21st Century Life Skills

Basic life skills that every middle class adult is expected to know in the 21st century in the United States:

1. How to type well and reasonably quickly.

2. Moderate proficiency with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Windows.

3. How to drive an automobile (unless physically impaired from doing so) and how to refuel it and what routine maintenance is necessary.

4. Knowing what to do in a car accident.

5. How to use a web browser.

6. How to call and text message and use other basic features (including the app store) of a smart phone.

7. How to tie a necktie (men only, although there are probably parallel female garments that women have to understand how to wear such as earrings and bras).

8. How to tie your shoes.

9. How to use Google maps and do Google searches.

10. Understanding of basic emojis and internet acronyms.

11. Understanding the organizational chart at a basic level, of all levels of government in the U.S.

12. Understanding of time zones and daylight savings time and leap days.

13. An ability to book a commercial airline ticket for yourself and to rent a car and book a hotel/motel.

14. An understanding of how credit cards and debit cards work.

15. A basic understanding of residential leases and mortgages.

16. A basic understanding of the financial markets.

17. An understanding of the main taxes applicable to you (retail sales, federal income, state income, property taxes) that aren't "invisible" (like gasoline taxes).

18. An understanding of basic accounting and finance concepts.

19. How to videoconference in one of several possible tools (Face time, Zoom, MS Teams, Webex, etc.).

20. A rudimentary understanding of the legal process in civil and criminal cases.

21. Knowing how to cross the street as a pedestrian.

22. Knowing how to handle weather conditions and natural disasters in your area.

23. Knowing the threats posed by wildlife and plants in your area.

24. How to read and speak in English.

25. How to use elevators and escalators.

Quote Of The Day

I'll pray that every time that landlord goes out somewhere, he accidentally steps in dog poop. 

- Victoria of Many Faces, Episode 1 (after "that landlord" refused to rent a place to her because she recently adopted a child).

How We Got Here, And Where We Might Go Next

Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.

Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.

This post surveys some of the possible answers.

An institutionalist approach

An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy. 

This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).

Fundamentally Broken Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.

Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.

Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.

Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.

Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.

Culture

The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.

This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.

Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules. 

There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.

The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.

For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.

This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.

Malleable culture

One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.

A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration. 

In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.

Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.

Static culture

In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.

It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.

In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.

Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.

This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.

This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.

More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.

Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.

Environmentally determined culture

A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.

While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.

Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households. 

Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households. 

Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties. 

Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.

Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.

Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.

The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.

Synthesis

Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true. 

Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.

On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.

If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.

The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."

Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).

In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.

Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.

How We Got Here

Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.

Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.

The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.

Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.

Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.

Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.

Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.

People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair. 

A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.

We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.

Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.

Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.

The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right. 

While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.

What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?

I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.

One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from  the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.

The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon. 

If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century. 

This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.

There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.

One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.

Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).

If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.

Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).

Music Can Make Life Liveable

 

Opera And Ballet

Opera and ballet are skeletal stories, told live in extremely intense ways, with maximum pomp and circumstance.

Madam Butterfly, for example, a gilded age classic written by Puccini that debuted in 1904, has only about 11,000 words (with considerable repetition), less than a novella, although more than a typical short story, which is fitting as it can't quite decide if it is a two act opera or a three act opera.

Pop songs are typically two to four minutes and have 300 to 700 words (often with considerable repetition), but are often recorded and are often presented with less pomp. Even a whole album of pop songs, to the extent that people make them anymore, typically has fewer words than a typical short story.

The intense focus these culture genres place on an elemental basic idea or story is part of what makes these works primal and emotionally powerful.

In contrast, a typical single volume novel has 70,000 to 100,000 words, often is made up of several volumes, and tells a much more fleshed out story with multiple intertwined parallel plot lines. It too is powerful storytelling, but in a more cerebral way.

Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

A Song For Our Times (Mad World)

 

Cheese Is Good, Teens Are Tame, Crime Is Down, Lot Of Americans Are Immigrants

* A study linked eating cheese to lower dementia risk.

