Let's Reason

The average American consumes about 11,000 watts of electric power a day in order to enjoy the usual amenities of everyday life. Of these, only about 90 watts of energy (or 2,000 calories) are needed for an average human body to keep going each day.  This means that all this excess energy consumption is the result of 10,000 years that took us from the introduction of farming to our current modern life.  Most of this energy demand has been generated the last two centuries after the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  Of course, demand has to be matched by supply which has primarily come from hydrocarbons and increasingly now from renewables.

The industrial revolution marked a significant jump in energy consumption as well as prolific waves of new wants and needs that require energy to be sustained.  The industrial revolution also accelerated the urbanization of human populations as large waves of rural people migrated to cities where the factories and major commercial activities were located.  As a result of this urbanization process, 80% of the global population now lives in cities. 

So, an important question emerges: how does energy demand scale with city size?  That is, how energy demand grows as city population increases, and what causes this energy demand.  These are some of the questions Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, answers in his book SCALE: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.  I wrote out the whole title to convey the broad scope of the scaling phenomenon that West attempts to present to us.

Before he tackles the energy demand and supply of cities, West establishes the scaling laws that govern biological organisms, like mammals.  Thus, for example, the metabolic rate (energy needed to keep an organism going) grows at a slower rate relative to body size.  That means, an animal with double the size of another animal needs less energy to charge its cells.  In formal language, the metabolic rate scales (grows) sub-linearly with body size. Cities resemble biological organisms because they are conglomerations of people who need energy and thus have to create supply mechanisms for the energy to flow around, as blood does in a body. West has found that the infrastructure (roads, gas stations, electric, gas and water lines) of cities around the world grows by about 85% when city population doubles.  That means physical infrastructure scales (grows) sub-linearly with city size.  But in contrast to biological organisms, cities require more and more energy as they grow bigger, meaning that their energy needs (the metabolic rate) of cities grows super-linearly with city size.

West explains that the energy demands of cities come from the socioeconomic activity of a city.  Examples of socioeconomic metrics are wages, the GDP, innovations (given by number of patents), and number of professional people.  Measured by these metrics, socioeconomic activity expands 15% faster than city populations, that is in a super-linear fashion.  This is possible because cities produce more social capital that engenders more interactions, more ideas, and more output.  Unfortunately, some negative metrics, like crime and diseases, also rise faster than urban populations.  The super-linear scaling of socioeconomic activity with city size implies that energy needs also more than double each time city population doubles and that explains the tremendous energy consumption of the last two centuries.

As I alluded in a previous post, human activities get progressively greater in volume and complexity requiring more energy to sustain them.   More formally, West argues that unbounded or open-ended growth of socioeconomic activity eventually leads to what futurists call singularity.  That is, the point of time our energy demand overtakes our energy supply, thus, creating an energy deficit that leads to the collapse of the system.  The only way to avoid a singularity is to generate new supplies of energy or alternatively shift to another way of life.  That is, either way, we need to reestablish a balance between energy demand and energy supply.  This is how we have avoided a collapse of human life (or civilization) up until now.  We have done it with continuous innovations that either result in more efficient use of energy or the extraction of more energy out of its various sources.   Fertilizers, for example, produced great efficiencies in food production to meet the needs of fast-growing populations around the globe. 

There is, however, another bigger catch according to West.  Over time, socioeconomic activity grows in a super-exponential manner that brings the energy deficit (or singularity) faster and faster upon us.  This requires that the pace of innovation quickens as we move from one possible singularity to the next.  It’s like switching from one fast lane to a faster one to stay ahead of the singularity that is chasing us.  Another way to put it is to say that the time interval between pathbreaking innovations has to be shorter and shorter.  The question then is: can we do this and if yes what gives?

A recent article in the New York Times had the title What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs?  The sub-title was even more worrisome: “There has been a steady drop in disruptive feats since 1945, according to new research.”  The fact is we have moved quickly from the computer to the internet and now to Artificial Intelligence.  Can we though sustain this pace of technological innovations and even more importantly accelerate it?  I think an honest answer is: we simply do not know.

A corollary question we need to consider is whether our human nature is wired to adjust to new patterns of life at an ever-faster rate within a lifetime.  Our current state of maladjustment to just one new reality, that of social media, is a clear warning of the looming dangers.   But AI enthusiasts tell us not to despair.  The reason is they rely on another singularity that may be a solution to our problem.  That’s when our bodies and brains will be augmented by genetic alteration, nanotechnology, and AI to become hybrid cyborgs no longer bound by the constraints of biology and I would add of the limitations of human psychology.  That will be the emergence of a new species, the Transhuman. 

Of course, there is another path that can slow down the growth of the socioeconomic Behemoth.   This is the adjustment to a slower pace of life, the slower creation of new wants, adopting the moderation of satisficing in place of the hyperbolic maximizing.  The current state of the world suggests though that the proverbial horse of unstoppable growth may already be out of the barn.

I recently found myself in Austin, Texas, and so I decided to visit the Presidential Library and Museum in memory of the 36^th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.  To the members of my generation, Lyndon Johnson is still remembered (often disapprovingly) for his prosecution of the Vietnam war.  Indeed, opposition to the war forced Johnson to drop out of a run for a second full term, yielding instead the baton to his vice-president Hubert Humphrey.

It is unfortunate that the Vietnam war often overshadows Johnson’s domestic achievements.  This record, all part of the War on Poverty and the Great Society more generally, is arguably second only to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.  The breathtaking scope of the Great Society aimed at removing racial injustice at the ballot box and civic life, relieving older and poor Americans from the want for healthy and dignified lives, and lifting the fortunes of underprivileged Americans through expanded opportunities in education, housing and jobs.   

Johnson’s domestic agenda can be appreciated only by taking a longer view on American history.  That means to recount the abrupt end of the Reconstruction Era and the gradual demise of voting and other human rights of Black Americans despite the 13, 14 and 15 Amendments that had enshrined them in the Constitution.  It was after all only in 1954 that Brown v. Board of Education had ended segregation laws, but racial discrimination in the exercise of voting and civil rights was still around.  It was against this reality and with an inspirational push from Martin Luther King and mass demonstrations of Black and White Americans, that Johnson succeeded in passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively.  That’s why it is often stated that America became a full democracy only after the passage of those two acts.  “It is wrong-deadly wrong-to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.”  That’s how Johnson put it at the time.  Regrettably, his words are still relevant to this day. 

