An Investment Gone Sour

I have become a fan of Matt Levine, who writes about Wall Street for Bloomberg. Levine is pretty much the only thing I read about Wall Street these days, because I have little interest in Wall Street, but I find Levine fascinating and hilarious. Fascinating because he provides intriguing tidbits of information about important things that I know nothing about, and hilarious because he is just that kind of writer. His latest column is about a lawsuit filed by the Libya Investment Authority against Goldman Sachs, alleging a fraudulent derivative sale in 2008. The LIA bought $1.2 billion worth of derivatives based on Citibank stock, and stood to make a lot of money if the stock went up. Bad timing. One representative for the plaintiffs said that they didn't understand that if the stock went down, "they could lose all their money." Levine:

But that's a weird thing not to understand. It is true of any stock! If you buy a stock, and the stock goes to zero, you will lose all your money. I mean, if you just bought plain old Citigroup stock in January 2008, you'd have lost 96 percent of your money within 14 months. It may be the case that no one at LIA understood that, if they invested in the shares of big international banks, they could lose all their money -- but that was a widely shared delusion, even in early 2008.

Instead, the main complaint seems to be that the LIA didn't understand the details of the derivative structure: They didn't understand the fine points of the documentation, and they didn't understand one big point, which is that "they hadn't purchased actual shares." The LIA's Citi trade was "a cash-settled forward purchase agreement for Citigroup shares with downside protection in the form of a put option at the same price as the forward," which I guess sounds a little complicated. (Let's give it an acronym for convenience, say CSFPAFCSWDPITFOAPOATSPATF.) You can also say it was "a cash-settled call option," which is equivalent, and somewhat less of a mouthful. Or you can say it was "a bet that Citi's stock would go up." That is more intuitive, but it is not equivalent. It is information-destroying: A cash-settled call option is precisely the same thing as a CSFPAFCSWDPITFOAPOATSPATF, but there are lots of ways to bet that the stock will go up, only some of which are identical to the CSFPAFCSWDPITFOAPOATSPATF.

There are times where the specifics matter. If a salesman says "hey you should do a hedge that will compensate you if interest rates go down," and you agree, and then interest rates go down, but the hedge doesn't actually pay out because of some weird structural feature that the salesman forgot to explain to you, then you have every right to feel aggrieved. If a salesman offers you a bet that Citi shares will go up, and you take the bet, and Citi shares go up, and you don't get any money, and you ask him what happened, and he shrugs and says "derivatives are complicated, man" -- you should probably sue him. But if a salesman offers you a bet that Citi shares will go up, and you take the bet, and Citi shares lose 96 percent of their value, it looks a little funny to go to court and say "well we didn't understand the structural nuances of the bet." The nuances are not your problem.

The most interesting thing about this Levine column is his thoughts on salesmanship in the modern world. The LIA was talked into this deal by Youssef Kabbaj, a London-based derivatives salesman who was at the time one of Goldman's top rainmakers. Their lawsuit accuses him of "undue influence," that is, of being such a good salesman that they couldn't resist him:

This sort of thing is as old as business, but we live in challenging times for it. Objective performance is easier than ever to measure, making it harder than ever to justify choices based on boozy dinners instead of rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Communications are easier than ever to record and monitor, making it harder than ever to operate by means of nods and winks. Technology has devalued human intermediaries: Now we buy stuff over the internet, not over dinner. Our society has an ideology of meritocracy, and a distrust of corrupt elites who use connections to get ahead. It's just a bad environment for the classic skills of salesmanship and relationship-building.

One way to think about the Libya case is that Kabbaj was really good at the classical arts of salesmanship. He did all the best salesman-y things. He spent a lot of time with the clients, paid attention to them, explained finance to them. He helped them write memos so they'd look good to their bosses, he got their brothers internships so they'd look good to their families, he brought them gifts of aftershave so they'd smell good. They wanted to do business with him because they liked him, and trusted him, and thought of him as one of them. He inserted himself so fully into their lives that they forgot he was a salesman. . . .

Libya knew it was betting on bank stocks to go up, and those stocks went down. It's not claiming fraud. It's claiming "undue influence." The problem is not that Kabbaj was lying. It's that he was too charming. Libya isn't saying it was duped. It's saying it was seduced.

Is that a good legal theory? I have no idea. It does seem weird to say it's illegal, or even suspicious, for a salesman to befriend his customers. And yet it strikes me as plausible that a salesman could be too good, too seductive, that he could get so deep into his clients' hearts and minds that they'd have a good claim to send back anything he sold them. The traditional check on that sort of thing is that relationships are reciprocal: If you become your client's best friend, he probably becomes your best friend, and you're not going to put your best friend in a terrible trade, are you? It takes a particular sort of cold-bloodedness to spend months cultivating a close personal friendship with someone, and then use that relationship to rip him off to enrich yourself. One reason that salesmanship is so distrusted, these days, in the financial industry, is that people are more willing than ever to believe that derivatives salespeople are exactly that cold-blooded.

A Bill I Suppport

The ACLU:

Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) introduced the Solitary Confinement Reform Act, which would require federal prisons to ensure that any period in solitary is as brief as possible and under the least restrictive conditions possible. It would also mandate that prisoners in solitary spend at least four hours per day outside their cells, have access to rehabilitative and educational programs, and be permitted to interact with other people in addition to other reforms.

More on Trump's Utopian Promises

Charles Krauthammer:

Take the most striking — and overlooked — moment of Trump’s GOP convention speech. He actually promised that under him, “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end.”

Not “be reduced.” End.

Humanity has been at this since, oh, Hammurabi. But the audience didn’t laugh. It applauded.

Nor was this mere spur of the moment hyperbole. Trump was reading from a teleprompter. As he was a few weeks earlier when he told a conference in North Dakota, “Politicians have used you and stolen your votes. They have given you nothing. I will give you everything.”

Everything, mind you. “I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years.” No laughter recorded.

In launching his African American outreach at a speech in Charlotte, Trump catalogued the horrors that he believes define black life in America today. Then promised: “I will fix it.”