* Teen alcohol, nicotine, and drug use in the U.S. is at record lows, and cocaine and heroin use, while not at record lows, it much lower than it was a few decades ago.

Teen use of alcohol, nicotine and marijuana remains at record lows, according to national survey results released Wednesday. . . .

Two-thirds of 12th graders this year said they hadn’t used alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or electronic cigarettes in the previous 30 days. Thirty years ago — before the advent of e-cigarettes — the figure was closer to about one-third.

Among 10th graders, 82% said they hadn’t used any of those substances recently. Among eighth graders, 91% didn’t use any of them. Both are records for those ages in the annual survey. . . .

The new results come from the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey, run by the University of Michigan. The annual survey has been operating since 1975 and has long been considered a top source of national data on teen substance abuse. This year’s findings are based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 in schools across the country. It was conducted from February to June this year.

Teen drug use has been gradually declining for decades, and fell dramatically at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when students across the country were told not to go to schools and to avoid parties or other gatherings. Experts expected at least a bit of a rebound as pandemic restrictions eased, but that hasn’t happened.

The 2025 results show no increases in teens’ use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or nicotine vapes in any of the three grade levels. In 2024, researchers had noted an uptick in the use of nicotine pouches, but that too held steady this year, the survey found.

Energy drinks are as popular as ever, with daily consumption reported by 23% of 12th graders, 20% of 10th graders and 18% of eighth graders.

The survey also found a striking increase in heroin use. Use by 12th graders in the previous 12 months rose to 0.9% in 2025, from 0.2% the year before. Use by 10th graders hit 0.5%, up from 0.1%. And use by eighth graders also rose to 0.5%, up from 0.2%.

Cocaine use held steady for 10th graders, but rose for eighth graders — to 0.6% — and 12th graders — to 1.4%.

Teen heroin and cocaine use are “leagues below what they were decades ago,” but the increases warrant close monitoring, said Richard Miech, survey team lead at the University of Michigan.

The teen heroin and cocaine figures are small enough that they could just be mostly a statistical random sampling variation.

* Teens in the U.S. are having sex less (from an AP news story of May 13, 2023):

[A]ccording to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . . . 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.

Teen pregnancies and the teen birthrate are also at record lows for all of history and prehistory in North America.

* As noted in the previous post, property crime rates are at record lows. And, violent crime rates are also very low.

* Meanwhile, prior to Trump taking office, the percentage of Americans that were foreign born was at an all time high.

Empirical Tests Of Economic Theories

Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.

* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.

* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.

* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.

* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.

* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.

* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.

* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes. 

One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).

The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.

In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.

Extinction Burst!

A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.

This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.

Dreaming About A Better Future: Beliefs, Culture, And Political Economy Edition

It doesn't hurt to image a better future, even if you have no way of getting all of the way there very quickly at the moment. Technologically driven change is more powerful, more inevitable, and more common, but beliefs, culture, and political economies can progress as well.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world without the beliefs held by flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, evolution deniers, ancient astronaut believers, believers in lost high technology civilizations, faith healing believers, people who believe that demons are real, people who believe in possession by evil spirits, people who think that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, anti-fluoride activists, human caused climate change deniers, people who deny that men walked on the moon, and the pseudo-scientific beliefs of adherents to other forms of pseudo-science? Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where we didn't have elected officials and politically powerful individuals who took absurd conspiracy theories like government weather manipulation, Jewish space lasers, sex trafficking dens hidden by pizza parlors, 2020 U.S. Presidential election results denial, and Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs seriously? This isn't impossible. There are many parts of the world, and there are large subcultures in other parts of the world, where these beliefs are vanishingly rare and no one of consequence holds them.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where the vast majority of people saw the metaphysical worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism as myths akin to the predominant view held by modern people today about the pagan religions of the pre-Christian Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Norse people This isn't impossible either. There are parts of the world where this is the predominant worldview, even if there are fairly small minorities of true believers and many people still acknowledge cultural identities with roots in religion.

