Snow White.
Snorri was a Christian who was trying to preserve the tradition of Skaldic poetry. He did try to systematize what was mostly an oral tradition, but nobody else in the Icelandic sources tries to explain much about Ygdrasil and how it connects the realms of humans with the realms of gods, dwarves, elves, or Jotun. You just needed to know what all the kennings referred to.
[OT]
BTW, it’s “Granada”.
(Not Grenada)