In the past century, a fairly common political form is “executive democracy”—rule by a single leader who dominates the state to the same extent as classically-understood monarchs, like Dionysius of Syracuse in the 4th century BC or the Merovingian kings in the 5th century AD, and whose power is contingent on winning popular elections. Men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Lee Kuan Yew, and Nayib Bukele control their governments at least as thoroughly as the average Greek tyrant or medieval king. If they lose an election, then they will in fact relinquish power—de Gaulle resigned in 1969 after losing a critical referendum with 47% of the vote.

Sometimes, an executive democracy is held in place only by the executive’s world-historical skill and will, and shifts to a different political form once he’s gone. The United States ceased to be an executive democracy when President Roosevelt died and President Truman took his place. Athens ceased to be an executive democracy when Pericles died and no one else could match his ability to reliably persuade the assembly—as Thucydides describes it, “what was nominally a democracy was becoming in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.” (2.65.9-10) Sometimes, an executive democracy is a stable political form which can endure with a series of merely competent leaders. The Botswana Democratic Party’s five semi-dynastic presidents ruled the country from its independence in 1966 until their first electoral defeat in 2024.

Of course no single leader is literally omnipotent. Even very powerful monarchs, like Cyrus the Great or Henry VIII or President Roosevelt, must manage the elites and deal with internal factions, and will suffer their share of local defeats in the internal power struggles that happen in every government.

While 20th century ideology munges together the concepts of elections, separation of powers, and liberalism, these are actually completely different things which can occur separately, and often do. The idea of an absolute leader who rules only so long as he keeps winning elections seems like a contradiction in terms from within this ideological frame. But empirically we see them fairly often. This causes some ideological twisting and gyrating among commentators attempting to square the circle, often by insisting that an executive democracy can only be a transitional stage on the road to a self-coup imposing an authoritarian dictatorship backed by repressive secret police. These people are often surprised when the ideologically inconvenient executive eventually loses an election and concedes power in accordance with the normal practice of the law, as we saw with Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat earlier this year.

Like any political form, executive democracy occurs in both functional and dysfunctional instances depending on the individuals who make it up—mainly the executive, in this case—and has its own particular advantages and weaknesses. From the perspective of democratic legitimacy, its main advantage is that the lines of accountability are very clear, especially compared to the electoral bureaucracy which prevails in the United States and most other Western countries. Structurally an electoral bureaucracy suffers from extreme diffusion of responsibility, where no individual is to blame for any particular failure, and there is no democratic mechanism by which the people can bring their will to bear. Often the bureaucrat class pursues its class interests in ways which the people collectively hate, since the people have no practical way of disciplining the bureaucrats. In contrast, in an executive democracy, individual ministers and legislators are accountable to the executive, who manages his party’s internal structure. Meanwhile the executive is accountable to the people, who can and will throw him out—and thereby also his lieutenants—if they don’t like how things are going overall. The people don’t have to track the intricacies of each individual policy, like whether housing costs are too high because zoning is too lax or too lenient, or other questions which are often too abstruse for most people to reach well-justified conclusions. They can simply vote out the executive because housing costs are too high, or reelect the executive because crime is down.

Executive bureaucracy is certainly not the best political form—there is no “best political form”, there is only ever a political form which functions well with the available ruling cadre, and is adapted to the nation’s present needs. It is merely one of the political forms which occurs fairly often, and it is best understood in mechanistic terms rather than ideological terms.

On Brazil’s Election Day I was talking to Renan Santos, the Mission Party candidate for President. He had recently cast his vote in front of all the news cameras—as he sat down with us one joker asked “So who’d you vote for?”—and we were still several hours away from getting the first results. As Renan was telling us about the Mission Party’s history, he said that, to run an outsider political campaign, you have to be willing to “lose, and lose, and lose, and win.”

After twelve years of campaigning, Renan and the Free Brazil Movement had hoped that this election would be the beginning of victory, with an impressive showing in the presidential race and serious gains in the legislature. It was not to be, as we learned that night. Renan came in fourth place with 2.6 million votes, 2.2% of the total, and his party kept its single seat in the federal legislature but failed to add any more. It was a thoroughly mediocre result. The Mission Party boys are dusting themselves off and plugging along, continuing to build up the movement’s fundamentals—cadre, doctrine, mass mobilization—and get ready for next time.

As Renan tells it, the Mission Party developed as a way to continue and institutionalize the energy of mass protests against the corruption of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. After their initial goals had been achieved, the movement’s organizers, like Renan, realized there was no good reason for them to pack up and go home when their country still faced so many problems. With a bunch of quality people and free energy lying around, they began the trial-and-error process of turning this raw material into a durable organization. They are maintaining their energy—just watch any videos of their events—and not giving up.

This is the correct move in their position. There have been plenty of insurgent political parties in modern history. Most failed. The successful ones generally follow a similar pattern.

Continue reading my full article at Palladium.

The beating heart of any civilization’s lifecycle is its economic engine. When the economic engine is working well, this leads to expansion of the civilization’s territory; expansion of its population; expansion of scientific knowledge; and cultural flourishing. In Carroll Quigley’s taxonomy, this “age of expansion” is the third of the seven stages a civilization passes through. Usually it lasts for a few centuries.

As time goes on, every economic system becomes encumbered with parasites. Social classes which had established themselves by increasing economic production come to put less effort into increasing economic production and more effort into extracting revenue from the economic production of others. The owners of the means of production cease to manage the production directly, and put the management into the hands of non-owning professionals; this leads to a focus on steadiness rather than growth, since the managers can be blamed and fired for failures but do not capture much of the gains of growth like owner-managers would. (Legend has it that during Classical civilization’s age of expansion, when the Romans came to appoint Cincinnatus dictator, they found him at his plow, personally overseeing the production at his estate. By Caesar’s time this was unheard of, and landowners would put the stewardship of their estates in the hands of professional overseers, usually freed slaves.) Social and class competition intensifies. Economic production is still expanding, but at a slower rate than before. This is Quigley’s fourth stage, the “age of conflict”. All this probably sounds familiar. Western civilization has been in this stage since the mid-20th century.

From this point, one of two things can happen. Most often, the decay advances steadily. As economic expansion becomes more and more encumbered with parasites, jockeying for position internally becomes more and more important, so people direct more of their efforts towards jockeying and less towards production, so economic expansion becomes harder and jockeying becomes more important, and so on until the mess becomes totally locked in. At this point, the course of the civilization’s lifecycle is set. It will continue decaying, growing slowly weaker and more decrepit for many centuries. Eventually it becomes so hollowed out that outside invaders can push over its fragile remains.

Sometimes, before things get this far, the decayed economic engine is circumvented by a new form of economic organization, which leads to expanding production outside of the domains overrun with parasites. In late medieval Europe, the decaying feudal manorialism was circumvented by commercial capitalism, based on urban crafts and long-distance trade. The feudal nobility was left in place, but they became less and less relevant—some places still have their dukes and barons today, for all it matters. Commercial capitalism also eventually decayed into a tangle of guild privileges and mercantilist parasitism based on restricting, rather than expanding, production and trade. As this happened, it was circumvented by industrial capitalism, based on the operation of machines and mass production.

