Let's Reason

If I had to summarize the essence of the neoliberal order, the prevailing economic thought for the past forty years, I would argue that it allowed private, especially shareholder, profits to become its central organizing principle.  In this mission it did not have a more loyal handmaiden than finance, both as an academic discipline and a practiced profession.

These thoughts came back to my mind after learning of the passing of Michael Jensen, one of the most influential finance academics and a driving force behind placing finance at the center of the neoliberal order.  The other driving force was Eugene Fama, the 2013 Nobel Prize winner in economics.  Fama has been the high priest of capital market efficiency, that is, the theory according to which the prices of financial securities, like stocks and bonds, reflect the aggregate information of all buyers and sellers in these markets.  As such, prices give reliable signals to firms and investors about the values of firms and other assets.  The Great Recession of 2007-2008 put this theory to its toughest test and many economists found it wanting. 

For Jensen, the villains were entrenched executives who having to choose between an option that aligns with their interests and one that enhances shareholder value they will opt for the former.  In 1976, Jensen came up with the so-called agency theory that exposed the conflicting interests of managers and shareholders and suggested that the most effective way to align the interests of the two parties was to turn managers into shareholders.  This could be accomplished by granting executives stocks and options to buy stocks.  This way value maximization would be the common goal for shareholders and executives.   By the early 2000s, in the wake of the Enron debacle and other managerial abuses, Jensen had come to regret the corruptive effect of stock options which he called managerial heroin. 

As with many “great” ideas the law of unintended consequences had spoiled expectations.  Although the agency theory was sound, it became the spring board for executive compensation packages that blasted away any measure of moderation.  The result was exorbitant compensation packages which are still central in our current discontent with inequality.  In the 1960s, executive compensation averaged around 20 times the average worker salary.  By 2000 it had reached its highest level at 366 times.  Was there any credible evidence the new industry captains were that superior compared to their predecessors? Hardly.  In the earlier decades the American economy had thrived and the productivity gains were shared fairly between profits and wages.  More corrosive, though, was the moral hazard problem the new compensation schemes created for executives.  If their wealth depended on the value of the firm’s shares, why not attempt to boost their value by unethical, even unlawful, means.  Misinformation, lack of transparency, pursuing irrational risks, could be employed to boost stock prices and executive wealth.  The Enron and similar cases around 2000 and the housing crisis of 2007-2008 had the finger prints of such moral failings. 

Creating corporate efficiency by aligning the interests of executives and shareholders was not sufficient for value maximization.  What about firms that continued to operate under inefficient managers?  Wouldn’t it be better if these firms were put under the control of more successful executives?  Michael Jensen was again influential in shaping and promoting the corporate control theory and its business applications.  Corporate takeovers facilitated by investment bankers and funded by private equity firms, hedge funds, and the infamous junk bond markets became the tool that held the promise for new value creation.  Hundreds if not thousands of finance research papers provided the empirical justification as they amassed lots of evidence that this type of creative destruction indeed created new value.

Finance practitioners and academics started to view firm balance sheets as if they were made of Legos.  Move these pieces here and there, spin off or sell some businesses, go offshore, take on more debt, pay hefty dividends, this was the new language of finance.  The problem with these restructurings was not that they did not produce profits, at least in the short run.  The problem was that they were evaluated with one beneficiary in mind, that is, the shareholders.  No wonder, therefore, the empirical studies found supportive evidence.  

What was left out though was any negative consequences for other stakeholders.  The laid off workers, the hollowed towns, the decayed social fabric of previously bustling industrial hubs, the deaths of despair caused by alcohol, opioids, and suicides.  From the 1950s to the 1970s, under the bargaining power of labor unions, corporate executives had accepted a social contract of reasonable shared prosperity.  The neoliberal order had nothing to do with that.  Markets were supposed to operate with as few rules as possible and everyone was supposed to fend for him/herself.   Entrepreneurs, the so-called producers, were responsible to organize businesses for maximum profits and workers had to retool themselves and follow businesses to their new more profitable locations.  Of course, that was impossible if the new locations were in Mexico, India, China, and Southeast Asia. 

The question is why finance academics followed this narrow perspective.  By the early 1980s, finance professors had soured on managerial power and they had concluded those post-War II executives were sacrificing value to build corporate empires and accommodate generous union contracts.  For conservative academics the choice was easy.  Economic efficiency had to be restored and unfettered markets were the best instrument to that end.  Liberal finance academics just rode the wave of the New Left (a term found in Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order) which also counted on markets and entrepreneurship to set creativity free for the new digital age.  In addition, creating a global economy and lifting all boats around the world was a commendable economic project.

With hindsight, we can contemplate the flawed consequences of putting so much faith in capital markets and the ability of managers to strike a fair balance between the private and the common good.  The reality, though, is we all followed in the intellectual footsteps of Fama, Jensen and the mantra of shareholder value maximization.  I am not sure how present finance academics think about the social responsibility of their craft, but I hope they have learned what we missed.  

The anxiously anticipated decision from the International Commission on Stratigraphy is finally in.  We are not there yet.  The Anthropocene epoch is not yet upon us.  It was supposed to be adopted as a new epoch marked by the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945, although some set its birthday at the explosion of the hydrogen bomb in 1952.  The Anthropocene epoch would set us apart from the Holocene epoch that came at the end of the ice age and the wake of the first Agricultural Revolution some 11,000 years ago. 

This whole controversy around the validity of the Anthropocene epoch made me curious; so I set out to educate myself about our geological timeline.  First, some definitions.  Anthropocene means a new (Greek kainos) epoch in Earth’s history impacted by humans (Gr. anthropos).  The preceding epoch Holocene means a whole (holos) new epoch marked by the first serious impact of humans on nature through agriculture and the domestication of animals.

Right now, we are in the Meghalayan age (marked by an extended drought 4200 years ago) within the Holocene epoch, of the Quaternary period (beginning 2 mya*), of the Cenozoic era (beginning 65 mya – with the end of dinosaurs), of the Phanerozoic eon (beginning 540 mya – with the appearance of complex animals and plants) on planet Earth born about 4.6 billion years ago.

