Let's Reason

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’.”

We have always been told to believe that a good education and job are the products of personal effort and skills, and they are, therefore, meritoriously deserved.  In recent books, though, this view has come under a withering critique on the premise that merit, education, and privileged occupations are now perceived through the lenses of a new ethic that has opened a dangerous gap between those who claim to have all three and those who allegedly lack them.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good by Michael Sandel offers an insightful exploration of the new meritocratic ethic and its social and political spillovers.  Sandel argues that over the past forty years successful people have distanced themselves from those in the lower socioeconomic rungs by convincing themselves that their success is solely due to superior personal responsibility and merit.  Thus, they have drawn a thick and bright line that connects success to merit ignoring the role of luck, inborn talents, family entitlements, and other factors that lie outside their control.  The new meritocratic ethic is dominated by a hubris that says “I deserve my success” and the more damning view “failure is on you.”

Among professional classes, this meritocratic ethic goes along with the view that education, college education in particular, signifies a lot about one’s station in life, not only in terms of financial success but also in terms of social status and contribution to the common good.  Thus, a good education has become an indispensable ingredient of dignified work and informed opinion.

These views, however, have not played well at all with the majority of working-class people, two thirds of whom have no college degree and a majority are occupied in blue-collar jobs.  The message “you get what you deserve” has become so powerful that although working people strongly resent it, they have also bought into it, as surveys show.  They resent it because they have seen how their lives have been appended as jobs moved oversees and how little attention their displacement has attracted from politicians and administrations.  They also feel their blue-color work and lesser education are looked down upon by educated elites.  They cling, however, to the American dream that with personal effort all is possible.

What Sandel finds inconsistent with American history is that the Puritan (or Calvinist) belief that salvation comes from God’s grace and not necessarily from personal moral success (i.e., merit) has been replaced by a new message (primarily linked to the prosperity gospel movement) that has tied success to goodness and from there to salvation.  As a result, both, religious belief and secular ethic consider merit to be the precondition for heavenly salvation or financial success.

Sandel writes that conservatives and liberals have failed to respond to the grievances of ordinary working people.  Conservatives are unwilling to provide a better safety net on the premise this demeans the willingness and ability of working people to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.  Liberals, on their part, while they recognize the value of distributive justice, that is, a fairer distribution of economic outcomes, like the conservatives, they fail to deliver contributive justice, that is, to convincingly articulate the idea that all work contributes to the common good, irrespective of its monetary reward or content.

A culture that ignores the contributive value of work is what we find on the dark side of the division of labor.  While division of labor is an efficient arrangement, it unavoidably relegates people to different jobs that depending on the times and society’s priorities and biases may confer unequal payoffs and social esteem.  Emile Durkheim, founder of modern sociology, saw that danger when he argued that the division of labor can be a source of social solidarity, provided everyone’s contribution is remunerated according to its real value for the community, that is, its contributive value.

The classical economists were keen to recognize two kinds of value: exchange value and use value.  The former was the market price a good, including labor, fetches in the market.  Use value is the intrinsic worth of a good.  In the case of labor, its use value is Sandel’s contributive value.  Unfortunately, exchange value and use value rarely coincide.  We saw this in the darkest days of the pandemic.  The only work that mattered was that of doctors, nurses, hospital aides, ambulance drivers, delivery persons, food store clerks.  Except for doctors, the rest were workers of modest salaries.  In ordinary times, other occupations, from education to caregiving and public safety to manufacturing and science, provide us with essential services.  But think how their exchange value compares to that of executives and experts in business, finance, and the tech industry.  And why are professionals, whose only job is to help wealthy people minimize or evade their taxes, so much better compensated than essential workers?

A self-serving industry of consultants and celebrity agents assiduously promote the talents of their clients and why they deserve their high remuneration.  Educated elites from top universities have convinced us that only their cohorts should represent us in corporate boardrooms, the Congress and government, and top courts.  That was not always so.  FDR’s administration had citizens with humble credentials who excelled, and Truman never finished college.  Sandel calls this the worship of credentialism that also raises a divide between the well- and less-educated citizens.  The irony is that over the last forty years the US has stumbled from one economic or foreign policy crisis to another while it has been run by these highly credentialed people.  

