Author: George Papaioannou

The political history of America shows that progressive agendas are born out and passed in periods of crisis.  Roosevelt’s progressive agenda was the response to the economic devastation the Great Depression had wreaked on Americans.  Johnson’s Great Society was the response to the accumulated racial injustices and the abuses of the voting rights of Black Americans.  Today’s progressive agenda comes at a time when despite enormous wealth creation the country fails to provide many of its citizens acceptable living standards or the opportunities to gain control of their lives and enjoy basic economic security and quality of life.    

Past progressive agendas aiming at economic security and social justice have been met with loud denouncements from conservative or rich politicians and economic elites.  Roosevelt was accused of introducing socialism, if not communism, and wealthy Democrats and Republicans ganged up against him.  The powerful Morgans were so incensed by FDR’s programs that they would be happy, if they could, to set up the Morgan financial empire anywhere else but the US.*  But Roosevelt, like Johnson after him, was tough enough and willing to give back as much and more as he took from his detractors.  In the end, both prevailed over their opponents.

Interestingly, neither FDR’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society had to include the progressive initiatives, like Social Security and Medicare, respectively.  The pressing issue for FDR was to extricate the US from the thralls of a declining economy and high unemployment.  He could have done that by merely relying on monetary and fiscal policies to boost purchasing power and energize the business sector.  Johnson also created Medicare and Medicaid while the US economy was experiencing robust economic performance.  Nonetheless, both FDR and Johnson realized that saving democracy (in FDR’s case) and creating a more equitable and healthier society (in Johnson’s case) justified institutions and government programs that provided essential benefits that were beyond the reach of many individual citizens.  This is actually what we find at the core of progressivism: civic and state initiatives that lift up the individual in order to create a stronger whole.

So, one point to make is that progressive agendas have been met with opposition from counter interests that reside with both parties and the business elites of the country.  Therefore, we should not be surprised by the opposition we now see against the progressive agenda in the Build Back Better plan despite the popularity of its components.  Notwithstanding this popularity, there is though something the present debate lacks but both FDR and Johnson had going for them.  What they had was an intellectual or moral voice that would make the case for their progressive agendas. 

Roosevelt’s intellectual mentor and influencer (to use a modern term) was none other than John Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the last century.  Keynes had come to see economics as the means to secure the good life for everybody.  And the power to do that rest in the hands of the government.  Johnson’s powerful moral voice was that of Martin Luther King, Jr.   Although King’s message was for racial harmony, the moral force it projected was so inspiring as to extend into a call against poverty and for improving the well-being of the common man, Black and White.

Despite the promises of the Great Society, the subsequent direction of the economy in America has been toward a “winner takes all” mentality that leaves too many people on the wayside of economic progress and security.  This in turn has had significant and dire consequences for individual lives and the social fabric of the country.  Thus, today’s imperative for a progressive agenda gathers force from the present state of inequity across the educated and less educated, the wealthy and poor, the urban and rural Americans.  The unprecedent concentration of wealth and the differences in incomes are not mere statistics.  They signify entirely different levels in the quality of life between the well-to-do and those (a sizable portion of the population) that find themselves at the lower rungs of the ladder. 

The problem is not that some make too much money.  The real problem is that a lot of people make too little.  Worse even is the uneven distribution of opportunities.  Supporting an earlier start in education, or a more affordable access to it, or having a more secured and healthier childhood is not granting privileges but making sensible investments in the well-being of the entire country.  Likewise, enabling mothers to go to work thanks to affordable child care is a boon to the economy.  The scourge of opioids, the suicides of despair, poor health indicators, high mortality rates, and child poverty, all together, paint the picture of a society that fails to live up to the expectations justified by its unprecedent national wealth.

Is there a moral dimension in how we appraise a progressive agenda?  An austere, conservative view advocates that individuals compelled to make choices under financial constraints become better citizens.  The progressive view is that freedom from having to make choices among essential goods due to financial constraints is the superior organizing principle a society ought to adopt.  Roosevelt had called this “freedom from want.”  What about a political dimension?  When a system does not produce equitable outcomes, it risks losing its legitimacy.  Between the two world wars, Keynes advocated policies that would protect the legitimacy of democracy and capitalism.  To his dismay, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic went the opposite way and the result was the rise of populism and authoritarian strongmen, like Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. 

Successful economies without progressive institutions and standards betray their mission.  When private enterprise, society, and the state working together reach a point where scarcity is no longer justified by aggregate wealth, all citizens should enjoy a decent living standard.  Keynes, the visionary of a good life for all, had envisioned the decent life to extend from meeting basic human needs to enabling the common citizen to partake of culture and the arts.

Setting such a progressive vision and priorities is possible only in societies in which economic performance is the handmaid of society, not the other way around.

* Parts of this post drew information from The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes of Zachary Carter.

We usually say “the elephant in the room” but I chose elephants in the planet to signify two things: first, we still live in separate rooms (countries) on this planet; and second, in each of these rooms there is a different elephant (sometimes more) that we like to ignore.  And, of course, the future of real elephants depends on how we handle our metaphorical elephants.

World leaders have met 26 times since 1995 to agree on how to protect the climate.   This week’s meetings in Glasgow are the most critical thus far as all the evidence points that unless serious action is taken earth’s climate will warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level by the end of the century. 

Climate, however, is not our only concern.  We also have to protect biodiversity which has declined at alarming rates.  The protection of climate and biodiversity is essential to a healthier and livable planet.  Pursuing both, it will come down to passing from one world to another.  On one side, we have millennia of human life that has prioritized human gratification regardless of its harmful effects on the rest of natural life and the earth’s climate that sustains it.  To abandon this path will take a radical technological and cultural transformation on part of the human race.  On the other side, there is the promise of a safer world in which, however, daily life can be only imagined in all its aspects and wrinkles.

We know what we need to do from a technological standpoint to move from one to the other world.  We need to drastically reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and other harmful substances.  We also need to raise our sense of responsibility to the rest of the natural world.  For these things to happen we have to reduce the human footprint on the earth.  Our footprint includes where we live, how we travel, and what and how much we produce and consume.  That’s where I believe the greatest challenges lie.  These challenges are the elephants in our rooms we need to consider.

