Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death

James Fortin, a journalist for Socialist Action (SA), pens an article entitled The Capitalist Criminality of (Un)Natural Fracked Gas. It is complete nonsense, buttressing SA's reputation as a pro-poverty grouplet. Indeed, the logical conclusion is that American houses should not be heated, and children should be allowed to freeze to death. It's the socialist way.

The rot starts at the top:

Exxon Mobil, fifty years ago, was the first to obscure and lie about the dangers that fossil fuels pose to the climate. But such criminal “traditions” carries on to this day. Pittsburgh EQT, the largest supplier of U.S. gas, pumping about 4 billion cubic feet a day, says on its website as of this writing: “Clean burning natural gas is an important part of our country’s energy mix, and we are proud to be a major producer of natural gas and even prouder to produce it in an environmentally responsible manner.”  Whatever the claim, the record on natural gas says otherwise, overwhelmingly.

If anybody is lying about fossil fuels, it's SA. Solar and wind (S&W) combined produce less than 4% of America's energy, while fossil fuels are responsible for 80% (nuclear, biofuels and hydroelectric make up most of the difference). It is literally impossible for S&W contribute much more than 10% of total electricity production. Germany has gone the farthest with this, with S&W comprising 11.9% of total electric power, but they have the costliest electricity in the world, at 38.1 cents/kwh. Compare that with Oklahoma's 8.8 cents/kwh.

Unlike what Mr. Fortin claims, cheap electricity does not just benefit Exxon Mobil. How many children would freeze to death if Mr. Fortin turned off gas supply? How many people would lose their jobs if factories had to pay double or triple their current electric bill?

Mr. Fortin admits that gas has ended most coal consumption in the US, and also that it is a much cleaner fuel. As a result, US CO2 emissions have declined steadily since 2005.

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He also points out that cheap gas made investment in S&W uneconomic. Of course--why invest in something that's more expensive, and therefore wastes more resources and is likely worse for the environment? Raw materials needed for S&W manufacture include silicon, copper, aluminum, cadmium, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc, along with rare earth metals. These are expensive to mine and leave a lot of heavy metal waste in their wake. It is not clear that S&W is a green technology.

While understating the potential costs of S&W, Mr. Fortin hugely exaggerates the dangers of fracking. He writes,

Fracking operators have avoided disclosure of the chemicals used in their extraction process. Numerous studies though have confirmed evidence of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene contaminating groundwater in the area of the wells, and populations in the vicinity of wells experiencing disproportionate occurrences of respiratory, nervous, and immune system problems. A wide assortment of lesser impacts such as headaches, eye irritation, and dizziness have been found as well.

Mr. Fortin provides no source for this data. While the precise components of fracking fluid are kept as trade secrets, the major components are well-known: sand and soap. There is this:

Fracking fluids fall within such cryptic catagories as carrier/basefluid, biocides, scale inhibitors, solvents, friction reducers, additives, corrosion inhibitors, and non-ionic surfactants – which is a catch-all category for dozens of fluids like Naphthenic Acidethoxylate or Poly (Oxy-1,2-Ethanediyl), Alpha-(4-Nonylphenyl)- Omega-Hydroxy-, Branched.

While it sounds scary, most of these are just "soap." Indeed, the term surfactant is a generalization on the "soap" idea. "Solvents" is likely just a synonym for water. According to The Frackers (my review here), the industry has become very sensitive about being green, and tries to source all fracking fluid ingredients from consumer products. It is highly unlikely that anything very toxic is found in fracking fluid--certainly not as hazardous as the waste from S&W manufacturing.

The chemicals that Mr. Fortin lists are very unlikely fracking ingredients and are almost certainly not used. Benzene is a strong carcinogen and is banned from most industrial processes (and from undergraduate chemistry laboratories). Mr. Fortin, as usual, provides no reference nor context for his data. Similarly, his list of ailments is so vague and so common that it is unlikely that they're caused by fracking.

He also writes,

In one Texas location a study performed between 2012 and 2015 demonstrated that babies born to mothers who lived within 5 miles of natural gas flaring during that time frame were 50 percent more likely to be premature. In other areas excessive nausea, fatigue and cancer have been attributed to exposure to radioactive materials extracted from the fracked bedrock together with the natural gas.

Natural gas flaring comes from oil wells, not gas wells. The purpose of a gas well is to capture the gas, not to burn it off. So this is a silly charge. He may be correct that gas wells bring radioactive substances to the surface, but this has to be a minor effect. Is there any evidence of higher radioactivity around gas wells? I doubt it, and again, Mr. Fortin cites no reference. Here as well, the list of ailments is too vague and other possible causes too widespread for anything to be attributed to gas wells.

I'll cite just one more paragraph, full of hyperbolic claims. My responses are in red.