The Great Society was though more than restoring political and human rights to all.  It also aimed at fighting poverty, extending the safety net, and expanding opportunities.  All these initiatives would inevitably push the role of the state beyond the boundaries set by FDR’s New Deal.  This was not, however, something the opposing forces were willing to accept.  FDR’s New Deal had been inspired by the theories of John Maynard Keynes.  After Keynes’s death, other scholars and public figures, like John Kenneth Galbraith, had picked up the Keynesian torch and tried to keep it burning.  At the same time conservative and moneyed interests were staging their counterattack on multiple fronts through think tanks, like the National Economic Council, and print outlets, like William Buckley’s National Review.  Programs associated with the New Deal were branded as collectivist and socialists, and even an above-board president like Dwight Eisenhower was accused to be a Communist agent (by the founder of the John Birch Society).  Furthermore, academics who taught or wrote books on Keynesian economics were attacked for spreading unamerican ideas and were often closed out of academic positions.   (In other words, wars about ideas and politics resorting to what we now call cancelling and disinformation is nothing new in America.)

So, the Great Society was conceived and designed at a historical juncture that would coincide with the end of the period the political scientist Robert Putnam has called the Upswing (i.e., the upward trend of progressive ideas).  Despite the turning winds, the Great Society came to life with an astounding long list of laws, programs, and institutions.   Besides the most well-known, like the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start, a lot of other programs intended to rectify problems plaguing cities, rural areas, and poor Americans, improve labor laws, promote the arts and culture, and protect the environment.  To promote civic engagement, several programs relied on the mobilization of citizens.  These programs included the Job Corps to help young people acquire marketable skills; the National Teacher Corps to improve teaching; and the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) to enlist socially conscious young Americans to help poor neighborhoods. 

In a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, called his program the Great Society and explained why it was significant.  In his words, the goals of the Great Society were to improve the human condition of Americans and elevate American civilization; promote inclusivity in the fruits of the economy; and put a stop to the erosion of values in community life that breeds loneliness, boredom and indifference.  Despite the progress we have made since then, many of these problems are to a lesser or greater degree still around us.

As I walked through the library, I started to realize the message of the Great Society to us.  It was undoubtedly a lesson in the role of government faced with serious realities both in the foreign and domestic fronts.  At the foreign front, the US was in contest with the Soviet Union and China to win the hearts and minds of the newly independent countries, all of them emerging from colonialism.  The US could ill afford an internal deficit in democracy and economic inclusivity and equity while fighting in Vietnam in the name of democracy and capitalism.  Today, we are in a similar contest with China and other authoritarian governments.  The best way to convince other countries that liberal democracies can stand and prosper is for us to set the example.  We are currently struggling to do so.

In the domestic front, the plight of Black Americans and the disrespect of their voting and civil rights had reached the boiling point.  It was time for the federal government to restore these rights by effective means of enforcement.  At the same time, the Keynesian underpinnings of the Great Society echoed the idealism of Keynes himself who believed that economic prosperity ought to be a tool for a society to battle scarcity and enable its members to enjoy the amenities of the good life.  The Great Society was aimed toward those ends. 

The legacy of the Great Society is still debated as to whether it delivered on its promises.  To its critics the record is mixed; but in light of all that has since happened a clear verdict is almost impossible.  What we need to acknowledge, however, is that the Johnson administration had the political courage to identify what ailed America and felt compelled to act in the way only governments can act to address longstanding, entrenched and big problems.  Today, problems in the economic, social, and environmental fronts along with their dire consequences are still with us.   Johnson believed that the government of the strongest and biggest economy had to think big and be at the forefront of the effort to solve the big problems of the day in spite of all the voices to the contrary.  Conviction to this principle, not its complete success, is what makes the Great Society a remarkable achievement in the art of governing.

Today, progressive movements face a similar challenge: to summon the inspiration and resolve to lead societies to the politics of problem solving for the betterment of humankind.

Note: More on the politics of that era and about the Great Society can be found in The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter.  

It was three years ago that I wrote a post recounting the major events that had occurred during the first twenty years of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries and remarked how lucky we had been the first part of this century to live in relative peace and astonishing progress.  So why not be optimistic about the rest of this century?  But then things happened to show that reflecting about the past and extrapolating into the future may be a pleasing mental occupation but it’s full of risks for disappointment. 

What happened reminded us that we have not yet transcended our basic nature that makes us behave like an ordinary species alternating between great and awful behavior.  What happened was the outbreak of the pandemic and the demonstration of heroism by care givers, from ambulance drivers to nurses and doctors who risked their health and lives to take care of the pandemic victims.  That was us in our best behavior.  And then before we had managed to extricate ourselves from the scourge of covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine came with all its carnage and barbarity.  That was the worst in us.

Human history is full of moments of greatness and exaltation but also moments of brutality and despair.  And yet in our endless search for a meaning based on hope and purpose we have built a grandiose pedestal for our species.  We have woven a triumphalist narrative that tries hard to separate us from all other creatures and bring us closer to the divine.  Thus, we have endowed ourselves with rational minds and immortal souls, despite the fact that our rationality is being tripped by our emotions and cognitive biases all the time and our immortal souls are humbled and tempted by residing in our mortal bodies.   

This grandiose sense we have about ourselves can be useful as a stepping stone of inspiration for great pursuits but it can also set us up for disappointment.  If we expect so much of ourselves as moral agents or doers and transformers of nature it is because we prefer to ignore our limitations than to heed them.  And yet, in moments of wise self-reflection we have created myths like those of Icarus and the Tower of Babel as a warning against the dangers of hubris.

It is, of course, a fact that thanks to our more sophisticated brains and the development of language we acquired the ability to organize social relationships and networks that accelerated learning, built skills, and fostered innovation.  But if we think deeper, our human evolution is a process of laying one layer of complexity on top of another.  Peel back all the layers, and you find that the end goal is to meet basic needs we share with other creatures.  Take shelter as an example.  Beavers build a damn and make a lodge.  Thousands of ants get together and build elaborate anthills.  A cave or hut would be enough for hunter-gatherers.  We modern humans go to the bank, take a mortgage, use lawyers, hire a contractor and then movers bring our stuff to the house we have built or bought.  Thus, to meet our housing needs we depend on banking systems, legal systems, construction systems, moving systems.  As I said layers of complexity.  But here is the funny thing.  I am not aware that animals or hunter/gatherers have homelessness.  But we do!