The first challenge we face in reducing the human footprint on the planet is population growth.  Thankfully, two factors are helping in this regard.  The first is the dramatic decline in infant mortality across the globe so that we no longer need to have many offspring as insurance against premature death.  The second factor is control of birth rates thanks to more education and the use of contraceptives.  But while lower birth rates have brought better living standards to overcrowded poorer countries, they have raised anxieties in developed nations with below replacement birth rates.  Since our global population is way past what experts consider to be its sustainable level (no more than 3 billion) we need to turn our attention away from population growth to its distribution by adopting more open immigration policies.  This, of course, is a red flag to nationalists, meaning it’s one of our elephants in the room

The second elephant is over-consumption fed by the culture of consumerism.  It has two dimensions.  One is our desire to over-satisfy existing needs (Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”).  Bigger houses, bigger and more cars, more clothes, more extravagant recreation activities.  The other dimension is the creation of new needs.  To satisfy new needs we often utilize new technologies that further expand the human footprint.  Consumer demand is the bulk of the GDP of all countries and economic policies rely on boosting consumer demand to grow the national income.  The consumption problem will not abate in the future as billions of people from second and third world countries ascend toward a middle-class income level and are influenced by the global reach of consumerism projected by affluent countries.  And over-consumption has an attendant problem: wealth seeking, which itself generates activity that increases the human footprint. 

The third elephant is the need for global collaboration.  To this end, we need to move from the concept of the national common good to the concept of the global common good.  But as difficult it is for individual citizens to prioritize the national good over their personal good it is equally difficult for countries to temper their nationalist interests in the interest of the global common good.  Maintaining the great forests of the earth and reducing pollutants and planet-warming chemicals requires a global response because environmental degradation does not respect national borders.  The developed countries which were the early climate abusers have to shoulder more of the cost of climate protection so that less developed countries can improve their wellbeing.  There is no guaranty that all major countries will attain this enlightened spirit of cooperation.  Domestic political rivalries often trip the most ambitious and determined efforts to serve climate-related priorities.  The US is a case in point.  Here the profit interests of the fossil fuel industry and its political collaborators have stymied Congress from ratifying international climate treaties.  In China, the preoccupation with ensuring the ability of the Communist Party to deliver prosperity to the Chinese people is their domestic obstacle.  In Russia, the huge dependence of its economy on fossil fuels makes the country less eager to contribute to climate efforts.

Finally, there is the elephant of how we want to treat and interact with the rest of natural life.  In this regard, there is a dark possibility we have to account for.  What if after we attain a net-zero state we feel more empowered to expand the human presence and activity beyond the current boundaries.  Our history shows we use technological advances for both good and evil.  What would that do to other species?  What if we manage to counter the negative climate effects of deforestation by other means, ignoring biodiversity concerns?   Along with other species this will further contribute to the demise of those of our fellow humans that still choose to live in their tribal and indigenous customs and ways of life.  They have already suffered a lot in the name of explorations, conquests, and economic exploitation of their lands.  And yet they are the sole source we have to find how we lived in the distant past and our sole way to learn how humans cope and live in harmony with nature.  We make every effort to preserve antiquities and artifacts and we build museums to house our Picassos and Cezannes.  Don’t we owe the same and more to our human past life surviving in the Tribes and Indigenous People of our Planet?*

 * With our typical overconfidence in the universality of our values, modern humans have all along assumed that indigenous people wish to be brought up to our way of life.  That’s a falsehood.  To this day, indigenous people around the world remain indifferent to the comforts of modern life and refuse to be assimilated and change their ways of living.

You are in a restaurant with people you don’t know very well and you propose to split a salad with one of them.  You recommend a salad with arugula (a bitter-tasting green) which your co-diner politely declines.  Have you learned anything about this person?  Well, a whole bunch of research would predict that your co-diner most likely has conservative leanings. *

If you are surprised, so was I when I came across the article “The Yuck Factor” in the March 2019 issue of The Atlantic.  By that time, I had read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and how our moral foundations matrix (based on evolutionary factors) explains our political orientation.  Then I read BEHAVE by Robert Sapolsky and again I encountered a whole section on the relationship of politics to psychological and biological factors.

Sapolsky asks three questions: (a) Do political orientations tend to be internally consistent for each one of us, that is, do they come as a package?  If you are for domestic law and order, do you also support foreign intervention to keep international order? His answer is: Usually.  (b) Do such consistent orientations arise from deep, implicit factors with remarkably little to do with specific political issues?  He replies: Yup.  And (c) Can one begin to detect the bits of biology underlying these factors?  He writes: Of course.

The internal consistency of our political orientations is in full display in surveys about various issues and party affiliation.  Democrats tend to be pro-choice, recognize climate change, favor safety net programs, and pro-immigrant.  Republicans tend toward the opposite direction.  According to Sapolsky, there are underlying factors that explain these differences.  Conservatives are more uncomfortable with ambiguity and more likely to perceive threats (e.g., from immigrants or Muslims).  Conservatives also dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, and are more parochial in their empathy.  As a result, conservatives like loyalty, conformity, and authority.  (Consider for example the greater party solidarity among Republicans than Democrats.)  Conservatives’ dislike of change and novelty also makes them nostalgic of the past.  (That can explain why Make America Great Again resonates so intensely with Republicans).

On the other end of the political orientation spectrum stand the liberals who place more emphasis on caring and fairness.  Because liberals are more comfortable with novelty and change, they are more inclined to do away with established social and religious norms in order to serve their priorities, like reducing poverty and inequality, and promoting LBGTQ and women’s rights.  Conservatives on their part are more inclined to resort to power of authority in order to preserve their own priorities, safety and conformity. 