The attack on public health is part and parcel of the assault on the environment. With the development of fracking technology came the exploitation of shale geological formations where 75 percent of U.S. gas now originates, now found throughout the continental U.S. Obviously any resource extraction has some environmental impact. But fracking is less dangerous than coal mining, than the traditional way of procuring gas, and likely less destructive than the manufacture of S&W technology. A poisonous mix of patently secret  chemicals and massive amounts of water, under enormous pressure, are blasted into the fissures created thousands of feet below the surface. The list of chemicals is not secret, and they're not especially poisonous. The deadly concoction – presently with each well consuming over 14.3 million gallons of water on average – is pumped out and stored for treatment and further use. Fracking in total uses about as much water as American golf courses. Much of the water comes from deep underground, way below well-water aquifers, and is too saline for human/agricultural consumption. That the water is reused is a benefit. The fracked gas now being produced releases into the atmosphere carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, alone. Methane is natural gas, and is the product the frackers wish to sell. They obviously try to prevent its escape into the atmosphere. Unlike CO2, methane decomposes quickly in air. Side effects (have that read “cost of doing business”) include earthquakes, billions of gallons of water poisoned beyond repair, and despoilment of grasslands and forest. The earthquakes are a problem, but increasingly understood and perhaps avoidable. As said, the water is already saline before the frackers use it, and "despoilment" is a lot less than open-pit mining, as is done to obtain copper and other metals for solar panels and electric cars.

Not only is Mr. Fortin against fracking, he's also against pipelines. Indeed, he's against any kind of industrial infrastructure at all. He apparently believes that electric power and home heating will appear miraculously from the tooth fairy and free unicorns.

The man literally believes that letting children freeze to death is a price worth paying in order to prevent "climate change." Mr. Fortin and SA have their priorities all mixed up. They're subscribe to pro-poverty politics.

Unlike Mr. Fortin, I'm against poverty, and I hope it can be eliminated.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade and China
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?

For those of you who don't follow the ins and outs of Trotskyist grouplets, Socialist Resurgence (SR) arose from a split in Socialist Action (SA), as I described here. Nominally, the split was over some abstruse (and irrelevant) issue concerning Syria. In reality, I think the break-up was over leadership. Specifically, SA's chief honcho (and failed presidential candidate) is the incompetent, 80 year old Jeff Mackler. He has been national secretary since SA was founded in 1983.

The problem extends way beyond SA. Gus Hall was national secretary of the CPUSA from 1959 until just before his death in 2000. James P. Cannon, founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led the organization from 1938 to 1953--though he retired long before he died in 1974. The SWP is now helmed by 81 year old Jack Barnes, who has served since 1972.

So Trotskyism has a problem--their leaders seem to think they own a birthright. There is no bench, no term limits, no succession planning. It's a conceptual flaw in the democratic centralism framework, and it's why the organizations always split after they grow beyond a certain size. I see no indication that SR has addressed--much less solved--this issue.

In commemoration of James Cannon's birthday, SR comrades Ernie Gotta and Erwin Freed pen companion articles about the relevance of his legacy for today. Mr. Gotta writes,

Cannon would likely conclude (I think this is obvious) that the revolutionary leadership of the working class in our present moment is in poor condition. He might suggest that our historic role in 2021 must be in reforging a revolutionary leadership in the U.S. with a deeply internationalist perspective. As we begin resolving the problems of revolutionary socialist leadership in the U.S. through fusions and regroupments, we’ll have to do the same internationally as well.

This is mostly Trotskyist gobbledygook, but a little meaning can be extracted. By "revolutionary leadership," he means the existence of a vanguard party. This is a disciplined organization that is possessed with the precisely correct political line so that it can steer the benighted working class around the dangerous shoals of reformism and ultraleftism until a workers' state beachhead can be established on the other side.

SR possesses at least a tinge of self-awareness in the realization that their organization--perhaps 50 comrades--is too small to qualify as a vanguard that's gonna overthrow the capitalist system. So they have connected with an umbrella group--the Revolutionary Socialist Network--consisting of leftover grouplets from the now defunct International Socialists (along with something derived from the Workers' League). It's a hodge-podge of sectarian grouplets that all believe in almost the same thing but for theological differences. And they can't agree on who their leaders should be--so I think unity is likely a lost cause.

Mr. Freed opines on the importance of the "revolutionary press."

The press is a central component of all Bolshevik organizations. As Cannon said, the purpose of the vanguard party “is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.” Cannon took seriously the paper’s role in realizing these actualities, which Lenin defined as “not merely a collective propagandist and collective agitator, [but also] collective organizer.”

The concept was likely unworkable even in Mr. Cannon's day, but today it is completely ridiculous. The idea is that a single publication (edited by Socialist Resurgence) will have so much credibility among the working class that they won't bother to read anything else. Perhaps that was vaguely realistic dream when each city had only one daily paper and two TV stations--a Revolutionary Press could conceivably gain status in that environment. But today--with 500 channels on TV, millions of channels on YouTube, along with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., etc.--the notion that the publication of some tiny grouplet like SR is gonna get heard above the noise is utterly absurd. Not gonna happen. Even the New York Times struggles in this environment, and nobody else has a chance.

Still, they're trying, and unlike their former comrades in SA, they're competent. Their webpage is as good as any of the grouplets--but you can see by the number comments (mostly zero) that their reach is not very far. SR consists predominately (as best I can tell) of graduate students--people whom Lenin would've called the intelligentsia, but whom I refer to as the lumpen proletariat. But they're educated, they write well, and they can organize things like a podcast.