After a few centuries, industrial capitalism, too, is now heavily encumbered with parasites, rent-seekers, state-backed monopolies, and all the rest. We see the hallmarks like separation of ownership and management, and huge sectors of the economy that make money by restricting rather than expanding production. The comparison is stark with the much younger version of industrial capitalism which has taken shape in modern Chinese civilization, where the mass manufacture of cheap goods expands at a breakneck pace, growing the production of real wealth (steel, cars, ships, solar panels, drones, …) with vastly lower financial profits than its Western counterparts.

Most civilizations only have one economic engine before they reach terminal decay. A few have two. As far as I know, Western civilization is the only recorded civilization which had three successive economic engines. Is there something in Western culture that makes us better at this? Did we just get lucky twice in a row? I have my guesses and just-so stories but I really don’t know. Is this our last age of expansion before we slide into our civilization’s long slow old age, or will we circumvent it with a fourth? The window is open for another couple of generations or so. Things haven’t ossified yet.

I had returned to Boston in the first place because I’d decided to learn to code. At the same time I was getting involved with the local group, I took an intro programming course and did some online tutorials. On paper I knew the basics, but I wasn’t qualified to make real contributions to real software in return for real money. Instead I found a greybeard expert through a ridiculous string of connections—my mom’s dance instructor’s husband—who was willing to teach me informally while I worked on their codebase for free. A few months later the company got bought, and the owner made sure I landed with a junior position at the acquiring company. I learned that software isn’t for me, and I left that career behind when I left Boston, but the experience was instructive.

A few years after that, I met Samo Burja and we quickly became friends. He’s a well-known figure today, but back then he was another internet rando who’d moved to the Bay Area intellectual scene and was busy meeting all the people he’d been arguing with online. His research was very early-stage but I could tell it was the real deal, so I appointed myself to his project. The first time I told him this he nodded along but it didn’t lead to anything. The second time I told him was the same. But after our third conversation, something stuck. He made a serious effort to teach me his theories and methods. I extended his theories and applied them to some new subjects, especially industry and technology. Once his work was more developed and people started recognizing it, Samo started his company, and brought me on as one of the founding employees, where I worked for eight years.

The point I’m making here is also a big theme in Oliver Habryka’s interview we posted at The Students earlier today, much more dramatically in his case than in mine. Wherever there’s a valuable project, there’s always a lot of useful work that’s going undone. If you just show up, learn the lay of the land, and start doing the things that need doing, it’s usually a ticket towards the center of whatever group you’re looking at. This is much less true in sclerotic bureaucracies—in fact, the difficulty they have absorbing outsider talent is one of their major disadvantages. But for any group or team or community that isn’t locked down like that, it’s often a great way to contribute.

The first part has worked sometimes. The second part does not work. People have tried since the Old Testament and it fails reliably.

When Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, a recurring theme is the Israelites’ ingratitude. They complain constantly about all the things they left behind in Egypt, they make plans to return, at one point they complain that God has brought them to the desert to die of thirst while they are eating the miraculous food He created to keep them alive. Frankly the strongest evidence for the Biblical miracles being true is how it depicts the recipients complaining about everything rather than falling down in awe.

Even without divine intervention, there have been plenty of times that reforms have improved things, whether for all of society or for some particular group. In the 20th century, Americans decided they would not abide old people suffering in poverty, and created government payment programs for their benefit. Today, between Social Security and Medicare, about $2.5 trillion goes to paying the elderly. This is about 37% of the total federal budget, roughly one and a half times what the entire U.S. military spends. Do the recipients say “I am so glad I live in a generous society which provides for me as I become frail and unable to provide for myself?” Absolutely not. Most see these payments as an unremarkable and automatic background fact of the world, more like rain from the sky than like a sacrifice others are making to care for them.

The attitude is much the same for every other redistribution program. Gratitude for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid is not so rare as gratitude for Social Security, which is to say that I have heard recipients express gratitude more than zero times, but it is certainly not the norm. “Society never did anything for me, I had to grow up on food stamps and section 8” is a feeling common enough to be a cliche. Like the Israelites who complained of the manna they were eating, the outside help is taken for granted so deeply that the fact of being helped becomes a grievance.

In the absolute most extreme cases, if you literally go to war on someone’s behalf and get blown into chunks of meat to help them, this is enough that people will feel grateful—temporarily. The people who personally remember what you saved them from will give thanks. Their descendants mostly will not.

I read a memoir by a former slave freed in the American Civil War, who writes of her grandmother Dolly Reed:

The hardest blow to [my grandmother] was the failure of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank in Savannah, for in that bank she had placed her savings, about three thousand dollars [roughly six or seven years of a median worker’s wages] … she said, “I will leave it all in God’s hand. If the Yankees did take all our money, they freed my race; God will take care of us.”

While Reed’s expression is the most vehement of these I’ve seen, gratitude to the Union was the norm among the freed slaves who actually lived through the Emancipation Proclamation, and who often personally met some of the Yankee soldiers who fought and died.

The freedmen’s gratitude died with them. Mitch Kachun’s “Festivals of Freedom” documents the fervor of early emancipation celebrations, like Freedom Day and Juneteenth, and how this fell off with the next generation. By the turn of the century, the older generation lamented “a steady decline in attendance upon Emancipation Day observances” and a drop in their ideological content: “While the recreation and amusements enjoyed by the thousands of colored people present were perhaps good in their places, it would have meant so much more had this followed an appropriate program including the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and an inspiring address.” Meanwhile the younger Black intellectuals argued that social progress demanded the end of emancipation celebrations in favor of focus on “a new emancipation”: “The sooner the Negro forgets that he was once a slave, the better. The sooner he quits celebrating the day when one white man took him away from another, the better.” In the century since then, historical memory has trended steadily further in the same direction.

All this is entirely separate from whether these things are worth doing. You can improve the world. You can make people’s lives better. Americans are strongly in favor of all the programs in this essay for reasons that have very little to do with expecting the recipients to be grateful.

The point is that, if you fix things, don’t expect to receive much gratitude in return. The professionals in your field might give you a plaque, and the intellectuals might write some blog posts about how your work helped things. But you should understand that the median person on the street will just accept your better world as their due, and continue agitating for the next thing. If they think of your work at all, it’s as likely to be to complain that you took too long.

Cope is one of the most powerful psychological forces distorting our thinking. People have an incredibly strong need to believe that things will turn out okay.1 For people who emotionally believe that the universe consists only of our present society, this obviously distorts how you see things, because you need things to turn out okay in our present society. This is the source of common fantasies about e.g. utopian revolutions (among those dissatisfied with the current structure), or “The End Of History” eternally preserving the post-WWII political order (among those satisfied with the current structure), and many other fantasies, as well as the much more common reluctance to look squarely at problems which seem hard to resolve with our present social structure.

Once you take the very long view, and your emotional universe includes the distant past and the distant future, a lot of this psychological pressure is lifted from your analysis of today’s conditions. Will things turn out okay in our present society? In some ways yes, in some ways no, but it’s not the final word. In the year 3500 this will all be dust and something else will be happening. Maybe it’ll be better in 3500, and if not then, maybe in 5000. You don’t have to load so much of the cope onto the things happening in your own lifetime.

The point is not that you should fall into nihilism. The fact that our society is temporary does not mean it’s unimportant. Our mistakes and failures might be repaired in a couple hundred years, but that’s not much solace to our grandchildren if we screw things up in the meantime. Still, people seem to think much clearer when they see the stakes as very very large, rather than infinite.