How primitive have our politics become? Fix what? Family structure? Social inheritance? Self-destructive habits? How? He doesn’t say. He’ll will it. Trust him, as he likes to say.

After 15 months, the suspension of disbelief has become so ubiquitous that we hardly notice anymore. We are operating in an alternate universe where the geometry is non-Euclidean, facts don’t matter, history and logic have disappeared.

And then this, which appears as the caption to a photograph on the same page:

Speaking at a rally in Melbourne, Fla., Sept. 27, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said there are only "41 days to make possible every dream you've ever dreamed."

Donald Trump as a Utopian

Scott Alexander endorses Hillary:

Many conservatives make the argument against utopianism. The millenarian longing for a world where all systems are destroyed, all problems are solved, and everything is permissible – that’s dangerous whether it comes from Puritans or Communists. These same conservatives have traced this longing through leftist history from Lenin through social justice.

Which of the candidates in this election are millennarian? If Sanders were still in, I’d say fine, he qualifies. If Stein were in, same, no contest. But Hillary? The left and right both critique Hillary the same way. She’s too in bed with the system. Corporations love her. Politicians love her. All she wants to do is make little tweaks – a better tax policy here, a new foreign policy doctrine there. The critiques are right. Hillary represents complete safety from millennialism.

Trump’s policy ideas are mostly silly, but no one cares, because he’s not really running on policy. He’s running on making America great again, fighting the special interests, and defying the mainstream media. Nobody cares what policies he’ll implement after he does this, because his campaign is more an expression of rage at these things than anything else.

Alexander explains that the biggest problem with Karl Marx was that he actively refused to make any clear statement about what the world would be like after the revolution: "Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation." So his followers went about destroying capitalism without giving anywhere near enough thought to what might come after, with predictably disastrous results. Since he realized this, Alexander writes,

One of the central principles behind my philosophy has been “Don’t destroy all existing systems and hope a planet-sized ghost makes everything work out”. Systems are hard. Institutions are hard. If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it. Throughout history, dozens of movements have doomed entire civilizations by focusing on the “destroying the current system” step and expecting the “build a better one” step to happen on its own. That never works. The best parts of conservatism are the ones that guard this insight and shout it at a world too prone to taking shortcuts.

Donald Trump does not represent those best parts of conservativism. To transform his movement into Marxism, just replace “the bourgeoisie” with “the coastal elites” and “false consciousness” with “PC speech”. Just replace the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of the workers, with the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of “real Americans”. Just replace the hand-waving lack of plans with what to do after the Revolution with a hand-waving lack of plans what to do after the election. In both cases, the sheer virtue of the movement, and the apocalyptic purification of the rich people keeping everyone else down, is supposed to mean everything will just turn out okay on its own. That never works.

A commenter here the other day quoted an Atlantic article complaining that “The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”. Well, count me in that second group. I don’t think he’s literal. I think when he talks about building a wall and keeping out Muslims, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. When he talks about tariffs and trade deals, he’s metaphorically saying “I’m going to fight for you, the real Americans”. Fine. But neither of those two things is a plan. The problem with getting every American a job isn’t that nobody has been fighting for them, the problem with getting every American a job is that getting 100% employment in a modern economy is a really hard problem.

Donald Trump not only has no solution to that problem, he doesn’t even understand the question. He lives in a world where there is no such thing as intelligence, only loyalty. If we haven’t solved all of our problems yet, it’s because the Department of Problem-Solving was insufficiently loyal, and didn’t try hard enough. His only promise is to fill that department with loyal people who really want the problem solved.

I’ve never been fully comfortable with the Left because I feel like they often make the same error – the only reason there’s still poverty is because the corporate-run government is full of traitors who refuse to make the completely great, no-downsides policy of raising the minimum wage. One of the right’s great redeeming feature has been an awareness of these kinds of tradeoffs. But this election, it’s Hillary who sounds restrained and realistic, and Trump who wants the moon on a silver platter.

I endorse the basic thrust of this argument. The bane of our politics and maybe all democratic politics is mistaking technical problems for moral problems. It is not enough to have your heart in the right place. It is not enough to sweep the bad people out of power. It is not enough to proclaim the rule of the people, or the rule of the real Americans. Governing is hard. Governing well is so difficult that hardly anyone can do it.

If you think waving a flag with a pure heart can solve a problem like rising inequality, or the Syrian civil war, go ahead and vote for Trump. But if you think solving hard problems requires careful thought, long deliberation, and hard work, you have only one choice in this election: Hillary.

Costs and Benefits of Immigration to the US

Big new report from the National Academy of Sciences outlines some of the impact of immigration to the US:

The report suggests that immigration is not a clear-cut issue in which one side is right and the other wrong, but that there are both costs and benefits.

The crux of the problem is that the plusses and minuses are not distributed equally. The academy found, for example, that the willingness of less-skilled immigrants to work at low pay reduced consumption costs — the costs to consumers of goods and services like health care, child care, food preparation, house cleaning, repair and construction — for millions of Americans. This resulted in “positive net benefits to the U.S. economy during the last two decades of the 20th century.” These low-wage workers simultaneously generated “a redistribution of wealth from low- to high-skilled native-born workers.”

The frequent harshness of these trade-offs in real life is masked by the academic language of the report, which points out that native-born workers who are substitutes for immigrants “will experience negative wage effects” — in other words, lower wages.

This seems to sum up the conventional wisdom on immigration right now: on the whole it makes the nation richer and more vibrant, but it hurts the native born workers who compete with immigrants for jobs, driving down their wages. This may have the effect of worsening inequality:

Immigration lowers the wages of competing workers, while raising the return to capital and the wages of complementary workers. In other words, the immigration surplus does not accrue equally to everyone. It goes primarily to the owners of capital, which includes business and landowners and investors.