Wouldn't it be great to have a world where there was no place where women were denied access to more than rudimentary education? This is already true in most of the world. But it is not true yet Afghanistan, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, in tribal societies in parts of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, and in some Islamic countries (or at least parts of them). Historically, women (and for that matter, almost everyone) was denied access to more than rudimentary education. But most of the world has moved beyond that situation and it isn't impossible to change that in the last remaining hold out societies.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world free of misogyny and bigotry towards foreigners, non-white people, and LGBT people? This is possible too. There are, at a minimum, large subcultures in many places in the world where this is the overwhelming the case among members of that subculture.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world that is profoundly less corrupt? This isn't impossible either. There are multiple countries, and there are more subcultures within other societies, where this has been accomplished at well.

The way that a world like this arose would matter, of course. I am imagining a path that would primarily involve gradually converting people to new worldviews, not a path with mass slaughter or one secured with fear or harsh repression, although it wouldn't necessary be completely voluntary either.

Once achieved, this cultural change could be stable. There isn't anything inherently wrong, for example, with the people in Red State America. They just have a culture and belief system the remains in place due to cultural inertia, that in the context of a modern, scientific informed, technological culture with a strong state, is dysfunctional and undermines their own well-being (in addition to making the world worse for everyone who shares the flawed democracy that is the United States with them, and everyone who is subjected to American power in its foreign and military affairs).

John Lennon's song "Imagine", however, wasn't right. We wouldn't live without war in peace and harmony even without religion, countries, and possessions. 

Life without religion can work, but isn't a panacea. Life without countries and possessions, where people just share everything and live as a brotherhood of man, doesn't work. Countries and reasonably regulated ownership of possessions are necessary conditions to peace and a decent life for ordinary people. 

Life without countries promptly leads to anarchic warfare, violence, and warlords. It looks like Somalia over the last few decades, not the garden of Eden. Indeed, well run countries, and systems of strong nation-states in the context of a well-organized international community with widely agreed upon borders, tend to suppress military conflicts, which are resolved by politicians, diplomats, and lawyers instead. 

The last time U.S. states were at war was one hundred and sixty years ago, in 1865. The last war in the U.S. with American Indians ended more than a century ago in 1924 and was followed by legislation that gave Native Americans who were parts of Indian tribes full U.S. citizenship. If the part of North America that is now occupied by the U.S. had been made up of many different independent countries, there would almost surely have been more international wars in this territory in this time period. 

We could also have a global system that somehow prevented psychopaths and authoritarian dictators from gaining control of, or holding onto control of, nations. Some of the worst wars and circumstances for people on Earth exist as a result of a handful of authoritarian leaders and their inner circles of advisors. 

We could have international institutions that could discourage wars. We could have global institutions that prevented the injustices, corruption, and incompetence of national leaders and oligarchs from persisting and triggering insurgencies, violent coups, and civil wars.

All past attempts at life without possessions in the Soviet Union, in communist regimes in Asia, and even in large-scale communes, failed. And, their disavowal of property, and of any meaningful level of inequality, was an important cause of their own collapse. It wasn't just that communism wasn't done right in these cases.

The transitions to Communism in Russia, China, and other places like Cambodia, were some of the worse catastrophes and epic scale tragedies of human history.

In the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact, communism just died, producing a variety of successor regimes, none of which significantly disavowed large accumulations of possessions. Communist Asia has kept their Maoist style one party political systems, but they didn't keep its extreme prohibitions on private ownership of property to the point where it has the toxic concentration of extreme wealth associated with "late stage capitalism" despite being nominally communist. Communist regimes in Africa have had a similar fate. Communism is Cuba has been most of the most successful attempts at it, but has been seriously flawed and authoritarian nonetheless, and communism in Venezuela has been an unmitigated disaster. But we could significantly reduce poverty and other failures of capitalism without abolishing possessions and property and market based economic systems entirely.