I just listened to a podcast on Socialist Resurgence Radio, an interview between host Alex Coy and SR's resident economist, Osman Keshawarz (a grad student at UMass). I do not have a transcript, so apologies if I misremember something.

1. It's professionally done. The sound quality is excellent, the host is fluent and entertaining, and the guest is smart and well-informed. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. How very unlike the endlessly boring podcasts by Jeff Mackler, hacking his way through a monotone exposition of whatever (I never managed to sit through an entire episode).
2. Mr. Keshawarz, while competent, is still wrong. He thinks wealth accrues in a zero-sum competition between capitalists and workers, where the system is rigged so that workers inevitably lose. In truth, it's not zero-sum--the standard of living of everybody in capitalist societies has steadily increased since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This is because entrepreneurs, via a process of trial and error, try to find the most efficient uses possible for resources (labor, capital, raw materials). Accordingly, there is a continuous ratcheting up of productivity, leading to more wealth across the entire society.
3. Mr. Keshawarz is narrowly correct about the division of the producer surplus. That is, at any given time the producers (workers and capitalists) have to figure out how to divvy up the proceeds between them. But he completely ignores the consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to consumers by reducing the costs of production as much as possible. It is the growth in the consumer surplus that drives the persistent increase in our standard of living across the centuries.
   

   

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4. As mentioned, entrepreneurs seek to maximize social utility by a process of trial and error. The purpose of financial markets--in all their complexity--is to reallocate capital from inefficient enterprises to efficient, highly productive enterprises. Of course there is a lot more error than there are successes--most new ventures either fail, or end up as small businesses. Mr. Keshawarz apparently wants the 14,000 people employed by GameStop to keep their jobs forever, despite the fact that the company no longer makes any sense--the world has changed. Even he admits that those employees are today "ripping off their customers." It will be much better if that labor force is reemployed doing something else that is of greater value to consumers.

Anyway, SR is interesting. They write well. They know how to host a podcast. Whether or not they have the precisely correct revolutionary program is above my paygrade. But I am certain that their larger influence on American society and history will be zero.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on the Pandemic
• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Health Care Workers
• New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend

Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

This is the book that Jack Barnes wishes he'd written. Mr. Barnes is the long-time leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who penned a tome entitled Are They Rich Because They're Smart? .

In today's book, The Cult of the Smart, author Frederik deBoer declares

This book is my prayer for the untalented, an attempt to show how badly our society and its people are hurt by the obsessive focus on schooling and smarts.

He does answer Mr. Barnes' question: they are rich because they're smart! This is unjust in two ways:

1. The emphasis on smart results in a meritocracy, namely a class of people that claim for themselves all the best jobs, and because they've done so well at school, they hold themselves morally superior to folks with low IQ scores. Mr. deBoer claims that most jobs don't require a high IQ, and sorting people by education is largely unjust.
2. "Smarts," aka intelligence (measured as IQ), is substantially genetically inherited--that is at least 50% of a person's IQ score can be attributed to genes. In this it is very much like musical talent, aptitude for basketball, or good vision, among many other traits. And while those attributes can contribute to a better life, smarts looms vastly larger in future outcomes. Intelligent people earn substantially more than the less intelligent. In Mr. deBoer's world, this is grossly unfair.

Mr. deBoer imagines himself a Marxist, and accordingly the real villains are the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the top 1%. But there not very many of them--only 1%--so while their economic importance is indisputable, their cultural influence is much weaker. For this they rely on the upper middle class--the top 20% of the population, and the best-educated people in the country. These are the folks who dominate academia, the media, politics, and the prestigious professions. They are, in a word, the meritocracy. This is also Mr. Barnes' point of view. 

The claim of the education establishment is that school is the great leveler--it gets everybody up to speed so they can compete in the modern economy. Mr. deBoer disagrees.

Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

He describes college as the "instrument of inequality." Students are tracked according to their IQ scores--those who are smart get ahead and eventually enroll at Harvard. The less gifted wind up at the local beauty school. It's deeply unfair.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do students perform badly because they attend bad schools? Or are the schools bad because they enroll poorly performing students? The received wisdom on the Left is the former answer--if we just equalized the schools, or the curriculum, or the funding, then all students would excel equally and educational inequality would disappear. This is termed the blank slate hypothesis--the contention that all children are equally endowed with intelligence, and all can learn calculus if they just try hard enough.

Mr. deBoer rejects the blank slate hypothesis. Summarizing current literature, he writes,

The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes. The degree to which genes assert themselves varies over the course of life. Profoundly unequal environments for children can drown out genetic effects. There is also what behavioral geneticists call the "unshared environment," ...--the influence of unpredictable events, random chance, the flux of life. But none of that changes the fact that our genetic heritage deeply influences our behavioral selves, including our academic selves and that we should recognize that individual exceptions are less important than larger trends when we are dealing with broad populations. Like, say, when we're considering educational policy.

What Mr. deBoer writes about genes and behavioral traits corroborates the book Human Diversity, written by Charles Murray and which I regard as the leading textbook of the discipline. That Mr. deBoer and Mr. Murray mostly agree is something I find very reassuring.