Immigration has been a major piece of background to the economy of the past 40 years. Along with free trade and lower taxes, it has led to a country full of bold people doing exciting things, with a vast diversity in food, music, and entertainment, the world's most innovative companies, a disproportionate share of Nobel Prize winners, and so on. Immigrant ambition drives the meritocracy toward ever greater competitiveness; immigrant muscle builds the gleaming office towers where the meritocrats have their spiffy offices. Ordinary Americans have benefited from this economy in many ways, from smart phones to smart cars, but our incomes have stagnated and our debts have grown. Americans on the margins – poor, ill-educated, mentally ill – have suffered as immigrants have bid down the price of low-skill labor and bid up the cost of housing, while the meritocrats have increasingly thumbed their noses at the useless 47 percent.

I am ambivalent about the role of immigration in all of this. On the one hand I see that in old cities like New York or Washington, the most vibrant neighborhoods are the ones full of immigrants. Many of the movers and shakers in American business, science and technology have been immigrants, from Nikola Tesla to Sergey Brin. Since I work along the margins of the construction industry I work with immigrants all the time, and I have always been impressed by the diligence and professionalism of immigrant workers.

On the other hand, I suspect that the flood of cheap, willing laborers from Latin America really has pushed our economy back toward the Gilded Age, which was also a time when mansion-dwelling millionaires benefited from the labor of millions of hungry new arrivals.

But even if it were true that immigration was a major cause of rising inequality, what would we do about it? The people arriving in the US legally are mostly on the high-skill side, like the ambitious Nigerians I wrote about a few days ago. (Or else they are refugees, a completely separate issue.) The people who drive wages down by taking work at any wage are largely illegal. We could, obviously, make it very difficult for undocumented people to live and work in America, but I think the price would be very high. For example, we could issue biometric national ID cards coded with our retina scans and require that they be used for almost everything. I suspect Americans would rebel. Many people who hate immigration would also hate a regime that punished small contractors for paying day laborers in cash when they needed some quick help. So long as that is the attitude, we can never keep illegal immigrants from finding work.

The notion of rounding up 10 million people and forcibly deporting them turns my stomach.

I would support some changes in immigration policy, such as perhaps a reduction in legal immigration and a shift in its focus toward highly skilled people rather than family unification – especially if that could be made part of a general effort to reduce inequality that also included higher taxes on the wealthy, a higher minimum wage, and larger wage subsidies for poor families. But immigrants are not responsible for our problems, and I resist any effort to blame them for things like crime and the decline of old manufacturing cities. It is really this irrational anger that has made most of the American left so pro-immigrant of late, on the principle that whatever Trump supporters hate must be a great thing. I won't be drawn into that sort of shouting match. Immigration has powerful impacts on our nation, and we ought to think about it carefully and design our policies to make those impacts as positive as possible.

A Babylonian Sufferer Ponders the Gods

A Babylonion poem of c. 1100-800 BCE, From Slightly Alive Translations:

Sufferer:

I sought signs across the world, but received no omens.
The gods do nothing to thwart the devils’ plans.
A patriarch drags boats through the canals,
while his son lounges in his boudoir.
The elder brother hunts as fiercely as a lion,
but the younger finds success while herding cows.
The heir trudges through the streets like a peddler;
the second son donates largesse to the poor.
How could I surpass the luminaries to whom I grovel,
(when) I must kneel even to my inferiors?
Lowlifes sneer at me while they prosper and thrive.

Friend:

You “perceptive genius,” you “sovereign of sagacity” —
you disrespect the gods because of your angry heart.
The divine mind is as remote as the zenith of the sky;
perceiving it is more arduous than people can understand.
Everything that has breath, every handicraft of the mother-goddess:
why are all offspring unpredictable?
Look at a cow; her first calf is inferior,
while her second offshoot is twice as good.
A fool can be a firstborn son,
while the second (son) achieves perceptiveness and valor.
However much they try, people cannot understand the logic of the gods.

Sufferer:

My friend, listen closely, so you can understand my argument.
Pay attention to every word I have chosen.
People revere the words of the influential, even known murderers,
but revile the penniless who did nothing wrong.
They champion the apostate whose “justice” is abomination
but exile the just who obey the gods’ commands.
They fill the wrongdoer’s treasury with gold coin
but strip every provision from the grain bins of the poor.
They bolster the leader who is guilty to his core
but destroy the helpless and trample the weak.
So here I am, disempowered, while the elite torment me.

Friend:

The king of the Ancient Ones, Enlil, creator of the multitudes,
proud Ea, who measures out the (primordial) clay,
her Majesty who forms them, Mistress Mami:
they saddled humanity with serpentine speech.
Mendacity, not truth, was their constant gift.
Proudly, they speak of the fortune of the wealthy:
“The king receives riches at every turn!”
They abuse the penniless like thieves;
they saddle them with slander and plot their deaths.
They cultivate misfortune for them like criminals, because they have no guidance;
they sap their last strength, then extinguish them like embers.

Sufferer:

My friend, you are compassionate: try to comprehend my depression.
Come help! See my suffering and understand it well.
I am a mere slave, “perceptive” and pious,
and I have not seen one iota of loyalty or help.
Silently I walked my city’s streets;
my cries were inconspicuous, my speaking hushed.
I stared at the ground, never raising my head;
I did not fawn over my colleagues in the assembly like a slave.
May the god who rejected me grant help;
may the goddess who abandoned me show compassion;
may the king, sun of the people, guide (us) like a god.

Taliban Leaders Blast Trump

Love this story:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Taliban leaders followed the U.S. presidential debate closely but heard nothing on Afghanistan, a spokesman said on Wednesday, adding that they were not impressed by Republican candidate Donald Trump, whom they considered "non-serious".

The leaders watched Monday's televised debate from a secret location in Afghanistan, but neither Trump nor Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton talked about their intentions for the country, the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said by telephone.

"The main thing that we would like the next U.S. president to do is to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors," he said.

"Why are they hated worldwide? It's because of their aggressive policies. They invade other people's countries and kill innocent human beings for their vested interests." . . .

Zabihullah also had harsh words for Trump, a political newcomer who has attacked what he calls the failed policies of the Washington political classes.

Taliban leaders considered Trump a "non-serious" candidate who said "anything that comes to his tongue," the spokesman said.

How Much Impact did Stop-and-Frisk Policing have on NYC's Crime Rate?

