What’s a Trillion, More or Less?

Elon Musk

Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure. No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most citizens have money.

Start with how Musk became rich. He didn’t create or sell anything valuable. His IPO on SpaceX common shares enjoyed a price jump, causing the fraction of shares in Musk’s hands to increase. In other words, his “net worth” includes the promised future value of transactions he hasn’t yet made. You or I can claim future transactions as personal value only under specific circumstances, controlled by regulations and personal integrity.

This personal integrity component matters. Musk’s notorious buyout of Twitter caused massive financial losses that reduced stock values by half. Then he stopped the bleeding by selling Twitter’s successor company, X.com, to xAI, his tech startup. He moved his holdings from one pocket to another, giving himself a markup along the way. He later repeated the trick, selling xAI to SpaceX, mere months before selling SpaceX to Wall Street.

Each of these transactions created money without creating value. Neither Twitter nor xAI saw their corporate functioning improved by the transaction; in fact, neither has ever turned a profit. Neither has SpaceX. Smarter critics than me have analyzed the SpaceX IPO and determined that it involves nothing but high-minded promises and Elon’s personal financial network. Tesla’s mediocre cars have no resale value, and the Boring Company’s tunnels barely exist.

Please remember, when we discuss Musk’s “net worth,” we mean its dollar value, not actual dollars he has. Musk’s fortune mainly consists of his stock portfolio, which mostly comprises his own companies. He pumps their floating value by making his companies seem desirable, but he also controls the supply, keeping them scarce. He cannot ever sell his stock holdings, because that would flood the market and crash their value.

Musk isn’t a trillionaire because of products he makes, services he provides, or material he sells. He’s a trillionaire because of resources he owns. This is the definition of capitalism. Sometimes, when we reformists deride “capitalism,” conservatives accuse us of opposing free markets. Not so: markets exist in economic models other than capitalism. Rather, capitalism is the system that controls who owns which resources, and how they’re priced.

Home Depot is a market. So is the informal collocation of off-the-books day laborers in the Home Depot’s parking lot. Home Depot’s market is regulated by legislation, Federal Reserve policy, and labor law. The day laborer market is regulated by trust and honor. But only the Home Depot is capitalist, since it also owns its concrete slab building, its supply contracts, and the parking lot where the day laborers meet.

But Musk has reached a plane where Home Depot can’t reach. Home Depot has value only if it creates value for other people. It must sell product at sufficient mark-up to generate profit, but not so much that it discourages commerce. It must both read the present market, and anticipate future trends. And it must make moral compromises, such as letting undocumented day laborers use its grounds.

Let’s put it another way. A friend of mine, a registered Libertarian and outspoken Musk supporter, owns the local craft brewery. He owns his building, his tanks, his trucks, and his distribution contracts. But to remain solvent and pay his workers, he must produce beer. He can’t sell futures on his proposed ability to produce epoch-making innovative beer, eventually, then punt down the road. He must sell beer now.

This doesn’t apply to Musk. Of the six corporations Musk controls—Tesla, X Corp, xAI, SpaceX, NeuraLink, and the Boring Company—only Tesla currently sells products on the open market. And those, as reported by neutral reviewers, are good-enough cars whose resale value is undercut by limited battery life. Musk mostly sells the promise of future dividends, a promise he’s never consummated, and keeps moving into the future.

It’s apparently paradoxical. He’s charmless in media interviews, disdains workers and women, espouses small-f fascist politics, and sells mostly empty promises. Yet the retail value of those promises has made Musk a trillionaire. Which means that, ultimately, the foundation of that trillion is Musk himself. At least Cornelius Vanderbilt, for all his dick-swinging vulgarity, built actual railroads. What even is Elon’s trillion?

Obsolete Men and Vanishing Adulthood

This essay is a follow-up to Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic and Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

Braden “Clavicular” Peters

I don’t like giving Braden “Clavicular” Peters free oxygen, largely because his philosophy is so dangerous that I fear it becoming airborne. His belief that life belongs to those who are good-looking enough is maybe not controversial, as we merely average-looking men can attest. But his desire to manipulate his physiognomy to become as absurdly handsome as possible, involves a regimen of intensive self-harm.

It was bad enough with men like Andrew Tate, whose abusive workout regimen has distorted his body as badly as his soul. Any psychologist can tell you that obsessive bodybuilding, to the point where your body becomes cartoonish, emerges from the same well of self-hatred that manifests in women as anorexia nervosa. Tate is loud and charismatic enough to make his insecurities everyone else’s problem, at great mutual cost.

Peters, though, doesn’t just distort himself. Bodybuilding is only part of a larger regimen, which includes injecting dangerous drugs, wolfing down questionable supplements, and self-flagellation. He became the public face of “looksmaxxing” in recent months as the most grotesque part of his regimen—self-administered facial beatings with a hammer—went viral. He believes that treating himself with violence will make him more conventionally handsome.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Recent photos show Peters looking like an exaggerated form of a mid-20^th Century matinee idol, with big shoulders, great hair, and a well-defined chin. Of course, as I write, Peters has recently turned twenty, so whether his good looks represent his abusive regimen, or simply graduating from awkward adolescence, is subject to debate. What we can’t debate, though, is: this man looks thirty.

Telling a twenty-year-old woman that she looks thirty would probably get you smacked. In American culture, female physical beauty correlates with outward markers of fertility, which means youth. Women use ointments, tinctures, injections, and surgery to stave off the appearance of age, though the results are questionable. Lauren Sanchéz Bezos’ recent appearance at the Met Gala resulted in laughter at her augmented appearance and questionable wardrobe.

Lauren Sanchéz Bezos

But for men, looking older is desirable. In interviews, Peters describes injecting himself with steroids at age fourteen to achieve the shredded look that normally requires years of dedication and effort. His famous, highly defined jaw, does indeed come to most men through years of small-scale trauma, sports injuries, and dangerous work. Like millions of adolescents, Peters wants to skip the dues-paying stage and be recognized as an adult.

Who can blame him? As entry-level professional jobs dwindle, men keep jobs into their twenties and thirties that formerly belonged to teenagers. Countless adults, of both biological sexes, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ houses. Student debt, once a ten-year commitment, has become a lifelong burden. The average age of first-home purchase is now forty. In such an environment, paying one’s dues in linear time is downright foolish.

In such an environment, Peters doesn’t want to merely look good. Placed in his social context, Peters wants to speed-run adulthood, or anyway the one aspect of adulthood which he can control. Savvy media manipulators can fake the personal characteristics that make older men attractive to women, including emotional regulation and economic stability. But only those willing to treat themselves violently can look old enough to enter the market.

However, let’s continue looking at that same broader context. The ways that men used to hasten rugged good looks, like playing sports or doing difficult physical labor, are all communitarian. There’s no such thing as solitaire football, and building a house requires a team. The ways men formerly organized themselves into communities, including labor unions, religious congregations, and even bowling leagues, look increasingly quaint, if they even still exist.

Peters has to speed-run adulthood alone because, otherwise, he has nowhere to go. Modern life has become mostly solitary and, unless you’re born to money, the chance of getting ahead through hard work and ingenuity alone is virtually nil. Peters has made himself a mass-media grotesque, but in doing so, he’s captured our attention, the one meaningful resource for cash-poor boys hoping to make themselves a life in American modernity.

Our solution must involve getting outside our own homes, and outside our own heads. Easier said than done. But even as churches and unions seem irrelevant, many communities still have adult sports leagues, maker spaces, and public libraries. Individuals and small groups can organize new networks, like community choirs, improv companies, and charitable volunteer organizations.