Mr. deBoer urges his fellow Leftists to reject the Blank Slate dogma--the evidence for genetic influence on personality is too strong. By insisting on a manifestly false principle, the Left discredits itself.

In one important respect he disagrees with Mr. Murray--Mr. deBoer insists there are no racial or ethnic differences in IQ or other personality traits. He concedes that much is inherited--children tend to be as smart as their parents, who in turn take after their grandparents, and similarly are related to their cousins, nieces and nephews, and the whole clan. But to then claim that an ethnic group that practices endogamous marriage does not share on average a suite of personality traits is unreasonable. Of course they do--and in fact they must, as is amply and overwhelmingly demonstrated in Human Diversity.

Scott Alexander, in his lengthy review of The Cult of the Smart, argues that this opinion is not just a concession to political correctness, but rather a deeply held belief by Mr. deBoer--which Scott describes as vaguely irrational. But I think I have some insight here, because like Mr. deBoer, I have spent my career as a college professor. And I can tell you that thinking about IQ in racial categories is deeply, deeply destructive.

I used to teach general chemistry to a class of about 100 students--including a handful of Black students. It is horribly unfair to those students to walk into a classroom with the prejudice that Blacks aren't as smart as whites. For even if that is true on average, the students in my room are not average--they're not even close to average. For that matter, the white students aren't average, either--because anybody who enrolls in a general chemistry class is both smarter and more motivated than anything average. Conflating a half dozen individuals with an average over a large, and in this context irrelevant population is a huge category error. So big, in fact, that it's immoral. Anybody smart enough to read Charles Murray or Frederik deBoer should know better.

I think Mr. deBoer, with his otherwise irrational rejection of racial similarities, is responding to that immorality--and for that I give him props. But he's still wrong.

Mr. deBoer offers two lists of reforms--a list to be accomplished in the short-term, like under the Biden administration. And a more utopian list that might have to wait till after the revolution. Surprisingly, I agree with many items. I'll summarize in bullet points:

• "Provide Universal Childcare and Afterschool Care"-- He rejects the argument that either of these improve educational outcomes, but he supports it...

As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility for each of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.

Needless to say, I don't support this objective.

• "Lowering the Legal Dropout Age to 12"-- If the less-intelligent are forced to stay in school, then the obligation to graduate them requires the school to dramatically lower standards. Mr. deBoer documents this phenomenon at length. Among other things, it renders the high school diploma meaningless.
  
  I support this--our children spend waaaay too much time in school. An unmentioned corollary is that we need to let teenagers participate in the paid labor force--otherwise you have unsupervised kids out looking for trouble.
  
  
• "Eliminating Charter Schools"-- Why? I mostly accept Mr. deBoer's argument that charter schools yield no net positive educational benefit, but that misses the point for two reasons. First, while not changing the statistical average, charter schools may be of significant benefit to individuals. It's very much like the Black students in my gen-chem class--the average is irrelevant. All that matters are the individuals. Why not let students choose the school where they will be most successful?
  
  The second reason--even if there is no educational benefit--there are surely other benefits. There are, for example, advantages to children wearing uniforms--it likely saves the parents money. Scott mentions that kids can escape bullies by moving to a charter school. For many kids and parents, they're just more fun. Besides, they're cheaper than the public schools. I see no benefit in banning them.
  
  
• "Loosening Standards"-- I strongly agree with this one. We should abolish the absurd standards left over from the early 20th Century. My pet peeve--which Mr. deBoer also addresses--is the high school algebra requirement. Many kids will never pass it. Many more will pass it, but only at great cost in terms of time and misery. And to what end? If anything is less useful than high school algebra, I can't imagine what it is. Probably fewer than 1% of jobs in this country will require any facility in algebra, and computers can do it better than you can. The only people who should take algebra are people who are interested in mathematics for its own sake, or people who know they're headed for certain STEM careers.
  
  I feel the same way about long division. When was the last time any reader of this blog used long division? Likely not since the fourth grade. Waste of time.
  
  
• "College is Unnecessary for Living a Satisfying Life"-- Amen, brother! In college we have something called a general education program that's designed to turn you into an educated man or woman. In this day of unlimited bandwidth and instant access to any information you want, it's completely unnecessary. Anybody can go on YouTube and learn about anything from introductory electrical engineering to the Bible as literature, and everything else in between. The notion that you have to study all that at age 18 (when, frankly, most people are not interested) is almost as silly as learning algebra.
  
  If we canned the gen-ed programs, college could be shortened by a whole year, saving everybody a lot of time and money.
  
  I disagree with Mr. deBoer's claim that general education is mostly about racial bigotry.
  
  He spends most of the chapter discussing the salary benefits that accrue to college graduates. He rightly points out that it's mostly about native aptitude, not anything learned in school.
  
  My view is that college is useful for those people who enjoy school and are good at it. Everybody else should stay away. The worst thing you can do for your career is to go to college and then not graduate. That's a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your life. Better not to go to college at all.