No matter how interesting the geological line is, I find the lineage of humans even more so.  Our genus Homo starts with our ancestor H. Habilis about 2.8 mya.  It is followed by H. Erectus 1.7 mya, H. Heidelbergensis 0.7 mya, H. Sapiens 0.3 mya, and here we are as the Modern Homo Sapiens since 50 thou. ya.  Since the human line split from the other primates, a good many other human-like species came and went, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans whose DNA we still carry in a tiny amount.  But homo sapiens is the one human species that managed to survive all adversity to this time.  No wonder we are full of ourselves.

Now this succession and extinction of human species along the way reminds me of the myth about the creation of humans in Hesiod’s (9^th century BCE) Theogony (Creation of Gods).  First, the Gods created the Golden race (the best of all), followed by the Silver, the Heroic, the Copper, and finally the Iron race.   Just like the offspring of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, the Iron race is destined to live with worries and suffering.  I find it interesting that in both, the Greek mythology and the Hebrew bible, the better days of humans are in their earlier not the later stages.

That’s not how we modern humans think.  No matter what cards we are dealt, we believe our present world is the best humanity ever had and even better days await us in the future.  I suppose this confidence comes from our triumphs in science and technology.  But not everybody agrees with this assessment.  For example, the transition to agriculture has been held responsible for eliminating the egalitarian life of hunter/gatherers, and for ushering in class hierarchies, administrative bureaucracies, and the regimentation of work.  

So, is it possible that our own human intelligence takes us down to a path toward a post-human species?  As a matter of fact, brilliant minds have been actively speculating about this possibility.  On one side, we have the anti-humanism futurists who believe that we will degrade the environment to the point it can no longer sustain us and we will go the way of the Copper race.  Then, once we are gone, the Earth will no longer suffer in our hands.    

On the other side, we have the Transhumanists who believe that by harnessing the power of AI humans will find ways to solve their environmental problems by becoming all mind and data and no physical matter.  By uploading our minds on platforms our environmental impact will come to an arrest and we ‘ll live peaceful and prosperous lives like the Golden race or Adam and Eve before their fall from grace.  Sadly, neither school of speculation envisions a human future where a physical body and an ethereal mind interact to produce the human experience of our present state.

So, I asked myself what name we could give the next species if the Transhumanism prediction came to pass.  I came up with the name Homo Artificialensis, before a Google search revealed the next human (?) species had been already named Homo Artificialis. 

It is really worth asking what species contemplates its own extinction or its transformation into an artificial entity as the only solution to preserve what is left of nature.  Both views reveal our anxiety about our impact on nature and our resignation that we cannot stop moving “from living with what nature give us to living with what we want to have from nature” in the words of a thinker.

The more, however, we want to bend nature so that it gives us what we want, the more we set ourselves outside nature.  But this is not a way of living or thinking shared by all humankind. Most of humanity has lived and continues to live within limits set by nature and thus it bears very little responsibility for the environmental damage we experience.  That’s what the climate researcher Stephen Lezak correctly points out (NYT 3/26/24).  And he adds that as noted in a statement published in Natural Ecology and Evolution by a group of scientists “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”

That’s an important point to heed.  It implies we have choices as to how we wish to live as humans and we are not locked into a path entirely determined from outside ourselves.  Which brings us to the reason for naming our epoch as Anthropocene, that is, the explosion of the atomic bomb.  Did it come up by happenstance?  What if the terms put on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles were not so onerous as to breed humiliation and misery?   What if economic policy makers had listened to voices like that of John Maynard Keynes as to how to address the threats of inflation and unemployment?  What if in the absence of these adverse consequences of peace, there was no World War II, and there was no race to develop nuclear weapons? 

Resorting to historical “ifs” may sound naive.  But historical retrospection can also inspire cautious reflection as we choose our steps into the future.  That is after all the value of history.

*mya means million years ago.

Imagine if we looked at poverty not just as a personal failure or the result of bad luck, but as a sign of malfunction of the economic system, that is, the same way we take fever as a sign of illness.  What if we scrutinized the economic system for its failure to reduce poverty the way we scrutinize it for not yielding higher growth or higher employment. 

These are the questions you take away from reading Matthew Desmond’s book Povery, By America, which I introduced in my last post on this blog.  As the title implies, Desmond argues that poverty in America has some special features because of the way our economy and public policies work which make poverty endemic to our socioeconomic system.

Various statistics on poverty in America describe a very inconvenient picture.  Before covid in 2019, OECD ranked the U.S. worst in poverty among 26 developed nations.  So, Desmond asks why this is happening in the richest nation on earth.  Desmond builds a strong case that poverty in America is not accidental, not due to laziness, and not borne out of reliance on welfare, but rather due to an economy that disadvantages the poor, an ill-designed safety net, and limited opportunities to avoid or exit poverty.

There are many reasons a person can fall into poverty.  Growing in a poor and/or dysfunctional family; dropping out of school; having encounters with the law that escalate to greater economic and social displacement; inability to meet medical bills.  Worse though is what keeps poor people trapped in poverty.  Low wages, no access to affordable housing, unaffordable child care.  The question, therefore, is how we manage so that individuals can either be caught before they fall into poverty or be empowered to jettison themselves out of its orbit. 

Desmond identifies three market sectors that work against the interests of people with limited means and pushes them further into poverty.  One is housing with its insufficient supply that imposes higher than fair rental charges on the poor.  Poor people have to accept high rents for poorly maintained houses in predominantly depressed areas.  Besides spending an inordinate amount of income on rent, poor people are also trapped in communities with limited opportunities for socioeconomic development and advancement. 

The second economic sector that can contribute to poverty is the labor market.  The persistent stagnation of wages since the 1970s is a well-known cause of this reality. A recent Brookings Institution study found that 44% of working age Americans earn low wages.  The frozen federal minimum wage is one reason for this.  The dramatic shrinkage of the number of unionized workers has also deprived them of bargaining power in setting living wages.  In addition, the nature of employed work has changed to the disadvantage of workers.  The fraction of full-time employment with full benefits has been shrinking in favor of part-time and temporary gig jobs that shift the burden of health insurance costs and saving for retirement from employers to workers.  Ironically, Desmond notes, the welfare programs the government offers low-wage people work as complement to the low wages paid by many corporations.  No wonder large corporations are in support of welfare programs. 