What about the biological origins of political orientation?  This takes us back to the emotional pair of disgust and fear of threat.  Studies have shown that conservatives have lower thresholds of disgust than liberals.  Thus, in experiments, conservatives are found to experience greater activation of the amygdala (the brain area that perceives threats and controls anxiety) when presented with disgusting images.  So, if you puke you rebuke.  If you associate migrants with diseases, find some sexual relationship distasteful, and your taste receptors are more sensitive, to bitter and other unfamiliar tastes, you are more likely to have conservative leanings.  After all the emotion of disgust is one of the mechanisms of detecting threats and as such it plays an evolutionary role in survival.   

There is also evidence that brains with more gray matter in the cingulate cortex, which regulates empathy, are more linked to liberalism whereas brains with bigger amygdala are more linked to conservatism.  According to Sapolsky, the brains of conservatives are more likely to process threats and disdainful stimuli at the visceral level whereas the brains of liberals are more likely to temper visceral reaction with some rationalization that takes place in the frontal cortex.

These differences in biological factors do not bestow superiority or inferiority to liberalism or conservatism.  Each leaning aims toward survival but by different means.  Their coexistence in a society can protect both liberals and conservatives from their most extreme predilections.  Thus, the liberal tendency to break with the past, embrace the new, and charge forward can benefit from the conservative hesitancy toward novel and untested experiences and the higher sensitivity to threats.  So, this is one practical consequence of liberalism and conservatism operating within a society.

Another thing to keep in mind is that genetic predilections are just the first draft of one’s personality.  As Jonathan Haidt suggests individuals follow different life paths in which they encounter different experiences and undergo adaptation processes which further shape their personalities.  Sapolsky always emphasizes that attention to genetics without accounting for the environment leads down to wrong conclusions.  For example, experiments have shown that under certain conditions liberals and conservatives become, respectively, more conservative or more liberal.

Personality and political orientation are also affected by the personal narratives each one of us constructs to make our actions and decisions meaningful and part of a bigger purpose.  For better or worse, personal narratives are often influenced by outside narratives, mostly associated with religious beliefs and political ideologies.  Do these outside narratives push us toward a more calibrated and thoughtful processing of our visceral feelings or do they play on our innate fears and resentments?

How do we explain, for example, the growing polarization of the American public over the last twenty or so years?  It cannot be that all of the sudden the genetic predilections for liberalism and conservatism grew more extreme.  Nature does not work with such abrupt jolts.  What has happened is that the environment we find ourselves has changed dramatically over this period.  Immigration, social and job displacement, and inequality have grown into bigger problems.  And within this environment, political, news media, and religious players have propagated narratives that have hardened our acceptance of the Other.   

It would be easy to blame polarization on biology and genes.  But it would be wrong.  The solution is to motivate ourselves (as Sapolsky’s evidence would imply) to engage our brains more in the practice of critical reassessment of our visceral reflexes.  

* Don’t expect every conservative friend of yours to reject your salad with arugula.  The experiment among 64,000 Americans found that twice as many conservatives rejected arugula relative to liberals.  This does not mean all conservatives in the sample rejected arugula.  Statistical results based on samples only tell us what is likelier not what is absolutely certain. 

There are two serious defects that ail today’s corporate governance, that is, the system that governs decision-making authority in corporations.  First, the bulk of voting power has been taken out of the hands of individual shareholders and given to institutional shareholders, that is, mutual funds and other wealth management investors.  This has eroded shareholder democracy and has practically denied a voice to the actual owners.  Thus, we face an economy beset by the dual concentration of market power and voting rights in the hands of, respectively, fewer firms and voting entities.  Second, women and minorities are still poorly represented on corporate boards, thus leaving more diverse and important perspectives with weak influence on corporate decisions. 

There is, though, a third cause for concern in relation to how corporate boards are structured.  Specifically, they fall far short of assuring us how they uphold the social responsibility principles they claim or are expected to care for.

For most of its life, the corporation has functioned to serve economic efficiency, and in particular the economic interests of its shareholders.  The rationale for this was that the shareholders bore the ultimate risk of the enterprise and, hence, they should have ultimate authority over its management.

But then in the middle of the “greed is good” hype of the Eighties, business academics and practitioners realized that subordinating the interests of other parties to those of the shareholders could damage the economic efficiency of the firm and hurt shareholders.  Thus, the stakeholder theory of the firm was born.  To achieve long-term survival and prosperity firms were advised to pay fair consideration to the interests of stakeholders (like debtors, workers, customers, and suppliers) not just to those of shareholders.  This alignment of the shareholders’ interests with the interests of the firm’s other stakeholders was still a call for economic efficiency, and thus, still consistent with shareholder ultimate decision-making authority.

What has happened since the Nineties, though, is that the range of stakeholder interests has been broadened to include the interests of local communities, climate and environmental concerns, diversity, and social justice.  This expansion of the stakeholder concept comes from our recognition that firms do not operate in a vacuum, but instead they can generate risks and harmful conditions to be borne by all and not only by the traditional stakeholders. 

The new class of stakeholder interests falls into the realm of social responsibility.  Whereas the traditional board structure remains effective in managing decisions related to the economic efficiency of the corporation, it is time to ask:  Is this board structure still effective in managing decisions that satisfy the social responsibility of the corporation?  That is, we have to ask:  Can shareholders consider the interests of a community in a relocation decision?  Can shareholders consider the workers’ interests in acquisitions that result in downsizing the labor force?  Can the shareholders consider ecological and environmental risks if it means lower profits?  Can the shareholders give a fair chance to women and minorities of color to participate on boards and executive positions?

There are usually two ways to nudge firms toward certain behavior.  One is to rely on market forces.  Thus, debtors can refuse to lend untrustworthy firms.  Consumers can refuse to buy from unscrupulous firms.  The same way, we can argue the public could shun firms with a poor social responsibility record.  But that would require we have reliable and verifiable information about hundreds, thousands of firms the public deals with.  It would also require that the public has reasonable choices if it is to discriminate across good and bad corporate actors – not exactly an easy matter in a world of growing concentration in many important markets.  (How many have abandoned Facebook in light of its recent bad publicity?)