It’s important to remember, when thinking about how the future will go, that nothing stays the same. Twenty years from now, the United States Congress will either run better than it runs today, or worse. The same goes for learning about the past. When you read about what Congress was up to twenty years ago, you’re reading about a different institution that functioned differently than the Congress of today.

The most basic reason for this is that man is mortal. People die and others start doing their jobs—maybe better, maybe worse, but not exactly the same. Young people grow up and have new ideas and start doing new things, which are either better or worse than what the last batch of young people did. Every organization is being constantly refounded. In sixty years it will experience ~100% turnover and become a completely different organization.

Institutions are usually built in short, sharp bursts. Growth is difficult and chaotic and people are arguing all the time. You look back two years later and things are totally different.

Decay is usually slow and steady. People are working hard and fixing problems, and each fix is 90% as good as the way things were before, and if you’re not paying close attention you won’t know that it’s any different. You look back two years later and things look pretty much the same. Then after 10 different 90%-as-good fixes you’re down to a third of your original quality.

If you find yourself looking around and asking “Are we growing, or decaying?” then you’re almost certainly decaying.

In theory this all works great. As everyone does their jobs, civilization ascends higher and higher, with more material wealth and better-administered laws and more knowledge than before. The institutions, and the people within the institutions, accumulate money and power because they do useful jobs well. The physical wealth, the cars and pants and couches, get distributed to people in return for making contributions to society.

The car company is only able to make cars and sell them at a profit because it’s in a society which has lots of law and lots of knowledge, so it makes sense that the producers of material wealth will end up sending some of that material wealth to the institutions that produce these intangible goods, through some combination of law and custom. That’s what it means for everyone to participate in a functional society. If you squint a little bit and force everything into an econbrain framework then you can even see it as a kind of trade.

The problem is that piles of wealth attract parasites. If you fill your pantry with sugar then ants will try to get in. For an institution, this happens both internally—you are giving out steady high-paying salaries, so people try to get those salaries by doing work which superficially appears to help your company, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money—and externally—you are giving money to institutions that educate the youth, so institutions try to get that funding by doing work which superficially appears to educate the youth, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money.

Bigger piles of wealth and power and prestige attract parasites in greater numbers and with greater sophistication. I’ve seen small hobbyist communities attract clumsy affinity scammers who run away with a few thousand dollars in donations for fake cancer treatments. I’ve seen fashionable research organizations attract smooth-talking job applicants angling for no-show sinecure jobs and connections in the scene. I’ve seen the feeding frenzy of half-baked grant proposals when the FTX Future Fund sprayed out $100 million in donations before its funders were arrested for fraud. I’ve seen brilliant hucksters spin elaborate webs of lies and apparently-working “AI” technology to try to scam tens of millions of dollars from investors.

In isolation this is inconvenient, but not a disaster. You spend a fraction of your resources on detecting and purging parasites from your system. Your detection won’t be perfect, so parasites will consume a fraction of your resources on top of that. It’s a source of drag, and will kill some projects on the margin, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what’s happening. Every big group in the history of the human species has had some amount of this going on.

Things get really bad when the parasites become politically organized. This is the point where things metastasize. Once an institution contains a powerful faction who are appropriating the institution’s resources at the expense of the institution’s mission, rather than by fulfilling the institution’s mission, it has entered a terminal spiral which is nearly impossible to reverse. Isolated individuals stealing stuff can only do so much damage, and the amounts they can steal are limited by the need to avoid detection. On the other hand, factions can bend the institution’s priorities to boondoggles which are easier to steal from, and in advanced cases such changes in strategy crowd out even the attempt to do real work.

For example in 2021 San Francisco, where I live, launched the Dream Keeper Initiative, which describes itself as a “citywide effort to reinvest $120 million over the next two years from law enforcement into San Francisco’s Black and African-American communities”. In fact it was largely a pretext for city officials to solicit bribes in return for sending city funds to their friends. The former head of the program, Sheryl Davis, is currently being tried for conflict of interest and misappropriating public funds. Most brazenly, Davis funneled millions of dollars to Collective Impact, a nonprofit organization she founded and formerly led, which paid the executive director salary of Davis’s live-in boyfriend James Spingola while the two shared bank accounts and expenses. As of now, most of the corrupt nonprofits involved have not been charged, such as the Homeless Children’s Network, which received $3.5 million from the program while paying kickbacks to Davis’s son.

The point of redirecting the money is precisely that it makes the money easier to steal, since the police are supposed to produce an output which can be checked, and the NGOs are not. (San Francisco police, like most American police departments, are notorious for making schedules which give officers large overtime payments as a matter of course—in 2024 about a third of officers received over $100,000 in extra overtime pay—but the officers do actually work a lot of overtime in order to receive this.) Many similar schemes were launched across the country around the same time, in large part pushed by people intending to take a cut for themselves and eager to distort the ostensible purpose to that goal.

Of course, when people are organizing to loot an organization, they don’t say so in those words. They’ll tell a nice-sounding story to everyone outside their faction, and cooperate to cover for each other—this consists less of explicit conspiracy and more of tacit cooperation on the basis of shared professional interest and ideological affinity, although there is some explicit conspiracy, and it’s disproportionately important when it does happen. Only when the fraudsters have triumphed completely and have no remaining fear of punishment will they openly defend the fraud without any reference to the organization’s ostensible purpose.

Another example, less lurid but as important as the looting of government budgets: Recently Arxiv announced a policy of banning authors for one year if they submit papers containing “incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation”, including “hallucinated references”. Lots of academics attacked the policy. Some did so by lying, claiming that it is wrong to punish authors for making mistakes formatting their references, as though it were being applied to people who mistyped an author’s name rather than people who claimed to base their arguments on works which do not exist. More interestingly, though, many attacked the policy on the basis that it will hurt the careers of the many academics who routinely cite references without reading them, that “it’s very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible” and therefore fake LLM citations should not be punished. Very obviously, inserting fake citations (whether done by human or LLM) is a practice which cannot possibly occur in a work that is constrained by attempting only valid arguments and is trying to say things only if they’re true. Very obviously, works which fail such a basic brown M&M test do not advance society’s knowledge. In fact they retard the pursuit of knowledge by drowning out real work. And Arxiv’s detractors do not contest this! Instead they argue that the policy will hurt the careers of people who acted in accordance with academic norms. Which is true so far as it goes, and would be a good reason to oppose the policy if the purpose of publishing papers was to provide comfy make-work jobs to people who abide by academic norms. But if the purpose of publishing papers is to produce and disseminate knowledge, then of course Arxiv should purge fraudsters who jam the frequencies with antiknowledge, most especially when such practices are the norm. (I suspect it’s not a coincidence that Arxiv made this move two months after announcing its intent to leave the university system and become an independent organization.)

From this, we can see that the cancer is more advanced in academic publishing than in San Francisco exostate “non-government” organizations. In both cases, the fraud rings have achieved enough internal control to steer the project to their own ends rather than the ostensible purpose. In both cases attempts to fix the “dysfunction” by pouring in more money make the problem worse because the people causing the problems are the ones who get the money—it’s like trying to get the ants out of your pantry by pouring in more sugar. The more money San Francisco gives to organizations claiming to treat drug addiction, the more addicts die of overdoses. The more money is given to academic historians or psychologists or Alzheimer’s disease researchers, the worse the outputs of their fields become. The institutions are too corrupt to turn resources into progress towards their ostensible mission. But in the case of San Francisco graft, people still have to lie. If they’re caught then a few of them will go to jail, and a few more will lose their government checks, at least until they move to a new 501(c)3. Meanwhile the publishing academics are so far gone that the corrupt ones don’t have to lie anymore.

