More People Confusing Capitalism with Life

Somebody on Twitter/X:

Genuinely, I DO NOT like the concept of capitalism. I don’t want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something.

What does any of that have to do with capitalism? I have a thoroughgoing capitalist job with a big corporation. I do not work every day – there are things called weekends, holidays, and vacations – I make art (novels), I have a wonderful garden, and I feel a great many things. Nothing about capitalist life keeps people from feeling things or making whatever the heck they want.

Besides, does this tweeter know anything about socialism? Because, trust me, people under Real Existing Socialism had to work a great many days and struggled to feel things beyond resentment at the totalitarian system that was keeping them down.

There is no system that allows lazy people to enjoy a decent lifestyle while idling around their gardens making art that nobody else is willing to buy.

People.

Help from Outside Can Damage Local Institutions

From a review of Breakdown in Pakistan by Masooda Bano, part of Scott Siskind's book review contest:

Since Pakistan’s government is of limited use to much of its population, “a vibrant network of [non-state groups] emerged to meet the collective needs of the community and those of the poor.” They weren’t founded in response to availability of external funds, but as a response to disasters or a perceived need among some target population. Bano cites the example of Anjuman-Faizul-Islam, one of Pakistan’s oldest voluntary organizations (VOs), “set up in response to a famine in Bengal that left many children orphaned,” or the All Pakistan Women’s Association, created in 1948 to promote women’s rights, literacy, and economic opportunities.

With the dawn of the NGO era of aid in the 1980s, Western donors and charities began combing Pakistan for local nonprofit partners to implement their projects, and discovered this rich base of small-scale organizations already acting as an informal safety net. The way ahead seemed clear: train Pakistani VOs in grant management and project implementation, so they could tap into larger donor funds and take their good work to scale.

Grants were won; aid projects implemented; success declared. But as Bano relates, Oxfam soon discovered an unexpected dark side to its “capacity-building” work in Sindh province. It had trained six locally prominent welfare organizations in strategic planning and proposal writing, and got them started on implementation by giving them $1000 to work with. The VOs largely met their explicit project targets, and seemed ready to engage with international development funds on a scale much greater than they’d handled before.

Yet all six organisations were visibly more dysfunctional at the end of the project than they had been at the beginning. They were consumed by factionalism, accusations of favoritism, legal battles over control of funds. And they had lost virtually all of their volunteers—notably including the members whose monthly donations and contributions of time had for decades been the backbone of their work. An Oxfam official observed about one group: “From thirty active members, the size of the team shrank to three or four people who had become workshopias,” i.e. those who had gone to every training workshop and built the strongest relationships with the foreign donor. The kind of welfare work the VOs had previously done, based on mobilizing communities for mutual support, was now beyond their capacity.

Western aid to poor countries may have saved many lives, but the unintended costs have been very high. 

Drones and Economic Warfare

Daniel Miessler on Twitter/X:

Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function. . . .

You can just make a list of oil refineries and production plants and the infrastructure around their main exports, and you can just attack them and destroy them and take them off the list.

4 years ago I would have thought there are too many of these components and they're too easy to recreate, but both of these collisions have taught me that there are far fewer and that many of them will take years, if not over a decade, to rebuild.

It's very strange to me that drones can now effectively harm the economy of a country. 

According to the Kyiv Post, Russia's capacity to refine oil has fallen by 43 percent, and I have seen other serious estimates as high as 58%. This hurts, as the long lines at gas stations show.

And now attacks on Wildberries warehouses; Wildberries is sort of the Amazon of Russia, and these warehouses hold billions of dollars worth of stuff. Forbes estimates the losses in three warehouse attacks like this.

• Seller inventory losses in the Moscow region: at least 150 billion rubles ($1.91 billion) and warehouse restoration cost: up to 33 billion rubles ($420 million).
• Seller inventory losses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk: 100–120 billion rubles ($1.27–1.53 billion).
• Total estimated damage: 283–303 billion rubles ($3.60–3.86 billion).

