For Certain Values of Great

Posted on Sunday 19 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

From Facebook, a few days ago. The science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson attempts to summarize the current condition in a single sentence.

Facebook, Robert Charles Wilson, 11 Jan 2025: via David Gerrold.

The concentration of wealth is driving novel communication technologies that are creating a tsunami of misinformation that enables the emergence of far-right political entities that further protect and capture wealth by gutting democratic governance and suppressing knowledge about climate and environmental emergencies through the devaluation of education and science at a time when artificial intelligence begins to transform the nature of war and competition for resources risks armed conflict between nuclear-armed nations no longer constrained by a liberal ideology of cooperation and human rights.

Inequality and oligarchs, check. Misinformation, check. Suppressing knowledge about climate change, check. AI, check. …

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NY Times, Opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 15 Jan 2025: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is

When was America great? What does MAGA want to go back to? Trump never says exactly.

And yet Trump does have a sense of when America was great. You can see it in the substance of his second-term agenda. What does he want to do with another four years? Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.

And

Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was far smaller and less prosperous than our own.

And so Trump is obsessed now with President William McKinley, who occupied the White House from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. The Guilded Age, when the rich got richer.

Indeed, as a billionaire himself, Trump has every reason to look back to the late 19th century as a golden age, a time when wealth was an even more direct path to political power than it is now. A time when the American political system sputtered and struggled under the weight of endemic corruption. When with enough cash on hand, a railroad magnate or a steel baron could buy a set of politicians for himself, to do with as he pleased. It was a time when public power was too weak and limited in scope to stand as an effective counterweight to private fortunes, and where the laboring classes were under the heel of powerful corporations, whose allies in government were often ready and willing to use force to stifle discontent.

(As my discussion of Lakoff suggested: reducing the power of the government gives the wealthy opportunities to become more wealthy.)

And so:

If what Trump idolizes is some part of the 19th century, then to “make America great again” is to make the United States a poorer, more isolated place, whose economy and government is little more than an engine of upward redistribution for a handful of the wealthiest people on the planet.

In fairness to the incoming president, there is no reason to think that he has any of these precedents in his head. What he has, instead, is a deeply rooted sense that the world is a fundamentally zero-sum place and that American greatness means that others must be diminished. His zero-sum, social Darwinistic intuitions are echoes of an earlier age of reactionary aggression and shameless avarice. There is no such thing for Trump as a positive exchange or a mutually beneficial relationship. There is only winning and losing, the dominant and the dominated.

I’ve said this before too: conservatives view life as a zero-sum game, while the arc of history has been advancement for all via non-zero-sum games. Trump is the epitome of tribal mentality. And apparently many many people are sympathetic to his worldview.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Politics | Comments Off on For Certain Values of Great

Immigration, Economic Growth, and the Limits of the Planet

Posted on Saturday 18 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • NYT has ideas about regulating immigration, given the assumption that America needs more people;
  • Paul Krugman looks at economic growth (and Scott Bessent);
  • But neither of them addresses the impact of continued economic growth, or expansion of the population, on the Earth’s biosphere and the survival of the human race.

I find this piece interesting, but for reasons different than a concern about the immigration crisis.

NY Times, Opinion by The Editorial Board, 10 Jan 2025: A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess

The problem is immigration, the board says, and the inability to regulate it. (But the real problem is something else, I would say.)

There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year.

Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.

In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

I have two or three reactions. First, this concern about a shrinking population is also part of the right-wing’s panic machine. You hear this especially from Musk. Have more babies! And in other countries: Japan, mentioned above, and China, which repealed its one-child policy meant to control overpopulation. Second, this is a legitimate problem, in some sense, as some argue, for reasons like the unsustainability of keeping the older population alive with a shrinking base of younger people to pay social security taxes, or occupy the jobs needed to take care of those olders.

But third, taking the bigger picture, humanity cannot simply keep expanding its population indefinitely, without further ruining Earth’s ecosphere and exacerbating climate change, which is a far bigger problem than putting a strain on public services.

I’ll summarize the pieces recommended “three big shifts in federal policy” to solve current concerns.

1. Prevent illegal immigration;
2. Expand legal immigration;
3. Deal humanely with the illegal immigrants already here, including the “Dreamers.”