The final chapter of the book lays out his idealistic perspective. It's complicated and I won't cover it here. Let me just pick out a snippet. 

The modern meritocracy doesn't judge itself by its material well-being, but instead ranks itself by status symbols: where you went to school, where and how intensively you've traveled, how Woke you are, how much you feign concern for the environment, etc. Mr. Barnes cites a similar list.

Mr. deBoer writes,

The old version of middle-class success--a two-car garage, a well-mowed lawn, and a big-ass television--seems simpler and more accessible, as it placed far less emphasis on success in a scarce number of fields ... But of course the heyday of this type of success was riven by racial and gender exclusion...

Like too many Leftists, Mr. deBoer grossly exaggerates the effects of racism. The problem was never racism as much as poverty--solve the poverty problem (which we've substantially done), and the "racism" mostly goes away.

And so those old middle-class ambitions have made a comeback--now expressed as Make America Great Again. The Left, of course, interprets it as "racism", but then they interpret everything that way. It's not racism. It is instead a plea to return to middle-class, bourgeois values that are much more democratic than those of our current meritocracy.

Mr. deBoer has written an excellent, very worthwhile book. Jack Barnes really needs to read it. 

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Are They Rich Because They're Smart?
• Book Review: Human Diversity
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education

 

Teachers Can't Teach

Teachers get a bum rap. If Richie can't read and Suzie can't do her sums, it's all the teacher's fault. The failure of our public schools is chalked up to the perfidy of the teachers' unions. Even I have piled on, blaming teachers for the existence of "systemic racism" because they've failed to educate us white folks out of our primordial prejudices.

Of course it's not true--or at least not the whole truth. Richie might be dyslexic, and Suzie maybe isn't very bright. A lot of kids watch too much TV, are obese and unhealthy, have mental health issues, have fallen foul of the law, are smoking too much dope, or, like Suzie, aren't all that smart.

No bespoke third grade curriculum is going to overcome all those handicaps, no matter how good the teacher is.

But I'm still gonna cast some shade on the teachers' unions, because to them it seems it all reduces to not enough money. Teachers aren't getting paid enough--and if only their salaries were doubled or tripled then all the above problems would be solved. Or, as a condition of going back to work after the pandemic, the ventilation system of every school in the country has to be completely rebuilt. Failing that, or perhaps in addition to that, teachers need to be first in line for vaccinations.

If those conditions aren't met, they threaten to go on strike.

Left Voice, a high-quality blog published by a loose collective of New York City college professors and their hangers-on, has the education beat covered. They include this picture of Catholic school students.

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Alert, physically-fit, neatly attired in bespoke uniforms, hair laboriously primped--these are the kids educated by Catholic schools. The parents have obviously invested lots of money and hours of time into their offspring. The teachers don't do any of this--they don't buy the uniforms, arrange for the extra-curricular dance classes, make sure the kids do their homework, or get them ready for school every morning. The parents do all of that--leaving it to the Catholic schools to take credit for being better than their public counterparts.

And yet it's not enough for Left Voice author Ellie Thomas, who writes about the Catholic school where she works.

In August, my school district gave families the option of either full-time, in-person learning or full-time, remote learning. At my school, more than half of all students returned in person, and in some grades nearly all returned in person. Over the summer, Catholic school teachers in my district were likewise offered the option of teaching in person or remotely, which came as a relief to many teachers who were afraid to contract the virus or spread it to vulnerable family and community members. However, that mandate quickly changed: in the end, all teachers were required to teach both in-person and remote students while in the school building, without any additional compensation for the additional workload. Those who refused were told they could sign a voluntary resignation letter. 

Ms. Thomas seems remarkably ungrateful. With all the obvious sacrifices that parents make to send their children to a Catholic school, it is surely reasonable to expect school employees to reward the effort. We learn later in the article that the school did accommodate the employees with release time, and nowhere in the article does Ms. Thomas claim there was a Covid outbreak--so it's all just one big whine.

Meanwhile, James Dennis Hoff--history professor, union activist, and Left Voice journalist--reports from Chicago (dated 2/11/21)--

After three weeks of fierce negotiating and threatening to strike, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has reached a tentative agreement with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) administration to reopen all of the city’s more than 600 public schools.

Chicago's schools have been closed since March 17th, 2020 (nearly a year ago) on Governor Pritzker's order. Prior to the governor's edict, Chicago's mayor Lori Lightfoot had vowed to keep the schools open. She was forced backtrack on that. While we right wingers occasionally accuse her of not having much of a backbone, there's no question but the lady has heart. Here's what she said (3/13/20):

“In light of this order, the best place for our students to be is at home,” she said Friday evening. “I’m asking residents to remain in your homes. Of course, I know that’s not possible for everyone. CPS serves thousands of children who’re experiencing homelessness or housing instability.” … 

Lightfoot is calling on the business community to accommodate workers who are CPS parents and may not have access to paid sick leave.

“No parent should be forced to choose between staying home with a child or earning a paycheck. That is why my team is finalizing our contingency plan to meet the needs of our children and families,” Lightfoot said. “In Chicago, we know that schools are more than just places of learning.”