As you can see, not very much.

Note that this refers to the policy of random frisking of young men in high crime areas implemented for a while by the NYC police, not the nearly universal police practice of stopping people who look like they are up to no good.

The Arizona Republic Endorses Hillary

Interesting news:

Since The Arizona Republic began publication in 1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. Never. This reflects a deep philosophical appreciation for conservative ideals and Republican principles.

This year is different.

The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified.

That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.

The challenges the United States faces domestically and internationally demand a steady hand, a cool head and the ability to think carefully before acting.

Hillary Clinton understands this. Donald Trump does not.

Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. Donald Trump does not.

Clinton knows how to compromise and to lead with intelligence, decorum and perspective. She has a record of public service as First Lady, senator and secretary of state.

She has withstood decades of scrutiny so intense it would wither most politicians. The vehemence of some of the anti-Clinton attacks strains credulity.

Trump hasn’t even let the American people scrutinize his tax returns, which could help the nation judge his claims of business acumen. . . .

Yet despite her flaws, Clinton is the superior choice.

She does not casually say things that embolden our adversaries and frighten our allies. Her approach to governance is mature, confident and rational.

That cannot be said of her opponent.

Clinton retains her composure under pressure. She’s tough. She doesn’t back down.

Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.

That’s beneath our national dignity.

A Plea to Leave ISIS Alone, for Now

Ramzy Mardini warns that driving the Islamic State out of Mosul will only unleash civil war, because opposition to the Islamic State is the only thing holding northern Iraq's various ethnic and religious factions together:

In parts of Iraq recaptured from the militants where I’ve traveled, signs of any central authority are nonexistent. Instead, what has emerged from the conflict is a complex patchwork of ethnic, tribal and religious militias that claim fief over particular territories.

This was the case in liberated parts of Sinjar, where the massacre of Yazidis, a religious minority, perpetrated by the Islamic State with local Sunni collaborators compelled the United States to intervene militarily in 2014. Now the remaining Yazidi community is divided and militarized, with each militia backed by a different Kurdish faction, and each Kurdish faction in turn backed by a different regional power. . . . “ISIS changed everything,” one Yazidi man told me. “We can never trust Arabs again.”

Among the forces marshalling for the attack on Mosul, Mardini says, are

Sunni Arab tribal militias looking to expand control over territory ahead of the next provincial elections; Shiite Turkmen militias aiming to cleanse Sunni Turkmens from the area; Shiite Arab militias seeking a bigger say in government; and Kurdish groups wishing to consolidate control over disputed territories. Behind all these is a prime minister who needs a victory to strengthen his weak hand in Baghdad. And behind him are Turkey and Iran, both maneuvering their armed proxies to extend their influence.

It does seem like a real mess. But on the other hand I think the war is stoking these conflicts, and I don't see how they will ever settle down while the fighting against the Islamic State continues. Plus, reports coming out of Mosul suggest that as military tensions mount the Islamic State administration is becoming ever bloodier and more vicious, and it would be hard for anyone to decide to leave a million people in that situation indefinitely while the rest of Iraq sorts out its problems.

The SpaceX Plan for Mars

SpaceX video on their plan to send people to Mars. Elon Musk gave a major presentation on this plan at the International Astronautical Congress this week. It strikes me as much more feasible than the Mars One plan, but of course that is a very low bar. The huge rocket that would start the mission would be bigger than a Saturn V, and Musk thinks it would cost $10 billion to develop. The plan is to power it with 42 rocket engines, the new "Raptor" model that SpaceX is just now testing. Of course the reason the Soviets never got to the Moon was that their 30-engine N-1 booster blew up every time they tested it, so right there is a huge engineering challenge. Musk envisions a slow, six-month flight, in zero gravity with minimal shielding, and he said at the meeting that he isn't going because he wants to see his kids grow up.

It is certainly possible to get people to Mars. But it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and right now I can't see the US or anyone else making the investment.

Teen Birth Rate Still Falling

To its lowest level ever. Look at the decline in teen births to African American girls: down more than 60% in 25 years.

September 28, 1991

Twenty-five years of loving marriage.

Pawpaws

At Great Falls, Virginia. Not quite ripe.

The Latest in Celebrity Security

Via Marginal Revolutions, a British newspaper account of a celebrity wedding in the south of France includes this line:

It was said before that wedding that there would be ‘White House-level security,’ and there was an anti-drone falconer on the property.

Take that, paparazzi. And if you were looking for a career that involves working with animals. . . .

Nazi Meth

German writer Norman Ohler has produced a book about drug use in Nazi Germany, called in English Blitzed, and it's a real eye opener:

Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned. At a company called Temmler in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild, its head chemist, inspired by the successful use of the American amphetamine Benzedrine at the 1936 Olympic Games, began trying to develop his own wonder drug – and a year later, he patented the first German methyl-amphetamine. Pervitin, as it was known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train drivers (initially, it could be bought without prescription). It even made its way into confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,” went the slogan. Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which they would be able to get through their housework in no time at all – with the added bonus that they would also lose weight, given the deleterious effect Pervitin had on the appetite. Ohler describes it as National Socialism in pill form.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before soldiers were relying on it too. In Blitzed, Ohler reproduces a letter sent in 1939 by Heinrich Böll, the future Nobel laureate, from the frontline to his parents back at home, in which he begs them for Pervitin, the only way he knew to fight the great enemy – sleep. In Berlin, it was the job of Dr Otto Ranke, the director of the Institute for General and Defence Physiology, to protect the Wehrmacht’s “animated machines” – ie its soldiers – from wear, and after conducting some tests he concluded that Pervitin was indeed excellent medicine for exhausted soldiers. Not only did it make sleep unnecessary (Ranke, who would himself become addicted to the drug, observed that he could work for 50 hours on Pervitin without feeling fatigued), it also switched off inhibitions, making fighting easier, or at any rate less terrifying.

In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors, recommending that soldiers take one tablet per day, two at night in short sequence, and another one or two tablets after two or three hours if necessary. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe ordered 35 million tablets, and the Temmler factory increased production. The likes of Böll, it’s fair to say, wouldn’t need to ask their parents for Pervitin again.