Versions of this tripartite approach were once embraced by political leaders in both parties. But in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status, while Republicans increasingly portrayed even legal immigration as a negative force in American life. The influx of immigrants into the country, in record numbers in the modern era, has overwhelmed red and blue state approaches. Both parties need a reality check.

…
Mr. Trump, for his part, is mistaken to portray immigration as a drain on the nation’s resources. He should be condemned for his routinely bigoted portrayal of immigrants, often in defiance of the facts, as a danger to the American people and to the nation’s identity.

Instead, immigration ought to be regarded as an investment in the nation’s future.

The piece goes on at great length with examples of immigrants’ stories. But it never deals with the issue of an indefinitely expanding population, and its strain on the Earth’s biosphere. *That* is the real issue, the existential problem to be solved: How can humanity adopt a “sustainable” existence on Earth that does not threaten its ability to sustain us? This will entail massive shift in cultural assumptions and priorities, and an end to the idea that the economy needs to “grow” indefinitely. That, I recall someone saying, is the policy of the cancer cell.

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As it happens, we have this complementary piece from Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman, Krugman wonks out, 17 Jan 2025: Voodoo, MAGA Style, subtitled “Republicans still believe in magic-based policy”

Beginning:

Patriotism is still, I guess, the last refuge of scoundrels. But for the past 45 years or so — ever since Reagan — economic growth has come a close second. The left isn’t completely free from this nonsense, but mostly what we see are right-wing politicians justifying cruel and/or irresponsible policies — massive tax cuts for the rich, harsh treatment of the poor and working class — with the claim that all will be well because these policies will unleash rapid economic growth.

Donald Trump has brought his own brand of nonsense, with claims that tariffs can make foreigners pay for everything. But the old voodoo is still very much part of the mix.

And then he talks about Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary.

The other day I wrote about Trump’s team of economic yes-men, but I didn’t say anything about Bessent, who was widely regarded as a relatively conventional, reassuring pick. Yet Bessent’s “3-3-3” economic plan — or maybe it’s just a concept of a plan, since he has provided no specifics about how he might achieve his goals — is full-on magical thinking.

I won’t talk right now about Bessent’s implausible claims that he can increase oil production by 3 million barrels a day or reduce the budget deficit to 3 percent of G.D.P.; Catherine Rampell is good on these. Instead, let me narrow the focus to his claim that he can raise economic growth to 3 percent.

And then follows many charts and technical discussion — remember this Substack blog is called “Krugman wonks out.” I’ll reproduce just the first one here, above, which he refers to as “a stylized picture of how the economy behaves over time.”

Yet Krugman doesn’t challenge the presumption that the goal is indefinite economic growth. What he does is challenge how Republicans think they can accomplish this; thus the allusion to “voodoo economics.”

Well, Republicans believe, or claim to believe, that they can sharply raise productivity growth by cutting taxes on the rich. You could say that claim is unsupported by evidence. But that’s too weak; in fact, it’s powerfully rejected by the evidence.

With more charts.

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I’ll save kibble for next time.

Posted in conservatives, Economics, Politics | Comments Off on Immigration, Economic Growth, and the Limits of the Planet

Lakoff on “Privateering,” and the Consequences of Shrinking the Government

Posted on Friday 17 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

More things are fitting together. Conservatives, be careful what you wish for.

Chapter 7 of the Lakoff book, THE POLITICAL MIND, which I passed over in my review, is about what he calls “privateering.”

This is when government services are handed off to private corporations. (As those guys who want to cut the government by $2 trillion would have to do.) The process involves enablers, dismantling acts, privateers themselves, and so on. (Lakoff goes into detail.) The results increase profits for stockholders and executives of those corporations, at the expense of the government’s mission to protect and empower citizens. And, crucial point, the public ends up paying much more for those services than they would have through their taxes.

(Lakoff’s basis, as I didn’t quite spell out in my review, is that progressives, driven by empathy, think the government has a moral mission to provide protection, and empowerment. That that’s what government is for. In contrast to conservatives’ obsession with hierarchy, obedience, and discipline.)

In fact I read about one example a about a year ago (on a plane flight back from Austin), without realizing it was an example of a larger issue. This was in Cory Doctorow’s novel The Bezzle, a contemporary novel about a forensic accountant, a ponzi scheme on Catalina Island, and the privatization of California’s Department of Corrections. The effects of that privatization include making it much more difficult, and expensive, to visit prisoners because, well, the private owners are mostly interested in “how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.” (Per the description on the Amazon page.)