We must seek the trappings of adulthood, once hoarded in the workplace, out in the large rcommunity.

Reading and Thinking in a Paranoid Age

Johann Hari

Yesterday, as I write, I finished reading a book. Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have merited an announcement; I did it as regularly as breathing. But this has become more rare and remarkable, and as a book blogger, I have concrete evidence that this is the first time I closed a book and proclaimed “Finished!” in nearly three months. Not that I haven’t read, but I haven’t followed one book through to the end.

Nor am I alone. Anecdotally, my friends report a massive increase in doomscrolling, perhaps the most passive activity which modernity permits. One sits with a small, pocket-sized computer, flipping listlessly through two or three orphan apps, hoping something jumps out urgently enough to fill the spiritual void we all apparently share. Nothing arrives, of course. But the hope of finding something provides a greater sense of reward than getting up and doing something constructive can.

Johann Hari synopsizes the multi-pronged science behind this decline. Some of it comes innately from just getting older, as it becomes harder to create new synaptic connections. Activities which come easily to youth and young adults, like reading, studying, or handicrafts, just grow harder for adults, and we need to develop discipline enough to overcome this. So yes, if reading and art seem more difficult than when you were small, that isn’t just rosy-eyed nostalgia.

But the problem isn’t wholly internal. Technology critics note that our smartphones, tablets, and other screen technology have addictive qualities. App developers maximize the hypnotic quality of their interfaces, utilizing design principles that make us want to stare. Streaming content on platforms like Netflix and Disney+ have more camera cuts and other jolt moments than the broadcast television I grew up watching, which triggers the reptile brain to keep watching, scanning for further life-saving inputs.

I cringe, though, at the word “addictive.” The concept of addiction gets misused in government PR and middle-school “Just Say No” curricula. Often, to describe something as “addictive” implies almost magical properties, like a cursed object that weakens and destroys its owner. This isn’t so. Not everyone who tries cannabis or cocaine becomes addicted, just as not everyone who fiddles on social media on their phones becomes addicted. Something deeper and more primal happens first.

Dr. Gabor Maté

As addiction specialist Gabor Maté writes, addictions develop under specific circumstances. Some people become addicted after life-shaping traumas: childhood abuse and neglect mold children’s brains in ways that protect them as kids, but are maladaptive in adults. Addicts consume their product to numb their trauma scars. Other addicts have more fleeting issues. The second-leading cause of addiction is loneliness, which addicts can overcome through sociability. For AA participants, spirituality arguably matters less than the meetings.

What, then turns screens addictive? Returning to Hari, he writes that certain life experiences create trauma-like effects on the brain. This includes certain forms of uncertainty, including poverty, homelessness, and war. Many American soldiers notoriously became heroin addicts in Vietnam, then cleared up when they returned to civilian life. I grew up believing that people became homeless because they were addicts, but that’s backward; they become addicts because they’re homeless. Substances take the fear away.

America’s economy has created unprecedented prosperity, but hasn’t distributed it equitably. Elon Musk is currently angling to become our first trillionaire, while uncountable underemployed Americans rely on multiple part-time jobs and gig work to stay afloat. I’ve bounced among short-term jobs for three years, often panicking to keep rent paid and lights on. When I pause between hustles, that allows time for thoughts to emerge, reminding me of every bill about to go into arrears.

Hari and Maté agree that such uncertainty warps the brain. In conditions of constant fear, the limbic system, and especially the amygdala, gets bigger, while the prefrontal cortex withers. A larger amygdala makes us highly reactive, even downright paranoid. An atrophied cortex means less self-discipline, and just as importantly, less ability to empathize with strangers. Both of these make us too impatient for the detail work and contemplative pace of reading or of creating art.

Uncertainty and paranoia have become our standard of life. Not just economic uncertainty, but street violence and wars of choice permeate our daily lives. This results in a population more primed for fear, snap reactions, and restlessness. Into that circumstance, streaming TV media increasingly gives us very loud, aggressive, juddery content that sates our need for stimulation. Something as sedate as reading or listening to classical music seems quaint. So no, it’s not just me.

Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto

Elinor Ostrum, 1933-2012

When Italian-English explorer John Cabot “discovered” the island of Newfoundland in 1497, he marveled at the ocean’s abundance of North Atlantic cod. Cabot’s journals claim his men could fill their stocks by simply dangling baskets overboard. When English printers published news of Cabot’s discovery, commercial fishers flocked to what became Canada. But, as Cabot sailed with Bristol seamen, some historians suspect that Bristol fishers harvested the waters now called the Grand Banks even before Columbus.

Elinor Ostrum is the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Her reputation rests mainly on her first book, 1990’s Governing the Commons. In this book, Ostrum demonstrates how traditional agrarian societies manage commonly owned resources, like pastureland. She commences the book by describing how a Turkish fishing village partitioned access to their patch in the Aegean Sea, ensuring everybody has equal access to prime waters without depriving anyone else.

I remember reading Ostrum’s description of folk governance and thinking: that sounds great, but one diesel-powered trawler with a five-mile line could ruin that arrangement for everyone. Ostrum wrote her book to refute Garrett Hardin’s 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons, which postulates that humans will inevitably exhaust commonly held property. Generations of economists, like Ostrum, rebut Hardin’s claim by noting that, for centuries, humans didn’t exhaust the commons; that’s a Twentieth Century phenomenon.

Archeological evidence suggests that Newfoundland was the last part of the Americas to receive permanent human settlement. But the Maritime Archaic people, a lost culture known only by their artifacts, settled the island around 9,000 years ago, and humans have occupied the island ever since. Humans, both indigenous nations and European colonists, survived side-by-side with Newfoundland’s caribou herds, abundant timber, and Grand Banks fisheries for centuries, and all four flourished. The relationship seems highly reciprocal.

Now the timber, caribou, and fisheries are critically endangered. Deep-water fishing, once an artisanal trade conducted with hand tools in wooden vessels, is now performed commercially by steel-hulled ships with diesel engines and massive refrigerator compartments. Those who could afford these massive pollution machines could haul enough catch to feed the lucrative European and North American markets, while artisans lost revenue on scale. This became an embodiment of that capitalist truism: Them that has, gets.

Garrett Hardin, 1915-2003

Garrett Hardin based his treatise on the theories of Thomas Malthus and the behavior of single-celled organisms in laboratories. Malthus claimed that humans’ ability to procreate will inevitably exceed nature’s ability to grow food, leading to resource depletion and catastrophic die-offs, which Hardin verified among paramecia, which exhaust all their food, then starve. Malthus (a former clergyman) believed the most charitable action was to let the poor die. Hardin preferred benevolent intrusions into market economics.

These conclusions contain stacked assumptions. Malthus assumed that conditions he observed among Surrey peasant farmers, in a historically unique time of economic upheaval, represented humanity overall. Hardin assumed that microorganisms in laboratories behaved like wild microfauna. Both are wrong for comically obvious reasons. Surrey was heavily impoverished by aristocrats adjusting poorly to the rapid transition to industrial capitalism, while lab samples don’t reflect wild conditions, where food replenishes itself, while predators thin the wild microbiome.

For centuries, humans managed natural resources fairly responsibly. This includes indigenous American populations, which (generally) regarded land husbandry as sacred duty, and Europeans, who simply lived on the land they worked. Then the Enclosure Movement happened. Once-shared resources, like Hardin’s hypothetical pastureland, became private property, which one could license to exploit. Same with mineral resources, wild game, and even residential land. Communities, which once governed resources jointly, became atomized, competing for access to scarce staples.