Finally, poor people are severely underbanked and left to manage their finances with payday check-cashing and lending outlets.  Even when poor people transact with banks their perennial inability to cover checks and pay debts on time exposes them to overdraft and late-payment fees.  Desmond estimates that poor Americans spend $61 million a day on check-cashing and credit related fees.  With little access to credit their buying power is limited and so are their opportunities to better their lives.

The overall result is that those among us who earn the lowest wages are compelled to pay the highest prices.  Very aptly, in this connection, Desmond quotes James Baldwin who remarked “how expensive it is to be poor.”

Our lack of success on the war against poverty persists despite the fact that funding of welfare and safety net programs has significantly expanded over time.  The reason is, that unlike other Western countries, a great deal of funds nominally earmarked to fight poverty are diverted to other causes.  Most responsible for this are states with a tradition of aversion toward supporting poor people.  A good example is the refusal to expand Medicaid to provide health insurance to low-income people.

Further contributing to pushing poverty to the fringes of economic and public policy are prejudices built on myths divorced from factual reality.  Here are some of these myths that Desmond debunks.  Poverty is deserved because poor people are lazy or have low work ethic.  Both are wrong.  You can work full-time and still be poor in America.  Poor people use welfare funds on non-essential goods like tobacco and alcohol.  Wrong.  Better off people spend twice as much on alcohol than poor people.  Poor people are trapped in welfare programs and stop seeking work.  The evidence shows otherwise.  Poor people desire better lives like the rest of us and grab opportunities to become independent of government assistance.  The poor like to live on the dole.  Also wrong.  Desmond shows that the poor are less successful in utilizing government support programs than middle- and upper-class families.  In other words, poor Americans have lower take-up rates of public benefits than well off Americans.

There is also a wide-spread belief that the poor are a burden to society.  When we account for government funds lost to mortgage interest tax deductions, the untaxed health insurance benefits employees get from employers, various tax breaks and loopholes, and a host of other government support programs, the better off classes cost the government more than the poor.  Thus, in 2018, a middle-class family received $7,100 more in overall government aid than it paid in federal taxes.  More recently, the bottom 20% of the income distribution received $25,733 in government benefits but the top 20% received even more, $35,363!  If anything, we are all on the dole.  We can bemoan the widening budget deficits but we cannot blame the poor. 

If we are serious about reducing or, even better, abolish poverty, we need to treat it as part of a comprehensive economic policy.  Poverty is not inconsequential to the health of a society.  Poverty breeds less educated citizens, less skilled workers, broken households, underdeveloped children, unhealthy social habits, and crime.  Above all, it deprives people of their dignity and pride.  Poverty is a negative externality of the economic system that touches all of us.

It also steals the potential for a better society.  Desmond asks: “How many artists and poets has poverty denied us?  How many nurses and engineers and scientists?  Think of how much more vibrant and forward-moving our country would be?”

White working class Americans no longer align with the Democratic Party. Neither do they trust the old Republican Party establishment.  These two realities hit Democrats and Republicans back in 2015 and both sides have been trying ever since to fathom the causes of this historical rapture.

Some of the hypotheses going around include:  it’s just the product of populism; the new economic order is not working for noncollege workers; working class people are consumed by the culture wars; they don’t feel respected; There is a kernel of truth in all these explanations, but each one of them and even all together leave out longer brewing developments in American society which can offer a more convincing explanation.

I found the traces to an alternative explanation while I was reading Poverty, By America by Princeton University sociology professor Matthew Desmond.*  The gist of this explanation is this:  Starting in the late 1960s, the costs of social reform in America fell predominantly on white working class Americans.  In the mid-sixties, Lyndon Johnson’s pathbreaking legislation reaffirmed equality in civil rights, voting rights, and housing.  Along with the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), these laws aimed at ending segregation and restoring equal rights to all Americans in order to achieve social and economic integration.

How well, however, did these social reforms play out in reality?  As Desmond writes, less privileged urban and rural white Americans were practically asked to bear the consequences, that is, consequences their fellow more privileged and affluent white Americans were not willing to put up with. 

Desmond recounts events that we all, more or less, know.  Following the desegregation of public schools, affluent white families abandoned them for private secular and parochial schools.  The better off decamped to the suburbs where they could control school boards and zoning commissions.  In all major cities public schools were left to educate Black kids and the kids of poorer white families.  Given how public schools are funded, the withdrawal of better situated families along with their tax dollars and political influence left public schools underfunded and underperforming.

Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 removed discrimination on the basis of race, municipal and zoning authorities found indirect methods to keep out minorities of color and poor white families.  The most effective measure was to restrict the construction of multifamily dwellings and affordable housing in general.  This way public schools, parks, pools, and other public amenities in affluent suburbs and exclusive neighbors were redlined for the use only of those who could pass the test of inclusiveness.

As these reforms were taking hold, white voters in general started to develop a hostile attitude toward taxes dedicated to the goal of social integration and services to underprivileged Americans.  But white revolt against taxes had an unintended consequence.  The quality of public goods and services deteriorated but not to the same degree for all.  Less affluent whites residing in cities and less prosperous places had to content with crumbling schools and parks, while locally raised revenue in affluent suburbs ensured first-rate public facilities for those lucky enough to afford living there.  As Desmond writes a home mortgage was no longer a financing tool.  Instead, it became a ticket to buying an investment whose value was secured by scarcity thanks to zoning laws, and enjoying public safety, good schools, and securing admission to a good college.  Thus, Desmond writes, opportunities for social mobility were commodified.

In the early 1970s, incomes also started to diverge between noncollege and college educated workers.  The economic globalization and the growth of internet in the 1990s caused a further deterioration of the economic fortunes of less privileged Americans as jobs shifted from the agricultural and industrial heartland of America to cities, which became hubs of innovation, profitable businesses, and prosperity.  But thriving cities also became increasingly expensive in housing.  That also kept poor and less affluent families out of the places where opportunities for better living were created.

As the cosmopolitan outlook and ideas of educated elites and professionals drove them away from the interests of their fellow citizens who were less equipped to survive in the new world order, working class Americans felt the sting of abandonment.  Cosmopolitanism viewed the rise of foreign peoples out of poverty thanks to global trade as a sign of human progress but it failed to take notice of the social decline and human suffering following the collapse of previously mighty industrial centers in America.  As another Princeton economist, Angus Deaton, reminds us in his book Economics in America, the new order, so favorable to educated Americans, came at the cost of alcoholism, drug abuse, and deaths of despair among working class, and predominantly white, Americans.  Ironically, Deaton notes, the burden of defending the new order fell disproportionately on those who benefited the least.  In 2015, only 8% of the enlisted troops, mostly drawn from inner cities and rural areas, had a college degree.