Ohler got interested in Nazi drug use after reading the notes of Hitler's doctor; I think the knowledge that Hitler was a heavy user of cocaine, amphetamines, and opiates is fairly widespread by now. But the extent of drug use throughout the Reich has remained obscure. I must have read about the German invasion of France in two dozen books, including two just about that six weeks of fighting, but not one of them mentioned those 35 million doses of methamphetamine. Ohler claims that the initial German breakthrough was only possible because the men of the panzer divisions went for 72 hours without sleep. The picture at the top shows a bar of Panzerschokolade, chocolate heavily laced with amphetamines.

Maybe we shouldn't put too much weight on these accounts of amphetamine use as explanations for how the war went. Or maybe we should; amphetamine use at the levels Ohler describes absolutely can make men crazy. How many Nazis were drug-crazed on top of all their other problems?

And what about the other combatants? I have read that amphetamine use was widespread among American bomber crews, but until today that was actually the only thing I knew about drug use among the Allies. But just a bit of googling produces the information that the Japanese and Russians both produced and distributed massive quantities of dangerous (because sloppily made and contaminated with who knows what) amphetamines known in Russian as "Vint," and that the British, who had a long history of supplying their colonial soldiers with cocaine (see above), equipped their army with 72 million methamphetamine pills. I couldn't find a number for the RAF, but many sources offer the insight "Methedrine won the Battle of Britain". American generals loved amphetamines, which they said increased soldiers' "morale."

It's fascinating to think about the effects of dangerous, mind-altering drugs being used on such a massive scale by men carrying guns and flying fighter planes.

CEOs Don't Like Trump

The Wall Street Journal:

No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

During this year’s presidential primaries, 19 of the nation’s top CEOs gave to other Republican candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign donations.

Since then, most have stayed on the sidelines, with 89 of the 100 top CEOs not supporting either presidential nominee, and 11 backing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Trump certainly is a different kind of Republican.

Catapulting Snakes

In the naval battle between Prusias of Bithynia and Eumenes II of Pergamum in 184 BC, Hannibal, commander of the Bithynian fleet, used his catapults to fire pots filled with poisonous snakes onto the decks of the Pergamene ships. The initial amusement of Eumenes' men turned to horror when the contents of the pots were revealed, and the panic caused on the ships made them flee rather than fight, although their numbers were superior, and thus the stratagem helped to achieve a victory for Prusias' fleet.

– The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007)

Laura Knight

Laura Knight (1877-1970) had a bunch of firsts as a female artist Britain: the first female member of the Royal Academy, the first woman to have a major retrospective show at the Academy, etc. (Portrait of Ethel Bartlett)

This is probably her most famous work, Self Portrait with Nude Model, 1913, now in the Royal Portrait Gallery.

Knight had a pretty rough time growing up. Her father died when she was young. Her mother became a schoolteacher to pay the bills, but when Laura was 15 her mother fell ill, so she took over her mother's teaching job to support her sick mother and her two younger sisters. Amidst all this she struggled to get any real training in art. This probably explains why I have not been able to find any images of paintings she did before she was 30. She actually got her entrance into the art world by marrying another painter, Harold Knight, in 1903. (Portrait of Lubov Tchernicheva, 1921)

In the 1920s Bartlett painted dozens of images of circus performers and dancers. (Three Clowns)

An aquatint: Lady with Shawl, 1926.

During World War II she had another burst of creativity on war-related subjects, especially women in the war effort. (Corporal J.D.M. Person, WAAF, 1940, and Land Army Girl, 1939)

The Nuremberg Trial, 1946.

The artist in about 1910.

African Immigrants and African Americans

Some African immigrants and their children are doing very well in America. Measured by the usual metrics – high school graduation rates, test scores, income – immigrants from some African countries are not only doing significantly better than African Americans, they are doing better than native born whites. This has led to some complaints from African Americans that when an elite school wants to feature a minority student who has "beaten the odds," that star student is more likely to be a immigrant from Ghana or Nigeria than an American black. (One study found that although only 13% of black American 18-year-olds are immigrants or the children of immigrants, they make up 41% of the black students in Ivy League schools.) It also raises all sorts of questions about what racism is and how it works.

It is important to note that not all African immigrants are thriving. The immigrant blacks who get into Ivy League schools come overwhelmingly from Nigeria, Ghana, and the Caribbean; immigrants from Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, and Rwanda are doing notably badly. This seems easy to explain. Immigrants from Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, and Rwanda are mostly refugees who have been through terrible experiences, many from broken homes – like the "lost boys" of Sudan – whereas most immigrants from Ghana, Nigeria and Jamaica are from intact middle class families who choose to migrate in search of opportunity. Because of this difference you can't just look at numbers for "African immigrants" that lump all of these people together. The same patterns hold in Britain, where west Africans and many from the Caribbean are doing well, but refugees from war-torn nations are not.

I have been thinking about this issue because of what it says about race and racism in our world. These facts refute basic nineteenth-century tri-racialism, since it seems clear that west African immigrants are on average at least as smart and hard-working as whites. It is also hard on any sort of racial genetic model, since most African Americans are genetically a mix of west Africans and whites, with their white ancestors drawn disproportionately from the upper class. So what does explain the difference between African Americans and African immigrants?

Some African American activists have asserted that African immigrants simply don't face the racism that African Americans do. I am not aware of any good evidence for or against this proposition, but I still find it interesting. It suggests that modern American racism, at least in its harmful forms, is something quite specific: a response not to dark skin but to the particular mannerisms of African Americans. Immigrants and their children have different speech patterns and the like, so racist teachers do not respond to them in the same way. As I said, I am not aware of any good evidence on the question, but it bears thinking about.

Another way to think about the problem is by considering income rather than race. Much (but not all) of the differences in school performance and the like between African Americans and whites can be accounted for by income, that is, students from poor families always do worse in school than children from middle class families, and more African Americans are poor. Immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana have higher incomes than African Americans, so their children do better in school. But of course this is one of those explanations that just demands more explanations; why do west African immigrants have higher incomes?