The divide between the professionally successful and well-educated people and those of the lower income and educational rungs has shaken social cohesion in many countries beyond the US shores.  The challenge of those at the top is to carry success without hubris and not let it be the yardstick for measuring work dignity.  Also, by recognizing that the true value of work is not reflected only in its market value.   Even better, societies will be served well if their priorities align with the true contribution different jobs make to the common good. 

To support workers’ incomes in the wake of the pandemic in 2020, the US government extended regular unemployment benefits and also threw in an extra $600 per week.  This year, the aid to the unemployed continued with $300 of extra weekly benefits.  However, after a below- expectations net hiring in April, economists and politicians raised concerns that the extra and prolonged unemployment benefits may work as a disincentive to work.  As of now (June 2021) 25 states have heeded these concerns and have discontinued the extra benefits.

The concerns about the link between government support of workers and willingness to resume work is a debate about the supply of labor.  However, to limit the debate only to labor and ignore the supply of capital offers a narrow and incomplete view. 

In general, more is supplied the higher the price or payoff.  In the case of capital, whether it is invested in real business assets and operations or in financial assets, its supply depends on the magnitude of business profits or the returns (dividends or interest) of stocks, bonds and savings.  But its supply also depends on how its payoffs are taxed and how its deployment is regulated.  This is where politics and government policies enter.  Since the 1950s, there has been a dramatic drop in the corporate tax rates along with the adoption of various provisions that shield corporate income from taxes.  In addition, personal income from the appreciation of capital assets is being taxed at lower rates than labor income.  All this amounts to an extraordinary government support of capital on the premise that it stimulates its supply and in turn this helps the economy in terms of jobs and wages.

The empirical observation, however, shows that lavishing tax givebacks to capital does not necessarily lead to a better economy just as, conversely, tax increases do not kill economic growth.  Lower taxation of capital has instead contributed to the inordinate income and wealth inequality of the last quarter century.  The capital supply theory also ignores the importance of the other indispensable production factor, that of labor.  If labor is in short supply, capital alone is not sufficient to boost the economic output.  The present situation is arguably just that.  Businesses have jobs but not takers.

The labor supply also depends on its price, that is, wages.  Like capital, labor supply is affected by taxes, but also by other factors unique to labor.  Capital, real or financial, has no attitude or a family behind it and doesn’t catch a cold.  Labor instead has all that and more.  Work has to compete with leisure, taking care of children or elderly family members, and is affected by physical and mental wellness.  We value work for its wages but our willingness to work takes into consideration the cost of those other factors.  Lowering the total charges against labor income ought to push its supply up, just as lowering the charges against income from capital ought to boost its supply.

If that’s so, why don’t we treat labor and capital income the same way?  The present situation is forcing us now to consider this question with greater urgency.  So, let’s return to the initial question whether enhanced unemployment payments hold back workers from accepting jobs.  The accumulated evidence so far is inconclusive.  It is true though that there are workers who make in unemployment more than they would make working.  This is mostly true in service sectors, like restaurants, hospitality and retail, where wages are low.  Some would interpret this as proof that government subsidies undermine the incentive to work.  Others, however, would argue that wages in several sectors are so low that fail to match the subjective worth workers assign to their labor.  Their refusal to return to work is a way to signal their dissatisfaction.

There are also workers who could make more money if they returned to work but prefer to draw unemployment benefits.  What holds these workers back?  Several possibilities could matter here.  One is fear of getting Covid.  Another is expensive childcare for both preschoolers and school-age children who have not returned to school.  Or the fact that the pandemic has disproportionately sickened older people and the cost of outsourcing elderly care would offset any additional income from work.  Prospective workers are also utilizing their relative financial security, thanks to the enhanced unemployment benefits, to search for jobs that offer better scheduling, more paid-time-off for vacation or sickness, as well as other fringe benefits.  The present situation is a unique opportunity for American workers to reset the terms or at least signal their disapproval of the heretofore relationship between capital and labor.

And for good reason.  In all those factors that potentially support the supply of labor, like affordable childcare, pre-K education, parental leave, and paid-time-off, the US either lags other advanced economies or is near the bottom.  At the same time, the US is experiencing a declining labor force participation rate.* Since 1999, and except for Hispanic women, the labor force participation has fallen for White and Black men and women.  And the picture will get bleaker as the growth of the working-age Americans is projected to rise by only 0.4% annually till 1930.