Working class Americans eventually realized how little control and choices they had.  They were told what opportunities were open to them, in what economic order to make a living, what technologies to adopt, what wars to fight, and what was politically acceptable speech.  No wonder they came to distrust the symbols and power centers of the elites: meritocracy, universities, science, the press, electoral politics.  Even to doubt their patriotism.

Although white working-class people are distrustful of both conservative and liberal elites, they seem to really loathe the latter.  The reason is very plain.  Liberals were those who campaigned and pushed for the social reforms that would bring equality and integration.  But when they finally succeeded, they were the ones to retreat from the consequences of integration.  When Black Americans moved out of the South in the Great Migration of the 20^th century, they flocked in predominantly liberal cities.  As a result, that’s where the integration project was mostly going to take place.  The record shows affluent whites were not prepared for that.

Can we be optimistic about improving social cohesion and solidarity in America?  I am not sure, but I think that to heal the rift between working class and educated elites it is the latter that need to take the first and most decisive steps. 

*Matthew Desmond writes about poverty having lived it himself and having lived with poor people.  His book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City won the Pulitzer Prize.   

These are difficult times for free speech and academic freedom in American universities.  The enemy is within and without.  The forces that batter American institutions of higher learning are inside as well as outside.  Unfortunately, in many cases the culprits are in the camp that presumably is on the side of free speech and academic freedom.  That’s what makes the situation all the more perilous by muddying the waters.

The problem is not new but it came into full relief thanks to the ambivalent replies of the presidents of three elite universities during the recent Congressional hearings.  As a result, an assortment of parties with an ax to grind took advantage of the public criticism of university leaders to go after the whole premise of higher education.  That premise is that universities are the spaces where academic inquiry is free to explore every topic and students learn the art of critical thinking, develop their curiosity, and are trained how to debate ideas no matter how controversial.  As such a university is one of the most important pillars of liberal democracy and human progress.

Those who don’t feel comfortable with this premise are found among conservatives, red states, and big money donors.  (About the left’s culpability further down.)  Conservatives denounce theories and scholarship by calling them woke if they find them offensive to their interpretation of history and social phenomena.  They keep complaining that leftist faculty dominate the humanities departments and ask for their version of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), the same DEI they reject in other areas of academia and business.  They also ignore a well understood fact that the preponderance of liberal faculty in the humanities has more to do with the choice of conservative students in favor of careers in Wall Street and business than with any deliberate plot to leave conservatives out of the humanities.  

States dominated by GOP governors and legislatures have taken this conservative stance a step further by adopting laws that limit the scope of free expression and instruction.  As someone wrote in the NY Times, they are especially fond of attacking three-letter words, like DEI, ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance Sustainability), and BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction). Florida and Arkansas lead the pack in this connection.  But by doing so, conservatives contradict their own vocal opposition to government interference in the lives of their citizens.  They also forget that dissent and diversity of ideas – intellectual, religious, and political – are at the very foundation of the Western civilization which conservatives so much cherish.

After decades of plastering their names on buildings and schools of mostly elite universities, now some big donors are threatening to withhold or withdraw their money unless university administrations toe the donors’ lines with respect to what is admissible speech on campus.  The fact that their opposition to student demonstrations has emerged in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not prevent good faith people to see that what is under attack are fundamental principles of free speech and expression.  Cancelling prospective jobs of protesting students, publicizing their names, and putting pressure on university administrators to cancel lectures by pro-Palestinian speakers should not be condoned as rightful action justified by the donors’ identification with one of the parties.  Nor should we fail to see the double standard applied to the exercise of free speech under the First Amendment.  While wealthy donors are attacking free speech in academia, they also defend unfettered speech, theirs included, on social media.  The sad thing is, however, that contrary to the student protests, the free for all exchanges on social media have been responsible for the real deaths of young Americans.

Against this assault on campus speech and academic freedom, American universities must stand strong and defiant.  But first, they must clean up their own act.  The last twenty years, universities, especially private ones, have come to assume that speech and instruction are threats to the emotional fragility of students.  Thus, they have gone along with student demands to cancel speech found offensive to minorities defined by race or sexual orientation, or to other causes dear to the left.  To this effect, speakers with racist or anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ views as well as scientists who deny climate change have been either cancelled or disrupted.  And course syllabi must include warnings (triggers) about material that some students might find emotionally disturbing.

Thus, universities have succumbed to safetyism, as Lukianoff and Haidt call it in their book The Coddling of The American Mind.  Speech, open debate, and instruction must now be couched so that they protect the feelings and set of beliefs of different student groups.  The policies of safetyism have given us “safe spaces” where students of like beliefs can exchange their views as in an echo chamber.  Universities that adopt these policies forget that their social and intellectual mission is to train students in the art of democratic and pluralistic politics that demand openness of mind and countering arguments they despise with better arguments.  Universities forget to tell their students that when democracy falls and authoritarianism takes over there are no “safe spaces” for any of us.

Above all, though, universities must reject the encroachment of donors into their academic affairs and should not allow donor money to influence their mission.  If they do, then liberal arts are no longer a path to a liberating education and academic scholarship becomes the handmaiden of powerful interests.

Not all campus speech will please everybody.  I, like others, understand that some of it is ridiculous, offensive, and outright contemptible to many people inside and outside academic institutions.  But suppressing it by either suspending student groups or muzzling their voices is even worse.  Our constitutional right of free speech is impartial to pleasing or offensive speech.  After all, there are reasonable guardrails to keep speech accountable when and if it becomes harassing and hurtful to individuals.

In true democracies, freedom of speech and thought should be protected and empowered in every space of human activity.  But not more so than within the halls of universities.

In almost 30 years a party has lost the popular vote in seven out of eight elections and yet its nominees have won the presidency three times.  Twenty percent of the population can produce a majority of seats in one of the two legislative Houses.  Eleven percent of the population can produce enough votes to block legislation.  A party has won most election cycles in 26 years but the other party has controlled one of the two legislative Houses for most of this period.   