So this has really happened. Lakoff provides three other examples, as of the Fall of 2007. First: Blackwater, the private army of mercenaries (called security guards), that fought the Iraq War, charging the US government $445,000 per security guard—who were earlier trained by the government at taxpayer expense. Second, the FDA, whose funding was cut, sending responsibility for drug testing to the pharma companies. Who then fudged many of the results, because, well, profits win out. Third, health care. Health insurance companies make their money by denying health care. (Thus the rage of the guy who murdered that HealthCare CEO a few weeks ago.) Their overhead is far higher than Medicare’s. Americans resist the idea of universal healthcare (as somehow being socialist?) while being fine with police and fire service (that are just as ‘socialist’). Conservatives, who somehow think people don’t “deserve” health care, prefer privateering it. Which, as it happens, makes (conservative) businessmen more money.

The motivations of government agencies, no matter how inefficient you think they might be, are fundamentally different from the motivations of private organizations. Conservatives seem not to realize that.

Lakoff’s point is that privateering isn’t always bad, but we need to ask whether the moral mission of the government is compromised or not. And what does cognitive science say? That anything can be framed.

Stepping back. What are conservatives primarily concerned about? Small government, and big business. See now how those things fit together? Despite the naivete and cynicism (not skepticism) about what “big government” or the “deep state” actually does, and the inevitable inefficiency that comes with any kind of bureaucracy, I suspect there’s very little that the government does that someone wouldn’t complain about it if weren’t there. So if conservatives blast the government and push to privatize everything, why would that be? Not just to keep the government out of their private lives. But because a few of them, at least, will make a lot more money.

So all those conservatives who advocate a small government should be careful what they wish for. If the government shrinks, most of its services will be provided by someone else. Who then? People whose primary motive is profit. And that’s how the rich get richer. And private citizens end up paying more for services that used to be provided by the government.

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Cynics, Conspiracies, and the Oligarchy

Posted on Friday 17 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • RFK Jr. is a cynic, not a skeptic;
  • Conservatives would rather punish California than deal with the climate crisis;
  • Paul Krugman on how Trump has no plans, only yes-men;
  • Why the decline of DEI is a worry;
  • Peter Thiel now apparently really believes the conspiracies he’s been floating;
  • MAGA is getting an oligarchy, not lower grocery prices;
  • Trump has found two, even three, MAGA allies in Hollywood to give made-up positions to;
  • The common good vs. putting conditions on California wildfire aid;
  • Crossing the 1.5 degree mark and the descent into nationalism.

It’s always been necessary to clarify the difference between a skeptic and a cynic. RFK Jr. pretends to be the former, but is really the latter.

NY Times, Paul A. Offit, 13 Jan 2025: Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic.

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

…
When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.

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Similarly, in the way conservatives deny reality:

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 13 Jan 2025: Republicans see the LA wildfires as an opportunity to punish California, subtitled “People who refuse to do anything about the real crisis we’re facing, climate change, pounce straight to punishment”

But I confess that I am shocked at the monumental lack of grace, empathy and compassion coming from the right as this horrific emergency unfolds. … [T]the right-wing media, influencers and Republican politicians have been stunningly callous about this ghastly event, even for them.

Simplistic reactions.

Where does this madness come from? As historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in this piece from back in 2016, Trump likely got it originally from conspiracist Alex Jones. More recently, as you can see from that speech, it was former congressman and current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social media platform Devin Nunes who apparently filled his head with a simplistic tale about a big “valve” that Newsom (and Gov. Jerry Brown before him) refused to turn on to fill Southern California with all the water it could ever want because they want to save a “little fish.” (This piece at Vox lays out what this is really all about if you’re interested but suffice it to say that nothing Trump, Jones or Nunes said applies to Los Angeles or these wildfires.)

And from Trump:

Not one word of sympathy for the victims of the fire or any promise to follow through on federal help for the area. And one lie after another.

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Paul Krugman: Trump still has no plan.

