Let's Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From politics to social and health conditions, it seems, in the words of Princeton economists Case and Deaton, that there are “not one but two Americas.”  One is the America of those with a college degree and the other is the America of those without.  But if we look at how the college education system works, we also see a divide in the opportunities, the quality, and the burden shared by students who attend elite colleges versus those who don’t.

The co-existence of these two divides drives populist politics, differences in health and life expectancy, social decay, and uneven opportunities for advancement and social mobility.  The fact that they persist with little ameliorative action signifies that we are willing to countenance a system in which segmenting people by degrees of education is acceptable.

In an interesting and perhaps unexpected way, the Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action may become a catalyst for change.  Both public opinion and experts prefer that college admissions move from the race-based model of affirmative action to a class-based model that opens-up opportunities for all young people of underprivileged socioeconomic status.  Richard Kahlenberg who writes about educational and social issues has long exposed the preference of elite institutions for applicants from more affluent families.  Preferential admissions for legacy students and high-school players in boutique sports, like hockey, clearly favor the better off.  But beyond that, 71% of Black and Hispanic students admitted to elite colleges come from the top 20% of the income distribution.  Therefore, Kahlenberg writes, what elite institutions practice is an affirmative action for the rich. 

Another divide in the American higher education system is the huge chasm in resources between elite and non-elite colleges.  Sociology professors Arum and Stevens remind us that the Supreme Court decision affected the opportunity for an elite college education of only a tiny fraction of minority students.  The overwhelming majority of such students, however, go to colleges inadequately funded and, hence, less likely to provide the same quality education.  Arum and Stevens point to California for an example of uneven educational resources.  Whereas elite colleges in that state spend $40 to $60 thousand per student, non-elite colleges spend only $6 to $8 thousand.  So, if we care to even the quality of college education, we ought to provide sufficient funding to public colleges.  

The less financially privileged students who mostly attend the poorly-funded and poorly-resourced colleges also lose in another more devastating way.  They are the ones who hold a disproportional fraction of the $1.7 trillion student debt.  The explosion of student debt is primarily due to the shift of most public colleges, including the very top among them, to a tuition-based financial model with states allocating fewer and fewer budget dollars to higher ed. 

This shift was inspired by the market-based idea that a college degree could pay off its cost through the higher life-time earnings of college graduates.  Unfortunately, things have not worked that way.  Except for well-paying degrees, as those in business, computers and technology, career earnings in many other jobs have not matched the inflation of educational costs.  Thus, students who follow lower-salary careers fall behind in their student debt payments with serious adverse consequences for their lives.  Not surprisingly, degrees in the humanities that lack the earnings power of degrees in professional fields have fallen out of favor with students.  As a result, we are witnessing a worrisome trend of colleges closing humanities departments and eliminating humanities courses.  Markets are supposed to rationalize allocation of resources.  But in education, the debt-financed tuition model leaves a broad range of lower-wage occupations below the affordability threshold and risks depriving students of a well-rounded education, a critical part of which comes from a strong humanities curriculum.

This state of affairs in higher education has led even moderate commentators like David Brooks to decry the college admissions process as “one of the truly destructive institutions in American society.”  Brooks argues that the admissions hierarchy is replicated in society as elite colleges prepare young people to live within an ecosystem of privileged citizens with a sense of meritocratic attainment that alienates them from those who lack elite college diplomas or a college degree at all. 

But what makes America unique among affluent countries is the divide between Americans with and without college education as a predictor of basic living conditions.  Case and Deaton were the first to call attention to the plight of non-college educated middle-aged Americans in their book Deaths of Despair in 2020.  Case and Deaton continue to remind us that non-college adults are plagued by more sickness, more drug abuse, more suicides, and significantly shorter life expectancy.  It is shocking, they write, that Americans without a college degree are now destined to live 8 and half years less than college educated Americans.