One would guess that these stark examples of counter-majoritarian rule have occurred in some dysfunctional state that happens to be new to democratic rule.  But that would be a wrong guess.  These electoral outcomes have happened in the U.S.  And they are mostly the result of the rules that apply to the Electoral College and the Senate.  Indirectly the electoral advantage of the minority built into these two bodies also spills into the appointment of justices in the Supreme Court.  These examples are only a part of the evidence the political science professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt present in their newest book Tyranny of the Minority.  As the authors point out this bias in favor of the minority has become more pronounced in the 21^st century. 

These electoral distortions are the result of the bias in favor of sparsely populated rural states that has worsened since the adoption of the Constitution almost two and half centuries ago.  In more recent times state voting rules have also produced disproportional apportionment of seats in state legislatures.  This can happen through partisan gerrymandering.  Levitsky and Ziblatt offer Pennsylvania as a case in point.  Since 2000 the Democratic Party has won four of the five state-wide elections, and yet it is the Republicans that have dominated the state legislature whose members are elected district by district.

The counter-majoritarian features of American democracy raised concerns long time ago but efforts to rectify them have failed as a result (you guessed it) of the supermajorities needed in the Congress and the number of approving states.  Since the popular vote is not proportionately reflected in the Senate and does not matter in the count of states, amending the U.S. Constitution is extremely difficult.  As a result, the U.S. is ranked at the top of the Index of Difficulty of amending the constitution among other democracies.  For example, there have been approximately 700 failed attempts to abolish the Electoral College, the last one falling victim to the filibuster rule in 1979.  Interestingly, the filibuster has no constitutional origin, and to the contrary, as pointed out by Levitsky, Ziblatt and others, the Framers of the Constitution were not in favor of supermajority rules in the legislative bodies.  Instead, they sought to protect the rights of the minority through the Bill of Rights and additional amendments.

A negative byproduct of counter-majoritarian rules is that they incentivize the competing parties to concentrate their appeal to a minority of voters as long as these voters can produce electoral wins.  The best way to achieve that is to suppress the voting rights of the likely voters of the other party.  Indeed, vote suppression has a long and sad history in the U.S.  It started in earnest with the suppression of Black votes following the demise of the Reconstruction in the South after 1877 and has continued despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  Both major parties share the blame in this connection.  The Democratic Party was complicit in the suppression of the Black vote after the Reconstruction whereas the more recent vote suppression tactics targeting likely Democratic voters are being pursued by the Republican party.  Contemporary America is the country of super-efficient operations in all areas of human activity but voting.  Whereas other democracies strive to enable more citizens to vote, the opposite seems to happen here.

The circumstances surrounding the adoption and subsequent weakening of the Voting Rights Act highlight the ambiguous allegiances of Democrats and Republicans to the protection of the democratic right to vote.   Although the Act was pushed by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, it was approved in the Senate by a much higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats because of the staunch opposition of Democratic Senators from Southern States.  In 2013, though, it was Republicans who successfully contested Section 4b of the Act before the Supreme Court and years later used the filibuster in the Senate to block the restoration of the full force of the Act (Tyranny of the Minotity).  Related to the standing of voting rights in America is a recent article by Richard Hansen in the New York Times who points out that unlike other Western Democracies, the U.S. has no constitutional affirmation of the right to vote.

Although the occurrence of controversial elections is not a perfect measure of the quality of a democracy, their frequency, nonetheless, could indicate problems in the electoral process.  My search in Wikipedia for contested and controversial elections showed that since 1990 more elections (at the federal and state level) have gone down as controversial in the U.S. than in Western Europe or Canada.  In Europe as a whole, the overwhelming majority of controversial elections since 1990 have happened in the countries of the former Soviet Block which were new and inexperienced in the practice of democratic elections.

Controversial and contested elections bring in legal disputes and the court system.  The lack of a standardize rule book for national elections in the U.S. and the mosaic of state rules inevitably create an over-reliance on the judicial system.  We witnessed this in the 2020 presidential elections when dozens of state and federal courts had to pass judgment on the integrity of the voting process in various states.  However, the relatively recent politicization of the appointment of judges can introduce partisan politics and interests in the adjudication of election-related cases.  As we have seen in Hungary, Orban has managed to cling to power thanks to the control of the judicial system.

The essential features of a democracy are: the right of the majority of the people to govern; the protection of the civil liberties of all even against the wishes of the majority; and the smooth transition of power from election losers to election winners.  Americans like to claim that ours is the oldest and grandest democracy of the modern world.  While we are correct on the former, we need to be a lot more modest about the latter.  Cumulatively, the structural flaws that thwart majority rule, the vote suppression tactics, and the violent resistance to prevent the transition of presidential power after the 2020 elections have taken their toll on the international standing of American democracy.  In fact, the last ten years, the U.S. has lost ten points in the Democratic Index compiled by The Freedom House and ranks now below several Western European countries with 83 points (out of 100). 

Given the obstacles in changing the rules any time soon, the survival and quality of the American democracy may come down to the integrity of the justice system and first and foremost to the loyalty of citizens to democratic principles.  This loyalty is especially important for the men and women who seek our vote. 

There are three global imbalances that have started to challenge us and will be very consequential for our future as a global community.  These imbalances refer to the global distribution of consumption of fossil fuels, prosperity, and population growth.  These imbalances are interconnected and because of that I believe we cannot solve one by ignoring the other.  Although not everybody keeps track of these imbalances, their effects have started to account for the general discontent we see in Western societies, which are being and will be tested the most.

It is now generally accepted that the climate crisis requires a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels.  Politically, this cannot be achieved unless Western nations and especially the U.S. are willing to reduce their per capita consumption of fossil fuels.  This is so because large polluters like China and India are unlikely to accept reduction of their aggregate energy consumption without accounting for their lower per capita consumption.  They will continue to argue that it is unfair to sacrifice the wellbeing of their people so that Americans enjoy the fruits of high energy consumption.  Country statistics in Our World In Data show that in 2022 the per capita consumption of fossil fuels was 63,836 kwh in the U.S., 28,721 kwh in Europe, 25,344 kwh in China, 6,319 kwh in India and 3,545 kwh in Africa.  This means that for any meaningful reduction of the global consumption of fossil fuels the burden falls mostly on the U.S.  We need to both raise the efficiency of fossil fuels and more importantly switch quickly to renewable energy sources. 