Newfoundland fisheries didn’t collapse because “fishers” depleted the ecosystem; they collapsed because industrial trawlers depleted the ecosystem. And industrial trawlers happened because the government distributed fishing licenses, subsidized oil extraction, and collected taxes in ways that disadvantaged small operators. The Grand Banks yielded a record haul in 1968, then fell precipitously; yields tumbled around ninety percent in five years. A two-year federal fishing moratorium, introduced in 1992, has been extended indefinitely for over thirty years.

In other words, technology and policy combined to endanger the once-lush Grand Banks. Because humans assumed the trend lines would continue forever, they made no transitional plans; Newfoundland’s economy collapsed overnight. This bears consideration, not just for Hardin and Ostrum’s debates, but because it can happen again. As America has recently drawn in its own record harvests, powered by million-dollar equipment and ammonia-based fertilizer, we must think carefully about whether we’re following the same path.

The chain of thought continues in Notes Toward a Semi-Luddite Manifesto, Part 2

SNAP Disaster and Our Un-Free Market

By the time you read this, you’ll already know whether America’s federal government has suspended SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, or whether President TACO has done what he regularly does, reversing himself at the last minute. This of course matters for millions of American families. But in the long term, I question whether the event itself matters more than the systematic weaknesses it exposes in the American economy.

Walmart, America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, receives almost a quarter of all SNAP benefit spending, according to Axios. This reflects multiple factors: for instance, that Walmart exists in all fifty states and most territories. But it also reflects their decision to place themselves in chronically underserved neighborhoods and communities. Walmart has a near-monopoly stranglehold on many areas’ food supply, and they use it.

I can’t be the only news junkie who remembers the Great EBT bollix of 2013. I’ve already written about the event itself, and the moralistic outrage it precipitated online. The ways in which Walmart has no only gobbled up its captive market, but has become the necessary go-to for its market’s rush buying, reflects that America’s consumer economy is not free. The corporation has established permanent colonies in its market’s collective imagination.

This didn’t just happen. Informed critics have described how Walmart utilizes public subsidies to corner markets. Their government largesse often totals in the billions of dollars, and includes many of their own employees relying on SNAP benefits. This isn’t news; I discovered it in the 1990s. Economist John C. Médaille even asserts that even the interstate highway system functions as a subsidy, as Walmart’s just-in-time restocking method depends on reliable, wide roads.

Nominally, Walmart remains a private entity controlled by shareholders, mostly the Walton family. But its success has relied heavily on public-private partnerships and government welfare. Given this symbiosis, and the corporation’s ability to manipulate Defense Department levels of money, it bears asking when Walmart, and corporations of its size, stop being private companies, and become de facto shadow government bureaus.

Current events, however, reveal how precarious that market stranglehold really is. The threatened SNAP shutdown has caused fears of Walmart riots—not from the company itself, which rejects the rumors, but from ordinary customers repeating scuttlebutt online. If Walmart controls a neighborhood’s access to food, clothing, and domestic goods, then cutting off that access doesn’t just hurt the community. It also radicalizes its members to demand the goods hidden behind the wall.

Nor do I use the word “radicalize” lightly. The French Revolution happened amid a combination of massive imperial wealth, and unequal distribution, to the point where Jean Valjean’s loaf of bread has become iconic. Argentina came close to a populist revolution in 2001 because people couldn’t afford groceries, although groceries remained available. Argentina kept exporting food, especially beef, during its economic nadir; regular Argentinians just couldn’t afford it.

Appallingly similar conditions exist now. Elon Musk is currently tracking to become the world’s first trillionaire, money he can never possibly spend. Meanwhile, Walmart, as the largest SNAP vendor, has food available to sell, but SNAP recipients, most of whom are employed, simply can’t afford to buy it. If working-class Americans go hungry long enough, one wonders whether we might, for the first time since Bacon’s Rebellion, develop a sense of class solidarity.

Before continuing, I’ll acknowledge I’m slightly contradicting my past self. I recently made excuses for the influence which dollar stores have on America’s rural communities, saying that they create a nascent sense of economic self-determination. Of course, Dollar General has an almost Walmart-like grip on many communities, and they’re as vulnerable to a SNAP shutdown as any other monopolistic retailer.

Yet I stand by my prior opinion. I admitted that Dollar General is imperfect, and called it a transitional stage for rural economics. By teaching country dwellers that they, too, deserve nice things, I’d argue they also teach country dwellers to join forces to demand nice things. I still believe that’s true, and it encourages small town people, who often swallow a “rugged individualism” economic pill, to see their situation as collective, not atomized.

These events reveal that Walmart, Dollar General, and other near-monopolies rely upon government support on both the supply and the demand ends. A market economy in a massively technological society requires a stabilizing hand that remains responsive to the populace, not the plutocrats. We may reorganize that stabilizing hand, but if it does the job of a government, then that’s what it is. Modernity demands, not negates, a strong state.

In Praise(ish) of Dollar Stores

The Dollar General I've grown reliant on, in a Nebraska town of only 1000 people

We’ve all heard the ubiquitous complaints about Dollar General and similar “dollar stores,” though that name is increasingly anachronistic. They keep prices low by paying workers poorly, running perpetually short-staffed, and excluding local artisans. Their modular architecture is deaf to local culture and design. They distort our ideas of what commercial goods actually cost. Even John Oliver dedicated a block of valuable HBO time to disparaging how Dollar General hurts workers and the local community.

Like a good economic progressive, I internalized these arguments for years. I prided myself on avoiding dollar stores like plague pits. I aggressively disparaged when a treasured local business got flattened to build a Family Dollar store. Even on an extended Missouri holiday, fifteen minutes from the nearest grocery store, I finally gave in and entered the Dollar General, only two minutes away, I still rationalized myself by saying I remained dedicated to local businesses.

Through the last year, though, I’ve found my perspective shifting. I find dollar stores, and Dollar General specifically, more necessary than I previously realized. Dollar General is like audiobooks, or a Slanket. These products, invented to streamline disabled people’s lives, have gotten derided by able-bodied elites, who don’t realize how privileged their taunts really are. Likewise, Manhattan-based John Oliver, and writers in coastal California, might not realize how dollar stores improve life in rural America.

In the year I’ve spent caring for an aged relative in rural Nebraska, I’ve become deeply reliant on Dollar General. It keeps longer hours than the local grocery store, auto parts retailer, or pharmacy. This has made it absolutely essential for buying convenience foods, over-the-counter meds, and motor oil. That’s saying nothing of other products that nobody else sells locally, like home décor, kitchen supplies, and paperback books. Without Dollar General, these commodities would disappear.

Not that semi-luxury commodities don’t exist in rural areas. But without Dollar General, the nearest big-box retailer selling these products would be over an hour’s drive away, or else Amazon, which delivers to rural areas only sluggishly. The stereotyped image of rural America, with its drab houses, faded curtains, and faded clothes bespeaks the ways retailers don’t bother investing outside already-lucrative markets. Dollar General, by contrast, arguably creates lucrative markets in marginal or abandoned areas.

The small but diverse produce section in my local Dollar General

City slickers might not realize how inaccessible food is in rural areas. The term “food deserts” often describes urban cores, especially non-White neighborhoods, where Dr. King realized that fruits and vegetables were unaffordable, if available. But rural America is also heavily food desertified. Because economic forces, especially banks, force farmers to abandon diverse agriculture for industrial monocropping, farmers seldom eat their produce. In the northern Great Plains, farms mostly grow livestock feed, not human food.