Another way to discipline firms is through laws and regulations.  But this approach also has limitations.  It is often the case that society’s preferences in favor of stronger environmental protection or greater diversity are not countenanced by the political powers that are.   The point is that discipline from the outside, whether the market or the government, is not enough to bear on corporations when it comes to matters of social responsibility.

But there is a third way.  The right to board participation can be expanded to parties that represent the interests of communities, workers, diversity and ecological sustainability.  This board reform is most crucial for large corporations that have a big and heavy footprint on communities, workers, the ecology and social justice issues.  To the purists of the shareholder model this reform may be an anathema.  But we have to acknowledge the corporation is not the creation of natural laws.  It is a human innovation, a legal construct, that gave a solution to the aggregation of large sums of capital with less personal risk.  Over time, the law, the regulatory authorities (e,g,. the Securities and Exchange Commission), and stock exchanges have seen the need to enforce various representation rules in order to safeguard the integrity of corporate governance. 

Now we have entered a phase of reckoning with our responsibility to the wellbeing of communities and workers, gender equality, social justice and our threatened ecosystem.  Today’s corporations dwarf in size the corporations of the past and impact important aspects of human and natural life with unprecedented consequences.

Two years ago, the Business Roundtable (an association of CEOs) revised the purpose of the firm to include the responsibility for stakeholder interests beyond those of the shareholders.  It is time to acknowledge that these interests cannot be effectively served without proper representation.  Reforming the representational rules of corporate boards will better integrate economic, social, and ecological interests and serve the common good. 

More than 2 million years ago humans started to use stone tools for hunting, carving meat and other tasks.  This may have been the first major decoupling in human history.  It was the decoupling of productivity from body strength and dexterity.  Executing certain manual tasks was no longer strictly dependent on physical strength.  Even physically weak human beings could carry out work that exceeded the capacity of their bodies.

When we trace the human history, we discover many instances of decoupling that in some cases meant the passage from one level of civilization to another, more sophisticated, more complex and also freer of certain limitations.  This does not mean that all cases of decoupling produced only beneficial outcomes.  But influential they were.  Looking through such decoupling events is another way to study human history.  Over time, I have kept notes on decoupling cases I found important and below I present a list with the caveat there may be more which I might have missed.

At some point humans leaving in cold climates discovered they could freeze meat and consume it later.  That was the decoupling between the time food was produced (by hunting and collection) and the time it was consumed.  The refrigerator industry is a decoupling-enabling industry. 

Around six thousand years ago, humans domesticated horses, donkeys and oxen and started to use them to move themselves and material belongings.  The invention of the wheeled cart further facilitated the transport of people and goods.  These innovations decoupled distance and load of movement from the strength and endurance of human legs.

The Chinese used smoke signals and ancient Romans used carrier pigeons to communicate information over long distances.  This was the decoupling of information communication from hearing and sight distance.  The telegraph, the telephone and the internet are the modern facilitators of that decoupling.

The historical record shows that about four thousand years ago someone in Mesopotamia entered into a borrowing-lending arrangement with another party and, thus, credit was born.  That meant, today’s consumption was no longer limited to today’s income.  And, thus, the decoupling of consumption from income gave birth to finance.  The human capacity to delay gratification (which by the way seems to exceed that of other animals) is behind that trade of present consumption for future consumption with interest being the sweetener. 

Using projectiles, like spears and stones, in human battles decoupled the distance of combatants from the effectiveness of their weapons.  Body-to-body fighting was no longer necessary.  Modern warfare has advanced this decoupling to its maximum extent thanks to inter-continental missiles.

The invention of agriculture brought a division of labor and hierarchy of power that changed the terms of meeting human needs.  Whereas hunter-gatherer societies strove to meet all member needs out of the common production of food, agricultural societies introduced compensation arrangements in which the link between meeting basic needs and group responsibility to this end was broken.  Thus, we entered the modern period of institutional scarcity where wages often fall short of the means necessary to afford basic goods.  Call it the decoupling of wages from affordability.

The advent of large-scale manufacturing brought by capitalism intensified the decoupling between ownership of labor and ownership of capital.  Workers would be now compensated at a fixed rate (wages) whereas capital owners would be compensated at a variable rate by claiming the final surplus or profit.  Just as the decoupling of managers and owners created conflicts of interest, the decoupling of labor and capital created conflicts of interest between wage-earners and profit-earners.   In the United States, the expression Great Decoupling refers to the divergence of productivity gains from the much smaller growth of wages after 1972.

The invention of the stock corporation in the 17^th century decoupled ownership of a business from its management.  This decoupling is now studied under the purview of agency theory, that is, how managers, acting as agents (i.e., representatives) of the owners, make business decisions that ultimately affect the economic interests of owners and how conflicts of interest can be managed.

Another interesting decoupling happened in the exchange of goods and the evolution of impersonal markets.  Thanks to the development of trust among strangers and the disciplinary power of law or custom, market transactions were decoupled from kinship and intragroup ties.  This enabled markets to expand beyond tribes and localities and become national and transnational.

In the environmental sphere, we now talk of the decoupling of environmental impact from economic activity and growth.  This means we are moving (or try to move) toward modes of production and economic activity which are neutral on the environment.

Finally, the most radical decoupling will be the separation of brain functions from the physical body thanks to Artificial Intelligence.  Robotic brains will think outside the human body.  Even more radical will be the development of artificial consciousness residing outside the human body.  These prospects, of course, open possibilities we need to carefully examine before we adopt them.

As we look into the future, one thing is certain.  The human curiosity, inventiveness and adaptation to environmental challenges will usher many more pathbreaking decoupling ideas and events.  It’s all part of our destiny thanks to our big brains, the product of cooked food made possible by fire, which also decoupled night from darkness about a million or more years ago.