Paul Krugman, 15 Jan 2025: Trump’s Team of Economic Yes-Men, subtitled “Or, why he still has no plan”

Donald Trump won in November because many voters believed that he would bring down grocery prices; Republicans apparently still think he will, even though he himself admitted — after the election, of course — that it would be “very hard.” Here’s a clearer picture, via Briefing Book, showing that while Democrats, like most economists, expect inflation to rise under Trump, Republicans believe that he will somehow stop it dead in its tracks:

[ see graph above ]

But what will he actually do? Even though he will take office in just a few days, we have almost no idea.

That’s not because the Trump team is keeping its plans closely held, nor is it because there are major factional fights. All the evidence suggests, instead, that Trump’s economic team still doesn’t have any plans, or even concepts of plans. All it has are some half-formulated thoughts about how to cater to Trump’s prejudices without doing massive economic damage.

He never had a plan for replacing Obamacare, either.

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Conservatives going backward, that’s what they do. Just let white men run the world, things will be fine!

Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr., 15 Jan 2025: We should be very worried about the decline of DEI, subtitled “It’s another indication that the United States is going backward, only four years after the George Floyd protests.”

Diversity, equity and inclusion was never the whole solution. But it was a small part of the changes we need to create a country where Black lives, lesbian lives, female lives and others are truly valued and respected. That DEI is dying as Trump is set to begin his second term isn’t an accident but part of the same story. America’s moral arc is not bending toward justice — and I don’t know when it will again.

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Case study of the flaws in human nature that result in commitments to things that are not true.

The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, 15 Jan 2025: MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World, subtitled “Peter Thiel is the latest pro-Trump luminary to take a conspiracist turn.”

The essay opens with this open secret (to those outside the MAGA cult):

Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.

Then:

Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.

Peter Thiel and JFK, the coronavirus, Jeffrey Epstein’s death. And how the writer came to realize that Thiel really believes this stuff.

The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands.

We see this every day, as I keep pointing out; everything out of the ordinary must be *caused* by some conspiracy. Things can’t just happen. It’s all about narratives, how everything must happen for a reason. Concluding:

What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.

The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.

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Now you’re just getting an oligarchy, MAGA fans. Not lower grocery prices.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 16 Jan 2025: Tech billionaires expose MAGA’s “populism” con job, subtitled “MAGA ‘populism’ was always an inch deep — Trump’s billionaire-palooza proves it”

The entirety of Donald Trump’s con artist schtick to bamboozle his followers was perfectly illustrated in one recent photograph. In it, the president-elect sits grinning maniacally next to fellow rich white guy James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola. Clutched in Trump’s famously short fingers is an expensive, specialty-made “commemorative” Diet Coke.

…
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will all have prominent seats on the platform at Trump’s inauguration. The symbolism is unmistakable. Those seats are usually reserved for family members, former presidents, and prominent politicians. Giving those seats to billionaires signals loudly that this is a new era of oligarchy, without even an attempt to feign allegiance to pre-Trump notions of government for and by the people. President Joe Biden was alarmed enough to make this issue the focal point of his final speech in office.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said in his 17-minute farewell address from the Oval Office Wednesday night.

There was a section of Lakoff’s book, the one I recently reviewed, about “privateering,” a concept that’s apt here. Let me follow up on this another time.

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Great subtitle.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 16 Jan 2025: Trump nominates Voight, Stallone, Gibson as ambassadors to Hollywood, subtitled “Will the last Californian ally Trump calls to serve in a made-up position please turn out the lights?”

Donald Trump has always been a showman, but he’s looking for a little help to break through in Tinseltown.

The president-elect and former game show host gave in to his “Apprentice”-honed instincts on Thursday, kicking off a mad dash of Cabinet nominations on Thursday with a bit of razzle-dazzle. Trump tagged actors Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight to serve as his ambassadors to Hollywood, hoping the trio of MAGA allies could help usher in a new “Golden Age of Hollywood.”

Being a cosmopolitan kinda town, Hollywood has very few prominent right-wingers (slash conspiracy theorists), and Gibson and Voight are by far the two most prominent. Stallone is a borderline case, as the article explains, but perhaps three positions are better than two. Note how it’s always about recapturing a lost “golden age.”

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Trump identifies all the fellow tribalists he can find, and declares everyone else the enemy.

Robert Reich, 17 Jan 2025: The LA fire and the common good, subtitled “Are we all in this together or are we on our own?”

When conservatives are in charge?