The pandemic, in particular, has drawn attention to the number of women that dropped out of jobs to care for children and elderly relatives.  These reasons also keep women from returning to work at the same rates as men.  For American women, the labor force participation peaked just before 2000 and has been declining ever since for reasons still not fully understood.  In contrast, the female labor force participation in countries like, France, Germany, Denmark and the UK, has risen over the last ten years.  The lack of adequate support of families in the US also deprives American women of the privilege to have a free choice between staying home and going to work.  Their right to work should not be constrained by the high cost of caregiving.

Looking at how the economy and government have treated labor in the US, we see three developments that warrant attention and remedy.  First, since 1972 there has been a decoupling of wages from productivity that has kept incomes stagnate.  Second, while US governments have lavishly supported the supply of capital they have failed to do so for labor.  Third, the labor force participation rate has been declining for quite some time holding back  economic growth.

Just cutting unemployment benefits to force workers to take jobs is a very narrow-minded and unbalanced approach to solving the problem of labor supply in the US.

*The labor force participation rate is the percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years and older that is working or actively looking for work.

Recent news about slowing or even negative population growth in many countries around the world seems to have raised alarms and anxiety on several levels.  Already the usually cautious and deliberately moving Chinese government endorsed a three-child family policy to avert its projected downsizing from a country of 1.4 billion people to one with 730 million by 2100.

Economists and demographers in the US have also expressed their discomfort after the 2020 census revealed the US population had grown only by 7.4% since 2010, almost as low as the 7.3% growth rate between 1930 and 1940.  A number of countries, including South Korea, Singapore, France, Australia, Canada, Russia and Poland have adopted incentives to boost birth rates.  It is doubtful though these policies will achieve their objectives given current dynamics.

As I wrote in an earlier post two months ago, population growth is a complex issue with beneficial and harmful consequences.  As the title of the present post suggests I see population growth as a global issue that, like climate and the natural environment, calls for more comprehensive solutions.  Before I continue, I would like to put forth two realizations I have come to believe they should be part of the debate on population growth.

First, we cannot be pro-population growth without also advocating ecological balance.  Second, we cannot support population growth without addressing the depressing nexus between poverty, high birth rates and infant mortality.  Population growth is not a free lunch.

The first concern was succinctly articulated in a letter to the New York Times editor this way: “People [with fewer or no kids] might say something like this: ‘There are already too many humans on planet Earth, and it is time to begin a transformation to a stable, smaller human footprint.”  In a 2017 statement, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries declared rapid population growth as the primary drive behind many ecological and even social threats.  The transformation needed to reduce the human-based carbon-dioxide footprint includes: fewer children, fewer vehicles, limited air travel, and adopting a plant-based diet. 

I am not sure that as of now families consciously limit the number of offsprings to achieve the above results.  At some point though we may come to this conscientious decision.  Or we may hope that our technological prowess will enable us to survive with most of our modern comforts and in peace with nature.  So far, however, technological progress has burdened our natural environment rather than preserved it.  There is no guarantee future technologies will do better if left unchecked.  Therefore, we do need to bring ecological considerations into the discussion of population growth.

As of now the momentum is against any restraining of human expansion into nature.  I recently read that in the US the road system is so extensive that every part of what we call nature is within 20 miles of some road.  The pandemic is making this encroachment worse.  To avoid the confines of city life, families are leaving the big cities for open-space places.  Reducing residential density adds to the burden of the natural environment.  People must travel longer distances and more land is taken from nature.  It’s questionable whether work from home will offset longer commuting times.  Infrastructure projects like roads, rail systems, ports, dams, etc. are considered “progress” unless you ignore their impact on natural life and the climate. 

Individual life-style preferences and powerful economic interests by businesses and labor hinder the adoption of serious environmental conditions on land use for residential and extracting purposes.  I present these examples to highlight the difficult challenges we face and how, no matter how gradually, we inexorably move toward unsustainable future realities by doing what appears to be a good thing right now.