Thirty three years after his death, Richard Feynman still remains a popular name in the world of physics and he is even known to the general public thanks to the popular series The Big Bang Theory.  Besides being a brilliant physicist (he won the Nobel prize in 1965) Feynman was a man who lived a full life and did not shy away from expressing his thoughts on a variety of subjects in short stories, lectures and public presentations.  The best of them can be found in a small volume titled The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

The title truly epitomizes Feynman’s love of and commitment to scientific research.  He valued scientific inquiry not only as a source of personal intellectual satisfaction but also as our way to discover how the world works and help ourselves to live better lives.  Not surprisingly then, he defended the freedom to do research and demanded that the rules of objective and disinterested scientific research should be scrupulously respected.

To Feynman discovery of new things and ideas starts with doubt and society’s tolerance of doubt.  Doubt about the correctness or “truth” of old theories and findings is the springboard of inquiry.  Science, he argues, does not fully remove uncertainty about the questions it explores.  Science can only show that an explanation holds with less uncertainty than its rival alternatives.  This leaves the door open to doubt and further research.

In order to preserve the legitimacy of science and its findings, Feynman demanded that the scientist exercises absolute integrity in the collection of data, the judgment of the evidence and the recording of the conclusions.  To the members of the scientific community these admonishments may sound self-evident, but one would be naïve to think that Feynman’s prescription for honest science coincides with the public’s perception about the conduct of science.  The practice of funding research with grants from various industries and research done to soar up the commercial success of various products are not helping the public’s perception of science in our days.  The widespread skepticism if not outright dismissal concerning scientific findings, ranging from climate change to Covid 19 vaccines, shows that science has a serious image problem with society.  As a matter of fact, between 1970 and 2020 the percentage of Americans with a great deal of confidence in science has hovered around 50%.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, when Feynman wrote and talked about good science, he was aware that the public had a tenuous relationship with science despite the frequent declarations that we were already living in the scientific era.  He lamented that most of the public knew so little about science and people went on with their daily lives as if they were untouched by scientific applications.  We can imagine how disillusioned and anguished he would be if he lived among us today.

As he conducted his research, Feynman remained a conscientiously irresponsible scientist declaring he was not responsible for the world he had found.  To him science was silent about its uses, these to be determined by others.  Science is there only to discover.  Nonetheless, when he was called to help in the Manhattan Project, he did his cost-benefit analysis and made the moral choice to help.

What about the role of science in a world that believes in the supernatural?  Feynman found it inconsistent and inexplicable that society requires rigorous evidence to put its faith behind scientific discoveries, and yet it seems to be uninterested in ascertaining the validity of miracles, astrology and other supernatural beliefs. 

Before critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, had made a splash, Feynman took up the relationship of science to religion in his usual dispassionate, academic approach trying to do justice to both.  He starts by delineating the realms of science and religion.  First, he states that, unlike religion which seeks to provide a meaning of life, science has no such purpose.  How each treats doubt is another manifestation of their different realms.  If science starts with doubt and uncertainty, religion is where both end.

Then he identifies three aspects of religion and how science relates to them.  The first is the metaphysical aspect of religion, that is, religious beliefs about the creation and working of the cosmos.  Here, Feynman argues it’s only science that can provide answers based on evidence.  In the centuries following the Church’s attempt to silence Galileo, the Church discovered that accepting scientific findings did not spell the end of faith.  In some cases, the position of the Church changed thanks to voices from within the Church.  Thus, the Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang theory (the real one not its TV comedic version) was instrumental in adjusting the Church’s view toward a universe of finite (not eternal) life.  The late Rev. George Coyne, a Vatican astronomer and defender of Darwin, also played a role in Pope John Paul’s II admission that evolution was more than a hypothesis.  

The second aspect of religion is the ethical aspect, the one that gives answers to moral questions and establishes a moral and ethical code for the faithful.  Feynman says moral questions are outside the realm of science.  Nonetheless, to the extent a moral choice depends on how we answer “What happens if I do this?” then science with its empirical methodology can inform our moral choices.  That’s not different from the Socratic idea that “virtue is knowledge.”  If you know the consequences of your actions on others and you, reason can protect you from committing those actions that are harmful.

Inspirational is the third aspect of religion that Feynman identifies.  Religions need to inspire the faithful to keep their faith in the moral commands and the rituals of their religion.  It is in relation to this aspect that religion can come into conflict with science.  Religions often invoke metaphysical realities (a heaven for the righteous and a hell for the sinful) inadmissible to science which the religious person has to accept by force of faith.

Feynman was aware and concerned that friction between science and religion posed a problem to liberal societies.  He proposed that peaceful coexistence rests on the humility of the intellect and the humility of the spirit so that science accommodates faith and religion accommodates doubt and uncertainty. 

It is well-known that societies have an economic problem because they have a scarcity problem.  Too many needs and desires to be met out of finite resources.  As I have written in previous posts, different societies or social organizations have different degrees of scarcity and hence they face, correspondingly, a more or less severe economic problem.

The market system solves the economic problem through market transactions at the going prices.  And yet, scarcity always remains the elephant in the room.  By that I mean markets allocate scarce resources to people given their preferences and ability to pay but they do not ensure that everybody gets what one needs.  Thus, scarcity at the personal level can persist and when it relates to basic human needs like, say, food, this type of scarcity becomes more than a market problem. 

Scarcity of this type can extend beyond food to include the need for health care, child care, education, parental leave, retirement income, etc.  Modern societies have to grapple with these scarcities and decide which needs should not fall victims of scarcity.  Societal decisions about tackling the problem of scarcity reflect a society’s values and priorities (or biases) with respect to social and economic fairness. 

Market orthodoxy accepts that personally-experienced scarcity is the individual’s problem and the individual’s responsibility to address it.  But this view turns the unfettered functioning of the market system into a goal to which social concerns must be subordinated.  Even in America, social values and concerns have given rise to social programs, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, child support, etc.  The market view also ignores that individual scarcity downgrades society’s capacity to produce better economic outcomes.  Limiting education to only those who can afford it constrains economic growth.

These thoughts go to the heart of the debate around the $3.5 trillion budget of the Biden Administration that has stirred so much controversy.  More than the size of the budget proposal, it is the transformative implications of the programs funded by the budget that lie in the middle of the debate.  These programs include subsidies for child care, free pre-K schooling, sick and parental leave, free community college education and subsidies to lower health care costs.