What we call progress is actually a process of increasing complexity that opens up a greater distance – in terms of what we have to do – between a need and how to meet it.  With each layer of complexity, the opportunities and likelihood for friction, crime and war multiply.  And, of course, each layer of complexity requires more natural resources and further impacts the climate and the ecosystem.  Most layers of complexity breed new layers just like in an evolutionary process.  We thought, for example, we had solved lots of problems by inventing digital technology.  Now, though, we spend trillions world-wide to defend against cyber-crime which will cost us $10.5 trillion by 2025!  Of course, barring an apocalyptic disaster, there is no way going back by unravelling the complexity of human life.  All we can do is manage it. 

It is in myths our ancestors betrayed their ambivalence and fear about progress and tried to warn us but without success.  Thus, Pandora was admonished not to open the box, presumably given to her by Zeus.  Adam and Eve were also told by God not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  Nonetheless, curiosity led Pandora to open the box and desire to learn made Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  It is indeed curiosity and learning that breed and sustain progress which adds to the complexity of human life and everything that comes with it.

So here we stand as the species that not only has a consciousness about itself and its surrounding environment but also about the impact of its actions on the planet it occupies with the rest of life.  It is out of this consciousness of our impact that we now feel responsibility and guilt.  Our impact has grown so consequential that scientists have started to call the last century, even the last 10,000 years, as the Anthropocene period of planet Earth.  There is though another demarcation we can draw in our human history; the one that separates natural intelligence from artificial intelligence.  We are the first generations to live in this new era of intelligence.  

If our natural intelligence gave us some pause about the reach of our capabilities, artificial intelligence has kicked the doors of infinite possibilities open and has pushed us closer to full dependence on science and technology to solve our problems.  But this has come at a cost.  It has blunted our willingness to find solutions through the power and wisdom of self-restraint, moderation and thoughtful calculation of how to harness technology and science to serve the human condition and that of our planet.  Indeed, technological progress often runs ahead of our capacity to first adjust ourselves to its consequences.  It’s like indulging in unhealthy life styles because we rely on medicines to keep us healthy. 

Our preference to go down the technology road is reflected in the shift of our educational systems from the study of humanities to the study of STEM disciplines.  Cultivating the human character to reflect and act with temperance and wisdom has given ground to cultivating the mind to heal our problems only with science and technology. 

It is not surprising then that our reliance on technological solutions has reached the point that we consciously envision the prospect to colonize other planets to save our species instead of saving this one, our own, planet.  Let’s think about that.

Disclaimer:  This essay has not been composed by ChatGPT.

This is the time of the year we find our mailboxes full of pleas from charities and nonprofit organizations asking us to give to their causes.  And many of us open our checkbooks or use our credit cards to send money to strangers whom we trust to spend it as promised. 

If you think about it, the whole thing appears to be counterintuitive.  First, we part with our money; then we do something that helps strangers; and finally, we show trust to people about whom we know next to nothing.  How does this happen?  It happens because altruism and cooperation (and the trust that goes with it) are part of our nature and what makes us successful as a species.  Feeling good by doing good is a condition embedded in our nature.  There is plenty of related evidence to support it.  A good example is an experiment in which the participants were given various amounts of money and were told to keep it or share it with others.  No other factor mattered more for contentment than the act of sharing the money with others.  The interesting thing about natural altruism is that it doesn’t have to be reciprocal.  That’s why we are willing to help strangers when most likely there is no chance of reciprocity.

So, we give in various ways.  We volunteer to build houses for Habitat for Humanity (as former president Jimmy Carter did) or to mentor underprivileged youths for Big Brother and Big Sister, or work in soup kitchens or food banks or other community projects.  Or we choose the easy way out and give money.  I looked it up and found that by the percentage of the population that gives to philanthropy, Indonesia is at the top with over 80% of its people doing some giving.  But as percentage of the GDP no country comes close to the rate of giving by Americans. 

Some ethicists argue that for giving to be truly moral it ought to be purely altruistic and expect nothing in return.  This call for high-minded righteousness is though unnecessary.  At least for evolution and natural selection, all that matters is that altruism and cooperation work for a species even with some impurity of selflessness, like gaining social status.  After all, even religions reserve a place in heaven (not a small incentive) for the Good Samaritans among us.   

This is the kind of giving that happens at its most basic and human level.  But then we also have the mega-giving from corporations, foundations and wealthy people.  And here things get more complicated and deserve a debate.  Although on a first level all giving benefits somebody or some cause, it matters how it is done.  It matters from an ethical point of view and from a public policy perspective. 

First, from a public policy standpoint, giving can be entangled with public policy toward solving social needs and how government chooses to support private giving.  Here is an example of a public policy choice.  A British organization for homeless people found that for each pound spent on alleviating homelessness there was a total social return on investment of 4.37 pounds.  But then couldn’t we reap this benefit through public spending?  That is, when we observe a lot of giving, especially through organized philanthropy, this could be evidence a state does not do its part to fund some worthy causes.  This may explain why international data show a negative correlation between public spending and giving.  States like Finland, France and Norway with higher percentage of GDP dedicated to public spending rank lower in giving by citizens. 

We also have the question of whether government should subsidize philanthropy, usually done through tax breaks.  Interestingly, the robber-barons of the Gilded Age gave most of their wealth away before tax deductibility of donations was introduced in 1917.   Today, tax breaks for giving are part of the tools set for tax avoidance.  So, Robert Reich, a professor and author on labor and inequality raises the question “why should governments subsidize philanthropy by the rich?”  One could claim that all giving is good and thus deserves public support.  But social priorities may diverge from those big donors choose to support.  Thus, if we want to promote education, should tax subsidies be used for gifts to Ivy League universities or for funding community colleges?  Or if we want to promote culture, should tax dollars be used for splendid renovations of opera houses instead of supporting arts classes and cultural experiences in underprivilege areas?  High public profile philanthropy is also a means to earn reputation and status and thus stand apart.  Should public funds (that is, tax subsidies) abate this pursuit?  None of these questions aims at giving itself; they rather question as to what the proper role of government ought to be.

The ethics of giving concerns the legitimacy of the means that make it possible.  Anand Giridharadas, a critic of philanthropy that derives from corporate wealth, argues that it is in essence an ex-post rectification (albeit insufficient) of social problems caused by subpar wages, degradation of the environment, and the off-shoring of business operations.  Sometimes the funds used for giving may be derived from within the corporation.  That’s the case of CEOs who use corporate funds for high profile philanthropy that primarily burnishes their own reputation. This type of moral hazard problem, that is, doing philanthropy with someone else’s money, was after all behind Milton Friedman’s admonition that the CEO’s (or the firm’s) job is to maximize profits and then let its owners spend it according to their wishes.  And then we have the case of Sam Bankman-Fried who wanted to do good with his clients’ money.