On the one hand, yes, it is impressive how much damage Ukraine is doing to Russia's economy, especially when you consider that Russia has enormous air defense resources compared to most other nations. On the other, the war goes on, and neither side seems interested in peace, after many months of attacks employing tens of thousands of drones. It may be possible to seriously damage a nation's economy, but it is not easy.

Class in America

In this essay, Noah Smith articulates an important part of my own experience:

I grew up in the 1980s in a small house with only one bathroom shared between four people. The floor was linoleum. There was a carport instead of a garage, and we had one beat-up used Toyota Tercel hatchback. I don’t remember when we got our first color TV, but when I was young we had a black-and-white one that my grandmother gave us. Our furniture was all second-hand and we kept the couches covered up with worn old blankets.

When I was young, I mowed lawns for money. As a high school kid, I signed up to pick cotton by hand (!!) for an agricultural research project at Texas A&M University, for minimum wage. I have also worked as a cashier. Twice in my life, I have been a member of a labor union, and I have marched in a strike.

I have never once considered myself part of the working class.

Why not? Because I have never thought of class as being defined by a present snapshot of someone’s lifestyle or material circumstances. Instead, I always thought of class as being about someone’s potential. And I grew up always knowing that my economic potential went far beyond the rather humble circumstances of my early childhood.

Like Smith, I have at times been quite poor in my life: for the first three years after my parents divorced, when I left college and moved to Williamsburg, Virginia with no job prospects, during graduate school. But I was never a poor person; I was a middle class person who happened to have no money. I knew I would one day have a lot more, and eventually I did. 

Typewriters and Fertility

A new paper argues:

Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.

Via Marginal Revolution

What Really Uses Water: Almonds vs. Data Centers

Via Brian Beal on Twitter/X.

Capitalism is Not the Problem

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, via Marginal Revolution:

I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.

I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.

Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.

Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.

But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. 

I agree with this absolutely. There are issues with capitalism, but almost all the complaints I see against "capitalism" are really complaints about modern life.

More of my posts on this confusion: one, two.

What You're Buying this Year

Source: Sandboxx News

While most Americans have been distracted by other political matters, the Pentagon has quietly gone on a missile-buying spree. Spurred by wargames that show US forces running out of key weapons in a week or two of fighting, the Pentagon has done (at least) the following:

• Increased buys of Patriot surface-to-air missiles from 600/year to 2,000/year, and THAAD interceptors (for shooting down ballistic missiles) from 100/year to 500/year, both by 2030.
• Signed five new missile-related contracts with Raytheon, including increasing production of Tomahawk cruise missiles from 90/year to 1,000/year and tripling production of AMRAAM air-to-air missiles and SM-6 surface-to-air missiles.
• Made a billion-dollar direct investment in two companies that make rocket motors to increase production.
• Paid Lockheed-Martin to set up a second production line for the JASM-ER air-launched cruise missiles, with the aim of increasing production from 500/year in 2023 to 2,200/year by 2030. 
• Simultaneously made huge investments in both cheap offensive drones and anti-drone systems.

This on top of our ongoing programs to build two new fighters, the F-47 the Air Force and the FA-XX for the Navy, and our very expensive new B-21 stealth bombers.

I don't blame the Pentagon or the Trump Administration for this; we seem to be in a new era of global war, and they are responding to the threats they see. The waste of war just makes me sad sometimes. 

Elon for Immigration

There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley. 

– Elon Musk

This was in response to a poster who asked, "Genuinely curious: Are there actual instances where qualified native born Americans couldn’t get jobs in tech because foreigners took all of them? I’d be surprised if it’s true because at any given point there are hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in tech."

Immigrants and the US Budget:

Study from the Cato Institute:

The government first began gathering detailed information on benefits use by citizenship status in 1994. The data show:

1. For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
2. Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
3. Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level.

These results, which do not account for any of immigration’s indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth, represent the lower bound of the positive fiscal effects. Even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis. 

Do Doctors Get Rich Off Vaccines?

Jess Steier, Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph, Jen Covich Bordenick, and David Higgins: 

Recently, the Texas attorney general launched a formal investigation into what he called “unlawful financial incentives” for childhood vaccines, saying that he would “ensure that Big Pharma and Big Insurance don’t bribe medical providers to pressure parents to jab their kids.”