The consequences of lacking a college education also extend to poor family outcomes, such as the proliferation of single-parent homes.  Melissa Kearney, an economics professor, points out that children raised in single-parent homes are less likely to succeed in school and more likely to run afoul of the law.  Even worse, children of single-parent families are more likely to replicate the pattern of poor family outcomes in their own adult lives.

So, our current policies are inconsistent with our avowed goals.  First, our goal to maintain our global competitiveness requires that American colleges produce more and better educated students.  Second, our goal to have a society with the capacity to reproduce socially healthy outcomes requires that we have more stable and financially sustainable families.  To achieve these goals, though, we need to make education (college and vocational) more affordable and equitable across classes.  Neither seems promising under current policies.

Finally, there is another dimension in the college versus no college rift.  Educated elites like to glamorized college education as the ticket to social success and better living.  The representatives of these elites inhabit the two coastal strips of the country and live off the digital and information economy.  But a country needs food, energy, and other tangible goods to prosper.  And as of 2018, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics most of the Americans who provided these necessities lived in the middle of the country.  These people for good reason dispute the idea that a college education (at a high cost nonetheless) is indispensable for their jobs.  And, of course, they resent the fact that they have lost significant share of the production of these goods to foreign countries.  Hence, they feel abandoned.

Which leads to the question: “Should lacking a college degree mean a life in misery in America?”  How wise and politically sustainable is it to ignore the interests and social standing of the majority of the population that happens to forego or not afford a college degree? 

I never knew who Charles F. Feeney was until I read his obituary in the New York Times.  What piqued my interest to read beyond the headline was what followed his name “. . . Who Made a Fortune and Gave it Away. . . “ 

As I kept reading, I learned that Mr. Feeney (who died at the advanced age of 92) did something else more remarkable than having given his fortune away.  In his fifties, he abandoned a life of comfort and luxury, including palatial residences around the world, and spent the rest of his life with his wife in a modest rented apartment in San Fransisco.  By that time Feeney was a multibillionaire having co-founded a large chain of duty-free shops in airports and then reinvesting his money in venture capital projects.  After keeping $2 million for himself, he embarked on giving his $8 billion fortune away, not once disclosing his identity.  This dramatic change came after he started “to have doubts about his right to have so much money” and “that money buying boats and all the trimmings didn’t appeal to me.”

Charles Feeney is not the only super rich person that eschewed a luxurious life.  Warren Buffet is reportedly known to follow a relatively modest life without the extravagance of so many of his peers.  Such individuals are the exceptions that stand opposite to our current model of outlandish spending and supercharged consumerism.  We are now at the point where we have lost sight of the line that separates what is enough from what is too much. 

In the closing year of the 19^th century and at the zenith of the Gilded Age, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class in which he wrote about the public display of personal wealth in an attempt to emulate others and signal economic status.  The two world wars and the Great Depression destroyed fortunes and tamed spending habits, but eventually the building of immense fortunes and extravagant spending came back roaring in the latter part of the 20^th century and continue unabated to our day.

Then along the way, an interesting thing happened.  The excessive consumption habits of the rich metastasized to the upper-middle and middle classes.  Although many orders smaller on an individual level, consumption by the average person has many of the attributes of “conspicuous” consumption Veblen wrote about.  Living in McMansions, purchasing luxury goods, vacationing in plush hotels and resorts, cruising the seas, dining in fine restaurants, all these opportunities of high-end consumption are now within the reach of more and more people who do not belong in the class of the wealthy and superrich.  As a result, the very rich had to raise the ante. 

By that I mean that in a world where rising prosperity democratizes the consumption of perks previously enjoyed by the wealthy, conspicuous spending requires going deeper into lavish lifestyles.  This can take many forms: buying property in taller and taller buildings or very exclusive venues, building bigger and bigger yachts, flying larger private jets and much more.