Pretty quickly I learned that the best and fastest way to join a group is to organize events where we do the group’s core activity. In every group I’ve ever encountered, there is far more demand for social events and things to do than there is supply. Getting people to come is like giving away ice cream at the beach. You can make friends by showing up from the outside and consistently attending other people’s events, but it’s a lot easier and faster to make friends if you’re also organizing your own stuff and inviting the people you’re hoping to get closer to, or helping with someone else’s events. I’ve found this true everywhere from niche online fanfiction discussion groups to vanguard intellectual movements directing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries.

Surprisingly, it turns out things don’t actually work that way. In fact, events happen when someone puts in the legwork to organize them. And one of the most reliable laws of the universe is that, if something takes a little bit of legwork, then most people just won’t do it. A scene’s leaders are mostly the people who actually bother to put in the work.

The work of organizing is underappreciated by many people. But the other organizers are very attuned to this, and absolutely will notice who else is picking up the burdens.

I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders. Lots of people want to consume social fabric, but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric have largely fallen by the wayside. I don’t know how to solve this undersupply at the scale of society. But you can solve it at the scale of your own community by just supplying it.

Every political system decays over the decades, as the world changes and the problems the system was designed to solve are replaced by new problems outside of its scope, and as the people who built and understand the system die and are replaced.

So far there have been three different political systems under the US Constitution. First was the original system implemented by the Founding Fathers, with a relatively isolated agrarian economy; strong states; an untamed and effectively infinite frontier; and a minimal federal government funded almost entirely by tariffs. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down, culminating in the American Civil War.

From Lincoln’s war reforms and the following Reconstruction period was built the second system, with a stronger central government and substantial civil service; revenue largely from internal excise taxes; the consolidated two-party system of Democrats and Republicans; extremely rapid industrial growth steered by nationwide corporate trusts; the taming of the frontier; patronage distributed by local urban “political machines”; and deep ties to the international economic and political system. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down, culminating in the Great Depression.

From Roosevelt’s reforms during the New Deal and the war was built the third system, with a vast federal managerial apparatus in new bureaucracies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the greatly expanded federal executive departments; patronage distributed on the national level via new programs like Social Security; taxation almost entirely through income and payroll taxes; an industrial economy where large national and international corporations operate within the bounds set by federal regulators and bankers; imperial commitments across the globe; and the rest of the political assumptions we’ve all taken for granted for as long as anyone living remembers. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down. By now the decline has become obvious to everyone.

There might be another revival and a fourth political system. As a system decays, a window opens up for about a generation, where the established system is dysfunctional enough that it cannot reliably coopt or destroy competitors, but it still remains functional enough that political reform from within can solve the core problems and keep the fundamental social structures working with what are, in the grand scheme of history, relatively minor and incremental changes. In America this has happened twice before. The window of possibility is opening again.

Revival isn’t automatic. Most great countries eventually fall because they simply decay, and decay, and decay, until they just kind of fall apart under their own weight, like the Soviet Union or the British Empire, or an external invader finally pushes over the hollow remains with surprisingly little resistance, like Rome or the Austrian Empire. America is generations away from such a fate. But if there is no great political reform, that’s where the road leads.

Which road will we go down? It’s not a matter of historical law. It depends on the skill, will, and virtue of specific individuals. Will there be a team of people with the ability and energy to build power, the knowledge to design a functional new system from the parts available, and the capability to put it in place? It depends on how well all of us do our jobs.

I don’t find their attempts convincing. Perhaps more tellingly, from very similar assumptions they reach for very different explanations of why the bond should exist. Hobbes argues for an implicit contract by which the child is perpetually “obliged to obey” whoever nurtures them, if anyone chooses to do so, because otherwise the helpless infant would simply die. Locke argues that parents have an obligation from God to nurture their children, and this comes with a duty to use reason on the child’s behalf and exercise command until the child attains reason, at which point their obligation ceases; and that even adult children are obliged by gratitude and by God to honor and assist, but not to obey, their parents.

Say what you will about whether these arguments are sound, it’s clear that neither of these is the actual reason that parents and children share a bond. Whether a family accepts Hobbes’s idea of contractual obedience or not, whether a family accepts Locke’s idea of divinely ordained stewardship or not, makes little difference to the bond between parents and children in that family. Parental relations are a fact about the human race (and many animals), and these attempts to morally justify the family are unrelated to that fact.

This becomes clearest when we look at siblings. The bond between siblings is one of the most fundamental and most important facts of human psychology. Neither Hobbes nor Locke attempts to justify it at all. It’s unlikely that the idea of explaining sibling bonds simply never occurred to them; probably, they tried to come up with explanations within the moral framework they were developing, and couldn’t come up with anything satisfying.

This is because their contractualist lens has no room for the family. Their attempts to tack on justifications for the child-parent bond are weak and incomplete, e.g. neither accounts for the fact that parents almost always feel obligations towards their adult children. Their explanations for the rest of family life are even worse, or lacking entirely.

This is fine so far as it goes. There are many valuable moral arguments which are not a 100% complete description of all possible moral issues. Their outlook towards natural law and liberty clearly captures some important truths about human morality. But over the last few centuries, the idea that their premises are the only legitimate moral principles to argue from has become gradually more common. Doing so leaves out a tremendous amount of what people actually care about—family is an especially clear example but far from the only one. We can imagine a coherent mind with a morality formed by these principles and nothing else. But it’s not a human mind.

At the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, Jessica waits in line. She is slouched forward in the characteristic fentanyl fold, supporting her weight by leaning heavily on a wire pushcart. At the front of the line, she produces her Calfresh EBT card. The farmers’ market clerk charges her card $30 and gives her paper vouchers — $30 in regular SNAP vouchers valid at the farmers’ market, plus an extra $60 in vouchers from Market Match, a program that describes itself as “California’s healthy food incentive program.” Ostensibly, this program subsidizes low-income recipients’ purchases of fruits and vegetables.

However, Jessica — wearing a puffy jacket and pajama pants, looking like she’s in her 50s but probably younger — is not here to buy fruits and vegetables. Instead of going to a farmers’ market stall, she takes them to a nearby group of older Cantonese women, their faces concealed behind surgical masks and sunhats, hovering a few yards away. Jessica gives her vouchers to one of these women, who counts the $90 in vouchers and gives Jessica $50 in clean green bills. Cash in hand, Jessica departs. The purchased vouchers are then turned in to the farmers’ market organizers, and reimbursed by check as though they had actually been received in legitimate transactions. The whole transaction takes place in clear view, only a few yards from the Market Match tent and the security guard.

Jessica is a composite character, not a real individual, representative of the many people we observed and interviewed who sell their SNAP vouchers. It’s easy to guess what they do with the cash. Multiple fentanyl addicts confirmed to us that they regularly get their drugs by selling SNAP at the farmer’s market. “If you want to buy drugs and not food, you can do it,” says one. We asked another addict if he buys snacks with the cash. “No. I buy dope, man.”

Continue reading my full article at The Voice of San Francisco.