These conditions didn’t just happen. Macroeconomics isn’t inevitable, like rain. Top-level American economic policy flooded America’s central corridor with population after the Civil War, via the Homestead Act. But into the Twentieth Century, that same economic policy largely abandoned the homesteader population in favor of urban industrialization. America still needs its rural agricultural population; it just doesn’t provide that population with meaningful support anymore, since they aren’t lucrative donors. Nobody ever got rich hoeing corn.

Dollar stores are the logical market-driven response to this abandonment. Rural communities have some money, and they want—and deserve—nice things, like attractive curtains, affordable art supplies, and small electronics. Dollar General recognized an unmet market, and met it. Sure, they manipulate wholesalers and use just-in-time restocking to keep prices artificially cheap, in ways unsupported local businesses just can’t. But they aren’t culpable for economic policies that made Pop’s old-timey general store fiscally unviable.

Even their notoriously impersonal architecture reflects America’s top-level economic policy. Sure, I’d love if dollar stores hired local architects to conform their buildings to regional aesthetics. But Walmart and Target already priced architects out of small markets, and America’s rural economic abandonment means the dominant design style is often “decay.” Dollar General’s warehouse-like design and modular construction let them move into marginal markets quickly without incurring high amortized overhead, which just makes good business sense.

Don’t misunderstand me: dollar chains’ low pay, homogenous product, and deafness to local industry aren’t sustainable. I’ve grown fond of Dollar General, but at best, they’re a transitional response to larger forces. But John Oliver’s implicit expectation of shoving a Whole Foods into every small market is equally unrealistic. If we use the market access which dollar stores provide to build toward something better, then these chains have helped America through its current economic malaise.

Food, Economic Injustice, and You

Much modern farming less resembles gardening than strip-mining

Amid all the ICE raids which crisscrossed America last week, tipping into street protests in Los Angeles, the Omaha meatpacking raids got forgotten by the national media. This perhaps isn’t surprising. A substantially industrial city with limited glamour, Omaha often gets overlooked unless something catastrophic happens, like blizzards closing Interstate 80, or local darling Bright Eyes releasing an album.

Yet this raid speaks to an undercurrent in American policy. Specifically, since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation establishing the Department of Agriculture, American ag policy has focused on abundant yields and low prices. This has involved persistent overproduction of commodity crops, coupled with price supports, ever-improving technology, and efforts to create markets internationally.

As George Pyle writes, efforts to bolster production probably made sense in the middle 19th century, during a civil war, when threats to food supply were common war tactics. But conditions have changed markedly, and our central approach hasn’t kept pace. Agricultural technologies based on diesel-burning equipment and ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers have resulted in bloated yields, as Vaclav Smil writes.

Nick Reding describes how consolidation in the ag processing industry has cut wages so low, workers can only make rent by taking double shifts. Such marathon hours are often only possible when workers supplement themselves with illegal amphetamines. Though I broadly support drug legalization, amphetamines are so destructive that even I prefer they remain illegal. However, workers use them for one basic reason: to keep working, and get paid.

Nor are these outcomes unexpected. As Greg Grandin writes, President Clinton knew that subsidized American crops were artificially abundant and cheap. Before NAFTA went into force, he authorized what was, until then, the largest increase in Border Patrol manpower ever. Clinton knew that lifting trade barriers on subsidized American agriculture would cause food to hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing.

And he was right. Rural poverty in Mexico’s agrarian south quickly exceeded 70%, forcing workers, mostly men, to abandon ancestral farms and go anywhere that work existed. Something similar happened when Clinton forced Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to sign a free-trade agreement as a condition of American involvement in deposing Haiti’s illegal coup. Now, Mexican and Haitian workers comprise the largest number of America’s undocumented population.

Pigs don't live in pens anymore; this is where your pork comes from

Numerous White Americans remain invested in farming and agriculture, but primarily as owners or live-in bosses. Because much industrialized agriculture uses machine labor, full-time farmhands usually aren’t necessary. Workers remain necessary while planting and harvesting, but these aren’t full-time positions. This work mostly gets done by migrants—a condition few White workers would accept. Undocumented laborers mostly do this work.

That brings us full-circle to the meat processing plants which began this essay. Before 1990, meat processing was considered semi-skilled labor. The meatpackers in Upton Sinclair’s propaganda novel The Jungle were mostly White, first- or second-generation Eurpoean immigrants. But as Nick Redling describes, meatpacking industry consolidation after 1990 drove wages so low that workers with kids and mortgages can’t afford those jobs anymore.

Currently, America enjoys the cheapest food in world history; per George Pyle, most Americans pay more for packaging than for food at the supermarket. But food is historically cheap because it requires undocumented workers pulling abusive hours in Spartan conditions to plant, harvest, and process it. Workers with legal rights would complain to the NLRB under such conditions; undocumented workers have nowhere to complain.

Eyal Press claims that killing floor workers are among America’s most despised, doing work which consumers demand, but which offends our morals. We expect faceless strangers to kill, dress, and package our meat. Similar problems abound in related fields. Tom Russell notes that the Trump Administration wants a border wall built in regions where only Mexican migrants have the skills necessary for such epic construction.

Anecdotes of supervisors demanding long hours and dangerous work from meatpackers are legend. These demands come with the threat, either explicit or implicit, that we’ll call La Migra if you don’t perform. But like a nuclear warhead, this threat works only when unrealized. Once you drop your atomic bomb, literal or metaphorical, it’s expended, gone forever. And management is left with a vacant killing floor.

Donald Trump heard the threats of calling Immigration, and instead of recognizing them for the rhetorical device they were, he believed them. He authorized his administration to perform massive round-ups that look good on right-wing cable TV, but undercut employers’ labor pool. If this doesn’t stop, agriculture employers will have to start paying workers what they’re worth—and you’ll see it in your grocery bill.

Architecture and American Values

Nottaway Plantation in its salad days, in a promo photo from Explore Louisiana

The recent online brouhaha over the fire which destroyed Nottaway Plantation is revealing more than I wanted to know about American priorities. Billed as the largest antebellum mansion in the American south, at 64 rooms and 53,000 square feet, it stood intact from its completion in 1859 until last Thursday. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the Louisiana plantation house served mainly as a resort hotel, convention center, and tourist trap.

Social media reaction has split along predictable lines. Some respondents, mostly White, have insisted that the mansion’s historical significance and its elaborate architecture make it a legitimate destination, a piece of Louisiana heritage, and a massive loss. Others, a rainbow coalition, have rallied behind the plantation’s slaveholding heritage and called it a monument to American racism. Each side accuses the other of viewing the destruction through partisan political lenses.

Wherever possible, I prefer to assume that all debate participants, even those I disagree with, start from a good-faith position. I don’t want to believe that those who don’t spotlight the slaveholding heritage are, perforce, celebrating racism. And I hope those who center slavery as the building’s heritage, don’t covertly cheer for destruction. Though my sympathies lie strongest with the anti-slavery caucus, I’d rather believe everyone starts from good faith.

If that’s true, it follows that those mourning the loss of historic architecture, believe the building’s structural significance and its socioeconomic significance, exist in different compartments. They segregate different aspects of the building’s history into beehive-like cells, and assume the separate qualities don’t influence one another. Social media commenters have written words to the effect that “Slavery was terrible, but the building matters in its own right, too.”

This argument holds some water. Nottaway Plantation was, until last week, a surviving example of a mid-19^th Century architectural ethos. Not a reconstruction, a replica, or an homage, but an actual piece of physical history, a primary source. We shouldn’t discount that significance, regardless of who built the building; a physical artifact of American history existed for 166 years, until it didn’t. America is arguably poorer for the loss.