We can look at this budget proposal and see another example of big government.  Or we can see it as a way to solve the scarcity problem in order to promote social fairness, economic opportunities and human development.  If we agree that scarcity of goods with social value should not be determined by one’s personal means, then the role of government becomes apparent.  Governments earn their legitimacy from their ability to solve or mitigate problems.  The scarcity problem is one of the central problems of any society, thus, within the purview of government responsibility.  I believe this is the right point of departure rather than the outright rejection of government’s role.

Those who disagree with a more active role of government in addressing scarcity at the individual or household level make several charges. 

The supply side that matters is that of producers.  Conservatives prefer to boost the production of goods and services through lower taxes on firms and capital suppliers (i.e., individuals with invested money) and less regulation.  Thus, they rarely voice objections to using government fiscal resources to fund these policies despite evidence that they hardly help the broad masses to alleviate their scarcity problem.  The reality is that both entrepreneurial and human capital are essential for economic growth.  Therefore, programs that improve the quality and productivity of human capital as well as its supply should be supported and not derisively be called welfare.

Government programs make people lazy.  There is no credible evidence of that.  Instead, studies show that the importance of incentives is over-estimated.  Conservatives often point to the lower number of work hours of European countries as evidence that government services breed idleness.  A society can choose its preferred trade-off between leisure and income by favoring one over the other.  Different societies can be equally happy with different trade-offs.  Turning the argument around, one can charge that scarcity (i.e., inability to afford) of highly-valued goods (like health and education) is an economy’s way to keep people oversupplying labor and keep wages down for the benefit of the few.

Government programs waste the hard-earned money of the people.  Not necessarily.  The agencies that run Social Security and Medicare have strong records of efficiency.  And private firms can waste resources as well.  How many of them go bankrupt every year?  If we are willing to glorify the principle of creative destruction in the private sector, shouldn’t we cut governments some slack?

Government programs misallocate resources.  This means that if a good is offered at a price below its value people will overconsume it whether they need it or not.  In some cases, this is true.  But lower taxes and breaks to private businesses can also lead them to overproduce something and thus burn valuable resources.  Misallocation can happen on both the producers’ and the consumers’ side.

Fairness and efficiency are always high in these types of debates.  Only people blindsided by ideology that is not informed by evidence can conclude that left alone an economic system – any economic system – functions perfectly and fairly so that access to valuable goods and services is denied only to the most irresponsible individuals.  When markets are incapable to produce fair or valuable outcomes, we need to employ the powers of government to do so. 

Efficiency requires that in a world of finite resources neither the state nor the private sector can be allowed to indulge in wastefulness.  But the unexamined belief that waste lies only on the government side and not also on the private side leaves a society unable to serve its citizens.

In a world where these issues are not exactly black and white, we have to ask which point of departure is most likely to produce the best results:  The one that says “If you can afford it you can have it” or the one that says “If you needed and it has social value we ‘ll try to offer it.”

Fifty-five years ago, Senator J. William Fulbright published his thought-provoking book “The Arrogance of Power” as a warning against the militarization of US foreign policy.  US involvement in Vietnam was at the time just one year old and would last for another nine years.  Its cost in lives, treasury and a demoralizing defeat was a stark validation of the book’s thesis.  Alas, the same approach of military solutions would persist for the next fifty years with no different results.  This time, this half century of misadventures has ended with the exit from Afghanistan.

Fulbright defined arrogance of power as “a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations” and “the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission.”

Of course, the overt and covert militarization of the US foreign policy has been motivated by more than a sense of virtue and universal responsibility.  Various interests have pushed for the use of power for their own narrow purposes.  Agricultural and extraction firms with business interests in authoritarian countries in Central and South America; the defense industry that stands to benefit from the sprawling US military presence and conflicts around the globe, despite President Eisenhower’s warning about the industrial-military complex; lobbyists of foreign countries who push for the use of military deterrence to protect their clients.  Private defense contractors and consultants who benefit from the privatization of our national defense.  Nonetheless, the most specious arguments for the military approach come from conservatives and liberals who believe that democracy and respect for human rights are exportable ideals, so much so, that it is acceptable even if they come on the trigger of a gun or, these days, the wings of a drone.

This brings up two questions.  Is American exceptionalism an honest first instinct, which eventually mutates to the use of military power in pursuit of democracy and human rights abroad? Or is American exceptionalism the fig leaf that hides a more endemic preference for the use of military force in the conduct of foreign policy?  

There are reasons to conclude the second possibility is more valid, at least more often.  First, despite spending upward of $700 billion a year and maintaining 750 military bases in some 80 countries, American politicians and talking heads of mass media and think tanks try hard to convince us that our national security is at peril.  They know they cannot succeed without throwing in democracy and human rights.

Second, let’s look at the gap between mouthed ideals and actual facts.  Why support Latin American dictators if our goal is to promote democracy?  Why communist China and Vietnam are acceptable partners but communist Cuba is not?  Why accuse Biden for abandoning Afghan women when for decades we have ignored women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and other friendly countries?  Why go after Hussein on bogus charges when almost all September 11 perpetrators were the product of the Saudi-sponsored Wahabi branch of Islamic fundamentalism?

In his book “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in A World Transformed” Andrew Bacevich, a former Army officer, argues that American exceptionalism has inspired many foreign interventions in the name of democracy and human rights.  But, he charges, this idealistic narrative excludes “disconcerting themes such as imperialism, militarism and the large-scale killing of noncombatants.”  Furthermore, the most recent interventions have been ordered by presidents who either evaded the draft or, at any rate, never experienced the horror of war.

Of the many opinion pieces that have recently appeared after the Afghan exit debacle, the most scathing is that of Farah Stockman (The War on Terror Was Corrupt, NYT, 9/15/21).  Stockman details the immense corruption of Afghan politicians and civilians as billions of dollars poured into the country.  Instead of transforming and setting the Afghan economy and society on a self-sustained path, unaccountable siphoning of money to local operatives as well as American contractors and consultants turned Afghanistan into a “rentier state” (Stockman’s term), that is, a state dependent on the largess of its patron state.