For as long as any of us have been alive, we have seen an ever-changing series of popular predictions for how industrial technology is about to destroy civilization. Nuclear war was supposed to kill everyone, whether by literally exploding all of civilization or by irradiating the world’s surface or by nuclear winter. Toxic pollution and resource depletion were supposed to leave the world a barren wasteland. Overpopulation was supposed to lead to mass starvation, universal resource wars, and the collapse of society. Global warming was supposed to make the planet too hot for human life. And today, many people fear that artificial intelligence will disassemble humanity for parts.

So far, however, civilization has not been destroyed. It seems the demand for techno-apocalypses is much greater than the supply. What’s going on here? Why are so many people always convinced that technology is on the cusp of destroying civilization?

Of course, each individual prediction of doom has its own internal reasoning which should be evaluated apart from the broader trend. However the sheer number of widely expected techno-apocalypses, and the similarities in how the ideas are spread throughout society suggest a common pattern at work, separate from the question of how plausible any particular apocalypse scenario might be.

To understand this, the first thing we have to look at is when and where has this been happening. Is this a general phenomenon that humans do in all times and all places, or something that happens in all technological civilizations, or is it something specific to modern Western civilization?

It would be strange if there were popular predictions of techno-apocalypse before rapid technological change became such a visible force. This is indeed what we find. Before the modern era, the closest match is popular “millenarian” movements in Christian societies. These rhyme a little bit with modern techno-apocalypse, and the psychological effects on the believers are remarkably similar to the effects of modern techno-apocalypse beliefs, but they’re not really what we’re looking for. For one thing, millenarian beliefs are about society being radically transformed into a permanent utopia rather than being destroyed, and for another, the transforming force is Christ bringing about the Last Judgment rather than technology. We’ll have to keep looking.

Do we see techno-apocalypticism emerge as soon as rapid technological advance sets in? Actually, no! If we look around the Industrial Revolution, starting around the 1770s or so, there is nothing of the sort. Only a few cutting-edge intellectuals started to realize how important technological progress would be. Ben Franklin watched the prototype hot air balloons and immediately realized that air power would someday transform war, but rather than feeling anxious about the destruction it would cause, he hoped it might “[c]onvinc[e] sovereigns of the folly of wars.” This futurism was unusual even among intellectuals like Franklin, and none of it filtered down to popular discourse—understandably, because industrial technology was not yet transforming the regular person’s daily life.

It was not until the Second Industrial Revolution, starting roughly around the 1860s, that technologies like trains and mass production and electric lights rapidly intruded on urban people’s daily lives, and regular people began to perceive technological progress as a major force in the world. Yet, while there was popular discourse about technological progress, we still do not see techno-apocalyptic anxieties. The only case that looks a little bit similar was the “coal question,” the idea that available supplies of coal—at the time the only industrial power source in use—would eventually run out and industrial civilization would go with it. The idea was common knowledge in intellectual circles, but made approximately no impression on the public. Intellectuals occasionally brought up the “coal question” during popular debates about high coal prices, but never with the palpable anxiety of 20th century writers talking about “peak oil” and the like, and it never achieved any traction beyond the sort of philosophical futurist who in 2026 has opinions about the “simulation hypothesis” and the “Fermi paradox.”

Continue reading my full article at Palladium.

I’ve been going through the posts on Western culture from Richard Ngo’s 21st Century Civilization Curriculum and it reminded me of Quigley’s analysis. His is the best characterization I’ve seen of what distinguishes the ideology of Western civilization from the other civilizations.

We might begin by saying that Western ideology is optimistic, moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic yet social, and dynamic. All these terms refer only to aspects of the whole and do not really get us to its essence. This essence might be summed up in the belief that “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” Before we attempt to analyze this rather cryptic statement, we should say a few words about the more superficial aspects.

The Western outlook is optimistic because it believes that the world is basically good and that the greatest good lies in the future. … Western ideology believes that the material is good and the spiritual is better but that they are not opposed to each other since the material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world. The world and the flesh are good because they were both made by God (as in the Old Testament). The material world is necessary to the spiritual in two ways: (1) no soul exists without a body and (2) no soul can be saved except by its own efforts and cooperative actions with other persons, both of which can be achieved only by bodily actions in this world.

…

The democratic and individualistic aspects of the Western outlook were always present, and go back, like other aspects, to the New Testament. They rest on the belief that all men have souls fit for salvation and, in the long run, have equal opportunity to achieve salvation. These ideas also appear in Christ’s concern with the downtrodden and oppressed, in the belief that the first and greatest sin was pride (the sin of Lucifer) and that the greatest virtue was humility, in the Beatitudes and in many parables (such as that of the lost sheep). It is worthy of note that all these points are concerned not only with the individual’s relationship to himself and to God but also with his relationship to his fellow men.

…

All these different aspects of the Western outlook cluster about the essence of the outlook that we have tried to express in the statement that “Truth unfolds through a communal process.” The outlook to which this statement refers lies at the foundation of Western culture and is reflected equally in its religion, its politics, its science, and its economics. This outlook assumes, first, that there is a truth or goal for man’s activity. Thus it rejects despair, solipsism, skepticism, pessimism, and chaos. It implies hope, order, and the existence of a meaningful objective external reality. And it provides the basis for science, religion, and social action as the West has known these.

Second, this attitude assumes that no one, now, has the truth in any complete or even adequate way; it must be sought or struggled for. Thus this outlook rejects smugness, complacency, pride, and personal authority in favor of the Christian virtues and a kind of basic agnosticism (with the implication “We don’t yet know everything”), as well as the idea of achievement of good through struggle to reach the good. The earliest great work of German literature, Parzival, has as its subtitle “The Brave Man Slowly Wise.” This is typical of the Western ideology’s belief that wisdom (or any real achievement) comes as a consequence of personal effort in time. The same idea is to be found in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare’s tragedies (taken as a whole), and in Beethoven’s symphonies.

There are two important ideas here: one is that no one has the whole truth now but that it can be approached closer and closer in the future, by vigorous effort, and the other is that no single individual does this or achieves this, but that it must be achieved by a communal effort, by a kind of cooperation in competition in which each individual’s efforts help to correct the errors of others and thus help the development of a consensus that is closer to the truth than the actions of any single individual ever could be. We might call these two aspects the temporal and the social. They are covered in our maxim by the words “unfolds” and “social.”

There is also a third idea here; namely, that the resulting consensus is still not final, although far superior to any earlier or more individual version. Thus the advance of mankind or of any single individual is an endless process in which truth (or any achievement, even the development of an individual’s personality) is constantly approached closer and closer without ever being finished or reached.

We might mention also another phase of this outlook; namely, the idea that the cooperative effort that unfolds truth through a continuously developing consensus is a competitive process. More accurately it is cooperation through competition, as a game is. This refers to a social process that is superficially competitive but fundamentally cooperative, or, viewed in another way, a situation in which individuals compete and even struggle together for a higher social end (the consensus). This is a dialectic process and is one of the heritages from Classical antiquity, where this idea of the emergence of truth from pluralistic debate in the market place is found in the earlier dialogues of Plato and of other thinkers.

…

The same idea about the social (and dialectic) unfolding of truth is at the foundation of Western science. It assumes that science is never static or fully achieved, but pursues a constantly receding goal to which we approach closer and closer from the competition-cooperation of individual scientists, each of whom offers his experiments and theories to be critically reexamined and debated by his fellow scientists in a joint effort to reach a higher (and temporary) consensus.