The timing was uncanny. The four of us had just completed a six-month investigation into this exact question: Do pediatricians get rich from vaccines? 

Our answer, after analyzing available commercial reimbursement data from four major insurers across all 50 states, reviewing state Medicaid fee schedules, and interviewing pediatricians about the financial realities of vaccine delivery: no. . . .

The economics vary dramatically depending on where you practice and who you serve. In Colorado, commercial insurers pay a median of $42 for vaccine administration; Medicaid pays $21. In Mississippi, commercial rates hover around $22, while Medicaid pays just $11.68, well below what it actually costs to store and administer a vaccine.

That's why many doctors have stopped giving vaccines to adults; because it costs so much to store and administer vaccines that they lose money. Like most Americans I get all my vaccines at the pharmacy, because the volume of shots they give greatly reduces their storage costs, and they have lower overhead than physicians' offices.

The big numbers being thrown around about payments for giving vaccines relate to insurance company "quality programs," some of which do indeed pay doctors for giving vaccines. That's because they reward doctors for doing things that limit future costs to insurers, and giving people vaccines has enormous payoff in terms of reducing future hospitalizations etc. But those are broad programs that pay related to all sorts of metrics, of which giving vaccines is only one. And, remember, insurance companies do this because these programs reduce their costs in the long run.

Another point about the bogus numbers is that the people spreading them seem to think that the whole amount paid to the practice is income to the doctor, which is of course not true; again, many doctors actually lose money giving childhood vaccines, especially with Medicaid patients. They do it anyway because they know how important it is.

Generational Conflict and Taxation in America

Trump at Davos, on housing affordability:

Every time you make it more affordable for somebody to own a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses. I don't want to do anything to hurt the value of their house.

If I wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast that people could buy houses. But you would destroy people who already have houses.

This is just one of many ways that our economic questions intersect with generational issues. Trump is saying that protecting existing homeowners, most of whom are over 40, is more important than helping young people buy homes. You see claims like this being thrown around a lot in "affordibility" debates.

The question also comes up over property taxes. If property taxes are assessed on actual valuation, then people who own houses in areas where property values rise can get hit with high tax bills, and they hate this. The most famous response is California's Proposition 13, which drastically limits how much the assessed value of houses can rise under one owner. But that means the tax burden falls much more heavily on those who have bought their homes more recently, that is, the young.

But even that is not enough for some grouchy oldsters, who are campaigning to avoid paying property taxes altogether. According to Google's AI, sixteen states have programs to reduce or eliminate the property taxes of people over 65. I have seem several online comments to the effect that it is "unfair" for people who have paid off their mortgages to have to keep paying property taxes, which strikes me as bizarre; why should you not have to pay taxes on your property now that you actually own it?

All of this seems to assume that old people are poor, which is simply not true. Some old people are poor, but on the whole people over 65 have vastly greater wealth than those under 35. The notion that the nation's richest cohort should have their property taxes slashed strikes me as absurd.

A compromise approach that has gained steam recently is called the "circuit breaker," which limits the property taxes of those over 65 to a certain percentage of their incomes, protecting them if their incomes collapse or their property values soar. Which makes some sense to me, but why should this only apply to people over 65?

But basically I just hate it when people launch campaigns on the assumption that they and people like them suffer in some unique way that demands the government's attention. We are all Americans and we should all ask, first, what is the best policy for everyone.

Keeping Up with the TikTok Joneses

Noah Smith has a pretty good essay this week on a question he and I both wonder about: why do Americans feel that the economy is bad when all the numbers say it is great? Perhaps, he suggests, it has to do with social media, which constantly shows us people who appear to be wealthier, happier, and having more fun than we are. 

Well, maybe. In a sense this comparative approach has to be true, because we take our idea of what life should be like from those we see. Given the vast range of human lives, how else could we do it? People have been comparing their wealth to those of others for as long as we have had possessions; anthropologists find that this is a big issue in tribes who own next to nothing by our standards. 

There is tons of sociology showing that comparative  wealth looms large in our self-understanding; one of my favorite examples was a study that found moving to a bigger house did not make people happier unless their new house was larger than those of their neighbors. Smith cites a study that concluded

controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happines.