Counter to conventional thinking, poverty and high birth rates coincide.  Due to limited information and means poor people apply less effective birth control practices but they also experience higher rates of infant mortality.  Moreover, they see children as a supply of labor and family income.  Therefore, their cost-benefit analysis drives them to have more kids.  Conversely, this cost-benefit analysis drives more affluent people to have fewer kids.  Parental aspirations for their children’s future require more expensive education and upbringing.  Indeed, in parts of the world that live on $2 a day, families have on average 5 children compared to only 2 in higher income-level populations. 

Population projections show that already by 2040 we will experience a movement from the poorest level of global population to the two middle levels, those with incomes between $4 and $16 a day.  These income levels will number 6.9 billion people up from 5 billion today.  Thus, there will be two countervailing forces.  Birth rates will decline as incomes and parental aspirations rise.  Since, however, income, spending, energy usage and encroachment of nature move together, we should expect a heavier environmental burden if all else is left as things are now. 

Rising global prosperity will slow birth rates down so that, according to population projections, the number of children up to age 15 will be the same as now, that is, about 2 billion.  Which means the segment of people over 60 will increase faster.  This is what gives economists and governments nightmares and drives nation-based approaches that ignore the consequences of higher population growth on our planet.   The countries with serious aging trends can rely on a couple of possible solutions.  One is to admit more immigrants to achieve a better demographic balance.  Developed countries can also rely on the growing purchasing power of the rest of the world to generate the wealth they will need to take care of their aging population.

What all this tells me is that public officials and we citizens must become a lot more cognizant of the intricate relationships of population trends, demographic shifts, distribution of prosperity, human footprint, and ecological impact. 

Note:  Most of the population trends come from Factfulness of Hans Rosling (2017).

Wealth is a source of fascination and a magnet of human attention and endeavor.  It motivates people to work hard and achieve; live extravagant lives; wield power; impress with monumental projects; and leave behind outsized legacies.  But it comes with its own dark sides. 

The big picture about wealth in our days is this: never before humanity as a whole had so much wealth; despite the purported democratic nature of free markets, wealth is extremely concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of people; and despite more wealth, people in many countries, including the US, report that they are less happy than before.

So, thinking about wealth can be as fascinating as the subject itself.  Here are some questions I find interesting along with my short answers, leaving more elaboration to the reader’s curiosity and possibly future blog posts. 

How did wealth enter human history?  I suppose this happened when humans transitioned from an immediate return economy to a delayed return economy, that is, when the agricultural economy supplanted the hunter-gatherer and pastoralists economies.  Hunter-gatherers had to immediately consume the food they collected or at most rely on frozen leftovers in north climates.  Agriculture instead required to sow first and then wait to harvest and consume.  Food production required the use of physical capital (land, tools, and storage facilities) all of these being the early forms of wealth. 

How does its present composition differ from the past?  Not too long ago, most of the wealth was composed of tangible assets (land, buildings, machinery) and money, and long before that of tangible assets only.  Today the bulk of wealth (especially of very rich people) consists of ownership rights on intangible assets, that is, financial paper, like savings accounts, bonds and stocks.*  The funny thing is that the value of financial assets is itself mostly represented by the value of intangibles, like the future earnings streams and growth opportunities of the underlying businesses rather than the value of physical assets in place.  The value of future growth opportunities, in particular, is extremely vulnerable to political, social and economic disturbances.  This is important.  The very wealthy people and states of the world have a big stake in global stability and avoidance of war.

Why is so much more wealth created today?  Two words: globalization and technology.  Globalization expanded markets and revenues.  Contrast Facebook operating only in the 330 million people US market to Facebook operating in the 7.5 billion people global market.  Technology also has expanded markets and revenues.  Almost a century ago, a soccer or football match had a market equal to the capacity of a stadium; now, thanks to the radio, TV and internet, their market is global.  The result: super rich athletes.  It’s all a matter of scaling up.  If college professors could teach a class to millions of students their salaries would compete with those of news anchormen and anchorwomen.

Is extreme wealth concentration in society’s interest?  It depends on how wealth is created and how it is used.  If it is built on the pricing power of corporate monopolies and oligopolies, favorable taxation, political power, and depressed wages, then it is harmful to society.**  If it is built on an overt or covert class system that favors the offsprings of the wealthy through unrestrained inheritance rights or other exclusive privileges, then it is also harmful to society.  In short, wealth built on unfair distribution of economic output and opportunities undermines social trust and the citizens’ sense of justice and leads to degradation of solidarity and cooperation.  Worse, however, than concentration of wealth is the stability in the ranks of the wealthy.  Intergenerational perpetuation of riches amounts to having a plutocratic aristocracy.  It is very doubtful the interests of this class align with those outside.  The wealthy can rely on private wealth to buy good education, health and other services whereas the rest of the people rely on public services.  Thus, public priorities and tax uses are not aligned between the two groups.  In the words of economists Acemoglu and Robinson, societies decline when narrow elites organize society to their ends.  