However, compartmentalizing that history from the circumstances which created it, is itself ahistorical. I worked in the construction industry, and I can attest that the largest ongoing cost is human labor. Nowadays, construction involves copious large costs, including power tools, diesel-burning equipment, and transportation. But these are, usually, fixed-term costs. Human labor is ongoing and requires infusions of money, if only because workers get hungry.

Nottaway Plantation during the fire, in a photo from CBS News

Much labor is especially valuable because it’s rare. Framing carpenters, brickmasons, metalworkers, and other skilled laborers demand a premium because their skills require years of honing. Nottaway Plantation was built during the days of gaslamps and outdoor toilets, but nowadays, electricians, plumbers, and HVAC installers command competitive rates. Building such a massive mansion required skilled labor from workers who, being enslaved, couldn’t float their terms on the open market.

Many conditions also depend on the time and place. Anybody who’s lived in Louisiana knows that most of the state stands on spongy, wet soil. Building a multistory mansion requires sinking foundational pilings deep, possibly down to the bedrock, to prevent the building submerging under its own weight. Today, such pilings require diesel-burning machinery, sump pumps, and cast iron. In 1859, those pilings required many, many humans.

Therefore, the building’s architectural significance—which is real and valuable—relies upon the labor employed. Large-scale monumental construction always requires somebody able to pay the army of skilled workers whose labors make the building possible. This problem isn’t uniquely American, either. European monuments, like Notre Dame and the Vatican, were first built before Europe reintroduced chattel slavery, but the buildings wouldn’t be possible without the poverty of serfdom.

Too many accomplishments of human activity, rely on a small sliver of society having too much money. Without rich people willing to pay skilled workers, we wouldn’t have the White House, the Venice canals, legendary artwork like the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David, and other monuments of human capability. If Leonardo or Pierre L’Enfant needed day jobs to subsidize their crafts, they’d never have accomplished the potential within them.

So yes, Nottaway Plantation reflects architectural history and artistic movements. But it also reflects economic inequality and the labor conditions of antebellum Louisiana. It’s impossible to separate the two spheres of influence, no matter how much the privileged few wish it. Nottaway was an artifact of physical beauty and a community gathering place. But it emerged from specific conditions, which we cannot compartmentalize from the building itself.

Rich Men and Their Misshapen Brains

Elon Musk

Watching the eagerness with which American billionaires have rushed to pay obeisance to President-Elect Donald Trump has been a real education. Not in the sense of realizing that America’s rich are venal—that’s hardly news. But the haste they show in showering Trump’s planned inauguration with money and other resources speaks volumes to what these men want. They’re pouring million-dollar investments into an inauguration that threatens to become a coronation.

I’ve often wondered what makes men (and it’s indeed mostly men) want that kind of money. Oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have more money than they can possibly spend. And more than money: as Giblin and Doctorow write, half of Earth’s online advertising revenue flows through two companies, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Half of Earth’s online commercial transactions move, directly or indirectly, through Amazon or an affiliated company.

In other words, these monumentally rich oligarchs, some of whom command wealth exceeding the GDP of entire nations of the Global South, have not only money, but enough power to make medieval potentates blush. These financial superstars have become so powerful that, like real stars, their very presence bends time, space, and the value of a buck. Yet they pay homage to the political candidate who promises them ever more.

They cannot spend that kind of money. It cannot buy them any more comfort or security than they already have. Indeed, they need to employ cadres of guards, managers, and other functionaries to protect their wealth, making holding the money a financial burden on their bottom line. Paradoxically, having such money and power makes them poorer and more vulnerable. Therefore they must want something else, something non-monetary, from their investments.

Mark Zuckerberg

My mind returns to two prior authors I’ve reviewed. Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté writes that substance abuse patients choose their various addictions according to whatever traumas they suffered in childhood. Children who endured chronic physical abuse, become adults who abuse painkillers like alcohol. Maté writes that one heroin addict described the feeling of shooting up as receiving the warm hugs she never received as a child.

Business executive Joe Plumeri describes himself as a “workaholic,” whose social worth derives from his time spent working. In his memoir, Plumeri describes not only putting himself through punishing hours, but demanding his subordinates do likewise, sacrificing personal time, family, and sleep in favor of making money. Though a billionaire himself, Plumeri clocks less than one percent of Elon Musk’s wealth, too little to crack the Forbes 400 list.

The two most prominent relationships in Plumeri’s memoir are his father, and his son. In an early chapter, Plumeri describes his father showing him around the better-off neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, showcasing the splendor available to those who achieve worldly success. By his own admission, Plumeri put everything else behind achieving the worldly success that, he learned early, would make his father proud.

That “everything” includes Plumeri’s relationship with his eldest son, whom Plumeri describes struggling with alcohol and drugs. Christian Plumeri destroyed himself on substances, seeking the validation and happiness that his distant, workaholic father couldn’t provide. Notably, he completely fails to notice the parallels between his own work addiction, and his son’s substance addiction. Both Plumeris wanted their father’s love, and couldn’t do enough to earn it.

Jeff Bezos

One wonders, reading these accounts, what comparable relationships men like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos lack. Musk seeks extremes of wealth and political power, arguably to find the acceptance and love he increasingly doesn’t receive from his numerous children and ex-wives. Other billionaires hoard land, build spacecraft, and otherwise perform spectacles to receive adulation from shareholders and the public.

Because deep down, I propose, they’re lonely.

These men started off rich: Zuckerberg was a Harvard legacy admission. Bezos received seed capital from his parents. Musk has tried to bury the emerald mine story, but his own family confirms it. Given the crazed, excessive lengths they’ve travelled to become even richer, it seems likely that they, like Plumeri, inherited the myth of personal worth having a dollar value. They hoard resources because, basically, they need a hug.

Consider all they acclaim they’d receive by dedicating even a portion of their wealth to improving society. They have money enough to end famine, conquer homelessness, or halt global climate change. Instead, they’re donating millions to Donald Trump’s inaugural extravaganza. Because despite everything, their brains are already adapted to loneliness, rejection, and isolation. They’ll never make friends like ordinary humans.

And that’s why peons like me will never become rich.

Capitalism and the Winners’ Society

Jeopardyhost Ken Jennings

I just did something I used to do frequently, but haven’t done for years: I watched a full episode of Jeopardy. Television has lost its allure in recent years, and Jeopardy’s appeal to shallow knowledge of inconsistent topics has become an emblem of modern society. Too many people know surface-level flotsam about nearly everything, giving us all a false sense of expertise on topics where we’re profoundly ignorant.

One player, working with speed and confidence, managed to rack up the largest cash haul on the stage, then he hit a Daily Double. He decided to risk it all on a question about corporate ad slogans. Yes, he risked it all--and lost it all. He went from being in the lead, to having nothing.

American capitalism loves winners. I’ve witnessed journalists, economists, and social media stans tripping over their own packers to lavish praise on billionaire CEOs. It’s often unintentionally hilarious to watch White boys without two dimes to rub together, invent phony narratives to explain why Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are epoch-making geniuses, not just winners of America’s greenback lottery.

Business writers I've reviewed on this blog have lavished praise on society's winners. They will perform seriocomic contortions to justify why, say, Jack Welch or Sam Walton are intrepid adventurers and the epitome of moneyed masculinity. To critics like me, these paragons of capitalism are highway robbers and guttersnipes who hoard the wealth created by others. But their fluttering groupies insist their favorite CEOs generated their wealth by rubbing two sticks together in the woods.