I think using a broader notion of class, rather than simply income, explains even more. Many west African immigrants come from elite families; I have seen half a dozen stories over the years of people who are kings and queens in their Nigerian tribes but teachers or nurses in America. The Nigerian elite adopted the British attitude toward education, and they send their children to private schools and colleges on the British model. Nigerian immigrants to America maintain this tradition; in the 2010 census, 60.7% of Nigerian immigrants in the US held college degrees – that's more than twice the rate for whites – and 28% held graduate degrees.

Culture matters. People pass on to their children attitudes and expectations that have real weight. When it comes to education, Nigerian immigrants are more like Jews or Chinese than they are like African Americans, and this has a huge impact on how well people do economically and socially in the US.

The other thing I would say is that time matters. Cultures are after all hard things to change. I have seen a couple of studies lately showing that Europeans whose surnames were noble in the fifteenth century are still richer and better educated than people with peasant surnames. African Americans endured 150 years of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow, and that left a legacy that can't easily be erased. Even if Nigerian immigrants face some of the same short-term problems as African Americans, the way they respond to them is conditioned by entirely different backgrounds.

It seems inevitable to me that over time the distinctiveness of west African immigrants will fade. (I only know one African immigrant well myself, a Nigerian I play basketball with, and he has an African American wife.) I wonder, will their presence help blur the hard lines between the races in America? Will their attitudes toward education and success spread? Or will their children and grand-children move toward the African American norm, as the descendants of white immigrants have moved toward the white norm?

Real World Teaching

Scott Alexander:

When I was a student, I hated all my teachers and thought that if they just ditched the constant repetition, the cutesy but vapid games, the police state attitude, then everyone would learn a lot more and school would finally live up to its potential as “not totally incompatible with learning, sometimes”.

And then I started teaching English, tried presenting the actually interesting things about the English language at a reasonable pace as if I were talking to real human beings. And it was a disaster. I would give this really brilliant and lucid presentation of a fascinating concept, and then ask a basic question about it, and even though I had just explained it, no one in the class would even have been listening to it. They’d be too busy chattering to one another in the corner. So finally out of desperation I was like “Who wants to do some kind of idiotic activity in which we all pick English words and color them in and then do a stupid dance about them??!” (I may not have used those exact words) and sure enough everyone wanted to and at the end some of them sort of vaguely remembered the vocabulary.

By the end of the school year I had realized that nothing was getting learned without threatening a test on it later, nothing was getting learned regardless unless it was rote memorization of a few especially boring points, and that I could usually force students to sit still long enough to learn it if and only if I bribed them with vapid games at regular intervals.

Yet pretty much every day I see people saying “Schools are evil fascist institutions that deliberately avoid teaching students for sinister reasons. If you just inspire a love of learning in them, they’ll be thrilled to finally have new vistas to explore and they’ll go above and beyond what you possibly expected.”

To which the only answer is no they frickin’ won’t. Yes, there will be two or three who do. Probably you were one of them, or your kid is one of them, and you think everything should be centered around those people. Fine. That’s what home schooling is for. But there will also be oh so many who ask “Will the grandeur and beauty of the fathomless universe be on the test?” And when you say that the true test is whether they feel connected to the tradition of inquiry into the mysteries of Nature, they’ll roll their eyes and secretly play Pokemon on their Nintendo DS thinking you can’t see it if it’s held kind of under their desk.

I don’t think I used to be an optimist. I think I used to be a narcissist. I figured that when I was a teacher, everything would work out, my kids would be kind and attentive, my lessons would stick, and there would be no behavioral problems or if there are they would quiet down after I give them a friendly talk about why attention is important. I felt like the Universe owed it to me to have everything work out. I didn’t realize on a gut level that kids could just not cooperate.

I should note that Scott Alexander was not a teacher for very long and may not have been very good at it; skilled, experienced teachers do much better than this. But I have heard similar tales from others about their shocked encounter with the reality of student indifference, so I thought I would pass this along.

Who Wore Winged Helmets?

The Greeks, that's who.  Chalcidian-type helmet, 4th century BCE, recently sold by Christie's for $51,250.

It's a Big, Scary Universe

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

–H.P. Lovecraft

Thought

We come into the world wide-eyed, ready to stare.

–Simon Schama

Painting the Library of Congress Dome

Edwin Blashfield painting the lantern of the dome of the Great Reading Room of the Library of Congress in 1898, Washington D.C.

In Case You were Confused about the Out of Africa News

Many news outlets are running headlines this week like this one in the Times:

A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find

But others are running headlines like this:

Mysterious Branch of Humanity Possibly Discovered

That story goes on to explain that a "new, ancient" branch of humanity was in Australia before fully modern humans.

Both stores are based on the same group of three articles just published in Nature. Those articles describe studies that analyze large samples of human genomes from indigenous people around the world, 787 in all. They use mutation counts to estimate the date of the common ancestry for all those people. For the most part they come up with dates between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. Also, they find that all the people outside of Africa are more closely related to each other than they are to most people in Africa, hence, they descend from a single African group.

But wait – what about the skeletons found in Israel, apparently fully modern humans, that have been dated to between 90,000 and 120,000 years ago? What about the tools kits from Saudi Arabia that look like those of fully modern humans and date to 100,000 years ago? Modern human teeth from China dated to 80,000 years ago?

Two of these studies found no evidence for any such people; if they existed, these scientists suggest, they simply went extinct without leaving any descendants. But didn't modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals and Denisovans? Um, yes, they did. And why would they breed with semi-humans they encountered in their travels but not other modern humans?

Which brings us to the third study, based on genomes from Australia and New Guinea:

But on that question, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues ended up with a somewhat different result. In Papua New Guinea, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues found, 98 percent of each person’s DNA can be traced to that single migration from Africa. But the other 2 percent seemed to be much older. Dr. Metspalu concluded that all people in Papua New Guinea carry a trace of DNA from an earlier wave of Africans who left the continent as long as 140,000 years ago, and then vanished.