My problem with all thes arguments is that I don't see what about this is new. One of the broad changes that has taken place in western society is that wealthy people have in many ways withdrawn from center stage. Now many of the rich live in gated communities where you and I will never set foot, but they used to build their houses on the busyest street in town, where everybody had to see them. They used to go around in gilded carriages. Or think about Hollywood in the 1930s, offering Depression-era America a constant diet of fabulous millionaires in their fabulous mansions.

In 1850, tens of thousands of people lived as servants in the houses of the rich, sleeping in bunk beds in dingy little rooms just yards away from the silken beds of their employers. Many years ago I read a novel about a black American woman who worked as a maid for a rich white family, dividing her time between their lovely clean house, with three lovely clean daughters, and the rough house where she lived with her working class husband and three rough, dirty sons. It made a huge impression on me but I just searched for it and couldn't find it; if anybody recognizes it, let me know.

Being poorer than others is in no way new. So the argument that this explains our current misery depends on finding some way that the comparison now hurts more. Here is how Smith tries to derive this result from social media:

First, all of those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different, and certainly not Becca Bloom types. Housing markets, job markets, and all kinds of other forces tend to sort us into relatively homogeneous social classes. The rich and the poor were always fairly removed from the middle class, both geographically and socially. 

But perhaps even more importantly — and this was a point that David Marx especially emphasized — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.

But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer like the ones I cited above. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things. Some of them have jobs or run businesses, but you don’t know what those are. Some might have inherited their wealth. Some of them make money only by showing off their lifestyles on social media!

Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically, as if you’re looking at your sister’s house or your neighbor’s car.

I find this unconvincing. First, as I said, I do not believe that any human in a society we would call civilized is not aware that others are richer. Second, I am also skeptical of the argument that  the wealth of people on social media is mysterious. We have the internet! We can look people up and find out! Some years ago I saw a bit of a reality series called Crisley Knows Best, and after just a few minutes of watching them I offered the opinion that they had to be fraudsters. Which turned out to be true. (Donald Trump pardoned them.) So I am not impressed by the notion that mysterious wealth is throwing off our social radar.

So I don't know. Maybe it is social media; maybe it is a decline in belief in other things, like religion or a better future. Maybe people with fewer children just have more time to worry about it.

But I continue to think that all the awfulness of our politics is downstream from a widespread sense that life is terrible, and I keep wondering why that might be.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Rage Against the Digital Machine

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington who has won twice in a very Trump-friendly district, garnering her significant national attention. Even I have written about her. She put herself back in the news recently by introducing a bill to limit bright headlights, which, she says, is the kind of thing real Americans really want their government to do.

James Pogue has an interesting profile in the NY Times that brings home how poorly Gluesenkamp Perez fits into either American political party as currently constituted:

Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.

Personally I always regard too much interest in Wendell Berry as a sign of ill-thought-out alienation from the real world, and I will come back to that.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

One of Gluesenkamp Perez's stock lines is to complain about the "high cost of cheap goods." 

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This resonates widely in America; I saw lots of praise on Twitter/X for Trump's line about no child needing 37 dolls, and "this is a nation, not an economy" is a widely repeated line.

What makes me crazy about this discourse is the positing of this imaginary THEM, "the leaders who sold them to us." Nobody in Washington told Americans to buy cheap foreign crap; those things sold because, and only because, Americans chose to buy them over more expensive domestic alternatives. I mentioned here recently that a shower head company offered its customers a more expensive, American-made version of one product, and not a single person bought it. Lots of Americans claim to want things that last, but when offered the choice they almost always chose the cheap version. Whose fault is that?

Across the whole of my lifetime the political establishment has been struggling to preserve manufacturing jobs in the US. Programs to teach poor kids skills like carpentry or plumbing go back to the nineteenth century. Lately we have had a weird fad of trying to make all high school students "college ready" rather than teaching them auto mechanics, but plenty of intellectuals (like me) have protested this, and American community colleges have stepped into this void. My big project down in Danville includes a major program to train manufacturing workers. Even the US Navy funds a major program to train industrial workers.