Elon Musk

Among these praises, one seems pointedly recurrent: billionaires deserve their riches because they risked their own seed capital. Risk looms large in billionaire mythology. Michael J. Sandel quotes philosopher Robert Nozick as saying that all wealth is the product of bold risk-taking and unique innovation, the outcome of intrepid individuals who somehow exist in an economic vacuum.

However, even if we accept the risk mythology, it fumbles on one level: we evaluate risks by their success. It's easy to praise Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for their success, when we don't simultaneously evaluate why the founders of Sun Microsystems and Commodore International flopped so ignominiously. When we only look at those who risked and won, it's easy to think risk leads to reward.

But for every world-renowned success, there are uncountable failures. Eighty percent of American companies fail within five years. A handful of actors become million-dollar stars, but most limp along on day jobs before leaving the industry altogether. For every Facebook, there's a bloodbath of MySpaces, Geocities, and Friendsters. Failure, not success, is the usual outcome for risky courage.

Watching Jeopardy, that one player who lost everything didn't give up. He slowly won back the money he lost, then in Final Jeopardy, gambled everything again. He turned out to be the only player to recognize a question about Dashiell Hammett, and finished the game with almost four times as much as the second-place finisher. In under thirty TV minutes, he went from wearing egg on his face, to becoming the reigning champion.

Bill Gates

But that outcome wasn't inevitable. He won, not only because of his own wide-ranging knowledge, but because the rules called a halt to the game before he had a chance to lose everything again. He benefited from writers who corresponded with his backlog of trivia knowledge. And he handled the buzzer effectively--something many past players have said isn't easy.

When Elon Musk and his giddy evangelists call him a self-made billionaire, they overlook the environment that created his wealth. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the monopsony economy that makes Musk's companies possible results from public policy and social order. Regulations written to prevent past economic abuses, become barriers to entry for small start-up entrepreneurs. Inequality festers unchecked.

This doesn't mean risk-takers don't deserve reward. Musk, Bezos, Gates, and others did indeed risk their, or their investors’, seed capital, and could've eaten dust. But that doesn't mean they work alone. They used others’ skills, labor, and time. They benefited from technicians trained in state schools. Many, like Musk, received direct government subsidies to offset the costs which their risks carried.

American rhetoric in support of capitalism emphasizes the goodness of taking a risk. But in practice, our economy doesn't reward those who take a risk, but those who win. And victory is always socially conditioned. Success means what customers pay for, not what billionaires prefer. There's literally no difference between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, except that one guessed right.

First Dates, Economic Violence, and Coffee

Recently, I’ve seen two social media influencers who propounded the “rule” that women shouldn’t settle for coffee on a first date. These two influencers, both women, appear to be working separately, and use unique wording, so they probably aren’t bots. But they agreed that, unless a man takes the initiative to plan a complicated, and implicitly expensive, first date, he wasn’t worth a woman’s time. No coffee, meals a minimum.

Social media had provided would-be influencers a platform to peddle their malarkey, and many have. Few have achieved the cultural permeation of, say, Emily Post’s Etiquette or that 1994 encomium to personal repression, The Rules. But others have become widespread. Thank-you notes for job interviews, a thing that literally didn’t exist when I entered the job market in the 1990s, are now virtually mandatory in most industries.

Rules exist because we need them. Imagine a society without rules against, say, murder. I believe most people wouldn’t murder, but without a specific prohibition, a tiny minority would. Rules exist not only to standardize the principles we use to operate a complicated society, but to standardize punishments for those who transgress. Rules, written in advance and enforced by putatively neutral arbiters, make a safe and reliable society possible.

But the very processes which create rules, frequently turn those rules abusive. As Joe Nocera writes, universities created the NCAA to standardize the rules for American football. But once those rules existed, the NCAA had to enforce them—and it’s become notorious for enforcing them in arbitrary, high-handed ways which frequently disadvantage student athletes. The players hit hardest tend to be disproportionately Black and poor.

The NCAA is perhaps a frivolous example; little truly depends on BCS game rules. But the same principles apply to more significant examples. The perseverance of the Electoral College shows how rules written to preserve slaveholders’ economic advantage remain part of American law. The famous difference between sentencing standards for powdered cocaine versus crack show how lawmakers continue inserting such inequality into law.

Rules inevitably create hierarchies. Even benevolent rules, like laws against murder, enshrine some people (and not others) as worthy to enforce those laws. Rules demanding job interviewees write thank-you notes protect those who not only know to do so, but have the available time. And because rules almost always arise because somebody did something that needs correcting, rules contain moral judgement against some social out-group.

When self-appointed arbiters create dating rules, we should ask whom these rules serve. Declaring that a man must present a lush evening’s entertainment, on his own dime, seems facially neutral. But it serves those who have money enough to observe the rule—which means it serves men who are generally older, Whiter, and from stable urban environments. In other words, only men already well-protected by American society deserve romantic love.

Because the rules don’t specifically say rich men deserve women, one can argue that the rules don’t marginalize women. But that’s like saying redlining isn’t racist because it doesn’t name race. Making first dates more expensive grants advantages to those already well protected by American law and economics. It functionally states that only those who have money deserve women—an attitude that reduces women to the level of market commodities.

The #MeToo movement arose in 2017 because a subset of American men believed themselves more deserving of women’s affection, romance, and sex. These men were mostly well rewarded by America’s unequal distribution of wealth, and regarded access to women as just another perquisite. Money encouraged America’s worst men to degrade and dehumanize women, specifically because they had money.

Remember, coffee dates were recommended specifically to let women escape potentially hazardous encounters. Any rule, no matter who writes it, reflects the moral presumptions of its authors, and the informal rule of having low-commitment first dates in public places stemmed from the reality that a dangerous minority of men cannot be trusted. If the last decade taught us anything, those men are more likely to have money to splash out.

Some critics might respond that some men use inexpensive first dates as access to cheap sex. This is true; no rule is perfect. But the sense of entitlement that money fosters, has historically served women very poorly, except perhaps the minority of women with comparable social and economic status to their men.

Rules are never morally neutral, and always reflect the people who write them. If those writers are rich, well-protected, and high-status, they’re also probably untrustworthy, and so are their made-up rules.

We Don't Have to Serve the Network

Elon Musk

On Monday, September 30^th, 2024, the Verizon mobile phone and data network failed for millions of Americans in multiple markets. This had obvious immediate effects for personal communications and media consumption. But for innumerable gig-economy workers, such as drivers for Über, Lyft, and DoorDash, the outage impeded their ability to work and make a living.

This follows recent outages for other digital service providers. Since Elon Musk took over Xitter and cut support personnel, the site has suffered periodic site failures. This impedes many companies’ ability to communicate en masse with their customers, but is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. Far worse is the occasional Meta shutdown, as Facebook is the login portal for numerous other digital services.

And, holy cow, remember how many services wend dark following the most recent Microsoft outage? The post-pandemic remote work boom depends, in no small part, on how Microsoft and Meta have standardized communications and data sharing. Such outages steal workers’ ability to do decentralized, autonomous fundamental jobs. Modernity absolutely requires standardization.

Consider how many documents you’ve stored on the much-vaunted Cloud. Not only virtual data systems, like Google Drive, rely on the Cloud; you can’t even save documents locally in Microsoft Word anymore. Not to disparage the sharing and backup possibilities that the Cloud makes possible, but it also creates unprecedented vulnerabilities, both to data outages and to hackers. Everything you write is possibly exposed to mass attacks.