The young owner of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX has presented himself as an idealistic apostle of effective altruism.  I read that effective altruism is a movement spread by some philosophy professors which is premised on the use of reason and data to address long-term problems that will benefit many more people in the future than the just eight billion now alive.  To that end, effective altruism advises Its adherents to pursue lucrative careers that generate lots of wealth in order to fund these long-term causes.  In the Bankman-Fried case though, the dedication to this mission led to means that proved terribly damaging to his present clients. 

So, when we look at the net value of giving to society, we better look at it as part of the whole picture.  I would think that this evaluation should take into consideration the social return of giving as well as the tax revenues lost plus any negative externalities (side effects) caused in the accumulation of the resources that fund the giving. 

All in all, giving, as a natural expression of altruism, is part of the good side of our nature.  Nonetheless, as with so many other aspects of human behavior, it can raise questions, and sometimes its pursuit can cause more harm than good.  But for now, let’s give to the causes that inspire us and make us feel good.    Happy Holidays!

There is a well-known tendency for the people of a country to overemphasize the wrongs inflicted on them by other countries and to underemphasize the wrongs they have inflicted on other people.  Without any self-examination and introspection such gaps feed narratives that prevent nations from coming to some sort of mutual understanding and reconciliation.  This also applies on a broader sense in the way the modern West looks at its relationships to the rest of the world.

Why do I say that?  Because in the on-going war of Russia against Ukraine, the West found, to its chagrin, there is not much love, or rather solidarity, left between it and most of the other countries.  I checked the numbers and found that only about a sixth of the U.N. member countries support the West’s sanctions on Russia.  And then we have Saudi Arabia, a country heavily dependent on US military protection, which had no problem to side with Russia in agreeing to limit oil production and thus keep oil prices higher than otherwise.      

How should westerners react to this reality?  Well, I would suggest, with a good dose of introspection.   We can do so, as I did, by recalling the troubled history of the relationship of the West to the Global South (Latin America, Africa, South Asia).  I got some help in this exercise from being in the middle of reading Thomas Piketty’s book A Brief History of Equality, a book I cited in my last blogpost.  It is useful to recall that history so we can understand what explains the reluctance even opposition of many countries to the idea of siding with the West against its modern adversaries.

Of course, it all starts with the great explorations of the fourteen and fifteen centuries.  Native people were subjugated, their cultures and religions were eviscerated, and their treasures were taken to the royal courts of European emperors and kings.  It is a painful irony that after inflicting this civilizational annihilation, Europeans brought the artifacts of those nations to be stored in European museums for safekeeping on behalf of humanity.  All that destruction was justified on the European belief that Western government, culture and religion were superior and thus imposing them over other people was a gift to humanity’s advancement.  It is sad how many crimes are the offspring of such beliefs of a superior calling.

A few centuries later, colonialism turbocharged by capitalism intensified the exploitation of the Global South by the West many times over.   The noble version of the rise of capitalism finds its birth in the legal protection of property rights in England, the protestant ethic, the technological advances that raised the productivity of labor, and the magic of market economics.  However, the success of capitalism, at least in its opening stages, was due to the large-scale extraction of raw materials from colonies, to large scale deforestation and burning of coal, and the exploitation of cheap labor either through slavery or very low wages, most of them found in the conquered lands.

Using their military superiority, European colonial powers coerced their colonies to accept onerous trade terms and economic conditions that further sapped their self-sufficiency and economic well-being.  For example, India’s and China’s combined share of the global cotton industry was 53% in 1800; that had dropped to just 5% by 1900!  It was, after all, the unfavorable trade terms imposed by England on its American colonies that gave the impetus for the birth of the United States.  Thus, the economic dominance of the colonial European powers was not exactly the outcome of market economics but rather the result of a coercive capturing of markets by eliminating competition – a paradigm we now see repeated by big multinational corporations.

All along, the West has played the same game in its goal to capture and maintain economic dominance.  First, it develops its competitive advantages through restrictive trade practices and then it enshrines liberal and open-border commercial and financial policies through international treaties like, GATT and its successor the WTO (World Trade Organization).  But we also see the reverse strategy when Western industries fear losing business to powerful rivals, like China.  Thus, the West has taken steps to practically close its markets to next generation Chinese digital technologies and the US has even resorted to legislating an industrial policy to promote innovation and investments in semiconductors and other advanced technologies.

Beyond trade, in what Piketty describes as neocolonialism, the West has found additional ways to keep its influence on the global economy.  The important development in this regard was the successful infusion of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus in the mid-1980s.  Thus, the prescriptions to needy nations have been fiscal restraint, opening up their economies to foreign trade, deregulating their industries, and accepting the free flow of capital. 

Piketty’s data show the negative consequences of these prescriptions.  First, capital outflows from developing countries to the West have outpaced the incoming economic aid.  Second, the developing world continues to be a source of cheap labor as in the good old days.  Ironically, this has also undermined the interests of the working classes in Western countries, and, hence, their political and social instability.  Third, the demand for fiscal restraint has kept tax revenues low, thus, hindering the developing countries’ ability to provide social services to stimulate human development.  Contrary-wise Western countries continue to rely on large enough tax revenues, which, besides securing strong military capabilities, support an extensive safety net and human development effort.

This record has more than historical significance.  First, this record should impart some modesty in the West’s boast about the superiority of its political and economic institutions, when both have a record that is found wanting in their treatment of fellow humans.  Second, it illuminates the current problems the West faces in multiple fronts, including migration and climate change.  Very low incomes and insecurity continue to put masses of people from developing countries on the road to migration to the West.  Africa’s population is expected to double by 2100.  Think of the waves of migration if economic inequalities across the planet are not successfully addressed.  Developing countries are also left with little help from the West, despite promises, to fend off for themselves the disasters inflicted on them by extreme weather phenomena. 

In short, exporting democratic institutions and promoting world collaboration to fight the dangers from climate change, poverty, and pandemics will remain crucial challenges for the West unless and until the rest of the world comes to see the West as an honest and supportive partner. 