Here are some examples of gratuitous consumption.  Last year 13,000 weddings cost more than $1,000,000 in the US.  But the rest of us didn’t do that badly by spending an average of $30,000.  The top-floor penthouse at 432 Park Avenue in Manhattan was listed for $169 million in 2021 making it the most expensive property in Manhattan.  As the author of this article (in The Atlantic) writes, while the rich reside in ever taller skyscrapers the rest of us have to crane our necks more and more to get a glimpse of the sky.  In London and Manhattan many super-expensive properties remain uninhabited for months or years because they are bought to signal wealth not to serve as homes.  And who has missed that half billion-dollar yacht that Jeff Bezos built in the Netherlands and then demanding the dismantling of a bridge to make its way to the Atlantic?

Should all that extravagant spending matter at all?  While we can debate this question from a moral and cultural standpoint, it matters more for pragmatic reasons.  Extravagant spending by the wealthy and excessive consumerism by the rest of us have costly externalities that affect us and the planet.  From an environmental point of view, excessive consumerism means the extraction of more natural resources and the use of more climate-damaging fossil fuels.  As our footprint increases that of other species recedes and biodiversity declines.  A recent study found that the acceptable rise in global temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius is coming faster than the target year of 2050.  We seem to have pinned our hopes of fighting climate change on technology and alternative energy sources.  Is that, however, enough without any moderation of lifestyles?

From the viewpoint of how we allocate economic resources, we seem to tolerate a dualism in our society (I am speaking of the US) in which extravagant spending lives side by side with homelessness, polluted neighborhoods, inadequate health care, high rates of comorbidity in our population, and uneven and often inadequate investment in education.  In the ongoing discussions in Congress about the debt ceiling and our deteriorating fiscal situation, the least discussed topic is that of taxes.  Instead, one side of the aisle eagerly targets expenditures on those items that can make us a fairer and more livable society.

For the sake of preserving the health of the climate and that of our society, public policy needs to address the twin problem of excessive wealth and excessive spending.  We know how the enormous fortunes are being amassed.  Through the collapse of competitive markets in crucial sectors of the economy and through the preferential tax treatment of high incomes.  The United States practically invented progressive taxation.  In 1981, the top marginal income tax rate was still 70%.  And then the dramatic flattening of tax rates along with easily exploitable tax loopholes allowed the few to contribute so little to meeting our society’s needs.*

To address the negative externalities of excessive spending on the environment, we need to rationalize spending through taxation.  It is already done in the European Union.  Value Added Tax rates vary across goods and services.  In general, gas (bad for the climate) carries a higher VAT than food items.  Luxury items carry even higher rates.  Failure to reflect the cost of negative externalities is one of the major weaknesses of markets.  Taxing harmful spending is one way to correct this.

I have no way to know whether Charles Feeney abandoned his luxurious life to save the planet or because he was overtaken by the moral weight of modesty and moderation.  Regardless of why he chose a modest life, what he did was good and sets an example first and foremost for his wealthy peers and for the rest of us as well.

* In the summer of 2021, ProPublica published the taxes paid by wealthy people like Bezos, Buffett, and others.  They were shockingly low relative to the incomes and capital gains earned.  The data showed that the very richest Americans paid just 13.3 percent of their taxable income in 2018.

Matthew Bogdanos is not a household name by any means.  But it is to gallery owners, private art collectors and museum officials.  Bogdanos, who serves as the Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, has made it his mission to identify stolen or otherwise ill-gotten artifacts and return them to their lawful owners. 

An ex-marine, Bogdanos developed a personal disdain for the scourge of stolen art when he witnessed the looting of the Iraq Museum in the aftermath of the US invasion.  Thanks to his efforts, his team managed to recover approximately 10,000 pieces.  In his current job as a DA, Bogdanos has seized more than 4,000 artifacts and has repatriated hundreds of them to almost two dozen countries.  His legal successes have contributed to changing the attitudes and policies of art owners and museum officials.  As Bogdanos puts it, someone has “to guard the guardians (of art).”

Art that has fallen in the hands of private collectors or museums by illegal means in the black markets for artifacts is one part of the problem.  The other and more enduring and, I would say, more reprehensible part of the problem is art looted by national armies or removed by private citizens with the approval of state authorities and then brought and kept in the countries of the looters.