The world we live in is the world we have made. Nobody did this to us, not the government or the financial elite or the Jews or the Illuminati; we have done it to ourselves.

Many, many Americans are drawn to Wendell Berry's gospel of a simple life rooted in rural tradition. Berry wants people to live slowly and weigh any proposed innovation for years or decades before deciding to embrace it. His major practical complaint is against "cheap food", because intense competition among farmers forces them to adopt highly efficient, chemical-intensive factory methods. Maybe you nod along with this; but how did Americans react when we got a burst of food inflation in 2020 to 2023? It wasn't pretty.

Gluesenkamp Perez diagnoses Americans as suffering from deep fears about themselves and their world:

That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an “open society” and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations. It’s a way of life that’s anathema to both America’s economic promise and its cultural traditions.

Are you living a drone-like existence? I'm not. The worry that modernity will enslave us is two centuries old, but in fact modern westerners have more freedom than anyone else in history. If you ask me, the most drone-like thing anyone in the modern world does is factory work. Revulsion against that particular kind of dronish existence is helping to drive low-end manufacturing out of America. Nobody really wants those jobs. (Except Haitian immigrants.)

Where did I learn about Wendell Berry? On the internet. MAGA, supposedly seething against the financializing elite and their plan to make us drones, is the most online political movement in history.

Gluesenkamp Perez rebels, as many other Americans do, against an economic philoosphy that says the only real goal is to produce goods for consumers. Instead we should worry more about empowerment, autonomy, community, closeness to nature, workers' rights, or something else.

Even if we agreed that those goals were important, how would we pursue them? Gluesenkamp Perez supports tariffs, but since Trump started will-nilly tariffing the world, American manufacturing has declined. Maybe better designed tariffs would help promote manufacturing here, but, again, I am not convinced that Americans really want manufacturing jobs. How would more factory work promote "autonomy"? One reason I support real national health insurance is that I would like to help people pursue autonomy rather than corporate jobs of any sort, but people like Berry and Gluesenkamp Perez are too suspicious of Big Hospital and Big Pharma and all of that to put much energy into Medicare for all.

This whole line of thinking is fundamentally confused. How can we have both stronger communities and more autonomy?

Nobody forced us to live like this; this is just what free society looks like, at our level of technology and social organization. Peasants worked with their hands, lived close to nature, and mostly lived in strong communities, but they were not happier than we are.

If you don't like your life, change it. In our world, you have the freedom to do that. Neither peasants nor 1950s factory workers did.

Wealth and the Generations

There is a lot of froth in America right now about how tough the young have it: crushed by student loans, unable to buy houses, trapped in low-end jobs, etc. The counter-argument from economists is that, actually, the current generation of young people is accummulating wealth just as fast if not faster than the Baby Boomers did, and if they are buying fewer houses that is mainly because they are not getting married. (See the chart above.)

A commenter on Scot Siskind's substack wrote this:

Looking at some ‘wealth by generation over time’ graphs, I have an intuition that there’s a stable and repeating pattern in the US of the elderly accumulating all the wealth and power while the young are struggling and disenfranchised. And that this creates a legitimate and perpetual intergenerational conflict where the old people really are hurting the young by keeping wealth away from them and passing policies that benefit themselves and their preferences.

I think there is much wisdom here. I remember, back when I was young and struggling, reading something like, "of course the young feel deprived, they suffered a major fall in their standard of living when they moved out of their parents' houses." At the time this puzzled me, because I had never thought of things in quite that way. I saw living in crappy little apartments as part of being young and never considered it to be deprivation. But if what many people in their 20s want is what they had at 17, and that was their own room in a nice house in nice neighborhood with no worries about food or utility bills, then they probably do feel deprived. I am much better off, materially, than I was at 25 or 30 or 35.

I suspect the curves in that graph at the top were different in the pre-WW II era. If what mattered most was how hard you could work, your wealth peaked when you could work hardest, not as your body started its grim decline. But people still went through a cycle of struggle, comparative wealth, and then decline.