My last two posts dealt with the devolution of liberalism to a system of unchecked economic power and individualism that account for both widespread inequality and the rise of all-powerful business oligarchs.  I would like now to offer some thoughts that address two questions: why society should and how it can start moving toward regaining its right and power to harness the influence of private interests over our present and future course.

The Whys can be found in these concerns:  Who has the right to control transformative technologies that allows us to tinker with nature, including the human body?  Who has the right to control outlets of speech and expression?  Who has the right to control our personal data?  Who has the right to control decisions of existential importance related to climate change and ecological risks?  And, finally, who has the right to control the political power that will determine the answers to these questions?

Liberalism withers when citizens feel that their fundamental rights slip away from their ownership.  That’s when people start to grow disillusioned about their status in the decision making and deliberative process that bears on their rights.  So, we have to ask “why are we in danger of losing our control over the above areas of concern?” Then, we can start thinking how we can reclaim our right to be in the table of decision making.

My first culprit for our diminishing voice is the growing control of oligopolistic and monopolistic firms by powerful individuals, who behave as oligarchs.  The second is the deficit of accountability and representation in corporate governance.  And the third is excessive accumulation of private wealth.  All three are interconnected and mutually reinforced, and all three are built on an abusive exercise of the right to property.  This, of course, is not necessarily an exhaustive list.

Despite the lofty ideal of perfect competition, left to themselves markets have the tendency to veer toward oligopolies and monopolies.  This after all is the secret dream of every entrepreneur.  Already in the 1930s, the famous economist Joan Robinson, had coined the term oligopolistic capitalism to describe the market system.  Case and Deaton (authors of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism) argue that monopolistic rents (that is, profits over what competition would allow) are at the heart of inordinate wealth creation and economic and social inequality.  With the tolerance and acquiescence of governments, critical business sectors (even in health care) have been left to devolve into oligopolies if not monopolies.  Thus, persistent inaction in anti-trust enforcement has removed the checks and balances of the market system.  Whatever limitations the markets have to function as external monitors of abusive corporate power these limitations are further reinforced by the hands-off policy of government authorities.

We also have insufficient checks and balances within corporations because of a deficit in accountability and representation in corporate boards.  Let’s start with the extraordinary power CEOs (at least in the US) have on the composition of their boards.  Separating the position of CEO from that of board chair would better align CEO power with responsibility and accountability.  The fact that American corporations are resistant to this change in governance is more indicative of the influence of CEOs and less of any evidence regarding the long-run performance of firms. 

There is also a deficit in stakeholder representation in corporate governance which can be addressed by expanding the diversity of stakeholders on boards.  We can start by introducing the voice of labor in the boardroom as it is in Germany, Austria and the Nordic countries.  This system of “co-determination” extends the principle of inclusivity in corporate decisions in which both capital and labor have vital stakes.  We can also reduce the influence of very large shareholders by scaling down their voting rights as the firm grows bigger or more consequential.  This can check the power of dominant shareholders and give voice to smaller shareholders who can check self-aggrandizing behavior. *  We can also require that beyond a given size a firm operate as a public corporation subject to the rules and regulations of capital market authorities, like the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US.  Regulatory scrutiny will add transparency and accountability in the running of businesses.

Finally, we need to curb the power of private wealth.  It is high time we moderated, even better reversed, the fast growth of private wealth of the last 40 years – a period during which wages have remained stagnant – by returning to the tradition of steep progressivity in tax rates this country had until the 1980s.  Many Americans are unaware or forget that after adopting an income tax with a maximum rate of 7% in 1913, the US quickly moved to tax very high incomes at rates as high as 94% in 1944.  Even in the 1970s the maximum rate was over 70%.  The worn- out argument that high marginal rates impede economic growth or innovation has scant evidence on its side.  Immense private wealth leads to wasteful conspicuous consumption (bad for the environment), exclusive control over critical sectors (bad for accountability) and inordinate influence over politics (bad for democracy). 

The present state of excessive private economic power and sense of entitlement regarding the accumulation and the deployment of wealth is because of the influence of a political and economic school of thought which, despite all reasonable evidence, is convinced that the sum-total of individual interests and actions converge toward ends that are socially desirable and good.  By further believing that the right to property confers only privileges but no social responsibilities, this view is willing to countenance to the encroachment of participatory and pluralistic decision making by private interests.  The truth is that property rights are constructs of law and political dynamics.  They are not self-ordained or free of constraints.  For example, the very capitalistic and economically successful Germany declares in its constitution that the legitimacy of the right to property is conditional on serving the public good.  Thus, we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that these rights have no social purpose to serve.

Today’s unimpeded accumulation of wealth and its unchecked deployment is the product of deliberate distortions of how markets ought to work for the benefit of all and how the interests of society ought to have a voice within a democratic and participatory order.  Restoring this order is all the more important for liberal states with market economies as they are being challenged by authoritarian, one party, states like China as to how effectively they deliver for all of their citizens. 

* Some of these proposals come from the book A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty.  I would like to expand on the idea of diminishing shareholding rights as firm size or importance rises because of the widespread belief in the logic of the one share-one vote rule.  First, we already have different classes of shares that confer differential rights over the control and the profits of the firm.  For example, founders of new firms often issue to themselves B shares with enhanced voting rights in order to control critical firm decisions.  The market prices of different classes of shares reflect their relative power over control and cash flow, respectively.  Thus, reducing the control of shareholders by ceding some control to labor or reducing the voting power of large shareholdings as the firm grows bigger or more consequential are not ideas without similar precedent.

In the 1940s, the Swiss ethologist Rudolf Schenkel coined the term “alpha male” to describe the dominance of a single male in a colony of chimpanzees.  Later the term was extended to describe dominant males and, less frequently, females in human groups.  Chimpanzees happen to be our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.  So, isn’t it possible that we too share their predilection for the rule of one?

The reason I am writing about the alpha male is because we have started to see again the rise of super-dominant men both in politics and business.  I say again, because after a very long period of tyrants, kings, emperors, and dictators we had entered a period of more collective governance models.  So, I wonder whether the reemergence of the rule of one comes from the yearning of the subjects, the conditions of the times, or the force of the Ones.

The twentieth century had no small supply of them.  Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Salazar, Sukarno, Marcos, and Mao, along with a collection of Latin American and African dictators, became masters of the fate of their people.  This century, the rule of one has reemerged in Putin and Xi Jinping (as well as a few others of lesser import).  There are interesting differences and commonalities.  Rules of one that took the world to war have mostly come from the far right: think Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan; today it is Putin’s Russia.  Most of them rule after they have seized the levers of state power.  But some also manage to capture the loyalty of a large segment of their fellow citizens; think of Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Putin, Xi Jinping. 