Data from The World Bank show that global prosperity (I use GDP as a proxy) is very unevenly distributed across the globe.  In 2022, the average per capital income was $49,557 in High Income countries, $5,896 in Low-Middle Income countries and $750 in Low Income countries.  About 700 million people live on $2 a day.  Around 1 billion people live without electricity and basic services in health and education.  The bulk of the global population living in absolute or relative poverty reside in the Global South, that is, Africa, South Asia, and South America.  This uneven prosperity (often coupled with political unrest and high crime rates) is what drives the great migration waves toward the U.S. and Europe.  It seems to me that if the U.S., Europe, and soon China (whose population is projected to shrink to below 800 million by 2100) wish to maintain their economic growth, they must adopt a more welcoming posture.  At the same time, they must lead a coordinating effort to raise the living standards in the Global South.  As long as people are deprived of material subsistence and/or the aspiration for a better life, they will keep coming to the West no matter how high the border walls are raised or how many intercepting ships are sent to block sea routs.

The third imbalance is in the projected growth of the global population which now stands at 8 billion.  It is projected to grow to 10 billion by year 2100.  Three quarters of this growth will come from Africa, whose total population will more than double from 1.41 billion now to 3.96 billion by 2100 (source: Statista).  What these population projections mean for energy consumption and migration are quite self-evident.  Unless Africa enters a long phase of sustained economic growth, it will generate ever increasing migration waves toward Europe and even the U.S. as recent data indicate.  Uneven population growth will also complicate the decoupling from fossil fuel consumption.  If people move from low to high consumption countries, they will turn into high energy consumers, thus making it more difficult for the host countries to reduce overall consumption of fossil fuels and more urgent to develop alternative sources.  If prosperity rises in Africa and other depressed regions, that will come with much higher energy consumption.   In either case, the pressure will be on the advanced North (that is, the West) to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels for the simple reason that it is global energy consumption that matters in the fight to save the climate.

The interconnectedness of the three imbalances can be summarized in the following propositions.  To alleviate (it’s too ambitious to say eliminate) the imbalance in prosperity requires additional aggregate consumption of energy.  To avert climate crisis and even disaster requires we quickly shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.  And, to check migration requires we succeed in narrowing the prosperity gap.  So, we cannot solve one imbalance without affecting at least one of the other two.

Western countries are those that will feel the most impact from these imbalances and their consequences.  The West is the part of the world with the strongest business sectors and high-consumption populations.  Businesses dislike limits to their growth and so do people regarding their material needs.  Western businesses could expand to the Global South to seek profits but we are currently witnessing a retrenchment of the globalization model in the policies of Western governments, and especially the U.S.  Western populations are also reluctant to sacrifice material prosperity in the interest of global priorities.  This is, especially so for working class people who have seen their wellbeing suffer because of globalization.  Whereas upper-middle class and upper-class Westerners are asked to risk only further betterment of their comfortable lives, working class people are asked to risk their aspirations to better living standards.  This predicament is in fact a matter of concern for all underprivileged people of the world.  Why should they accept limits before they had the chance to taste prosperity?  The negative effects of placing limits on energy consumption on the short-term wellbeing of working people is part of the reason they reject climate science and the energy policies behind it.

The need to consider limits to growth is not new.  In 1968, The Club of Rome commissioned a study to estimate the environmental costs of rapid industrialization.  In 1972, Dennis Meadows of MIT and his team produced the book The Limits To Growth, which painted a rather bleak future.  At the time, both the book and its authors were dismissed.  The New York Times called the results “garbage in garbage out.”  In 2002, Meadows reran the study on more powerful computers and with updated data.  The results were the same.*  Right now, we know the climate and environmental crises are real.  With hindsight, we could say we have already lost fifty years since 1972.  And the three imbalances I identified here make our effort a lot more difficult. 

It is possible that rapid advancements in energy-related technologies will buy us time and allows us to make steady progress in arriving at a more balanced world in terms of prosperity and environmental sustainability.  Until then though politicians and citizens of the West must prepare the ground for some difficult adjustments.

* This information comes from Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time of James Suzman.

These are difficult times for humanity.  Having endured the deadly wave of the covid pandemic we walked straight into Russia’s war against Ukraine.  And as if that was not enough, here we are in the middle of one of the most devastating wars of recent decades in Gaza.  Meanwhile the world order is tested as the antagonism between America and China enters a more confrontational phase.  All that happens while we try to contain the risks from climate change, a deteriorating ecosystem, and the rise of powerful AI applications.  That’s where we stand as another year is approaching. 

And yet as a species, we have achieved remarkably great feats.  Our greatest achievement is that although we started as a weak species in a very unfriendly natural environment, we finally managed to tame nature and thrive as the dominant species of earth.  (I recently read that a study found evidence that our species had been reduced to just 1000 individuals before it managed to bounce up again.)  A look at our recorded history also shows that through fits and starts we have made tremendous progress in feeding more people, educating more children, healing more sick people, discovering more and more secrets of our natural world, respecting the personal and collective rights of more people, and be connected to more people than ever before.  To help us march together in the paths of peace and prosperity, of science and health, human rights, environmental sustainability, and other areas, we have also established global institutions, from the UN to the WTO.  These are manifestations of our human nature at its best.

Unfortunately, at the same time, we have conducted ourselves with cruelty, intolerance, and greed against other members of our species.  We have fought bloody wars, persecuted and annihilated millions of fellow humans, erased cultures and religions, enslaved people, and occupied foreign lands.  That’s humankind at its worst.  The last year alone, 108 million people were displaced globally due to armed conflicts and persecutions.  Among them, there were 30 million refugees.  The latest edition of the Global Peace Index (from the Institute of Economics and Peace) shows that last year 238,000 civilians died in global conflicts, a 96% increase over the previous year.  Civilian deaths and displacements have come at a cost of $1 trillion or 13% of the global GDP.  And right now, 91 countries are estimated to be involved in international conflicts compared to 58 the year before.  These statistics suggest that we still are the greatest danger to our own species.