The same outlook appears in the basic political ideas of the West. These are liberal and not authoritarian. They cannot be authoritarian because no individual or institution has full and final truth; instead a fuller and more complete truth emerges as a guide to social activity from the free debate in free assembly of all men’s partial truths.

…

The same kind of pluralist outlook is the real justification of capitalism and of all laissez-faire or pluralist economic systems so typical of the West even in its early period when economic development was taking its first steps.

…

Thus we see the basic ideology of the West reflected in all aspects of the society, and continuing to influence ideas and actions even after it has been explicitly rejected. It is, for example, behind the theories of such late and “unconventional” thinkers as Darwin or Marx, both of whom believed that the Better emerged from the Good by the superficial struggles of the many to achieve what could never have been reached by any single individual alone. In fact, of these two, Marxist dialectic materialism is rather closer to the Western tradition than Darwin’s struggle for existence is. Marx, like his mentor Hegel, was Western in his belief that progress is achieved through struggle, but, like Hegel, he committed the Western sin of pride (the sin of Lucifer) in the intellectual arrogance which expected achievement of a final goal in the material world and in the near future.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.”

Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”

In 1963 an archaeological survey partially excavated limestone pillars on a Turkish hilltop. The archaeologists believed these were medieval tombstones dating to the Byzantine empire. 30 years later, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt recognized clues that the site was likely much older and excavated it more thoroughly. There, at Göbekli Tepe, he discovered a neolithic monumental complex thought to be 11,500 years old. What had initially been identified as tombstones were merely the tops of massive 18-foot pillars.

According to the generally accepted timelines, Göbekli Tepe was built thousands of years before the invention of agriculture. As such, Schmidt believed this massive site was built by nomadic tribes, who would visit it briefly for religious rites without interrupting their wandering ways. In contrast to the usual theory, that civilization came into being in tandem with agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe proves hierarchical and state-like social organization predates agriculture, since the pastoralist nomads were able to able to recruit, organize, and feed the vast manpower needed to construct such a site.

Since Schmidt’s death in 2014, continued excavation has discovered evidence of domestic settlement and large-scale cereal processing at Göbekli Tepe. A 2019 paper by Dietrich et al. documents 7268 tools for grinding grain at the site. Rather than seeing this as evidence of sedentary agricultural life, the authors remain muted in their interpretation. “As no large storage facilities have been identified, we argue for a production of food for immediate use and interpret these seasonal peaks in activity at the site as evidence for the organization of large work feasts.”

It seems more likely that Göbekli Tepe was simply an agricultural city. The reason the architecture looks like a normal agricultural civilization, and does not look like anything we confidently know was built by nomads, is that it was a normal agricultural civilization rather than very unusual nomads. Schmidt estimated that only 5% of the site had been excavated shortly before he died in 2014, so continued investigation may someday uncover the “large storage facilities” whose absence was so persuasive to Dietrich et al.

Agricultural civilization is very likely older than is generally accepted. Our present archaeology has probably not identified the first-ever agricultural society, and perhaps we never will. On this hypothesis, the consensus for the beginning of agriculture will continue to be pushed earlier and earlier, first to 11,500 years ago and eventually further than that. Like the physicists Feynman describes, historians are being reluctantly dragged in a predictable direction by a predictable pattern of evidence. In 2015 a team of archaeologists published evidence of “small-scale trial cultivation” and “proto-weeds” 23,000 years ago, at a site twice the age of Göbekli Tepe.

“Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”

Rearguard actions are not always so steady and incremental. In 1912 Alfred Wegener published a paper arguing that the continents move. He noted that the coastlines and geological formations on opposite sides of the Atlantic line up nearly perfectly, and that fossil remains of ancient creatures were found on opposite sides of the ocean which they could not possibly have crossed, among other arguments. Wegener’s proposed explanation for how the continents move was wrong, but his explanations of apparent geological and biological mysteries which only made sense under continental drift are now considered correct.

At the time Wegener’s work was mostly dismissed, on the basis that continents moving sounds completely bananas. Only a small fringe of geologists continued to develop the continental drift theory. It was not until half a century later, when a separate research tradition discovered the theory of plate tectonics and provided a convincing mechanism for how continents could move, that continental drift rapidly became the scientific consensus.

More on this in a forthcoming article from Elizabeth Van Nostrand.

A thousand years ago, the inhabitants of what’s now the eastern United States were building cities and megastructures. The grandest of these sites we’ve discovered is the Cahokia complex of earth mounds, including the famous Monks Mound, whose base is the same size as that of the Pyramid of Giza, and the infamous Mound 72, which contains the remains of a mass human sacrifice of 53 young women who appear to be captives taken from a foreign ethnic group. Other mounds, smaller than Monks Mound but clearly large enough to require organized labor forces, are scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and the eastern United States.

We don’t know why these cities collapsed, and probably never will. We don’t even know what they called themselves. Archaeological evidence shows it disintegrated well before Europeans and their diseases arrived. We have found no writing from these people, and whatever oral histories of their collapse may have existed in 1492 did not survive the European contact.

While the evidence is not in dispute, academics generally avoid calling this civilization a civilization, and speak of the “Mississippian culture” or the “Mound Builders”. They admit that the people lived in cities at the largest sites. They admit that there is clear evidence of hierarchical social structure with differentiated social classes and professional administrators—they insist on describing this political structure as “complex chiefdoms” rather than “city-states”. They admit that larger cities ruled over weaker cities nearby—this was “settlement hierarchy”, not “imperialism”. Most scholars admit that the mounds were clearly built by large-scale mobilization of labor, probably on a corvee basis, although occasionally there are implausible proposals that the mounds were built by disorganized individuals bringing a single basketful of earth when they happened to visit the site, or other silly ways to deny the obvious evidence of well-organized labor mobilization.

Everyone knows that the Native Americans—or at least the North Americans—were noble savages who lived in harmony with the earth and could paint with all the colors of the wind. To say that the land was once inhabited by a civilization whose lives were closer to the Aztecs or the Mayas than to the small tribes who the Europeans encountered sounds as crazy as the idea of moving continents. There may be undisputed facts which cannot possibly square with the popular view, but these facts are unknown to most Americans. They are spoken only in euphemism and whisper, where it will not intrude on civic mythology.

The Ennigaldi Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which decides what to preserve, purchases tablets, and stores them in vaults. We are accepting donations if you want to support this work.

Ammonite Inscription Company produces tablets for the Ennigaldi Foundation and for anyone else. When I started this project I thought I could just raise money and buy tablets from the tablet guys. But there were no tablet guys who I could find, so I had to become the tablet guy.

It turns out these tablets also make great display pieces, so if you want a thousand-year inscription of your favorite poem or your wedding vows or a (black-and-white) artwork or your family records or anything, then Ammonite can do that. Going forward I also hope to sell to museums and others with an interest in long-term preservation, so they can just make a simple transaction rather than set up a production process from scratch.

In the future I’ll also offer “We make your tablets and store them in our permanent vault” rather than just “I deliver the tablets to you” but that’s a ways away.

My ultimate goal is to preserve the entire corpus of English-language Wikipedia c. 2014. This is more feasible than many people assume but it’s still very far beyond my current production capacity. I’ll be starting small and scaling up geometrically as I go.