Unlike Mr. Hoff, Mayor Lightfoot realizes that public school students are not always like the well-cared-for, intelligent, carefully groomed pupils in Catholic schools. Some of them are hungry and homeless, more haven't showered in weeks, a few are just plain stupid, and many others hugely unmotivated. There are those who are abused, or who live in foster homes, or who are lonely and abandoned.

These kids don't come to school to be educated--instead they just need a safe place to spend the day. If they're lucky, there's a teacher who can spare them a smile. Lori Lightfoot understands that.

Mr. Hoff doesn't. Instead he argues that schools should remain closed indefinitely.

Though they did not go on strike, the CTU managed to postpone sending most teachers to classrooms until it was safer and until all faculty and staff were vaccinated. In a country where right to work laws have increasingly undercut the power of unions, postponing school reopenings for more than an entire month is a significant victory. This was made possible because the CTU members voted overwhelmingly in January to support a strike if needed to win their demands. That strike threat was made all the more powerful, however, by the fact that the CTU had already shown twice in the last decade that they are willing to do more than make idle threats, and that they are ready to strike and strike big. That strike muscle is strong in the CTU and it is the reason why they were able to remain firm in their negotiations with Lightfoot and eventually win their demands.

So who are the teachers gonna strike against? According to Emma Lee, the foe is the evil Lori Lightfoot herself. Never mind that Ms. Lightfoot has humored the unions for nearly a year, keeping schools closed despite increasing evidence that opening them won't spread the virus. Meanwhile, the rightwing media accuse her of coddling the unions--the lady can't win. At the end of the day, she's just the messenger--she doesn't really control the purse strings.

My friends at Left Voice will say battle is against the millionaires and billionaires who supposedly have endless amounts of money stashed away in some safety deposit box. So let's imagine a selfish billionaire who lives not in Chicago but on the North Shore, and she hears that Chicago's teachers are going on strike. "Great!" she says. "Now the state can save money by not paying those stupid teachers. Hope they stay on strike forever." The teachers' union can't win against that attitude.

Or maybe the strike is against middle class homeowners, liable for property taxes, and who themselves depend on the public schools--if only for the sake of civil order. But they don't have a lot of money. Raising property taxes will reduce their home values, and ultimately force them to move. That's happening in Chicago already--the city is losing population.

In reality, the strike is against poor people--people who don't pay any taxes, who live on food stamps and Section 8, who spend time in jail and are functionally illiterate. The French have a word for them: Les Misérables--The Miserables, Those are the folks who the teachers' union really wants to screw over--with help from Mr. Hoff and his friends over at Left Voice.

A kid can't even get a smile anymore.

Further Reading:

• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalypse

The title is an exaggeration--apocalypse is only a tail risk, and perhaps not a very big one. In the long run we're gonna come out all right. Though there is a big problem with that--we have to survive long enough to get to the long run, or put another way, in the long run we'll all be dead.

Anyway--here are the four big issues that I think will determine our lives for the foreseeable future.

1) Demographics

World population growth is slowing, and by 2050 it is expected to start declining. The populations of much of the industrial world--Europe, Japan, Korea--are already in freefall. For other countries the handwriting is already on the wall--China's population is aging rapidly and within a generation they will look like Japan does today. 

The US is still growing slowly, but only because of immigration from small poor countries (e.g., El Salvador) not yet afflicted by family planning. While American baby boomers (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) gave birth to the Millennials, that latter generation is not continuing the tradition--birth rates among today's 30-somethings are very low. Unless that turns around fast, the biological clock eventually ticks against us as well.

The only part of the world still experiencing significant population growth is sub-Saharan Africa--and that likely not for very much longer.

Outside the United States (because of our large millennial generation) the population of working-age adults (18-64 year olds) is in freefall. Since economic growth depends first and foremost on the skill-adjusted size of the labor force, global GDP looks likely to shrink in coming years (unless African populations can substantially improve their skill levels and access to global markets).

A shrinking labor force means a shrinking GDP, but it's worse than that. All those old people still have to be housed and fed, so GDP per capita also has to decline. Or put another way, fewer goods and services will have to be distributed among more people. We're gonna get poorer.

In the long run the baby boomers will pass on, and presumably birth rates will eventually recover, in which case things will turn around. But that long run seems really far away--and as a baby boomer myself, I won't live to see the day.

2) Artificial Intelligence

Moore's Law states that the density of transistors on a chip--and with it, computer power--will double every 18 months. It's not just computers that have gotten more powerful, but also connectivity--from phone modems to fiberoptic cable, to 5G broadband wireless. There have been massive advances in computer architecture--not too long ago parallel processing required many computers--now as many as 12 processors are built into a single PC chip.

But even more impressive than all of that is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)--the ability of computers to solve complex problems. In 1996, chess world champion, Garry Kasparov played a computer named Deep Blue, and won. They went for a rematch in 1997, and this time Big Blue won--it was the first time an AI machine had beaten a human grandmaster. Now it's routine--AI chess is better than any human chess player. In 2016, a computer AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol at Go.