At the root of these conflicts and devastation lie the dark sides of ethno-nationalism and unchecked religious fervor.  Coupled with racism, cultural biases, and greed human-against-human strife continues to take us away from the paths of progress and peaceful co-existence.  Ethnicity, religion, race, and culture turn bad when they instill in us an uncompromising conviction of superiority that opens an almost dehumanizing gap between Us and Them. 

There is a lot of controversy whether intrahuman violence predates the emergence of the institutions of state and organized religions some 8 to 10 thousand years ago.  What is not in doubt though is the enduring power of the tribalism of Us and Them and its hold on modern humankind.  On one hand, our cognitive and critical thinking powers drive us to inventions and innovations that often surpass imagination.  On the other, the grip our emotions command on our behavior can turn everything to instruments of also unimaginable harm. 

What is also not in doubt is how emotions can move masses of people into destructive collective behavior leaving only a few to go against the waves of aggression and domination.  We are seeing this right now as the war in Gaza rages in apocalyptic fashion.  Many of the cries of protests from both sides call in overt or covert terms for the elimination of the other side.  What is remarkable many of these uncompromising voices come from supporters of the parties who live far beyond the theater of the war or have no familial relationship to the combatants.  We should expect that such distance would produce more balanced and less emotional protests.  But they don’t.  That shows the power of the Us versus Them divide.

And yet, the voices of reason, of empathy, of reconciliation do exist.  Out there, there are courageous and kind voices from both Israelis and Palestinians that argue for reconciliation, tolerance, and co-existence.  The most uplifting article I have read so far was one by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times (11/16/2023).  It tells the stories of individuals, Israelis and Palestinians, who have come to know each other and have tried for years to work together for peace, even now through these dark days when emotions run hot and visceral.  These are people who have the emotional strength to bridge the gap between Us and Them.  They are capable to see more of the common humanness that binds us all than the differences that divide us. 

Humans, being the most prosocial animals, have the capacity for reconciliation, much more than other species.  The same holds for nations.  In the post War II era, France and Germany finally decided to bury the hatchet and out of this came the European unification project.  America and Vietnam are now trading goods instead of bullets as some 50 years ago.

The greatest and most remarkable catalysts for reconciliation are though single individuals.  These are individuals who have the gift, plus the courage, to walk us over the gap between Us and Them.  Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela are some of these remarkable humans.  Their message was not that their side should live in peace by defeating and dominating their opponents, but rather how to live peacefully with them side by side.

If we have a chance to build a better world we better then listen to the voices of the kinder, more generous, more tolerant, more compassionate, and less greedy among us.  These may also be our inner voices if we only want to listen.

That’s my new year wish.  Let’s all try to bridge the gap.  

According to Stuart Russell, author of Human Compatible, the standard model of technology has so far worked as follows: we build a machine; we give it an objective to carry out; and off it goes doing its job.  And one more very important thing.  When we want to stop it, we turn it off.  Artificial intelligence, however, can upend this model because down the road it has the potential to learn how to disable the Off switch button.

The current debate about the place and the future of AI in human civilization seems, however, to mostly treat AI as part of the standard model.  It is true that groups of scientists, researchers and policy makers have expressed grave concerns about the existential risk AI poses to humanity, but their voices seem to be drowned by the numerous news articles that are more concerned with the usual pedestrian matters that surround each new technological breakthrough.  That is, the articles we daily read on AI first and foremost promote the great contributions AI can make in the fields of medicine, public health, education, and numerous other fields, arguably all of them valuable.  They also bring out the potential risks as AI tools can replace people in numerous jobs or be abused or misused for nefarious and criminal purposes.  This is the type of debate that has surrounded every past technological innovation dividing people between technology enthusiasts and Luddites who abhor technological advances.  However, AI has a new potential we need to address.

This potential is that our own creation can develop the capacity to no longer listen to us and turn against our own interests.  It is with this in mind, that we need to pay attention to the voices of skepticism.  Russell published his book in 2019, and yet this book is still relevant especially after OpenAI’s introduction of its AI algorithm ChatGPT.  Russell’s maim objective is to alert us to the risk of humans losing control over their AI creation.  This can happen when we build superintelligent AI tools (software and robots) which eventually learn to become autonomous from any human control.

Russell does not advocate that we shut down all research on AI.  Instead, he lays out his principles for building provably beneficial AI machines which even if they achieve autonomy will continue to serve humanity.  But for this to happen, AI machines must be trained to align their preferences and objectives with those of their human masters.  That means AI machines must be trained to be truly altruistic toward humans.  The core element of this altruism is that AI machines will be incapable of placing their survival over the interests of humans.

To build altruistic AI machines, however, poses significant problems for their creators.  To acquire preferences and objectives that align with ours, AI machines must learn from us.  To do so it means we have to open-up to them our most private secrets.   Even so, there is the problem that humans are not perfectly rational – far from that, whereas AI machines will be built to operate as rational thinkers.  How can they make sense of our idiosyncratic emotions, thinking processes and decisions?  Furthermore, as Russell writes, we are unpredictable and we are often uncertain of our preferences.  None of these challenges make the building of altruistic – as opposed to self-preserving – AI machines a certain success.

Equally skeptical about the coexistence of humans and machines is another pioneer of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the DeepMind, which in 2016 managed to beat the world champion of the game GO.  Like Russell, Suleyman does not believe that we should hold back research and innovation in AI.  In his 2023 book, The Coming Wave, Suleyman advocates for the containment of AI so that it does not escape beyond the point of no return as far as human control is concerned.  Drawing from his experience at DeepMind, Suleyman warns that we have no idea when containment or control is over and AI dominates humans as a superior artificial species.  That’s what he and Russell call our Gorilla problem.  That is, just as we humans emerged out of a common ancestor to dominate our fellow primates, AI can emerge from us to dominate us as a superior, albeit artificial, species.

All this may be dismissed as fanciful imaginative talk.  But that’s exactly why people like Russell and Suleyman worry about the state of the present debate about AI.  Russell sees three strains in this debate.  First, there are the denialists, who make various excuses to dismiss the severity of the AI problem.  Second, there are the deflectors.  They recognize the problem but they claim there are more serious problems to fix in many aspects of human life that make the ultimate risk posed by AI a second-order problem.  Lastly, there are the over-simplifiers who try to assure us the ultimate problem will be solved because after all they, as experts, know so.