Let’s go back to Fulbright words: “equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission.”  My reading and understanding of history make me believe this is a particularly Western attitude borne of a sense of cultural and religious superiority.  It’s not that non-Westerners (Islamists come to mind) have not acted on similar beliefs, but none has been as persistent and successful as the West.  I am talking here about the belief that our values and ways of life comply with the highest ideals and forms of civilized societies and that we have a rightful duty to spread them to the rest of the world.

Early examples of the West’s successful effort to dominate the world stage – with the inevitable cultural transformations – include the Hellenistic kingdoms following Alexander’s destruction of the Persian empire and the even more successful Pax Romana.  They were followed by the mission, not always by peaceful means, to Christianize Europe’s ethnic groups and the tortured Christianization of the indigenous people of the New World in the hands of the Conquistadors.  Likewise, colonialism, borne out of commercial interests, became the instrument of cultural and religious transformation imposed on indigenous people in Africa and Asia.

Viewed in this historical context, American exceptionalism is indeed the descendant of a long Western tradition of exporting culture and religion along economic and administrative systems to other people.  With few exceptions, we have learned that the Western model is not always transferable.  Instead, it has given risen to many failed states and civil frictions.  The disappointing results come because the West insist telling others to live with what works for the West but not necessarily for the rest of the World. 

At least one notable Westerner has realized this.  This person is none other than Pope Francis who recently criticized Western involvement in Afghanistan saying it showed the flaws of exporting Western values while also decrying the atrocities committed in the name of faith.  Coming from South America himself, the Pope’s comments echo the despair of those ancient indigenous people who saw their ways of life being erased in the name of a responsibility to spread what the West assumes to be universal values.

Returning to the blog in September reminds me starting a new semester after a long summer break.  The most challenging part of the first class of each course was to introduce myself to a new crop of students by telling them my name and writing it on the blackboard.  George Papaioannou. I would slowly pronounce each syllable of my last name hoping it would sink in.  Then I would use some rhythmic pronunciation.  Break after Papai and continue with oannou.  Next, I would tell my students that my wife had all her second-graders call her Mrs. Papaioannou in perfect Greek accent by the second week, hopping that would be a better motivator.  Since I knew all that had failed in the past, I would then allow with resignation “O.K., call me Dr. P.”  (I remember a faculty meeting, when someone called on a foreign-born faculty sitting next to me.  He mispronounced the name so badly that prompted my colleague to whisper in my ear “how come they expect us to pronounce their ‘American’ names correctly but they butcher ours?”)

I never asked my students how they spent the summer.  I thought this to be too personal and private.  But I would ask them whether anything relevant to the subject matter of the course had happened.  So, let me ask (just a rhetorical question) what happened this past summer.  Well, lots of stuff happened, and not all was good.  No wonder then, the mood in opinion columns and essays these days is dark and ominous.  News obeys Gresham’s law.  Bad news drives out good news like bad money drives out good money.

So, what happened this summer?  Horrible floods and fires around the globe happened.  Can I interest you in climate change?  Covid infections surged again.  Can I interest you in vaccination?  Private citizens went up into space.  Can I interest you in child poverty?  American troops exited Afghanistan after 20 years and $2 trillion dollars.  Can I interest you in the futility of nation building?  Two bills aiming at rebuilding this country and restoring social fairness are languishing in Congress.  Can I interest you in the tax evasion of the super-wealthy? 

I look at this list and realize that it can serve as Exhibit A of many of the posts on this blog.  I understand that not everyone agrees with the side of the arguments I have chosen.  But the framework for a discussion on these and other issues is there in these posts.  Many of the topics I have covered the last three years were not premeditated or planned based on my prior ideas and knowledge.  The most significant came out of insights from books that offered new information and fresh perspectives that deviated from our traditional understanding and worldview.  Below are the most notable insights to me.

Humans are not a unique species.  With respect to emotions, cognition and even consciousness we just lie on a continuum that includes a surprisingly broad range of species.  Our human uniqueness is a purely anthropocentric conceptualization of the world that has made us in many respects dangerous to our planet.  How we handle the climate and the ecosystem depends a lot on how much we come to terms with our necessary symbiotic co-existence with our natural environment.  After several years of putting it off, finally, this summer, I read the wonderful story of an African Grey parrot as told by its owner, Irene Pepperberg in “Alex and Me.”  By the time Alex died, he had the intelligence of a little kid.  The night before he passed, Alex told Irene “You be good. I love you.” “I love you too,” she replied.  “You ‘ll be in tomorrow?” Alex asked.  “Yes” Irene said.

A lot of things we understand as progress do not necessarily make human life better.  Progress is not a free lunch.  Many advancements and innovations (political, social, economic, technological) make life more complicated and are both the result and the feeder of our never-ending wants.  Just like entropy increases the disorder of a physical system, progress introduces disruption and disorder in our lives.  That is, the entropy of our lives goes up.  It takes enormous energy to reverse entropy in a physical system.  Likewise, it takes enormous human effort to control the disruption caused by human progress.  For every digital innovation, we have to worry and spend enormous energy to control the malfeasance that follows.  Thus, we find ourselves spinning in a wheel in the quest for “progress.”  Even worse, we rarely ask “progress to what end?”

Becoming human and surviving as humans is the result of sociality: living together, learning together, entertaining and supporting each other.  In the past, this meant personal and communal bonds.  Economic and social stratification, however, has pulled us apart into segregated islands.  Thus, we fail to understand and appreciate each other’s lives.  This social clustering is big part of the modern crisis of capitalism.  Although technology (social media, in particular) expands our social universe, relationships and personal interactions are not experienced the same way.  The dependence of our species on sociality should make us more socially conscious and responsible.  The common good ought to weigh more on our choices.