One of my favorite historical books is A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This chronicle of a Maine woman in the late 1700s traces out the arc of her economic life, which peaked when she had teenage daughters in the house. She was then the mistress of an impressive economic machine, with willing hands to weave, spin, and do other economically productive tasks. She saved money and bought land. Once her daughters married, and her own health declined, this all dropped away one bit at a time until she sold her loom and slid into unproductive and impoverished old age.

We have a different arc, but it is just as powerful. For someone like me, my salary will probably (God willing) peak right before I retire at about 67. If all goes according to plan, my mortgage will be paid off and I will be able to live comfortably on Social Security and my substantial IRA. My wealth will then gradually decline, but if I am lucky it will be enough to keep me fed and warm until I die. The enormous increase in the value of my house will provide a cushion should I need to move into a retirement home. Unless the US economy suffers a major crash, I would probably have to live well into my 90s to be as poor as I was at 25. So far as I can tell, that is a common arc for college-educated people of my generation, and the data seems to show that younger generations are tracking pretty much the same. That is our pattern.

One of the problems with our economic trajectories as currently constructed is that under this system we are poor during our prime child-bearing years. People like me bite the bullet, have kids and struggle, hoping to come out the other end ok. But if you already feel economically stressed and don't have nearly the material circumstances you want, I suppose that having children seems like a huge burden. My wife and I wanted children so much that none of that mattered, but I do see the problem.

But this is all about expectations. At 25 I lived in crappy apartments and ate lots of macaroni and cheese, but I never went hungry or shoeless. By global standards I was never poor. When my wife and I had three small children our lives were frantic – for a while we worked opposite shifts and one some days only saw each other on the way in and out the door – but it was the life I chose, so I never complained, and I now think it was very much worth it.

I am sure that our sytem could be better constructed and more fair. But if the complaint of young Americans now is that they are oppressed and deprived in a way their parents were not, they are wrong. They are just living through a different part of their lives.

The American Book Business in 2025

On the whole, the US book business is healthy: 707 million books sold in the year, including 184 million adult novels. It may be true that the average American reads fewer novels these days, or perhaps that the averaged college-educated American reads fewer novels. But in a country this big 10 percent of the people can drive an enormous industry.

Of course, most of that 184 million is genre fiction, especially thrillers, fantasy and romantasy. This New York Times piece mentions three fiction writers: thriller writer Freida McFadden (5.5 million books sold), young adult writer Suzanne Collins, whose Hunger Games prequel sold 2 million copies, and Rebecca Yarro, whose dragonrider Romantasy books sold more than a million copies.

Let me just insert a personal note here and say that I have hated everything I have ever read about people riding dragons. It's always utterly unmythical and unmagical, just, like, wouldn't it be cool to ride a big flying monster? Dragons should be more than that.

Physical bookstores are also doing ok, with sales holding steady.

Incidentally my own books accounted for 8 of those 184 million novels, so 0.0000000043% of the total vs. Freida McFadden's 3.0%.

Derek Thomapson and Ezra Klein, "Abundance"

Well, that was a fun Christmas gift.

Abundance (2025) is a hymn to the high-tech, eco-friendly future we can have if only we adopt the authors' political prescriptions. It begins by describing this future, in which we zoom around in electric, self-driving cars and supersonic airplanes, eating factory-grown meat and vegetables grown hydroponically in nearby towers, drinking desalinated seawater and treating all possible diseases and addictions with drone-delivered meds manufactured in low-earth orbit. Improved food production allows us to rewild vast areas that are now farms or ranches, while desalination allows us to let rivers run free. Because of AI and other technologies, most people enjoy all this while working only a few days a week. Sounds great!

The authors state their thesis at the beginning: "scarcity is a choice." Actually, though, they devote just as much attention to a separate thesis: that there is no conflict between economic growth and preserving the environment. In fact, they argue, in order to protect the environment we need a lot more economic growth. We need green energy, a vastly expanded electrial grid, and billions of new, electrically-powered machines. The biggest threat to a green future, in their view, is anti-growth politics.