Trump has spent much of the past week complaining — and lying — about California’s water policies, falsely claiming that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to deal with the fires. (The actual problem is that hydrants haven’t had enough water pressure to deal with the huge, sudden demand.)

Trump is now blaming the fires on migrants. He posted a claim this week that taxpayer “funds are diverted to illegal immigrants,” and then “an illegal immigrant comes and sets your house on fire and the fire department doesn’t have the resources to put it out.”

Now Republicans are talking about putting conditions on federal aid for wildfire relief — as if the Biden administration put conditions on southern states for hurricane relief, or as if some senator from Nebraska knows better how to prepare for wildfires than actual firefighters in California.

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The root cause of the fires is staring us all in the face, but conservatives would rather blame people they don’t like. (And/or they simply don’t understand the evidence and the conclusions the evidence implies.)

Slate, Eric Holthaus, 13 Jan 2025: Last Year Was the Hottest Year in Recorded History. Buckle Up., subtitled “Crossing the 1.5 degree mark isn’t as bad as you think. It’s worse.”

To me, the real consequence of crossing 1.5 degrees isn’t that any one thing breaks at 1.5 degrees. It’s that we’re slipping away from an era in which the community of nations came together for the common good of humanity—and moving toward an everyone-for-themselves descent into nationalism. It’s that any urgency we’ve felt so far, any actions we’ve taken, hasn’t been enough.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Narrative, Politics | Comments Off on Cynics, Conspiracies, and the Oligarchy

Jonathan Haidt, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”
(Penguin Press, March 2024, 385pp, including 90pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index.)

Here’s the latest by the author of one of my favorite books, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review ends here), whose past couple books have directly addressed current social issues. In 2018 there was THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, co-written with Greg Lukianoff, (review here). (Lukianoff went on to write THE CANCELLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND with a different coauthor, in 2023; I haven’t read it yet.) Now we have by Haidt alone this book, about the effects of smartphones and social media. As causing mental illness.

Right away I am skeptical. Anyone with a sense of history, particularly the history of technology, will recall moral panics about this or that new device or medium. Radio, TV, comic books, paperback books, video games, cable TV. Actually, all the way back to printed scrolls! Which, one of those ancient Greeks or another felt would undermined the ability of students to *memorize* what they needed to know. Yes all these things changed how some people led their lives. Were they reasons to panic? Only to conservatives, who want nothing to change, for whom the past is always idealized. Haidt’s target here is social media, especially through hand-held devices, and their affect on adolescents. Especially girls. Causes of mental illness? Certainly conservatives of the past foresaw moral evil in comic books, not to mention racy movies and TV shows. But illness?

On the other hand, the topic of how much screen time is suitable for kids has been in the conversation for years. Parents and TV hosts debate about what age their kids should get their first smartphones. Or be allowed to have social media accounts. Students are distracted by their phones during class, so some schools prohibit their use, asking students to check-in their devices during the day.

I’ll summarize Haidt’s the book with the stipulation that this is another book I sampled, carefully, but did not read every word of. Too many books, etc. Haidt made it easy since, like some other authors (Deutsch comes to mind), he helpfully summarizes each chapter with a page or so of bullet points at the end. So my methodology of going through this book was, for each chapter, to read the bullet points first, and summarize them in my own notes, then go back and page through the chapter alert for any colorful graphs, photos, or anecdotes, and sometimes take additional notes. It also helped that probably half the content here is similar to ideas in that CODDLING book.

I’ll mention that, to my surprise, this book has been on bestseller lists ever since it came out, some nine months now. On the latest NY Times hardcover nonfiction list, this week, it’s back at #1, after 41 weeks on their list. And it’s #3 on this week’s Publishers Weekly list, a list which helpfully tracks how many “units” the title has sold in the past week, and to date. This book has sold over 500,00 copies to date, more than any other title on the nonfiction list. So clearly the book and its concerns are resonating with many people.

So then, to give the author’s premise its due. Part 1 is about “the surge of suffering.”  Haidt claims that data show a rise in teenage anxiety, depression, self-harming, and suicide beginning around 2010, among Gen Z, the first generation who went through puberty with smartphones. And has lots of charts, in this chapter, showing these data. So something more than moral panic is going on. He claims it’s all related to smartphones, particularly the release of the iPhone in 2008, and later the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons on social media sites.