Does wealth make us happy?  Not necessarily.  The Easterlin paradox (named after economist Richard Easterlin) shows that across time it is relative not absolute wealth changes that matter for one’s satisfaction.  (Interestingly, the importance of relative versus absolute reward has been found in experiments involving primates and monkeys.)  Therefore, a higher GDP can leave a lot of people unhappy if their relative standing worsens.  Indeed, despite more than a tripling of the real per capita income between the 1950s and 2010s Americans do not report that they are any happier.  Surveys taken during the pandemic period show that 53% of Americans agreed that wealth gave them piece of mind in 2021 down from 65% in 2018.  Americans also felt financially happy with less wealth during the pandemic than before.  All in all, making wealth creation a goal without paying attention to its distribution and overall context of circumstances is a misplaced public policy.

Why aren’t we always resentful against very wealthy people?  When we feel that wealth is the product of effort (work) and merit (skills, talent) we accept wealth as a fair outcome.  In the opposite case, we feel resentment, especially when wealth and pervasive poverty coexist.  This goes back again to our natural sentiment of justice, that is, reward must be commensurate to effort.  This sentiment cuts though both ways.  It can trigger resentment against wealthier people but also against poorer people whom we perceive to get more than they deserve.  A large segment of working class Americans seem to be more resentful of poor than wealthy people.  This reflects the above the global average weight Americans place on merit and effort as factors of financial success.  As a result, many Americans resent social programs that increase the spending power of disadvantaged people.  This perceived link of effort to success is a serious impediment to enacting more egalitarian policies in the US.

To make wealth creation compatible with a good society, how it is created and how it is used are among the critical policy questions we must address.

* As of the first quarter of 2020, households and non-profits held $42.65 trillion worth of physical assets and $104.77 trillion worth of financial assets. (Federal Reserve, 2021)

** According to a study, between 1952 and 1988, 100% of the growth of stock values was attributed to overall economic growth whereas between 1989 and 2017 only 24% of stock appreciation came from economic growth.  That leaves monopoly profits, lower taxes, and lower wages as the main suspects for the remainder value growth.

Human civilizations have established a lot of institutions to serve economic, social, cultural, and religious needs.  Very often though the institution and its workings become more important than the objectives they are supposed to meet.  Thus, maintaining the purity of the rules of the institution takes precedent over how well it serves the people.

Take, for example, the institution of the market economy.  Markets have preceded capitalism but they are at the heart of the capitalist system.  The importance of markets in capitalism is so elevated that whole sectors (involving technology, law and regulation) are dedicated to designing new markets and making them more efficient in regards to speed and ease of execution and being capable of producing the best prices possible for buyers and sellers.

Today, an intricate web of markets covers the globe and makes it possible for everyone to participate in markets no matter how far away they are.  However, behind the glitter and sophistication of the market-world, the fundamental prerequisite of the market economy is inescapable: to participate in a market you have to pay.  Which means markets may not be affordable to all.  Or put differently, not all goods are affordable to all.  So what?  Should we care that not everybody can buy a luxury car? Or a vacation in Riviera or Santorini?  Not at all.

What about though of more basic needs?  Like food, shelter and health care that sustain us?  Like education that builds skills and knowledge and make us productive?  Like child day care and parental leave that help us keep jobs or balance work and life?  Until a century or so ago, societies did not seem to worry a lot if the market system failed to cover even the most basic needs of any number of people.  This task was left to churches, community organizations, and philanthropists.  Eventually, however, we invented the modern welfare state, with Scandinavian countries showing the way.  In America, Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society introduced and expanded, respectively, welfare programs to address basic needs associated with retirement, elderly health care, disabilities, early education and poverty.  These programs were not free of controversy.  They were resisted as socialist and conditioning people toward laziness and free loading. 