Bill Gates

How, though, do remediate this? The decentralized post-pandemic intellectual workspace requires standardized data platforms and content sharing, which requires large companies to coordinate our systems. Put another way, there’s no such thing as an artisanal cellphone network. Numerous small businesses—from conventional businesses to spunky Etsy entrepreneurs—need concentrated data sharing.

This creates an interesting tension. We valorize entrepreneurs, freelancers, and the self-employed as economic drivers. But to have any market outside a reasonable driving distance, start-up innovators require massive corporations with thousands, if not millions, of workers. The “gig economy” treats every DoorDasher or Über driver as a separate small business. But without the umbrella corporation coordinatingtheir options, their “businesses” vanish.

As a Distributist, I believe that economics should prize personal autonomy and abjure resource hoarding. When carpenters own their tools, and farmers own their land, they have the freedom to enter fair contracts, or refuse unfair ones. But the Distributist model, first postulated in the 1910s, simply didn’t anticipate today’s industrial complexity or global economy. Our world has become less fair, not more.

Therefore, the Verizon outage forces me to reevaluate my own beliefs. Distributed post-industrial economic power requires reliable communication and data storage standards, only possible when our communications systems share a language and a network. That level of coordination only happens when boosted by large corporations. Distributed freedom for some, requires wage servitude for others.

Mark Zuckerberg

Worse, while the liberty of freelance work hypothetically strengthens individual workers, the coordination necessary to actually find work proves terribly brittle. Your DoorDasher can freely accept or refuse each proffered job, but when the network collapses, every job vanishes, leaving the worker without options. In practice, disaggregated freelancers don’t work for themselves, they work for the network.

One could expand this argument to encompass the entire economy. Capitalism’s defenders claim that market capitalism is small-d democratic because we can accept or reject any transaction. This may hold for each unique transaction, but we cannot opt out altogether. We eventually need food, shelter, and clothing, which inevitably means transactions, which means buying into the economy.

Pure libertarian freedom, therefore, is always an illusion. We’re never independent actors; we rely on networks of trust, industry, and solidarity. Whether that means trusting our employers to deal honestly, relying upon industrial processes to keep us connected, or practicing solidarity with our peers (join the union or perish!), we remain permanently enmeshed in networks. I never exist truly alone, but always positionally, within community.

I’m old enough to have watched Communism collapse live on network television. The retreat of the Eastern Bloc revealed environmental blight, impoverished communities, and personal alienation—the same effects we witness now, in late American capitalism. The conventional economic binary which the Cold War bequeathed us proves massively unprepared for the post-industrial information economy.

When the network leaves us vulnerable, we need to recognize that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of our communities, not vice versa. We require new paradigms that organize our economy, technology, and government to serve us. And I’m only just beginning to delve into how that might work.

I Don’t Like How Pessimistic I’ve Become

Scarcely had the dust settled following last week’s shooting at Apalachee High School, in Barrow County, Georgia, before the speculations started—most of it predictable. It’s the ubiquity of guns in America! It’s the lack of access to mental health care! Is the shooter trans, queer, or otherwise marginalized? Batten the hatches, kids, a massive political shitstorm is a-brewin’!

Little information is forthcoming about the shooter’s motivations. We know he’s fourteen years old,* that his parents purchased the firearm he used, and that, in an unusual maneuver, authorities have charged his parents as equally culpable for the catastrophe. The swirling accusations about overwhelming cultural trends might speak to whatever motivated the shooter, but for now, verifiable facts remain scarce.

This violence comes amid perhaps the most acrimonious election season America has seen, outdoing the previous most acrimonious election cycle, which was the last one… and the one before that. Apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides has become de rigeur in Presidential campaigns. America’s economy is supposedly thriving, but doesn’t feel productive for most Americans, since only the rich reap rewards.

As usual amid such apocalyptic circumstances, ordinary people try to reclaim the supposed lost grandeur of the past, while ignoring planning for the future. One Presidential candidate promises to “make America great again,” while the other yearns for the New Deal unitary order. Exactly when this greatness occurred remains vague, since the New Deal was as organizationally racist as the lily-white simplicity of Leave It To Beaver.

Meanwhile, hucksters remind every demographic that they can reclaim lost meaning… for cash on the barrelhead. “Men used to go to war,” laments the recurrent meme, “and now they [insert ordinary thing people do for fun].” Alpha male influencers like Andrew Tate and Alex Jones offer classes, nutritional supplements, and private guidance to become a dominant he-man. Dave Ramsey promises that Jeus wants to make you rich.

Since Andrew Tate is currently awaiting trial for sexual assault and human trafficking, we know what, in his mind, constitutes male strength. Anybody who’s worked the Sunday lunch rush at most restaurants knows that outspoken Christians can’t be trusted with money. Then, while men teach other men to abuse women, and Christians teach other Christians to hate workers, the rich think they can outspend the Grim Reaper.

Karl Marx believed that industrial capitalism would empower the working poor to develop class consciousness and overthrow their economic overlords. That maybe seemed reasonable amid the Dark Satanic Mills of pre-Victorian England, when labor actions frequently ascended into armed confrontations with literal liveried royal soldiers. To Marx, it probably seemed inevitable that what he called “alienation” would soon be universal.

It is, yes, but not as he envisioned. As the agrarian ideal recedes in memory, and factories, coal mines, and shopping malls seem inevitable, labor actions have stopped resisting the employer; workers instead defend their way of life, the system that keeps them permanently impoverished, and the bosses and billionaires who loot the masses for money. Because industrialism seems inevitable, the poor stan shamelessly for the rich.

This maybe explains trends we’ve all witnessed. It seems straightforward to me, that billionaires and resource hoarders keep the White working class impoverished, but White workers turn their rage on Black and Brown people and immigrants. Women certainly aren’t sending men to war or to the salt mines—most hyper-rich are men too—yet men pummel women, literally or figuratively, to reclaim their masculinity.

Barrow County, Georgia, is mostly White and relatively middle class. Like many similar regions, however, it’s seen its racial demographics become more diverse, and its average income stagnate, for the last quarter century. As usually happens, the economic powers use this changing population to chisel huge concessions, which means all economic gains, insofar as there are any, will trickle up.

The Apalachee High School shooter, like millions in his generation, watched the future he and his family were promised shrivel to almost nothing. Like millions of others, he looked directly at the entrenched powers making his old world look inevitable, and who now stand bathd in the economic carnage they wreaked upon the community. And like always, he blamed the poor for his plight.

Until Americans demonstrate enough imagination to realize that another world is possible, this violence will repeat itself in America’s schools, centers of commerce, and public spaces. These are the places where the world inside our minds has become small, circumscribed by our economic conditions. Mass gun removals, besides being impractical, won’t change the underlying mindset.

*Per my standard practice, I will not say the shooter's name, lest I contribute to his unearned notoriety.

The Forces That Built the World We Live In

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Something must change, but it’s impossible to untangle the overlapping social, political, and technological forces driving our world. Activists and reform advocates have wanted to change the ways we built cities, generate power, grow food, and distribute money. But every time somebody makes even fiddling procedural changes, it creates a domino effect of unintended consequences. We need a guide with encyclopedic knowledge to organize reforms without creating a cascade.

Despite searching, I can’t determine Vaclav Smil’s original scientific specialization. Every press biography and university write-up calls Smil a “scientist,” and his writing shows definite interdisciplinary background knowledge. He definitely comprehends technical aspects of modernity that well-meaning activists frequently miss. Yet reading him, I noticed that Smil misses something, too: technological whiz-bangs require humans to operate them, and humans make choices.