So, the object of this writing is not per se the commendable work of people like Matthew Bogdanos, but rather the arguments made by the apologists of the great museums of the West in holding on to looted art and their resistance against repatriating it to the countries of origin. 

Given my Greek roots, this topic is close to my heart, since, as all Greeks, I resent the refusal of the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon during the Ottoman times, to where they belong.  It was though an essay written by David Frum that appeared in The Atlantic last year that I found objectionable enough to put looted art in my list of candidate posts.  And yet, month after month I demurred about writing about it.  Until this past month, when I saw an article by Jason Felch in the NYT with the suggestive title “Museums Should Have Never Hoarded Looted Artifacts.”

What I learned in this article was that art deemed to be of universal value (universal by the aesthetic criteria of Western elites) ought to be housed in the great museums of the West as the heritage of the whole humankind regardless of where it was produced and by what people.  That was how the concept of the “universal” museum was supposed to gain legitimacy.  This concept was an intellectual product of the Enlightenment which espoused universal values.  Of course, the emergence of “universal” museums would not be possible without the imperial outreach of European powers, the subjugation of their colonies, and the massive relocation of artifacts to their own museums. 

David Frum, who centers his essay around the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria,* makes similar arguments as to who is a better custodian of great art; inadequately funded and poorly-managed museums in poor countries or well-funded and well-managed museums in the West.  And by the same logic, great art deserves the greatest possible accessibility that only museums in well-travelled Western countries can offer.  However, Jason Felch points out that of the more than 8 million artifacts owned by the British Museum only one percent is displayed.  So much for accessibility.  And this year it was disclosed that 2,000 objects had disappeared from the British Museum without any clue how this happened.  So much for custodianship.

Frum does admit that artifacts kept and exhibited in Western museums perpetuate memories of a painful history of subjugation.  And having to travel to Western museums to see samples of their cultural heritage is one more reminder to the people of former colonies that their bondage to their colonial masters is not been entirely over.    

But then Frum is willing to defend the notion of the “universal” museum through a series of spurious and even, what looted nations would consider, offensive arguments.  These arguments run something like this: it is only a minority of local elites in countries of origin that care about repatriation; the binding and inspirational power of art works better in Western societies; the Western museum is a great accomplishment of human civilization; the artistic work of any country is part of a common heritage of all humanity.

So, what we have here is in fact a defense of neo-colonialism carefully camouflaged as a thesis that supposedly serves a higher purpose.  By that I mean that although the political and military subjugation of former colonies is gone, forms of subordination and dependency by other means still persist, and one of them is holding on to looted art.  Shamelessly, the hoarding of such art is framed in arguments that allow Western countries to be both the judge and the jury.  In other words, they are the ones who decide what criteria museums and even government systems in former colonies ought to fulfill to have a legitimate claim for repatriation.  Former colonial powers, which were often rapacious in expropriating the resources of colonized and occupied countries, now they declare the cultural heritage of their colonial subjects the common heritage of humanity which moreover should be enjoyed only in their own (Western) museums.

If former colonial countries had any intention to undo some of the damage of their colonial rule, they should first return the fruits of their looting to their rightful owners.  And if the great Western museums cared about the conditions of maintenance and display of these artifacts, they should provide financial and managerial assistance to establish well-run museums in the countries where the looted artifacts first came out of the hands of the artists in those countries.

For years, officials of the British Museum argued that Greece had no world-class museum to house the Elgin Marbles.  Then in 2009, Greece opened the Acropolis Museum which quickly garnered multiple awards and global recognition.  Of course, by that time the arguments of the British Museum had again shifted.

It is high time Western countries stopped hiding behind the self-serving construct of the “universal” museum and do the honorable thing and return looted art where it belongs. 

*Benin was an ancient kingdom in southern Nigeria.  The Benin Bronzes (though not made of bronze) are artifacts of exquisite artistry that belonged to the kings of Benin.