In the United States political leaders have either willingly refrained from pursuing the rule of one – George Washington being the primary example – or the constitutional checks and balances have proved to be quite effective in curbing such ambitions among politicians.  The striking exception is Donald Trump.  His rule over the Republican Party comes from the force of his appeal to the base of the party which is strong enough to help him enforce his rule by destroying the electoral success of his rivals in the party.  This is a cautionary note regarding the vulnerability of democracy to the appeal of the rule of one.

The rule of one has been though a lot more pervasive in the world of American business.  The Gilded Age got its name from the riches and business power of business tycoons who made their fortunes in oil, steel, railroads and finance and were named robber barons.  Their rule over the economy eventually waned after the passage of anti-trust legislation and under the political weight of the Progressive movement.  Extremely high marginal tax rates, in excess of 90% in the war and post-war years, further arrested the growth of their wealth and along with it their political power. 

In the post-war period, the baton of alpha business males was passed on to the CEOs of large conglomerates.  What comes to mind includes, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca, General Electric’s Jack Welch, and Disney’s Michael Eisner.  That was the era of managerialism and corporate “empire building.” No matter though how big their personalities were, the power of these executives was circumscribed by their corporate boards and the capital markets, especially the stock market, that passed judgment on their performance.

Now, though, we have a different type of rule of one in business.  The new Ones are founders of firms over which they have uncontestable control that makes them practically unanswerable to their stakeholders.  So, they can act on a personal whim with great latitude, very much so as in the era of the robber barons.  Thanks to very bullish market conditions they have also amassed mythical amounts of wealth in the form of shareholdings.

Like the old robber barons, the riches of the new Ones come from a combination of innovative practices and technologies and anti-competitive tactics.   Mostly unchecked by anti-trust legal challenges, they have been able to absorb any competitor that threatens their dominance in their markets.  By effectively depriving consumers alternative outlets to shop they create ecosystems of captured clienteles.  When we look at the rise of the earlier robber barons and the recent Ones, we see that it happens when business opportunities and technologies are in an inflection point.  The Ones rise by capturing new markets and technology before society and the state have had the time to place any rules and standards.   

Thus, the Ones are in a position to preemptively shape our future before we, as a society, have a chance to decide it.  Their hold on markets and technology can have a decisive influence on speech and expression, on social and political discourse, surveillance rights, and the end uses of other transformative innovations.  Here we are not talking only about the dominance of technocracy on our civic, social and personal lives.  We are talking about who controls technocracy.  The highly entrenched rule of one forecloses any collective deliberative process through boards, regulatory oversight, or social input.  It’s like placing our faith in the sense of self-moderation and self-regulation of single individuals. *

What stands behind the power and the potential scope of the power of the Ones is the unfettered faith in the resilience of competitive markets and unrestrained exercise of private property rights that Francis Fukuyama criticizes in the book I cited in my last blogpost.  What we seem to miss is that Adam Smith’s faith in free private markets and John Locke’s elevation of property rights can eventually crash against the unbound ambitions of entrepreneurs to whom competitive markets are unnecessary obstacles toward gaining business dominance and property rights are the ticket to self-aggrandizement.    

In Russia and China, we saw the rise of business tycoons whom we call oligarchs.  These oligarchs operate in a symbiotic relationship and at the pleasure of an authoritarian strongman or a single party.  Western democracies are supposed to serve social contracts according to which the private interest is bound up by societal and national interests.  Why are we then willing to place the future of our social contract in the hands of our own oligarchs?

*On this point, it is informative to know how Elon Musk, the most prominent example of the rule of one, thinks.  According to The Economist, Mr. Musk “paints stewards of fair play – regulators and boards – as pettifogging enemies of progress.”  And he refers to S.E.C. (the Securities and Exchange Commission) officials as “those bastards.”  

When it comes to liberalism and its offspring, democracy, we can say that two things are true: First, some form of liberalism and democracy is more widespread now than for most part of the last century; and second, both are currently challenged and even in decline.  The doubts about liberalism as an organizing principle of societies has given way to an open rebellion against its principles. 

Classical liberalism emerged gradually after the Protestant Reformation and found its full intellectual articulation in the Enlightenment.  It was a movement that purported to unshackle people from ecclesiastical authority and dogma, to liberate people from the oppression of absolute monarchy, and establish reason and science as the drivers of human choices and actions.  It espoused three foundational principles: individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism. 

In his new book Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama writes that despite its liberating intentions, liberalism has not always lived up to its principles.  By accepting colonialism and slavery it violated its egalitarian principle.  By imposing Western European moral, social and economic standards on non-European societies it turned its universalism into an instrument of erasing other cultures.  And by failing to apply checks to extreme individualism, it has led to the modern excesses in wealth creation and selfishness.

So, we have come to a point, that the forces classical liberalism unleashed are spilling dissatisfaction on both sides of the political spectrum, the right and the left.  Conservatives, with their stronger sense of nationalism and cultural traditions, is pushing back on the liberal ideals of universalism which supports tolerance toward diversity.  Working class people on the right are also resenting a liberal international economic order that undermines the economic and social well-being of local communities.  And they have also grown distrustful of government authorities and elites as the complexity of governing modern states has opened a wider information and transparency gap between those in the know and those outside the centers of power and knowledge.  This distrust feeds into notions of alternative facts and rejection of science.

On the left, the dissatisfaction with classical liberalism has several sources.  One is the tremendous inequality in wealth and incomes between a tiny slice of the population and all others.  Here the accused culprit is neoliberal economic policies with their sacrosanct reliance on property rights and unfettered economic freedom.  Another discontent comes from the leftist critique that liberalism with its belief that individuals are autonomous agents of their interests fails to see that many individuals are in reality constrained by the weaker rights or lack thereof of the group they belong to, whether defined by race, faith, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  Therefore, according to this critique, what matters is not just the affirmation of individual rights but rather of group rights.*  That’s how the left in its fight for equal rights for marginalized individuals is driven to identity politics and the closing of its mind to opposing voices.  (On this point, Fukuyama hastens to add that white identity politics has actually presaged identity politics regarding other groups.)