AI can do more serious things. For example, Mark Cuban (paywalled) notes that Amazon and Walmart use AI to perfectly price any product--too low a price leaves money on the table, and too high discourages purchasers. The result--the optimal market price--maximizes revenue, and gets more product into the hands of more consumers. No other retail company can do as well, and certainly not Mom & Pop, who are left in the dust.

So here's the rub: new technology has always displaced human workers, e.g., the automobile put blacksmiths out of business. But it has until now happened slowly enough that people could retrain for different jobs--not always painlessly, though usually within a decade. But AI is coming on so fast and is so disruptive that it is eliminating jobs much faster than entrepreneurs can create new ones. The result is a massive dislocation in the labor force.

My former career--college professor--is in the midst of disruption. AI can potentially create narrowly tailored, individualized instruction adapted to each person's unique learning style. Gone will be the 100-person lecture hall, along with the mediocre professor at the front of the room. The number of professor jobs is already declining, and pretty soon they will all get sucked up into the Harvard-Google cloud.

Today's workers compete against the machine only because for the moment they're cheaper. For the first time in American history, real incomes for a large fraction of the population are in absolute decline.

Today this is a disaster. But in the long run, consumers will benefit from vastly cheaper and better goods and services. And entrepreneurs will eventually find ways to reemploy the nation's labor force (though that will likely take several decades).

3) Bankruptcy

We're at the top of the debt cycle. The world is deeply in debt. In the US the federal debt is now nearing 140% if GDP. State and local debt has also grown during the pandemic.

(Source)

Because of historically low interest rates, corporate debt has exploded.

(Source)

Only households have paid down debt (deleveraged) since the great recession, forced into liquidation by the financial crisis.

(Source)

The problem is not just in the US, but extends worldwide. This debt can never be repaid under current circumstances--there simply isn't enough money. There are only two ways out of the problem.

The first is inflation. If the Fed and other Central Banks can inflate their currencies, then the real value of the debt gets smaller. This is how Germany during the Weimar Republic planned to pay off war reparations--with grossly inflated banknotes when millions of Marks bought barely a loaf of bread.

Today the Fed (and other Central Banks) are desperately trying to engineer a more modest inflation rate, which will effectively make the debt cheaper. But so far they are unsuccessful, and I think, because of items 1) and 2) above, they will continue to be unsuccessful. (They could create hyperinflation very easily--but as Weimar Germany illustrates, that cure is worse than the disease.)

The second solution--and the one that's most likely--is bankruptcy, occasionally also known as a debt jubilee. A bankrupt corporation is sometimes reorganized, which just means the lenders have to accept pennies on the dollar. Occasionally it's liquidated and all assets are sold--and again, lenders net only a fraction of what they were owed.

Nobody knows what happens to a bankrupt state, but we're likely soon to find out. Illinois is closest to disaster, but Kentucky, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and others are not far behind. A preview of this coming attraction happened in Puerto Rico in 2019--and it wasn't pretty.

Bankruptcy is good in that it eliminates a lot of debt and people can start over. But it's really bad because it effectively reduces the money supply, leading to massive deflation. Deflation does the opposite of inflation: while the latter makes paying off debts easier, the former makes it much harder. Therefore, if one large enterprise (corporation or state) goes bankrupt, likely many more will follow, and the country will end up in a deep depression. This is not good.

A corollary is the Fed can't raise interest rates as that would force companies into bankruptcy. A second corollary is that we will need endless streams of "stimulus" and "quantitative easing" indefinitely into the future. That won't make anybody solvent, but it will at least keep us liquid enough to make next month's mortgage payment.

In the long run, whether it be by inflation or bankruptcy, the economy has to deleverage. Only then can full economic growth resume.

4) The Dollar

The dollar is the world's reserve currency. That means almost all foreign trade around the globe is denominated in US dollars. The dollar's dominance began with the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, and became official when President Nixon dropped the gold standard in 1971. The reserve status of the dollar gives the US a great deal of soft power. And maybe not so soft power--we can unilaterally impose financial sanctions on other countries in a way impossible for anybody else.

But owning the reserve currency comes at a cost, and increasingly the cost begins to exceed the benefits.

In order to finance global trade, there must be a vast quantity of dollars held by foreigners. These dollars are deposited in dollar accounts in foreign countries--e.g., Switzerland--and are lent out by these foreign banks to finance what we now call globalization. Dollars held in foreign banks are misleadingly called Eurodollars--they have nothing to do with the Euro, and not really anything to do specifically with Europe. A US dollar deposited in a Canadian bank is just as much a Eurodollar as one deposited in Hong Kong or Switzerland.

The way other countries acquire Eurodollars is by running a trade surplus with the USA. We buy their products--toys from China or luxury cars from Germany--and we pay in dollars, which then get deposited in foreign banks and become Eurodollars. Their trade surplus is, of course, also our trade deficit.

The cost of holding the world's reserve currency is that the US must run large and permanent trade deficits with the rest of the world. This entails, among other things, gradually off-shoring all manufacturing to foreign countries so that we can import the products.