You can sign up for the Ennigaldi Foundation’s newsletter to stay updated as the work continues.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which soon became one of the most influential works of economics and anthropology ever written. Today it is best remembered for its role in stigmatizing “conspicuous consumption,” a concept Veblen coins in the book. Veblen’s full theory is much broader. He describes the leisure class, a group of people whose vocation is performing aristocratic leisure in order to show that they are higher and more honorable than the common throng. It has been over a century since Veblen’s time, and the specific forms of reputable leisure which the privileged class engage in have changed completely. The basic structure of the leisure class, however, is much the same.

The most reputable displays of leisure were aristocratic in Veblen’s time. Veblen uses examples like hunting for sport, speaking Latin and Greek, and learning refined manners to demonstrate “good breeding.” By now, all of this is hopelessly old-fashioned. But the leisure class is far older than these aristocratic values and aesthetics, and did not cease to exist just because that ideology collapsed. Today the leisure class has adopted the new ideology, which we can roughly call “social activism,” and performs its conspicuous leisure in accordance with these newer values and aesthetics.

The Leisure Class of Today

When we talk about “the leisure class” today, we do not mean people who spend all day watching TikTok or playing video games or listening to true crime podcasts. We are talking about people who engage in conspicuous leisure. By conspicuous, we mean that they show off their exemption from unworthy labor through accomplishments which those without leisure cannot match, for want of time or money or energy. They spend their time and effort in “honorific” pursuits which place them above the base necessity of directly producing wealth.

A meatpacker illegally working twelve-hour shifts can watch Breaking Bad when he comes home, so watching Breaking Bad is just ordinary leisure, and having opinions about Breaking Bad does not demonstrate conspicuous leisure. But only a man of means and distinction can take three-week vacations to go scuba diving in exotic locations—and upload the selfies to social media—so this becomes a mark of honor. In the language of today’s economists, what Veblen calls “conspicuous” might be phrased as “suitable for costly signaling.” Conspicuous leisure often includes mastery of subtle and exacting speech codes, and adherence to precise forms of manners, carriage, and behavior, all of which requires careful study and training within the social milieu of the reputable elites.

Continue reading my full article at Palladium.

Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.

In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.

Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.

The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.

Continue reading my full article at Unherd.

In the 1300s, the bubonic plague pandemic swept through Europe, and killed an enormous fraction of the population—perhaps a third, according to many estimates. Around this time, Europeans were also becoming wealthier, while urban artisans and guildmasters were gaining economic power at the expense of feudal lords. It’s a common myth that European wealth increased because of the plague. However, these economic and social changes had started a century before the bubonic plague reached Europe. Late medieval economic growth came from the rise of towns and burghers, and the Black Death just happened to come along in the middle of that. Other pandemics did not go along with rising prosperity, because they did not arrive in the middle of unrelated economic transformations.

One example of the common myth is presented by Noel Johnson, an economist at George Mason University, in an interview with Tyler Cowen:

“So 1350 is when the Black Death is occurring, around then. Europe loses about 40 percent of its population to this bacterial infection that spreads through. And as anybody who’s taken introductory economics might suggest, when the labor supply goes down by a lot, with 40 percent of Europe dying, then wages are going to start going up. This means the bargaining power of peasants, relative to landowners and so forth, are going to increase. … the main thing that’s going on with institutional change is going to be this shift in the bargaining power that’s letting peasants have more power relative to nobles.”

Of course, according to introductory economics, killing 40% of the population would affect demand for crops as well as supply, and so the first-order effect on labor prices is zero. For Johnson's explanation to make sense, there must be some second-order reason why mass death would have different effects on the demand for food versus the labor supply of farmers. The usual explanation here is that the survivors had access to more natural resources. Byrne Hobart covers this argument:

“[I]f your country is close to the Malthusian limit, it means the incremental farmer is not producing enough food to feed themselves — if the average person produces enough food for one person, and some people have good land, the more marginal land is necessarily producing less than that average. … Arguably, the event that set off the Renaissance, and thus the Industrial Revolution, was the Black Death. By killing a third of Europe, it pushed us to well below the Malthusian limit, raised workers’ wages, and limited governments’ ability to tax city-dwellers. Things really started to take off in Northern Italy, which is also where the plague first arrived. Of course, it could have happened anyway, and could have happened elsewhere — the reason it hit in the first place was that trade had globalized enough that rats and fleas from China found their way to Venice, which wasn’t happening as much beforehand. But certainly the Bubonic Plague accelerated things by eliminating a lot of people and raising the marginal productivity of the survivors.”

Scott Alexander gives the most concise summary of this argument I've seen:

“Some people argue Europe broke out of the Malthusian trap around 1300. This is not quite right. 1300s Europe achieved above-subsistence GDP, but only because the Black Plague killed so many people that the survivors got a windfall by taking their land.”

This paints a picture of Europe at the limit of its ecological carrying capacity, with incomes stagnating at the level of bare subsistence. Then the Black Death wipes out a huge swathe of the population, and that breathing room permits higher productivity and higher incomes. Laborers go from being a burden to being a resource worth competing over, enabling them to negotiate for better legal and customary privileges as well as a higher share of the wealth they produce. This helps establish the foundations of the technological explosion that would eventually let the West escape Malthusian dynamics, or at least raise the Malthusian limits so far as to be unrecognizable. It's a coherent and sensible story.

But of course a coherent and sensible story isn't worth much on its own. I can easily tell coherent and sensible stories for wildly different conclusions. Here's one: by causing people to abandon marginally-productive land, which was plentiful, in favor of especially fertile land, which was scarce, the Black Death made landownership more important, and reinforced the economic power of the landowning nobility. Here's another: the Black Death made it uneconomical to learn a specialized trade because you were so likely to die before earning enough to repay the investment, and so the shortage of skilled workers led to a collapse of productivity. These stories are both completely backwards and describe the exact opposite of the real history, but that's impossible to know just from thinking about the story abstractly. You have to check against the actual events.

So what do we find when we check the Malthusian story against the historical record? Superficially, it seems plausible. Countless farms and villages were abandoned after the Black Death. We have some individual accounts complaining about peasants trying to bargain for higher wages in the aftermath. The 1300s were indeed a period of economic growth and growing technological sophistication. However, on closer inspection, the timelines don't match up.

These trends had all been underway since at least the 1200s, and some from the 1100s. Over the centuries before the Black Death, surveys of population and economics like Wilhelm Abel's Agricultural Fluctuations In Europe From The Thirteenth To Twentieth Centuries show many small towns and market villages springing up, and a greater share of the population living in these towns. Real wages of tradesmen rise. A smaller fraction of labor went to the Malthusian struggle for subsistence, and relatively more labor went to luxury goods. Mechanical technology got better; most importantly, better looms and spinning wheels spread across the continent, while many watermills were built for industry like ironsmithing or papermaking. Peasant mobility increased as people were drawn to opportunities in the towns. We see some records of burghers and merchants with significant fortunes, whereas earlier in the Middle Ages, the richest people were nearly always nobles or clergy.

This transition, where the economic center of gravity moved away from agricultural estates run by nobility and towards towns run by burghers, was a centuries-long process which started long before the Black Death and continued long after. Attributing these changes in wealth, urbanization, and peasant mobility to an event which struck long after the trends began is like when people try to explain the modern decline in fertility, which has been dropping steadily for centuries, by pointing to much more recent changes like phones. When I look closely at late medieval economics, I don’t see much change in the long-term trends around the time of the Black Death.