As these discontents harden, each side has come to believe that the prevalence of the other side cannot be reversed through the democratic process and, hence, it represents an existential threat to the defeated side.  Thus, politics becomes a zero-sum game that renders victory a goal by all means.  Thus, distrust in the intentions of the opposing side leads to doubting democracy itself.

Fukuyama offers several possible ways to restore liberalism.  These include: checks on abuses emanating from absolute property rights; submitting economic behavior to the checks of worthy social ends; safeguarding individual rights regardless of group identity; reconciling nationalism with universalism; and above all exercising the virtue of moderation in order to avoid the excesses of selfishness.

In light of these thoughtful suggestions, we have to ask whether liberalism has the capacity for self-correction.  Liberalism is a lofty ideal but the facts on the ground are determined by the relative power of competing groups.  Liberal societies have always struggled to live under the principles of liberalism and have oscillated between social progressivism and unfettered individualism.  As Fukuyama points out, absent in the principles of liberalism is the pursuit of the common good.  That leaves liberal societies with the hope that individuals are rational enough to behave in ways that do no harm to collective aspirations and purposes.  But as Fukuyama himself admits individual rationality is a misguided assumption questioned by modern behavioral science.

I am afraid that embedded in liberalism are the seeds of its multiple crises.  By prioritizing individual self-reliance liberalism set the conditions for impersonal markets based on trust which were good for the market economy but undermined social bonds.  By elevating property rights to sacrosanct status, it checked the arbitrary expropriation of property by authoritarian states but it exposed societies to the whims of property and capital owners.  By placing its faith on science liberalism ushered in waves of innovations which, despite enormous benefits, they nonetheless destabilized the old structures and often put ordinary folks at a disadvantage as to how to navigate modernity.

At its birth, liberalism was shaped by the then prevailing historical circumstances.  Its emphasis on individual freedom and rights was a progressive reaction to the power of oppressive institutions.  Without, however, an effective restraining principle, it was inevitable that individual freedom would lead to excesses.  Manifestations of these excesses are the unrestrained pursuit of wealth and the reigning of, what Fukuyama calls, the sovereign self.

Now, however, we face different circumstances.  Powered by science and technical innovations, humanity has bent nature in many ways to satisfy its ever-growing needs.  Under the force of human intervention, our planet’s environment and climate are pushed dangerously close to the point of unsustainability.  At the same time, our failure to address economic and social fairness undermines the well-being of large swaths of humankind and raises the danger of social upheaval.

For the moment, liberalism remains the best of the alternatives we have available.  To survive, though, liberalism must again adapt to the circumstances humanity faces now.  If moderation is the means to this end, as Fukuyama proposes, then liberalism must balance its faith in individualism with the care for the common good.

*This is what started in Europe as the Critical Theory of liberalism and is narrowly presented as critical race theory in America.

I continue to write about the climate challenge we face because despite the flood of articles about it we do not seem to have a thorough understanding of the enormity of the problem.  As a result of this incomplete understanding, we become captives of political pronouncements, often culminating in treaties long in promises and short in commitments, and, even worse, with little mention of what it will really take to fight climate degradation.

When it comes to the climate challenge the crucial question is this: “Can humanity realize its aspirations within the safe boundaries of our biosphere?”  This quote comes from the book How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba.*  This book makes it plainly and painfully clear how much our modern world has come to depend on the use of fossil fuels and why, consequently, it will take a gigantic effort to decarbonize.  Smil is not an advocate of the continued use of hydrocarbons.  Actually, quite the opposite.  He believes though that any serious response has to start with a clear understanding of our dependence on carbons.  Only then we, ordinary citizens and politicians, can plot a realistic path out of it. 

According to Smil, the first thing we need to understand is that our modern world has been built on four pillars: ammonia, cement, steel and plastics.  Each one of them is critically embedded in a wide range of dimensions of modern civilization and consumes enormous amounts of energy that so far has been provided by fossil fuels.  For example, the production of ammonia, a critical component of fertilizers, requires hydrogen which comes from natural gas – a fossil fuel.  Thanks to ammonia-based fertilizers we have been able to feed 4 more billion of humans who might not have otherwise existed.  The Green Revolution of the 1960s became possible thanks to the widespread use of fertilizers, irrigation, mechanization, and crop protection, all of them built on the use of fossil fuels.  The tremendous efficiencies achieved in the production of food made possible the reallocation of 90% of US agricultural workers to the production of other goods and services that define modern life.  When we account for the nutritional gap in underdeveloped countries and their need to increase food production, we start to understand the additional amounts of energy required.

Cement and steel are two other important pillars of modern life.  Steel, especially, is important in the construction of means of transportation – cars, trains, airplanes and ships – that keep the world moving and have made globalization possible.  But both cement and steel are based on production methods that consume lots of fossil fuel energy.  Finally, plastics have become one of the most ubiquitous materials. From shopping bags, to construction, to a myriad of gadgets, and even medical instruments, it is very difficult to think of a world without plastics.  And their damage to the environment is double.  Not only they come from fossil fuels but, even worse, they litter the environment for centuries.

Our dependence in hydrocarbons is a modern development.  Until the early 1700s, almost all the energy came from the sun, the wind, burning biomass, and human and animal muscle power.  By 1850, fossil fuels still provided only 7% of all fuel energy.  But by 1950, fossil fuels supplied 75% of primary energy.  Today, the average inhabitant of the Earth can consume up to 700 times the energy available at the beginning of the 19^th century.  

Our current alternative to energy from fossil fuels is electrical power.  But despite all the efforts, electricity supplies only 18% of final global energy.  Moreover, the production of electrical power still relies on fossil fuels, in addition to renewable energy sources.  Reducing further and appreciably the quantity of fossil fuels we use for transportation, heating, and in manufacturing requires enormous additions of electric power that would have to be produced by renewable energy sources.  And here the irony is that many of the parts used in the production of renewable energy equipment, like wind turbines, themselves consume fossil fuels.  Since the climate conference in Kyoto in 1997 and 23 such conferences later, by 2019 our global reliance on fossil fuels had declined only from 84% to 78%.