I have some personal history on these questions. When the first genetic arguments for the "one wave out of Africa" were made 15 years ago, I accepted them wholeheartedly. Back then the upper bound for this migration was set at 55,000 to 60,000 years ago, and I began to write and talk about how this date would effect studies of things like language and folklore, given that we now had an actual date for when all the non-African culture of the world diverged. And then came the steady drip of counter-evidence: the Israeli skeletons, the Middle Eastern tool kits, interbreeding with Neanderthals, different genetic calculations that made the date more like 120,000, and so on. That moment of certainty and clarity was, for me, gone. I've never been able to get it back, and these studies don't get me there. It seems quite clear now that all sorts of people and semi-people were wandering around Eurasia 80,000 years ago, leaving traces in Israeli caves and DNA from New Guinea. Plus, my confidence in these genetic dates has been drastically undermined by the work done on the population of the Americas, because it turns out that some geneticists have been calibrating their clocks by asking archaeologists what the date should be and then tweaking their models to get the right date.

So while all of this is very interesting, there is a lot of work yet to be done.

Drone Photos Reveal New Archaeological Sites in Italy

Amazingly clear building foundations in this photograph of fields near Le Pianelle in Italy's Apennine Mountains. This effect is created when just the right amount of rain falls to emphasize the difference between the wheat growing over stone walls and the rest.

Overall plan of the area, with all the newly-discovered foundations picked out in red. The buildings are probably all from Roman times

An Era of Weaponized Sensitivity

Lionel Shriver is not backing down from the controversial speech about Cultural Appropriation she made a few weeks ago at the Brisbane Writers' Festival:

Briefly, my address maintained that fiction writers should be allowed to write fiction — thus should not let concerns about “cultural appropriation” constrain our creation of characters from different backgrounds than our own. I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d worried the speech would be bland.

Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics. The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand. . . .

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. . . .

Ironically, only fellow liberals will be cowed by terror of being branded a racist (a pejorative lobbed at me in recent days — one that, however groundless, tends to stick). But there’s still such a thing as a real bigot, and a real misogynist. In obsessing over micro-aggressions like the sin of uttering the commonplace Americanism “you guys” to mean “you all,” activists persecute fellow travelers who already care about equal rights.

Moreover, people who would hamper free speech always assume that they’re designing a world in which only their enemies will have to shut up. But free speech is fragile. Left-wing activists are just as dependent on permission to speak their minds as their detractors.

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

Andrea Frazzetta in Ethiopia

Part of a fine feature at the Times on the work of six travel photographers.

Charles Murray Worries about the Future of Conservatism

In an interview with Spiked, conservative crank Charles Murray worries about what support for Trump means:

Collins: You are a self-described libertarian, and your latest book is robust defence of freedom. Do you believe that Enlightenment values such as liberty are enough to stand up to the strong, often tribal, cultural forces at work today? Can they serve as a counter to those divisive forces?

Murray: A year ago, I would have given you a much more optimistic answer than I’d give you today. The thing about the Trump campaign that has been most disheartening has been the realisation that the electorate on the right, voting for Republicans, has many more people in it than I ever realised who don’t give a damn about freedom. They are motivated by the kinds of tribal instincts that you describe, and they are also populist in an authoritarian sense, in that they don’t want to limit government, they just want to use the powers of government for their own ends. In the short-term, then, I’m very pessimistic. I am very undecided about what will happen, but I suspect the Republican Party is going to go into serious decline. And, insofar as it does not go into decline, it is not going to represent policies that foster limited government and freedom. It will be a party that fosters a different kind of authoritarianism than the left does. The only difference will be in the type, not the authoritarian nature of the policies.

Caring for the Disabled in Hohokam Arizona

Back in 2006, archaeologists excavated a large cemetery in downtown Tempe, Arizona. These people lived in the village that was Tempe's predecessor, occupied between 700 and 1500 CE. The excavators recently published details about one of the graves, numbered 167, and it's a fascinating story. Archaeologist Eric Cox:

I was actually digging that one, and it was toward the end of the day when we started to uncover it. I got her skull uncovered, and I got to her left side, and … what stuck out to me was that her entire left side was gracile — it hadn’t developed as much as the right side had. It was like her left side was for a five-foot person, while her right side was for a five-foot-six person. Her skull was like every other skull that we had recovered, but her postcranial skeleton was all stained brown.

Closer inspection revealed that her spine was pockmarked with the pits left by severe bacterial infection.

Together, these signs suggest that the woman in Burial 167 suffered from a series of crippling conditions, each of which likely exacerbated the others.

The lack of symmetry in the woman’s skeleton, Cox explained, was the result of an acute case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Indeed, the condition was so severe that at the base of her skull, her spine curved at an angle of nearly 55 degrees.

The discoloration of her skeleton, meanwhile, and the curvature found in her arms and legs were telltale signs of rickets, a bone disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D, most commonly associated with a lack of exposure to sunlight.

Finally, the lesions found along her spine and limbs are the hallmarks of severe tuberculosis, an infection of the lungs that, in the most severe cases, spreads to bone tissue.

This was a seriously sick woman, who had probably not been able to walk for years when she died. That probably explains her rickets: unable to walk, she spent almost all of her time indoors.

Another strange thing was her teeth:

A staple of the typical Hohokam diet, of course, was maize, a gritty starch that was ground on stone metates. Grit from the stone grinders was often ingested with the corn, which caused heavy wear on teeth, a trait found on human remains throughout the pre-contact Southwest.

But the teeth from Burial 167 showed no wear at all.

“Her molars and her other teeth were perfect, basically,” Cox said.

“She had none of this wear, so she had a specialized diet. She wasn’t eating the same stuff that everyone else was eating.”

And yet in terms of grave good this was one of the richest burials in the cemetery, with several pieces of very fine ceramics.

To me the obvious interpretation was that 167 was a very special person, kept alive by her community because of her spiritual significance. Deformed shamans were common around the world, and the crisis that made a shaman was often associated with severe illness. There are many shamans in American Indian lore who ate strange diets -- come to think of it there are also those Hebrew prophets who lived on locusts and honey. It all fits together amazingly well.