As I have written in previous posts, Americans are more likely than other peer societies to believe that success is the result of personal merit and effort.  Safety nets are distrusted for fear they create disincentives to work.  And strong feelings of ownership, that is, what is mine is for me alone to decide how to dispose of, establish strong sentiments against taxes and redistributive policies.  Therefore, we should not be surprised why the current Biden plan to expand state support for various services, though popular in general, is opposed by die hard conservatives.

So, how do we reason about the opposite views on these issues?  First, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that people are innately lazy and inclined to take advantage of free services to work less.  Economic research shows that extrinsic incentives or disincentives (like a less or more generous safety net) don’t necessarily affect the supply of work.  Intrinsic incentives, like personal pride and concerns about one’s reputation, are often stronger motivators for doing the right thing.   Second, merit and effort do not pay well in a lot of jobs.  The unequal distribution of productivity gains and economic growth over the past fifty years has left many Americans behind no matter how hard they strive.  Third, why do we have the highest rates of drug overdose deaths and suicides in the developed world?  Why do we have higher morbidity rates and subpar health statistics, including life expectancy and infant mortality?  Why do we have higher poverty rates than other advanced economies?  Why don’t we excel in graduation rates and educational attainment?

There is a common thread that runs through all these ailments.  The average American cannot afford to have the kind of healthcare, education, work fulfillment, and balance of work and life that make a society satisfied with itself.  In other words, and despite the achievements of our aggregate economy, a large segment of the American population cannot afford the markets that buy good health, education, and quality of life.  So, what does a good society do?  Turn its back and accept the verdict of the market doctrine “you pay to play?”  I would hope this is not the way we want to address these challenges.

In my view there are two solutions to our problem.  One is to ensure that personal incomes rise to a level that enable people to afford the markets that buy a reasonable overall quality of life.  Switzerland is such a country.  It does not have the extensive welfare system of the Nordic countries so taxes are lower.  But inequality is also lower and salaries are high enough for the Swiss to enjoy private markets for things that matter to their lives.  Other countries, like Germany and Denmark, also recognize that markets should be affordable to people.  In these and other advanced market economies the replacement of pre-unemployment income is significantly higher and lasts longer than in the US.  Similarly, unemployment benefits are a much higher percentage of median disposable income than in the US.  (OECD, 2020 data.)

The alternative solution is a system where state-funded programs help cover the basic needs of those who would otherwise be excluded from markets for essential services.  In this approach, the state steps in to provide or subsidize the goods and services that make people healthier, better educated, more productive and give them more balanced lives.  In short, to address the market affordability problem for essential needs, an economy should either generate high enough incomes across the board or dedicate higher tax revenues.

An often-heard exhortation, consistent with the market doctrine, is that worthy things are worth paying for.  That leaves it up to the individual to decide what is worthy to have and, thus, worthy to pay for.  It ignores, of course, that while something may be very worthy and essential, it is at the same time unaffordable.  A more enlightened and beneficial view would argue that it is also in the interest of a society to find what is worthy to it and pay for it. 

Good societies find ways to make certain critical markets affordable to their members.  Good societies care less about the purity of the market doctrine and more about serving the people. 

April 22, 2021 was Earth day.  On this occasion, President Biden summoned to a teleconference forty world leaders (read Earth’s greatest polluters) to opine about the damage we do to our planet and how to save it.  So, you would be inclined to think that humans really hold planet Earth to great regard and in the good old tradition of humans they have even set aside a day to celebrate their hospitable cosmic abode.  Of course, we know there is considerable gap between professed concern and real action.

The truth is that if it were not for environmental scientists and activists around the world, state governments would do very little in this regard.  The fact that scientists and activists have such a hard time to move the needle is the ingrained attitudes and beliefs most of us have, which dispose us toward mistrust and denial.  After all, as a species, we have had a pretty good life so far.   We have been taught to believe that Earth with its animals, plants and other resources is ours to enjoy as far as our desires and ingenuity, respectively, dictate and enable us.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that taking real meaningful action to arrest, let alone reverse, environmental and climatic damage means to alter our lifestyles in dramatic ways, something for which we are not yet ready, either economically or culturally.  Opinion polls that show majorities of the public to be concerned about environment degradation and climate change do not readily translate to votes in favor of pro-environmental platforms.  This will happen when the public becomes educated enough about these matters so that there is a cultural transformation in societies around the world.