Part 2 is about “the decline of play-based childhood.” We’ve evolved into cultural creatures, in which children need time to learn. Play is the work of childhood; puberty shouldn’t come too fast. Free play is necessary; mistakes are not very costly. Children use both a conformist bias and a prestige bias: peer pressure, and needing to stand out. (Aside: these are examples in which so-called psychological “biases” are not only useful, but crucial, so that children don’t have to learn about the world entirely by themselves. It’s when adults don’t outgrow such biases that they become a problem. This conformist bias is what Adair meant in the item #1 in my review which references page 67.3.) Social media feeds on the prestige bias, indicated by likes, shares, and comments.

Children are by nature anti-fragile. (The Codding book covered a lot of this.) They need play, even risky play, yet parents (at least in the Anglo world) because more fearful, elevating safetyism above all else. Their ‘defend mode’ overrode children’s ‘discover mode.’ Early puberty involves much brain rewiring, and safetyism blocks experiences needed to learn to manage risk, and develop self-governance. As do smartphones. Meanwhile, the rites of passage that marked adolescent transition to adulthood have largely become eliminated in Western societies. Perhaps even a secular society might need such sets of milestones, beyond the traditional ones of ages when one can see certain movies, drive a car, buy alcohol and vote. Author proposes a set of milestones. Age 6: family responsibility, age 8 local freedom, age 10 the age of roaming, age 12 apprenticeship, age 14 beginning of high school, 16, beginning of internet adulthood, 18 legal adulthood, 21, full legal adulthood.

Part 3 is about “the rise of the phone-based childhood.” The four foundational harms are social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. These are amplified by screens, which adolescents spend 7 hours a day looking at. Face-to-face time has dropped; sleep has declined in quality and quantity; smartphones create interruptions; and social media is designed to be addictive.

Girls are more affected by social media than boys; they’re more visually oriented, and motivated by communion; they’re concerned about reputation, and their aggression is often expressed as trying to harm the reputation of other girls. Boys are prone to “failure to launch”; Japanese men, to “hikikomori.” Social media allowed them to become internalized. And it provided them with unlimited hardcore porn. Some boys became addicted to videogames.

Haidt discusses Durkheim and the idea of a scale of divinity, along which people can feel lifted up, or pulled downward. The sacred or the profane. Phone-based life pulls downward, and is contrary to the practices of religious and spiritual communities, in several ways. There’s a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart, and phone-based life offers only trivial content. [[ Well I take exception to both points, as have others; on the second, you can find whatever you want via your phone, if you want to. ]]

Finally Part 4 discusses “collective action for healthier childhood.” Again I think some of this was covered in Coddling. There are four types of collective response: voluntary coordination; social norms and moralization; technological solutions; laws and rules. Laws overprotect children in the real world, under-protect them in the virtual world. Tech companies should develop better age verification features. Schools should encourage more free play and recess. And they might go phone-free. And parents should become gardeners, not carpenters, i.e. don’t try to mold children directly. Give kids unsupervised free play. Delay introducing phones; find tech-free camps, exchange programs, part-time jobs, take a gap year. A free-range childhood is more likely to produce competent young adults, but it takes parents getting over their own anxiety.

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I don’t dispute most of the book, and we do hear of efforts by parents and schools to manage kids’ involvement with their phones. But the tech companies aren’t helping; if anything, just in the past couple weeks, they’re sucking up to Trump by making things worse. (Pretending that pointing out lies is somehow suppression of conservative views.)

And at the end, I’m still skeptical. Hasn’t human society gone through many shifts in lifestyle, and how children are raised, over thousands of years? Just imagine the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to living on a farm tending crops and raising animals. Wouldn’t the farmer’s kid envy the freedom of the free-reign child? (This is what some of the Bible stories were about; see here.) But human nature is flexible, and adapts as circumstances change, perhaps via what Wilson called “gene-culture coevolution,” which is to say that as circumstances change — e.g. new technology — there will be differential effects on various people, some better suited to the new order, others less. Followed by differential reproduction. Thus the growing cosmopolitan mentality, which might eventually overtake the tribal mentality (if humanity is to survive).