Most of the book is an analysis what we need to do to get this transformation. The discussion is interesting, but it is mostly at what I would call a middle level. For example, DT and EK spend a lot of time on the troubles with NEPA, and this discussion is valuable. NEPA was passed in an era of air and water pollution that was nightmarish by out standards, when the actions needed to clean up the planet seemed pretty straightforward. But in our world,

these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects neeeded in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the condequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. (5)

The problem with NEPA is not really the law as written. As I have written here before, the texts reads as pretty reasonable and sensible. The problem is that it gives people a way to file lawsuits against any project they oppose. This is an almost uniquely Americn problem; nowhere else in the world do citizens file nearly as many lawsuits against their own government. As the authors note, the result is that decisions that in most of the world are made by bureaucrats end up being made by judges. So NEPA, an instrument designed to protect the environment, has ended up hamstringing the government. One reason Republicans have never tried to repeal it is that it gives their own supporters a way to fight Democratic priorities:

Over the ourse of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.

One way to think about our highly bureaucratic, schlerotic system is to look at what we can do when we cast all the rules and limits aside. DT and EK talk up Governor Shapiro's rapid restoration of I-95 through Philadelphia after a damaging fire, which was all done as an "emergency," without any environmental review or competitive bidding. They also tout the Operation Warp Speed program to develop Covid-19 vaccines.

DT and EK devote a whole chapter to housing supply, and that is the main way their arguments have entered the discourse. I have already written about this part of the issue, so I won't belabor it again. But I think that saying "less zoning, more housing" is no kind of solultion; the successful French and British new urbanist projects I have written about here emerged from careful planning, not just changing the zoning laws.

Abundance also covers the "crisis" in scientific funding, which I have written about extensively (here, here, here). They make the usual complaints and recommendations that I consider shallow, e.g., that we don't fund enough younger scientists, when insiders will tell you that the last thing we want to do is to make young, highly productive scientists into grant recipients, which forces them to be mainly administrators. They complain at length about the refusal of grant-making bodies to fund mRNA research, but 1) this is wrong, tons of mRNA research was funded, and 2) sure, some great projects don't get funded because scientific funding is a human endeavor and therefore imperfect. It is points like this that always make me suspicious of grand, far-reaching plans; if you make a hundred points and are wrong about one of the few I know anything about, what does that say about the rest of your points?

Ok, fine, I don't know anyone who doesn't think the US is over-bureaucratized, lawsuit ridden, and too slow to do important things.

But I am interested in a deeper level of thinking about these problems: why do Americans want to hamstring their government? 

Because we do not trust our government. And to me that is another way of saying that we do not trust each other.

That, to me, is the real issue: we have no vision of the future that a majority of Americans share. For my whole life I have watched our government hatch schemes for making the country better, and then watched the people rise up against them. I was born too late for the great era of America doing things, which stretched from the 1840s to the 1960s: railroads, telegraph lines, power stations and electric lines, skyscrapers, pipelines, dams, roads, a vast array of new factories. Whole new cities. The Moon landings. I was born into the reaction against all of that. Baltimore was in the forefront of fighting the Interstate Highway System, and eventually succeeded in keeping I-70 and I-83 out of downtown. The same thing happened in Washington and many other places, and much of the system as imagined was never built. Then came the environmental movement, which I think was a great thing but often took the form of attacking the infrastructure we had just built. The expansion of nuclear power was shut down.

Then we had school busing, which turned a nation already on edge over desegration into a lava lake of resentment against "social engineering." Lately we have had rage against "gentrification."

Plus we have had two generations of architects determined to force modernism down our throats, even though a large majority hates it. I think it would be much easier to build things if architects hadn't forgotten how to make them attractive.

Here's a parable: in the 1930s, New Deal Progressives expelled people they considered materially and spiritually impoverished from thousands of places in America to create the TVA and many of our National Parks. In the 1980s both the parks and the TVA launched programs to record the memories of those who had been expelled, resulting in a great trove of oral history, and now they have dozens of exhibits devoted to the lives of those who were expelled. In working on this I have met people who are still mad about the expulsion of their ancestors, 75 years later, and do not in any way think that the creation of the National Park system, or the electrification of the Tennessee basin justifies what was done to their families.