To effect this cultural transformation about the natural environment, we first need, in my opinion, to battle beliefs that have made us inured to understanding our responsibilities.  I will address a few I have identified through my own education on the topic.

The first, I will call “It’s Nature’s Way.”  This is the belief that the earth has gone through many environmental cycles and yet here we are still standing.  Since these cycles (prior to the modern one) occurred with no interference from humans, they must represent, the belief goes, a natural phenomenon and makes little sense to fight it.  This is false.  Currently, the atmosphere contains 410 CO₂ parts per million (with more ppm signifying warmer temperature). This metric stood at 600-1400 ppm about 50 million years ago.  Afterwards, the earth gradually cooled, as CO₂ fell to 400 ppm around 3.2 million years ago, and then to 280 ppm about 127,000 years ago, a CO₂ content that with very little variation lasted until the Industrial Revolution.*

Thus, the earth had entered a cooling period when our hominin branch appeared and it stabilized at around 280 CO₂ through our life as homo sapiens, until CO₂ started to climb the last two centuries.  The new era of warmer climate is one our species has not previously experienced over a long period of time and, therefore, we have no idea what it portends for us.  That is, it may not be our natural environment.

There is also another part in the “It’s Nature’s Way” belief.  This belief is based on the correct premise that nature is indifferent to how and which species survive.  From about 250 to 65 million years ago the dinosaurs ruled the earth.  They were ferocious eating machines that, among other things, they suppressed the evolution of mammals.  Following their extinction, there was an explosion of mammalian life, of which an offshoot is us.  Today, we are the dinosaurs.  We exterminate, suppress, and regulate the lives of other species.  There is though a huge difference between dinosaurs and modern humans.  We have the capacity to understand and evaluate the impact of our behavior on nature.  Unless we conclude that, by virtue of evolutionary forces, we are enslaved to behave with selfish indifference to the rest of nature, we have no morality-based excuse to act this way.  Privileged with the capacity for awareness and appraisal we should also consider other options than the selfish exploitation of our planet and its life. 

The other cultural belief that explains our attitude toward nature is “Humans Are Unique.”  Since ancient times, philosophies and religions have celebrated the human uniqueness in reasoning, emotions, and sentience (felt experience).  But this dichotomy between human and non-human has started to crumble under the overwhelming evidence that comes from animal studies.  What we have been learning is that humans lie on a continuum in regards to cognition, emotion and subjective experience that includes a lot of other animals.  Hints and traces of these started in early life and evolved with a greater footprint in more recent animals and finally to us. 

In the recent Oscar Awards, My Octopus Teacher won for best documentary feature.  It is the story of an octopus off the shore of South Africa that “befriends” a diver over the course of its remaining life.  It is one of many examples we have where we see demonstration of some human traits in other animals.  As Peter Godfrey-Smith (author of Metazoa: Animal Life and The Birth of the Mind) writes, what we now know about animals should compel us to give them some deserved consideration in how we treat them.  And one cannot walk away from reading Frans De Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves without feeling a deep appreciation and bond with our animal neighbors on planet earth.

So, if a warmer climate may be unnatural to us; if our reasoning capacities establish an ethical obligation to the planet; and if we start to know we are part, not outside, of the animal spectrum, then we need to move toward a culture that is friendly to life, biodiversity and co-existence.

When evolution gave us the large and complex brains that enabled us to move up a notch in the continuum of reason and emotions, that was a gift with strings.  It made us capable to feel, understand, and achieve a lot more than other living organisms; but it also gave us the capacity to sense our responsibilities to nature.  Whether we like it or not, evolution made us the Guardians of Earth.

 * From “The Dark Secrets of the Earth’s Deep Past, Peter Brannen, The Atlantic, March 2021.

WEIRD as used here does not refer to uncanny or strange people.  It refers instead to people who live in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic countries. 

I first encountered the term WEIRD in Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”  As Haidt explains, to analyze how our minds work in forming ideas about politics and religion, he had to expand his Foundations of Morality Matrix beyond what would apply to people that lived in WEIRD countries.  He did so because an article published in 2010 had shown significant differences in moral attitudes between what its authors identified as WEIRD people and the rest of the world. 