It is possible to have a world that is peaceful, sane, rational, believes in science, with diverse populations, that is economically fair. The culture and worldview of Star Trek's society (although, of course, not all of its technologies), is not beyond the realm of possibility at a global level in the real world. Proof of the concept exists in multiple places. Expanding this set of beliefs and worldviews, and creating laws and institutions that support these kinds of societies is difficult but not impossible. 

Just because we failed to secure "the end of history" at the historical moment when it had seemed to pundits to be just around the corner, doesn't mean that this objective is fundamentally unattainable. Most great cultural and political revolutions have taken multiple attempts to finally gain hold.

France eventually secured a republic, despite the fact that it reverted to monarchy after the French Revolution and after some subsequent republics. The anti-monarchist uprisings of 1848 mostly failed, but a coupe of generations later, Europe was made up almost entirely of republics and constitutional monarchies in which the remaining monarchs were basically symbolic figureheads. Almost every newly independent country has coups and/or civil wars at some point fairly early on after gaining independence (the U.S. included). Some European countries have experienced coups and civil wars in the 20th century. A united India only lasted a few years before its Muslim territories were partitioned, the Muslim part was split by a civil war within a generation after that, and the Muslim successor states, between them have had multiple coups. A handful of monarchies transitioned peacefully into democratic countries, but these have been the uncommon exceptions and not the rule.

Why should securing the "end of history" be any easier? It isn't. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.

The Witches Road (Only Minimal Spoilers)

"The Witches Road" (2025) by Kate Elliott, can be summed up as The Apothecary Diaries x Shannara x Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. 

In typical Kate Elliott style, there is extensive world building that experiment with novel norms and social structures unfamiliar to many readers, there are richly developed characters, and cliche tropes and genre conventions are frequently turned on their head. 

It is part of a two book series, with the second volume to be released in November, and while it is not her magnum opus, something reserved for her seven volume pair of series in the Jaran universe, or her seven volume Crown of Stars series, it is still a very solid and immersive slow burn high brow fantasy romance in a lovingly crafted and fully realized world.

In this post-apocalyptic world, deadly instantly mutagenic spores associated with the "Pall" have enveloped huge swaths of land in a rigidly hierarchal empire with vague East Asian vibes. The empire is organized at almost every level to permit civilization to survive in the face of the scourge that is the Pall. It isn't entirely clear what lies beyond the oceans and the ocean-like barrier that is the Pall.

The part of the empire that we see, far from the emperor's palace in the heartland, is predominantly agricultural and organized around other primary industries like farming, herding, fishing, forestry, stone quarrying, and mining. The empire is a rigidly hierarchical, but intrigue filled, feudal society where aristocrats jockey for power united under a single emperor who has united all territory up to its natural boundaries. Many key professions like surveying, engineering, and serving as soldiers and as archivists, which one must enter something like a holy order at age seventeen, are also limited to children of aristocrats, above the level of servants assigned to support the professionals who may be commoners, although some professions, like couriers and midwives, need not be aristocrats, and meritocracy is creeping into upset the privileges of aristocratic rank within those professions. Education is limited mostly to aristocrats and the very promising commoner students of liberal aristocrats, with literacy being perhaps about as common as a college education was in the 1960s in the U.S. Themes of found family, sexual identity, servitude, child exploitation, overcoming trauma, and the role of single, adult, childless women in society, are explored in detail.

The empire has pre-industrial, roughly 17th to 18th century level technology (without gun powder, but with fairly easily available contraception and midwives that can safely assist women in obtaining abortions). It has steel, bows, crossbows, spy-glasses, portable fire starting kits, finely crafted clothing, precious metal coins (but not paper currency), accurate surveying and extensive written record keeping, carriages, Roman era grade plumbing and civil engineering, ships that can travel along ocean coasts, libraries but not printing presses, traveling theatrical companies, and significant amounts of travel and trade with all roads leading to the capital in the heartland. 