I still suspect this book amounts to a conservative screed about how life was better in the old days. Or, “Kids these days! They don’t know how good we had it”. But I’ll think about this a while longer. It’s certainly a book about how technological change affects people, which is a principal concern of science fiction. And I’ll think about examples of parents and kids in my own life.

Posted in Book Notes, Psychology, Technology | Comments Off on Jonathan Haidt, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Competence Is Beside the Point

Posted on Wednesday 15 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Several items today about the confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi; “Anonymous smears” and “I am not familiar with that statement”; competence isn’t the point, loyalty and disruption are.
  • The consequences of a “woefully uninformed electorate” and whether humanity might survive existential crises that the uninformed cannot comprehend.

My initial reaction to hearings like those today of potential cabinet members is to wonder, is that the best Republicans can do? Can they find no one with more experience for their proposed jobs, no one without clouds of accusations of financial or sexual or alcoholic impropriety? No one with a clue? As this first piece notes, those are the wrong questions. Trump doesn’t *want* smart or virtuous or principled people; he wants people who are unswervingly loyal and will follow his orders without question. That they’re dumb is therefore a feature; that they cheat on their wives is a feature, because it reassures the cultists that when *they* cheat on their wives, it’s OK, because everyone does it! This is the morality of the Republican party. It doesn’t matter that they’re all incompetent.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 15 Jan 2025: That May Have Been the Most Antagonistic Confirmation Hearing I’ve Ever Seen, subtitled “Is Pete Hegseth qualified to run the military? Wrong question.”
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MAGA Delusions About Health

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Just finished a book write-up, so a relatively short post today about current events.

  • MAGA delusions about health;
  • How Republican policies will make things worse, and how they don’t realize this.

If it’s Tuesday, there’s a Science Section of the NY Times. Here’s the lead piece today. As about so many other things, many people (but in particular conservatives and MAGAfolk) live with the fantasy that the past was somehow better than the present. It’s selective memory and the glow of childhood, perhaps. It doesn’t stand up to evidence. Everyone smoked in the old days — my parents chain-smoked throughout my childhood. And even doctors smoked, in TV commercials — see here. People forget.

NY Times, Gina Kolata, 13 Jan 2025: Have Americans Ever Really Been Healthy?, subtitled “Medical historians say that the phrase ‘Make America Healthy Again’ obscures a past during which this country’s people ate, smoked and drank things that mostly left them unwell.” [gift link]
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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Lunacy, Science | Comments Off on MAGA Delusions About Health

Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How American’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World”
(PublicAffairs, July 2024, 262pp including 16pp of acknowledgements, selected bibliography, and index.)

Here’s another recent book, which I bought mainly because I’ve seen the author’s name quite a number of times in recent years attached to articles I found astute enough to quote here. And, it addresses a key question that I have ideas about but no firm conclusion: what does the apparent retreat in America and other nations from democracy and toward authoritarianism mean? Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Human Nature, Politics | Comments Off on Zack Beauchamp, THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT

Human Nature and Existential Crises

Posted on Monday 13 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Yesterday I had an item and some comments about how the inability of many people to recognize existential dangers like climate change may in fact doom the species. (And explain the Fermi Paradox.) Too many people live in fantasy cultural and religious bubbles, focused on near-term thinking and resistant to understanding evidence of the world, and how the world is changing. Gradually, they may die out, leaving the world to those who *can* understand and adjust accordingly. Those will be the progressives and ‘globalists’ that the conservatives despise. Or, the conservatives will resist taking any action against such threats, turning every try into petty partisan bickering, and bring all of us down with them.

Salon, Brian Karem, 13 Jan 2025: The LA conflagration: It is now painfully clear what matters, subtitled “The wildfires in Los Angeles are a harbinger of our doom — yet ultimately leave me with hope”

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The California Fires and What They Reveal

Posted on Sunday 12 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The despicable Donald Trump ignorantly criticizes California politicians, rather than offering any sympathy for the victims of the recent fires;
  • How well-intentioned policies from decades ago are partly responsible for the fires;
  • How humans might be doomed by their own human nature;
  • Another Mel Gibson screed;
  • And my take on the real reason behind why so many people want to think evolution, or climate change, is false.
– – –

What a despicable person.

NY Times, 12 Jan 2025: Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’

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Posted in conservatives, Culture, Human Nature, Psychology | Comments Off on The California Fires and What They Reveal