Most of the time archaeology is a lot of very dry facts, and it takes a great effort of imagination to see anything beyond flakes and sherds. But sometimes stories spring from the ground.

Nixon was as bad as you think

Or maybe worse. Here he comments on the prison riot at Attica in 1971, which was ended in an orgy of indiscriminate shooting, targeted assassinations, torture, and (eventually) lawsuits:

I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots, just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect.

Misericords from St. Katherine's Chapel, London

These carvings were done around 1360 to 1380 for the Royal Foundation of St. Katherine, a church and hospital near the Tower of London. That church was demolished in the nineteenth century and the carvings have moved twice since then; now they are back in the east end at St Katharine’s Chapel in Limehouse.

Edward III and Queen Philippa

Various monsters

Pelican and chicks

Green man. More at Spitalfields Life.

Alphonse Mucha

Death of Hasanaga's Bride, 1899. From a series of illustrations to Slavic folktales.

Modeling the Crisis in Big Science

Ed Yong:

This is not a new idea. In the 1970s, social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that any metric of quality can become corrupted if people start prioritizing the metric itself over the traits it supposedly reflects. “We realized that his argument works even if individuals aren’t trying to maximize their metrics,” says Smaldino.

He and McElreath demonstrated this by creating a mathematical model in which simulated labs compete with each other and evolve—think SimAcademia. The labs choose things to study, run experiments to test their hypotheses, and try to publish their results. They vary in how much effort they expend in testing their ideas, which affects how many results they get, and how reliable those results are. There’s a trade-off: more effort means truer but fewer publications.

In the model, as in real academia, positive results are easier to publish than negative one, and labs that publish more get more prestige, funding, and students. They also pass their practices on. With every generation, one of the oldest labs dies off, while one of the most productive one reproduces, creating an offspring that mimics the research style of the parent. That’s the equivalent of a student from a successful team starting a lab of their own.

Over time, and across many simulations, the virtual labs inexorably slid towards less effort, poorer methods, and almost entirely unreliable results. And here’s the important thing: Unlike the hypothetical researcher I conjured up earlier, none of these simulated scientists are actively trying to cheat. They used no strategy, and they behaved with integrity. And yet, the community naturally slid towards poorer methods. What the model shows is that a world that rewards scientists for publications above all else—a world not unlike this one—naturally selects for weak science.

So long as scientists are judged almost solely by their publications, this will be very hard to change.

Fragments of Roman Frescoes, in the Met

The Metropolitan Museum has a remarkable collection of ancient Roman wall painting fragments. So far as I can tell the information on where these came from is minimal, so they must be dated mainly by style. Above, bird and vines, 2nd-3rd century CE.

 Vine, 1st century CE

 Unknown plant, 1st century CE

Gorgon, Julio-Claudian period, 14-68 CE

Fragment of border, 1st century CE

Gates Trashes Trump

Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense under both Bush and Obama, is not thrilled about Hillary Clinton, but is downright apocalyptic about Donald Trump:

When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own. He has expressed support for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for torturing suspected terrorists and killing their families; for Mr. Putin’s dictatorial leadership and for Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent successes against terrorism. He also has said he is for using defense spending by NATO allies as the litmus test on whether the U.S. will keep its treaty commitments to them; for withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe, South Korea and Japan and for the latter two developing nuclear weapons—a highly destabilizing prospect.

Mr. Trump has been cavalier about the use of nuclear weapons. He has a record of insults to servicemen, their families and the military, which he called a “disaster.” He has declared our senior military leaders “reduced to rubble” and “embarrassing our country” and has suggested that, if elected, he will purge them—an unprecedented and unconscionable threat. As of late, he appears to be rethinking some of these positions but he has yet to learn that when a president shoots off his mouth, there are no do-overs.

Mr. Trump is also willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself. He disdains expertise and experience while touting his own—such as his claim that he knows more about ISIS than America’s generals. He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations. . . .

The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone. In domestic affairs, there are many checks on what a president can do; in national security there are few constraints. A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America. . . .

At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.

I would describe Gates' record of judgment as mixed. He was peripherally mixed up in the Iran-Contra affair and supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but on the other hand he was an early advocate of open engagement with Iran on nuclear weapons and while he was Defense Secretary he generally worked against additional military adventures.

A Blue Collar Career

David Brooks reviews the career of a man he met in Kentucky:

He grew up about 65 years ago on a tobacco and cattle farm, but he always liked engines, so even while in high school he worked 40 hours a week in a garage. Then he went to work in a series of factories — making airplane parts, car seats, sheet metal and casings for those big air-conditioning fans you see on the top of buildings.

Every few years as the economy would shift, or jobs would go to Mexico, he’d get hit with a layoff. But the periods of unemployment were never longer than six months and he pieced together a career. . . .

His best job came in the middle of his career, when he was a supervisor at the sheet metal plant. But when the technology changed, he was no longer qualified to supervise the new workers, so they let him go. . . .

He also had a narrative about his own life. It’s not the agency narrative you often find in the professional segments of society: I found my passion and steered my own ship. It’s more of a reactive, coping narrative: A lot of the big forces were outside my control, but I adjusted, made the best of what was possible within my constraints and lived up to my responsibilities.

There’s honor to that, too. Still, over the past many months speaking with people in these situations, I can’t help feeling that society is failing them in some major way, and not just economically.

There is often a sad, noncumulative pattern to working-class lives. In some professions as you get older, you rise to more responsible positions. And that was true under the old seniority-based work rules in factories.

But now there is a stochastic, episodic nature to many careers. As workers get older, potential employers become more suspicious of their skills, not more confident in them. As a result, you often meet people who had been happiest at work in middle age, and then moved down to a series of positions they were overqualified for and felt diminished in.

This downward movement in later life is not just a blue collar thing. I have met half a dozen archaeologists in their 50s or 60s who show up working on our field crew beside 23-year-olds, with stories about how they once sat in offices and wrote reports.

The faster the world changes, the less experience matters, and the less we need the old to lead the young.