Meanwhile we see that AI research and tools have started to come out without a solid framework of checks and monitoring.  The European Union seems to be the only governmental authority to set some regulatory boundaries around AI research and applications based on the principle of “do no harm to humans.”  The Biden administration recently issued a declaration of wishes and admonitions but without any regulatory or enforcement bite.  China, Russia and other international players have been reluctant to impose concrete road maps. 

At the same time, the beneficiaries of this foggy landscape are the big data aggregators (Meta, Google, Microsoft and few others) who have a huge advantage over their competitors for a very clear reason.  As mentioned above, AI assistants serving humans must learn a whole lot about them.  Which means only big data aggregators have the data for such training.  Moreover, given the ability of these aggregators to compel users to surrender data, our privacy will be invaded much more than now.  In their effort to maximize the alignment of preferences and objectives between AI machines and humans, these aggregators will become more and more expansive in the types of data they will try to pry from us.  So, we need to set serious boundaries around our privacy and we also need to make the playing field of AI a lot more level to avoid dominance by few big players.

Mustafa Suleyman makes a great point we need to heed.  Superintelligence will be the last innovation humans make.  After that Super AI will be able to do everything.  This raises an important and momentous question.  What human-based and inspired capabilities do we humans wish or need to maintain before we lose our drive and/or skills to create, to imagine, to compute, and relate to others?  Do we wish to retain any degree of agency for ourselves?  That’s what the real debate about AI ought to be.

In a few words, the mood of the country is glum.  Majorities of Americans are not satisfied with the state of the economy.  They are not satisfied with the direction of the country either.  And yet, despite this backdrop of gloomy assessments, Americans are spending at healthy rates, the GDP grows quarter after quarter, and unemployment is at near record low levels.  So, what’s the matter with Americans?

To start with the economy first, a recent opinion essay in the New York Times by the economist Karen Petrou put its fingers on some economic realities that can remain obscure when we focus only on aggregate economic numbers.  First, Petru reminds us that the U.S. came out of the pandemic with greater economic inequality than before.  The concentration of total household income and wealth within the top 1% and 5% of Americans, respectively, has risen above its pre-pandemic levels.  Currently, 64% of American households make it paycheck to paycheck each month.  A recent content analysis of Tik Tok videos reported in the NYT shows unprecedented levels of economic despair among the young people of generation Z.  Living in a world full of information about the lifestyles of the better off, it doesn’t take a dive into economic statistics to realize how you fare economically.  Behavioral economics tells us that people judge their economic wellbeing not by their own absolute income but by how it compares to that of others.

The pessimism about the future is particularly worrisome.  One would expect that amidst the current explosion of technological advances (as in AI) and the great promises they hold for humankind (at least as told in the media) people would be wildly optimistic about the future.  But should they?  Americans have seen how earlier breakthroughs in technology and global trade have intensified, not lessened, the flow of the spoils to a small fraction of winners. 

The pessimism about the future is reflected in surveys.  In a recent NBC News poll only 19% of the respondents agreed that the next generation will live better than their own generation.  Is there any hope that things will change any time soon?  In his recent book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle, a Cambridge University professor, contends that the order of unfettered capitalism is on its way out to be succeeded by a reformed version of capitalism that is more inclusive and more focused toward serving the common good.  But again, how can this happen in an era of big money in politics and powerful corporate interests?

In addition to being dissatisfied with the state of the economy, Americans are also unhappy with the direction of the country and the dysfunctional political system.  An overwhelming majority, 78% of the respondents to be precise, think the country is headed in the wrong direction according to a recent poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Research Center.   An ABC News poll found that this opinion is shared by majorities of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.  A Pew Center poll found that 65% of respondents say the American system needs major reforms, and 57% believe the U.S. is no longer a model of democracy.  All these views collectively signify a radical reassessment of the American narrative that has heretofore painted America as the land of unlimited opportunities and a paradigm of democracy.

So, what explains this overall mood and especially the souring about the health of the American democracy?  For answers, it is time we turned to the U.S. constitution itself and how it has produced an increasingly counter-majoritarian political system. 

In their latest book The Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain in stark terms how the constitution, written more than two centuries ago and under the compromises imposed by the political realities of that time, is now responsible for undermining the fundamental democratic principle of majority rule.  This in turn, has opened up a persistent gap between the popular will and legislative outcomes.  In short, sparsely populated states and rural districts are now over-represented in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and most importantly in the Electoral College.   As a result, we have presidents elected without winning the popular vote and the Senate skewed toward senators elected by a minority of American voters. 

The ultimate outcome of a non-representative (in terms of popular votes) Electoral College and Senate is a Supreme Court itself dominated by justices who have been appointed thanks to the over-representation of a minority of the popular vote.  In addition, a minority of forty-one senators can block any proposed law thanks to the mechanism of filibuster, an anomaly not found in the constitution nor in any other western democracy.  This is in essence what Levitsky and Ziblatt call a counter-majoritarian political system that makes American democracy less of a democracy.

How could then this counter-majoritarian system be relevant to how Americans feel about the direction of their country?  First, many voters feel their vote is diluted.  Second, the popular will on major issues is not translated into a majority of votes to facilitate the passage of popular legislation.  Voters who feel strongly about major issues, related to abortion, gun control, the climate or immigration, know that despite the popularity of their positions there is no chance of legislative success.  Obviously, this contributes to their pessimism.

We also need to take account of another important factor.  Presently, America stands at the crossroads of either developing a functioning multiethnic-multiracial democracy or sliding back on its aspiration to become a better union.  Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that majorities of white Americans are feeling an existential threat to their influence and standing in the emerging multiracial America.  Whether their fears are rational or not matters very little.  On the opposite side stand those who fear that their civil liberties and voting rights are under attack.  The fluidity and ambiguity as to which road the country will take leaves many Americans with anxiety and doubts about the direction of America.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies better the unsettled times we live in than the resignation of significant numbers of Republican and Democratic members of Congress.  They cite political dysfunction and futility in effecting constructive changes as the main reasons of their walking out.  I am inclined to think that their exasperation reflects the more general sentiment that in a country full of potential for bigger things political minorities and self-interests stymie the progress to a better future.