Professor Smil identifies four synthetic products which he calls “The Four Pillars of Modern Civilization”: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia (he apparently excludes naturally occurring petroleum). These products create physical stability, economic prosperity, and at least a measure of control over the natural environment. Unfortunately, each also carries environmental and economic prices, some vast. And we cannot remove any without upsetting the architecture of technological modernity.

So far, so good. But Smil’s analysis of these products and their public applications, overlooks that using these products always entails human choices. Sometimes, those choices are private: you individually decide whether to spray weed-n-feed, an ammonia product, on your lawn. But when those choices are scaled to society-wide levels, we call that public policy, and it always involves conscious decisions, by lawmakers or their appointed bureaucrats, about how we’ll direct our public resources.

Because I live in Corn Country, I noticed Smil’s disregard for policy mostly in his passages on agriculture. Start with this: Smil insists that, to adopt an organic agriculture model free of synthetic chemicals and heavy equipment, we’d first have to revert to medieval peasant lifestyles. This is patently ridiculous, because Jethro Tull’s seed drill and its successor, John Deere’s steel plow, displaced agricultural workers long before diesel fuel and ammonia fertilizers existed.

Yes, Jethro Tull and John Deere were real people, before they became brand names.

Smil contends that only modern agricultural output makes modern civilization possible. But in Nebraska, where I live, corn (maize) farmers flail desperately to find or invent markets for their produce. This represents chemical-intensive farming technology, but also government decisions about which crops to subsidize. America regularly unloads surplus corn on chronically impoverished nations as “food aid,” undercutting native agriculture and increasing urban poverty and global dependence.

Vaclav Smil

Similar objections permeate Smil’s technological analyses. Portland cement produces approximately seven percent of Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions, but we can’t manufacture modern roads without it. And we need roads, right? Only somewhat. Roads are an example of what economists call “induced demand,” observed when newly constructed superhighways become congested within five years. Building roads creates the need to use them, especially as Americans refuse to fund public transit networks.

Modernity has produced unprecedented comfort and wealth, as Professor Smil writes, in the aggregate. Yet modernity hasn’t distributed its benefits evenly. Traffic jams represent a manifestation of modern wealth, after all. So did Houston’s inability to drain following Hurricane Irma. Single-use urban design, which necessitates commuting, and slovenly urban design, which causes rainwater to pool and wash away topsoil, are the product of policy choices, not inevitable outcomes.

I cannot find fault with Professor Smil’s technological analyses, especially since he’s more widely informed than me. He makes a persuasive case that living like we to today absolutely requires his Four Pillars, and even minor amendments will inevitably create painful dislocations with broad knock-on effects. We didn’t get into this position of economic inequality and looming environmental collapse overnight, and we won’t escape this position without changes that will overhaul our society.

Yet for all his technological clarity, Smil’s analyses completely omit the public policy and economic considerations which created such material dependency. Notwithstanding a later chapter on “risk analysis,” Smil defines risk in substantially technical terms, excluding nonlinear human variables. The world Smil describes didn’t just happen; bureaucrats, capitalists, and other unelected decision-makers built it, brick by brick.

This book provides valuable insights into the technical qualities of modernity, in plain-English terms for non-specialist readers. But Smil writes checks his analysis can’t cash, because he sees technocracy as an inevitable progression from cause to effect. He completely excludes the human decision-making processes that got is into the situation, thus overlooking the only forces which might get us out.

Modern Economics as a Moral Instrument

Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

Most wage-earning workers with house payments and bills know the current economy cannot survive much longer. People working overtime cannot afford groceries, and housing prices are more exorbitant now than immediately before the 2007 collapse. But with Cold War rhetoric still discoloring all economic discussions, what alternatives exist? What, importantly, has worked in real-world scenarios?

Nick Romeo is a journalist, not an economist; he doesn’t postulate alternative economic models from dust. Instead, he travels to places which have implemented economics beyond the dictates of neoclassical capitalism, to report on what works, and what doesn’t. This may mean cooperative models, like the Mondragon Corporation of Spain’s Basque Country, or the direct democracy of Cascais, Portugal. Everything described here has worked somewhere, and could hypothetically work elsewhere.

In his first chapter, Romeo briefly stops through American postgraduate economics programs, examining how academicians teach contemporary economics. The discipline he encounters is self-righteous and exclusionary, with a strong historical disdain for history and the humanities. It assumes humans are rational and amoral, and mathematics can describe economics better than anything else. But an increasing number of academic economists are recognizing how purblind this approach is.

Only in this first chapter does Romeo engage in abstruse theorizing; everything else focuses on real-world accomplishments. But this theorizing helps establish Romeo’s thesis statement, further expounded throughout the book, that economics isn’t a science (he uses the term “pseudoscience” generously). Economics originated a moral enterprise and a branch of philosophy, and Romeo aims to recapture that humane foundation.

Not for nothing, Romeo writes, was the Mondragon Corporation founded by a Catholic priest, not an economist. More a federation than a centralized corporation, Mondragon deploys the skills of diverse workers, who have democratic control over their employers. Mondragon eschews love of money or worship of hero CEOs, both hallmarks of American capitalism, preferring to empower workers to take ownership of their work and workplace.

Despite his talk of morality, and his lavish praise of Mondragon’s Father Arizmendiarrieta, Romeo’s economics isn’t religious. It is, however, humanist, prioritizing workers whose labors turn raw material into wealth, and not either money or economic “laws.” For Romeo, economics should focus on getting food, shelter, and necessities to humans, and protecting the natural environment. Mathematical models fail if they don’t achieve these goals.

Nick Romeo

Romeo’s moral calculus emphasizes economic outcomes excluded from textbook considerations. Are jobs merely a nicety provided by the ownership class, he asks, or a social entitlement? When workers’ productivity and ingenuity create corporate wealth, should workers own equity? Does “making a living” mean mere subsistence, or does the economy owe workers something more? These aren’t theoretical questions, and Romeo boldly proffers field-tested answers.

However, this creates some fuzzy outcomes. Romeo admits that morally minded economic models, like True Cost, must make flying decisions about what constitutes meaningful externalities, and therefore its titular “truth” remains open for interpretation—and, sadly, misinterpretation. Likewise, he praises purpose-driven corporation models which protect workers’ rights, housing access, or environmental restoration. He politely elides the idea that corporations might harbor bad purposes.

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), a democratic model Romeo describes across several chapters, he finally admits isn’t a single system. Some ESOPs give workers complete ownership over the companies their work has created, but others grant only nominal equity, less than a 401(k). Economic liberty, Romeo admits, comes from diligence, not from assuming the monied classes care about your outcomes.

Also, approaching his denouement, Romeo admits that economic circumstances change, and responses must change commensurately. He began writing during and immediately after the pandemic (mostly written thus, “the pandemic,” as though afraid of its scientific name, like saying Macbeth). As pandemic furor dissipated, the economy moved from stagnation to inflation, and he admits it’s necessary to back-construct responses from the models he’s previously explained.

Consistently, morality matters first. Throughout the Twentieth Century, politicians and economists have sought economic models they could deploy and ignore, like a well-oiled machine. Romeo instead describes economics as a moral instrument, to be nurtured, tended, and when necessary, replaced. I’m reminded of Distributism, a similar morally-minded economic model, which uses agrarian metaphors. We farm the economy, not grease its wheels.

Romeo shows economic models which prioritize care, cooperation, and human dignity. He doesn’t invent new systems from cloth, though he admits countless further untried systems exist. Instead, he encourages us to read economics as an opportunity to increase human flourishing, build stronger communities, and preserve the environment. We only need to treat economics as a liberal art, as it is.

See also: Why We Need Liberal Arts in the Business World