There are isolated elements present in the empire, like ancient triple towers of stone and a set of roads magically immune to spores and the Pall that are also conduits for telegram-like messages, which pre-date the empire and are associated with a legendary era associated in lore with ancient sorcerer-kings. Silk road style hostel-cities (also similar to inns along ancient roman roads), provided for when the roads were built, dot the ancient "witch roads" in enclaves that are also engineered to be free of the Pall and its spores if properly managed, although rural villages have far inferior defensive measures, and it isn't safe to travel at night due to spores, various forms and races of marauding bandits, and deadly wild animals. 

The current empire has a class of fairly modestly potent magic users under the strict control of the empire via its dominant religion, the Heart Temples, which is more pagan than quasi-Christian. But the people of the empire, who are apparently all nominally adherents to this religion, are not meaningfully more superstitious or religiously minded than their more magical than ours world warrants. Other, mostly lost and forgotten, magic exists as well.

While humans are predominant, their are minorities of several other sentient races - a race of indestructible giants that can read and write and understand human language but not speak it who go dormant at night, a race of three horned dwarves who ride wild cats in small groups through forests and sell themselves a mercenaries, a race of elf-like folk who can be hard to distinguish from humans broken into two hostile groups called the Sea Wolves and the Blood Wolves, and a more peaceful group known as Forest Wolves, and a couple of other sentient races who are mentioned by name in passing, but are not described or introduced in the first volume. Some of these humanoid minority races are refugees, sometimes more recently but often generations ago, from areas devastated by the Pall (as are, we eventually learn, our main character and her deceased sister). Aristocratic messengers riding griffins provide limited air mail service. A few kinds of fantasy creatures, as well as magically powered animal golems, fill the place of heavy machinery, for example, pulling fast carriages. The more advanced, prosperous, and magical days of the sorcerer-kings of legendary history also apparently had dragons and various kinds of powerful chimeric warriors.

The visible presence of, and attitudes towards, LGBT folks (several of whom are important or secondary characters) is comparable to that of the 21st century in the U.S. (with attitudes mixed between more liberal and more conservative aristocrats), although acceptance of concubinage, indentured servitude, roles of women, and the like are more or less in line with those of 17th-19th century East Asia albeit with gender equality approaching late 19th century to early 20th century Western levels or what is seen in modern Islamic countries, and attitudes towards psychology and appropriate interpersonal interactions to deal with people's emotions that are very modern.

Refreshingly, the main character is neither the 17 year old young man about to declare his profession, nor the handsome but arrogant prince who is second in line, together with his sister who is trying to undermine him, to the throne, after the incompetent and ill tempered young crown prince. Instead, it is the young man's 31 year old never married aunt who has served for ten years as a deputy courier, delivering messages by foot over a route that takes weeks to walk while keeping her eye open for spore outbreaks in order to stop them immediately before they get out of hand, and reporting generally on local conditions to the local junior aristocrat who runs the local way station along the imperial road and provides county-level type governmental supervision to the local rural villages.

Most of the characters, including our main character's sister who died a couple of years earlier in an avalanche while on bad terms with her child, have deep dark traumatic pasts that are only revealed bit by bit.

The nominal core plot revolves around our main character guiding the handsome prince with a secret mission on a shortcut past an avalanche blocked canyon (a problem his rival sister hid from him in an effort to one up him, or to create an opportunity to assassinate him in royal succession politics), off the safe and ancient witch roads, together with her nephew, both of whom are urgently escaping their dark pasts trying to catch up with them. But this mission gets a new twist when a charming, wiser, more open minded, and ancient "haunt" temporarily possesses the prince so it can travel to the same destination as the one where the prince was bound on a mission of its own.

I have no quarrel with the fact the she introduce many important terms and concepts long before they are fully explained. But, a small nitpick is that she invents many proper names and creature type names that it is hard to know how to pronounce, such as Xilsi, for which the pronunciation is the "X" is unclear. Given the neo-East Asian setting, I pronounced it in my mind as if it was a transliteration of Chinese with an "sh" sound, rather than the "ch" sound used for X as an initial letter in words of Greek origin. But the proper pronunciation of this name, and several other names and terms used in the book, is less than clear.