Ten years later in 2020, Joseph Henrich (one of the article’s authors) published his own book The WEIRDEST People in the World in which he shows how people in WEIRD countries differ psychologically and culturally from non-WEIRD countries, how these cultural traits came about, and how they facilitated the institutions that emerged in modern western societies.  As with all macro studies of this genre, there is a risk of oversimplification and loose generalizations.  On the other hand, it offers some new perspectives on how the western world (underdeveloped and backward 1000 years ago) came to its modern form, including its market economies and rules-based institutions.  It also offers insights into contemporary American attitudes.

So, first, who are these WEIRD people?  According to the evidence in the book, they are found mostly in Christian countries, and in particular in Western Europe, North America, and Australia.  Their concentration increases within Protestant populations.  As we will see, the reason for this geographic particularity has its roots in practices adopted by Christian Churches.

Second, what traits distinguish WEIRD people?  Henrich presents a plethora of statistical results to isolate these traits.  WEIRD people tend to be highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformists, and analytical.  WEIRD people focus primarily on their own attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations and less on their social roles.  Due to their mostly Christian upbringing, they are more likely to be moved by feelings of guilt than shame. 

In WEIRD societies there is an inflexible and more prejudiced extrapolation from character traits to behavioral outcomes, which is called dispositionalism.   For example, because I believe “he is lazy” explains to me why he is unemployed.  Dispositionalism comes with several psychological biases.  One of them is Cognitive Dissonance, which makes us uncomfortable with inconsistent beliefs, which we manage to reconcile with ex post rationalization.  Another one is Fundamental Attribution Error, that is, judging others depending on how we feel or think about them.

How did these traits come about?  Henrich argues that the primary factor was changes in marriage restrictions imposed by the Christian Churches.  Specifically, the Church sanctioned only monogamous marriages and prohibited marriages between relatives, like first and second cousins.  The result was the dismantling of family clans and life surrounded by one’s kin.  Young people were forced to seek spouses in other clans and move away.  To survive in unfamiliar social environments, medieval Europeans had to learn to live with strangers in a web of relationships that was unlike the kin-based arrangements they relied upon previously.  They had to develop relationships based on trust, rules and norms instead of kinship.  Where before interpersonal relationships based on kinship were sufficient to facilitate social arrangements and economic exchanges, now people had to rely on impersonal relationships.

The new impersonal social fabric had some important consequences.  First, it enabled communities to scale up to bigger towns and cities.   It also allowed markets to expand by relying on arms-length rules instead of kinship.  Holding one to his/her part of the bargain no longer relied on affinity and obligation toward one’s kin but on the need to comply with rules and norms that made cooperation mutually beneficial.  This was particularly important for the development of financial markets.  The financial literature presents strong evidence that financial markets had an earlier and faster growth in countries that were influenced by legal principles and cultural institutions that we mostly observe in Protestant-dominated countries.  Finally, societies that were now dominated by impersonal relationships had to develop political institutions that were based on the rule of law than on kinship-related power arrangements. 

In addition to marriage restrictions, individualism and self-reliance were boosted by the Protestant Reformation and the importance of self-salvation.  Literacy became necessary for seeking independent understanding of the holy scriptures.  This plus a reformist attitude further accentuated individualism and self-reliance.     

An important upshot of Henrich’s analysis is that by the time economic ideas and technology had become friendly to the emergence of capitalism, there were markets, built on trust and rules, able to accommodate trade well beyond the local level.  Having developed individualistic, self-reliant, and driven people, WEIRD societies also had the entrepreneurial capital to propel capitalism to prominence.

To the extent Henrich’s research is valid, we can draw some useful implications for our own contemporary world.  Some will credit Christianity as a positive force in the creation of modern institutions.  Others will see in the Christian practices that dismantled family clans and kin-based arrangements the erosion of socio-centric values and the ascendancy of hyper individualism.

An important lesson is that WEIRD countries should stop looking at other societies through their own lenses of individualism and arms-length ways of life.  The insistence on applying WEIRD attitudes to understand and judge the rest of the world is counterproductive and misguided.

Finally, the book helps us better understand today’s white American Evangelicals, arguably the most nonconformist and self-reliant of Christians.  Whether we agree or not with their individualism and their placing personal rights over social roles, Henrich’s book gives us a historical perspective that helps us understand where they come from.