Climate scientists tell us that we need to limit the warming of the atmosphere to 1.5 – 2 C⁰ above its preindustrial level by 2050.  This does not imply full decarbonization but rather removing the excess carbon by natural or technical means.  Already though the present trajectory points to surpassing this limit as a result of disagreements concerning the respective obligations of countries.  Developing nations, including the two behemoths, China and India, as well countries in the Global South (South East Asia, Africa and South America) are still trying to catch up with the living standards of the Western world.  Hence, reducing global reliance on fossil fuels rests more on the transformation of the economies and life styles of the developed world where, however, political divisions make such transformation exceedingly difficult. **

Without a global accord as to how we can adjust to living patterns that can be sustained by a much lower reliance on carbons, we continue to be victims of the law of inertia, that is, we continue to extend our dependence on fossil fuels.  But as our dependence on carbons grows so does the magnitude of the challenge and the effort of extricating ourselves from them.

The difficulty of making the right adjustments sooner than later is also compounded by the fact that the actions (and their associated costs) to control the gases (primarily carbon dioxide and methane) that warm the atmosphere will not yield appreciable results within our lifetime.  Therefore, these actions represent an investment one or more generations have to make for the benefit of future generations.  This long gestation horizon of the benefits of climate rehabilitation is another hurdle we have to overcome.

Finally, according to Smil, our wishful thinking that digitalization and Artificial Intelligence solutions are going to provide an easy way out of our climate challenge is just that, a wish not backed up by any credible evidence of materializing any time soon.

So, we come to realize two things.  First, the continued unchecked use of fossil fuels poses an existential threat to life as we know it.  At the same time a high degree of decarbonization can put serious limits to the use and consumption of materials critical to our modern way of life.  Thus, we need to manage our climate problem from both the supply and demand side of energy. 

*Professor Smil has written over forty books on the environment, population change, food production, and technical innovation among others.  He has the distinction to have had more books reviewed in the leading scientific journal Nature than any other living scientist. 

**In early 2020, the carbon emissions per inhabitant per year were about 20 tons in the US, 10 tons in Europe, and more than 5 tons in China.

Unless we see the lives of people within societies as a zero-sum game, we must admit that generating beneficial outcomes that spread over as many as possible members of a society ought to be a desired condition.  As social animals, humans thrive when they live in societies where they can learn from each other.  It should not be a surprise then, that a recent study has confirmed that opportunities to interact with the right people can be the difference between moving up socially (in economic terms) or being stuck into the class one is born.

In two articles published in Nature, Harvard professor Raj Chetty and his co-authors present strong evidence that what matters for social mobility is not just friendships but interactions and connectedness with socially better-situated people who can serve as role models and sources of advice on how to be admitted to better schools, apply for jobs, and network.   Thus, socially disadvantaged young people who live in what the authors call opportunity cities are more likely to become successful adults and move up the socioeconomic ladder.  On the other side, are places where such opportunities for cross-class interactions are lacking.  These are places also beset with high rates of poverty and inequality, poor schools and single-parent households.

Overall, opportunity places allow lower income people to build social capital, that is, connections, friendships and civic engagement.  Chetty et al., however, find that only cross-class connections are what matters for future success.  Importantly, the link between cross-class economic connectedness and social mobility remains strong even in the presence of lower-quality schools, racial segregation, poverty and inequality.

The authors find that what endows a place with opportunities for cross-class connectedness is exposure and low degree of “friendship” bias.  Conditions of exposure afford lower-class individuals more opportunities to interact with upper-class persons.  Such settings can be work venues, social clubs, recreational activities, places of worship and the like.  The problem is, however, that even when exposure opportunities are present, the “friendship” bias may keep cross-class interactions limited since people like to associate with members of their own circle.

The power of interactions with the “right” people had been shown even before the latest Chetty et al. research.  A study from 2018 had found that poor children who had moved to places where they could interact with successful people were more likely to succeed (in terms of earnings) than children stuck in places without such cross-class interactions.

As with most empirical studies of social issues, the findings of Chetty et al. can lead to different views regarding what is cause and what is effect.  For example, John Tamny of the libertarian advocacy group FreedomWorks writes in the RealClearMarkets that people choose the social environments that are desirable and advantageous to them.  Therefore, the chances for social success and mobility are naturally greater for the members of a social group (or class) that includes successful individuals.  This interpretation views interactions with those one deems advantageous as something of a commodity that can be “purchased” in the market of social clusters.  But can we really choose our preferred social groups?

It seems to me that this ability and freedom is compromised the same way some markets remain inaccessible because of frictions and barriers to entry.  In the market for social groups the common name of these frictions and barriers is structural segregation.  Segregation by race, gender, wealth, ethnicity or religion is a global phenomenon.  It has the purpose and eventually the effect of keeping “different” people separated.  We can trace a lot of the present-day social and political conflicts that afflict our world to these types of structural segregation and absence of conversation across the aisle.

Because the Chetty et al. study refers to the US, let’s focus on the phenomenon of segregation in this country.  Without ignoring other types of segregation, the most pervasive segregation in the US is that of the racial type.  Let’s remember that school segregation ended in 1954 thanks to a Supreme Court decision.  But that triggered a flight of white families to neighborhoods or suburbs where the chances of cross-class interactions, at least at the school level, would be minimal.  Even before school segregation was constitutionally ended, the rules of home financing worked against desegregation.  Thus, the 1930 Federal Housing Administration restricted the ability of black families to buy homes in socially desirable (mostly white) areas – a restriction lifted almost 40 years later by the Fair Housing Act. 

The sad story of physical and social segregation in this country is that instead of having improved it has worsened.  And, as odd as it may sound, cities in the Northeast, like Boston and New York, long considered liberal bastions, are among the most segregated large urban centers in the country.  Zoning laws that restrict affordable multi-unit housing continue to be the most effective barrier that keeps lower-income black and white people from joining upward mobile residential areas.  But as it is usual in such cases, barriers related to the housing market keep more black than white families out of affluent residential places.  For example, black households with middle-class incomes are more likely to reside in poor neighborhoods than white households in the same income bracket.  Another sign of deterioration is that segregation of households by income had become worse between 1970 and 2009.   That means affluent and poorer households were, respectively, more likely to live in residential places with households from the same economic class than in economically mixed places. 

Segregation by race or income limits the opportunities of exposure that Chetty et al. identified as one of the two conditions that facilitate upward mobility.  When poor and underserved people, regardless of race, lack opportunities to observe the habits and ways of successful people they have less chances to form aspirations for upward mobility.  I would argue that having a window to the upper rugs of the social ladder is the first condition to stimulate any desire to climb it.  Having the chances for interaction and connectedness comes most often only after exposure to successful people has been possible and habitual.

So, now that we have the empirical evidence as to what contributes to social mobility and fulfilling one’s potential, our challenge is to create the conditions that will make this possible.