If the Malthusian explanation were correct, the most basic historical observation we’d expect is that food should have become abundant after the plague. This did not happen. Thomas Malthus himself, who was a more careful historian than those who wield his name today, acknowledges that “after the great pestilence in the time of Edward III [o]ne should naturally have thought that the quantity of good land being abundant, compared with the population, corn would have been very cheap. It was, however, on the contrary, dear during the twenty-five subsequent years”.

We can also check the theory by comparing it to other mass die-offs. The mechanisms described should hold for any society based on subsistence farming that loses a notable fraction of its population. What do we see when we check similar examples?

On the Malthusian model, famines should be the clearest case of mass deaths raising living standards, since that's when you know for sure that a population is above the carrying capacity. Yet the Irish famine of 1845 reduced the island's population by about a quarter, through death and emigration, with no resulting economic boom. The Bengal famine of 1770 may have killed a third of the population and was also an unmitigated disaster. In fact, I've never heard anyone claim that a famine had an economic silver lining, even though in theory it ought to be a much stronger case for a Malthusian bonanza than a plague.

If we compare other pandemics which killed a similar fraction of the population, we see no economic boom. The Plague of Justinian (caused by the same bubonic plague as the Black Death) and the Antonine Plague are universally considered to be terrible blows to the might of the Roman Empire, with no indication that these plagues led to economic gains for society in general or for laborers in particular. Earlier, the Plague of Athens was much the same, and the only economic effects Thucydides mentions are people inheriting estates and spending their savings on luxuries. If we look at smaller plagues, like contemporary epidemics of cholera or ebola—which often strike in areas where subsistence farmers are still common—then those are clearly an economic burden rather than a windfall. If we look at plagues which killed a larger fraction than the Black Death... well, there aren't many. The only candidate I can think of is the wave of European diseases introduced into the Americas, which were definitely not an economic windfall, and was a major contributor to the complete disintegration of Incan civilization. I've never heard any proponent of the Malthusian theory explain why the Black Death would be economically different from these other plagues and catastrophes.

Malthusian theories do not give good descriptions of technological societies. The core Malthusian axiom is that the natural environment and the supply of resources are fixed. This might be a reasonably good approximation when modeling a population of rabbits. But for human societies which can gain or lose the organizational capacity to maintain large irrigation systems, which can invent better plows and crop rotation, where even Stone Age societies can use their labor to terraform the land and enrich the soil to increase yields, this theoretical assumption does not hold and the theory reliably gives the wrong answer. Changes in the economic circumstances of technological societies are almost always explained by social and technological causes, not by Malthusian ecological causes.

In the case of medieval Europe, the cause was the rise of towns and burghers, with social systems and physical technology capable of producing more goods. This transition predates the Black Death by at least a century, and continued for centuries after. The apparent connection is just a coincidence, and disappears like a mirage if you look at the history closely. Other mass deaths from plague or famine did not produce the greater living standards which Malthusian economics predicts, because Malthusian economics is completely wrong.

I’ll add that it’s equally important to contemplate the actions of the victims—and especially their inactions. Most victims were appallingly passive in the face of oncoming death. At the final moment, a man would watch a hundred people in front of him lined up and shot, and then line up to receive his own bullet. We’re told that people are cowards out of a desire to save their own lives, but when passive cowardice was very obviously a certain path to extermination, and the only slim chance at life was through some desperate action, approximately nobody tried anything. This was a shameful abdication of the most basic duty to protect one’s own life and the lives of others. We must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps. Man's capacity to follow meekly as he's herded to his obvious death is at least as important to understand as man’s capacity to slaughter innocents.

Once events have reached the point where you’re being lined up in front of a shallow trench filled with the bodies of your neighbors, you obviously don’t have any *good* options. Still, at that point there is nothing *worse* than doing what you’re told for the last ninety seconds of your life and making things easy for the death squad. Better to sprint for the edge of the field and force your murderers to spend a few extra bullets while they chase you down. Better to attack with rocks or fists or fingernails, go down swinging and maybe even injure one of them. Never mind the one-in-a-thousand chance that it somehow helps, that those behind you also run and a few slip away in the chaos, at least it’s better to disrupt the orderly factory lines of the death machine and mildly inconvenience those who operate it.

But we are not here to exhort the dead to be something other than what they were. Our purpose is to learn from what happened and avoid making similar mistakes. Why did the men who watched the death squads shoot their neighbors, shoot their brothers, shoot their daughters, wait obediently for their own turn to be shot? We can imagine the stultifying terror, the habit of obedience, the knowledge that whoever steps out of line will be shot first. We can imagine the hopelessness and dread and inevitability. We can imagine the brute herd instinct to stay in the mass with our head down.

There is room for debate on when it is appropriate to succumb to cowardice to save yourself. But if we introspect on the experience of cowardice, on how it feels and what provokes it, it is clear that cowardice sometimes makes self-preservation harder. Like any emotional reaction, paralyzing fear can be a useful signal in normal cases, but can lead to deranged behavior in unusual or extreme cases.

What attitude would it take to overcome the paralysis of the men waiting quietly at the lip of the trench? What pattern of thought would recognize, if not the perfect moment for action, then at least a moment where action is less doomed than kneeling for the bullet? What type of mind can take the threat seriously enough, can recognize the necessity of taking a gamble that probably won’t work, without being paralyzed with the enormity of the situation?

And if you take such an attitude and bring it earlier, before that final moment when all hope has already been lost, then it can indeed determine whether you survive. Over half of German Jews survived the Holocaust by simply leaving Germany before emigration was forbidden in 1941. Those who stayed behind were not a random sample. Polish Jews fared worse because the Germans arrived as a conquering army, so fleeing took an extraordinary effort and some luck, and only around 10% were still alive at the end.

One account—I don’t remember where I read it. A teenage girl and a resistance member are in love. He offers to smuggle her out of the ghetto. She wants to go, and asks her mother’s permission. Her mother refuses to send her off with this boy—if the Nazis catch them, they’ll certainly be shot. They have a big screaming fight for hours. Her mother refuses to budge. The girl is inconsolable but she won’t outright disobey her mother. Long after the war is over, the interviewer asks the resistance fighter, Did you ever find out what happened to her? And he answers, No, I assume they both died when the ghetto was liquidated.

The Holocaust gets more airtime than other 20th century atrocities, but all of this applies just as well to the Soviet exterminations or the Khmer Rouge exterminations or the Turkish exterminations. After surviving a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If … if … We didn't love freedom enough.

To some extent this is an unrealistic fantasy imagining a comforting but implausible level of coordination, but there is also a genuine realization that they had done nothing, in the last minute when there was any slim hope of winning a fight. The gulags were not quite extermination camps, and even a political prisoner like Solzhenitsyn had odds of survival better than a coin flip. How many Polish doctors and engineers had similar thoughts while they were being marched into the Katyn Forest? We can only guess. They didn’t leave memoirs.

When should you fight? When should you arm yourself? When should you make friends with a dozen men who think similarly and happen to know how to use weapons? When should you flee across the border into self-imposed exile? What are the signs to track, what are the thresholds to watch for?

I don’t have any general answers. It depends too much on the specifics of the situation. But these are the questions that come to mind when I read the histories. At the very least it’s a more fruitful lens than the tired “How can I pin Hitler’s crimes on my political opponents?” approach which has become so common.