I don't think DT and EK's vision will fail because of bureaucracy or NEPA or lawsuits; it will fail because the nation is not united behind their vision. Everything they propose is controversial. I think lab-grown meat would be great, but tens of millions of Americans would fight any attempt to end ranching, quite likely with guns. A shift from surface agriculture, some of it still done by family farms, to corporate-owned hydroponics towers would also be widely opposed. (Imagine all the ways the organic, anti-GM crowd will find to worry about hydroponics towers.) We already see bitter opposition to the phasing out of coal mining, complete with accusations of cultural genocide, and if anybody moves against oil drilling that would be even worse.

Everybody involved in firefighting or forest management says we need to do more controlled burns across the West, but every plan to do so is fought like hell by the residents. In a democracy, who has the right to tell them they are wrong?

So, yeah, it's stupid that we hold up solar farms for NEPA review, and stupid that Trump's crew thinks wind farms are a woke conspiracy. But this is a democracy, and it is very, very hard to do anything that 50 million people oppose, especially when those opponents include the neighbors.

One of my children asked me if solving our housing problems would be harder or easier than getting to the Moon, and I said getting to the Moon is much easier. There's nobody in the way who has to be moved.

At an even deeper level, I am not at all sure that humans would cope very well with no longer having to work to stay alive. Even though I am something of a rationalist, the sort of ultra-clean, hydroponics towers, desalinated seawater, all electric future they imagine makes my skin crawl. And without a future that a majority of people can get excited about, big changes will not happen.

Why Americans Feel Poor: Because $300,000 is Not Enough???

Some completely crazy claims flying around Twitter about how much money it takes to live decently in America.

First there was the $140,000/year is the real poverty line nonsense, launched by Mike Green based on some dubious arithmetic. Noah Smith has a bunch of similar claims at the link.

But it only gets worse from there. Goldman Sachs recently said that 40% of those making $300,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck. Which inspired this insane tweet:

A lot of people don't understand this, but it's 100% true, depending on where you live.

From 300k to 1mm, the precarity is the same as being poor - paycheck to paycheck. It's just that the numbers are bigger.

- Most people in the aspirational class live in more expensive cities where the hobbies are costlier. Rich people in Texas enjoy backyard barbecues and drive F150s, but in Greenwich, you need a Range Rover, and in Hong Kong, you need bottle service every Friday just to fit in.

- It's expensive having rich friends. Nothing is worse than seeing a billionaire grab the wine list at dinner, because they never expect to pay the tab.

- If you're in the aspirational class, and trying to keep up, when someone invites you to their house in the Hamptons or on their plane, you have to reciprocate.

- You always think that next year's bonus will be bigger. So it'll be easier to save $10 in the future than it is to worry about $1 today.

The lesson is this: if your "aspirations" require you to spend every penny your earn, you will always feel financially stressed no matter how big your salary.

Aspirational spending isn't limited to the rich; it's why many poor people buy name brand products (detergent, soap, cereal) rather than the store brand, and why many Americans of all classes drive cars they can't afford.

If you don't want to feel stressed about money, live within your means.

You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have a good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kept out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.

The Grid and the Future

Tim Latimer:

The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale.

I agree that this is a huge problem. We are rapidly building new electrical generation capacity in the US, mainly in the form of utility-scale solar arrays. But that does no good if the power can't get to users. We have dozens of solar projects that are built but producing no power because they cannot get hooked to the grid, and they can't get hooked to the grid because the utilities are far behind in making the necessary adjustments. This is why some major power users, like Microsoft, are talking about building their own nuclear reactors. 

Building long-distance power lines is just hard. People hate having them built near their houses, and for good reason: they dramatically depress property values. There is also some evidence that they can contribute to cancer; I think this evidence is bad, but it is better than a lot of other medical evidence many people believe in, e.g. harm from vaccines.

I had a small part in the last major US effort to upgrade our transmission network, the new Appalachian backbone that was necessary to stablilize the east coast grid, built in roughly 1995-2015. That took a lot of political capital, including a handshake between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but is showed that we can do it if we put our minds to it. Right now, though, politicians seem to be distracted by other issues.

The technology exists now to bury long-distance power lines, but it is expensive and so far as I know, none have yet been built in the US. But we may have to go that route to reach the grid we need.