Finally, reason does not necessarily win the day.  Emotions are stronger and often trounce reason.  Even more, knowledge and science as building blocks of reason are often, rightly or wrongly, perceived as abusive and breed resentment.  Instead, of enabling people to inform their emotions and make better judgments, they enable attitudes of cultural, social, and educational superiority.  The root of this goes back to the problem of the last paragraph, of living segregated lives.  David Brooks’ essay “Blame the Bobos” in The Atlantic is truly instructive in this connection.  (I had made similar arguments in my post on meritocracy.)   A present-day example of this divide of attitudes toward knowledge and science is our current split on how to confront the covid pandemic.

At the same time, we should be grateful to all those who care for refugees and migrants, the poor and sick, the hopeless, and the persecuted; in summary, all those who work hard to redress human hardship.  The fact that they are needed implies that our societies do not deliver in a fair and just way.  At least we can say that thanks to information connectivity we cannot remain unaware of what happens elsewhere.  Perhaps, we ‘ll slowly-slowly develop a more unified consciousness that will enable us to confront our destiny through common means.

This is the question with which Sapiens of Yuval Harari ends.  It goes to the heart of the problem we call the malady of infinite aspirations.  I come back to this issue after reading a column and a book review, both concerning the modern “miracle” of extending human life to almost double what it used to be just 200 years ago.  The book Extra Life calls this the greatest human achievement.  Extending human life is not, of course, the only kind of achievement we like to boast about.

What makes me skeptical about such pronouncements are two nagging thoughts.  First, all declarations about the greatness of progress at each historical point imply that humans knowingly lived worse and less happy lives in previous eras.  But this is just our own presumption.  First, without knowing what they could have in the future the reference point of past generations was only their past and present situation.  Second, even if they could accurately know the future, they might have rejected it as inferior to their present.  It is a case of ex post facto hubris when we claim that our times are the best and happiest of humanity.  Species adapt to their natural and social environments and do the best to survive in them.  If I don’t know what I may enjoy in the future I am content with what I have.  Future generations will pity our own for all the conveniences, advances, and knowledge we don’t have just as we pity past generations.

My second thought is that celebrating this or that as great progress conditions us in two ways: first to reflexively valorize all progress; and second to pay lip service to the consequences of progress. 

Take, for example, the case of mortality.  Living for ever has been the most ancient of our aspirations.  From the Sumerian epic king Gilgamesh who searched for the plant of immortality to the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce De Leon who searched for the fountain of youth, humans have longed for eternal youth and endless life. 

So here we are with the longest life expectancy of any previous generation and we still want longer life.  And when future generations succeed in living longer, they will still long to live even longer. This shows that no matter how happy we may be knowing we live longer than our grandparents we still feel a hole in our happiness because we know that there might be a better possibility in the future.  And that hole gets bigger the more we assure ourselves such possibilities are likely to come.  Like Socrates’s sieve our soul cannot hold anything and thus it always feels empty.

For tens of thousands of years, humans lived with what nature provided them.  But as we entered the agricultural era, we discovered we could tweak nature and breed better domesticated animals and plants.  For thousands of years after that we delegated other more ambitious aspirations to myths, tales and fantasies.  Then something happened that convinced us it was possible to make our dreams come true.  It was the point when we realized that we could gain greater control over the laws of nature and bend them to our desires.  It was the time we realized we could move from the myths, tales and fantasies of previous generations into the realm of possibility.  Aspirations could be realized.

The first step toward this tipping point was when science became less speculative and more empirical, thus instilling greater confidence in our understanding of nature.  The second step was when the discoveries of the new empirical science started to be converted into significant applications that changed human lives in small and big ways.  My choice for the person that became instrumental for the first step is the British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who is hailed as the father of empiricism.  Among his famous pronouncements were: “Man is the minister and interpreter of nature.” And that “By obtaining knowledge about nature man can reach power over it [nature] and establish an ‘Empire of Man over creation.’”  These are powerful and ambitious words that leave no doubt about the rising human confidence in our ability to not only control but also change nature according to our wants and aspirations.  Within a hundred years of Bacon’s death the industrial revolution was on the move and in time it would spawn the electrical, digital and virtual knowledge revolutions (AI).

And what about the consequences of progress?  If we equate all progress with the betterment of the human condition, then the relentless pursuit of progress and innovation leaves very little room not only to contemplate their consequences but worse to prepare us for them.  As a result, it is only afterwards we discover that we have unwittingly stumbled into new realities that are difficult to manage.  We can think of a whole host of innovations from nuclear power to digital social media that have added angst, anxiety and huge challenges to contain them.  We have reached the point that we no longer live within the laws of natural selection; we have begun to alter them.

But let’s go back to the ultimate aspiration: to fight aging and mortality.  First, to have longer lives without avoiding the decay of aging is a curse disguised as a blessing.   In a Greek myth, Eos (Dawn) convinces the gods to give her lover Tithonus immortality but forgets to also give him relief from the scourge of aging.  Second, there is no guarantee that of all the options open to achieve longer lives we may not choose those that may end our species as we know it.

It may be possible to enhance and extend human life by working within the normal parameters of nature with medicines and cell treatments that leave human nature fundamentally unchanged.  But there are also alternatives with potentially radical and transformative results.  Bioengineering already has succeeded bringing together the human body with computers.  Brain thoughts are directed to manipulate mechanical arms.  Chips in the brain could restore mental functions.  But even more transformative would be the uploading of human brains on computers.  All this is not a Jules Verne fantasy.  The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA is onto these ideas with results to show.  Will brains on robots be human?  Will a robot with your brain be you after it has been hacked?  Will the ultimate artificial intelligence be benevolent to humans?  Is this kind of progress acceptable?

That’s why the question “What do we want to want?” is so relevant and critical.  Wise management of our wants and their consequences is what stands between our human and post-human world. 

* In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates rebuts Kallikles, by saying: “Compare the soul of such a person [one with infinite desires] to a sieve, because this kind of soul cannot hold anything and thus can never be full with a finite and limited amount of things’.”