After WWII the US contributed 50% of global GDP. Today that number is below 25%. This isn't because the US is getting poorer--it's that the rest of the world is getting richer. But whatever the cause, we can no longer afford to run trade deficits big enough to finance global trade. It is impossible. The Trump administration understood this and set as a priority the reshoring of manufacturing to the United States. The Biden administration doesn't appear to get it yet, but I think they will quickly learn--reality will bite.

There is no other country in the world that is willing to finance global trade by running a huge trade deficit. China, Japan and the Euro zone all run trade surpluses, which means neither the Yuan, Yen, nor Euro can be a reserve currency. So we're screwed. Our current age of globalization is over.

This will be bad for the US--it will reduce our global dominance, and it will raise prices for American consumers. But it is a disaster for many developing countries that have pulled themselves out of poverty by selling goods into the US market. They will increasingly find that market closed to them.

It will be good for American workers--at least for a few of them. But the real winners will be American robots, who thanks to AI will be manufacturing stuff like it's going out of style.

In the long run something like bitcoin will be the world's reserve currency. But that's a couple decades away, at least.

Conclusion

We live in perilous times.

• Will a large fraction of our labor force become unemployable because of automation?
• Will the Fed work so hard to get inflation that we end up with hyperinflation?
• Will bondholders get spooked and refuse to refinance our debts, leading to a massive wave of bankruptcies and a global depression?
• Will the demise of the dollar lead to wars as countries scramble for resources that they can no longer buy because there is no reserve currency?
• Will the S&P 500 soar to the moon as a safe haven?  Or will it crash to earth as the economy disintegrates?
• Will quantum computing wipe out all cryptocurrencies, destroying our future reserve currency and new banking system in the process?
• Will some unanticipated event happen that rescues us from this whole mess?

I have no clue. It looks pretty grim from where I sit. All I can say is that in the long run we're gonna be richer than we've ever been before.

Further Reading:

• Austerity Comes to Campus
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Book Review: The Decadent Society

 

Software Eats The World!

Michael Roberts, in a wonderful article republished in Left Voice, describes the current economy as clearly and as accurately as anybody. There is almost nothing he says that I disagree with. It's what he doesn't say that raises issues.

Weirdly, I'm actually more pessimistic about the economy than he is. Usually it's Marxists who predict capitalism's imminent demise--but now I'm in the strange position of seeing more problems than he.

His description of the current economy is spot-on. I'll condense Mr. Roberts' argument to bullet points.

• "US economic activity is still some 20-25% below where it was this time last year."
• "Overall, the US economy has shrunk by about 4-5% in 2020.  That is the largest contraction since the early 1930s – or 90 years ago!"
• "All the evidence suggests that there has been permanent ‘scarring’ to the economy in employment, investment and incomes."
• "Instead, there is what I have called a ‘reverse square root’ recovery where output falls but then does not recover to the same trajectory of economic growth that was there before. That output is lost forever, as the forecast for the US from Oxford Economics below shows."

(Source)

Mr. Roberts then describes the government response to this situation. I don't disagree with him, but I'd like to put it in a different context.

There are two components to the so-called "stimulus," which for shorthand I'll refer to (imprecisely) as fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus.  Fiscal stimulus refers to payments made by the government directly to households and businesses. The money comes from government borrowing. That would include the CARES package, the $1200 checks we all got a few months ago, and the $600 checks we got a couple weeks ago. This is actual money put into the real economy, and should by all rights be inflationary.

Monetary stimulus, meanwhile, are actions taken by the Fed, most notably quantitative easing (QE), also misleadingly known as "printing money."

Jeffrey Snider (paywalled) describes the Fed as operating a warehouse, and as long as money stays within the warehouse, there is little effect on the real economy outside. The Fed prints money inside the warehouse, but unless the cash escapes into the wider economy, it doesn't really do anything. QE means the Fed is buying T-bills (and other assets) from banks (and now corporations). These assets are considered cash equivalents, i.e., nearly as good as money, and they are removed from the economy and sucked into the Fed's vaults inside the warehouse. Meanwhile, freshly-printed money is simply moved from one side of the warehouse to the other side--it never leaves!

The result--since cash equivalent assets are sucked into the warehouse and no cash is let out--is QE is disinflationary! Indeed, in the long history of quantitative easing, no inflation has ever ensued.

Essentially, in terms of inflation, QE undoes what the fiscal stimulus is supposed to accomplish--namely to create inflation. While QE removes assets, fiscal stimulus injects cash--and there is no net inflation. But there is now more cash and there isn't very much to buy with it (restaurants aren't open; planes aren't flying), so it goes back into assets. Mr. Roberts describes it this way.

Indeed, what has happened to all these credit injections is that they have been used by banks and big businesses to speculate in the stock and bond markets rather than to pay wages, preserve jobs or raise investment.  After the initial panic of the pandemic in March, the US stock market has gone on an unparalleled binge.

It is now at all-time highs and, relative to earnings and productive assets, is at extreme levels.  Yet with more Fed support to come, financial markets may well go rolling on up for a while longer.  So all monetary policy has done is to keep businesses on life support, while boosting the wealth of the very rich.

I'd take slight issue with the last phrase. It's not just the "very rich" who have benefited (though they certainly have), but it's anybody able to invest in assets. That includes the upper middle class--perhaps the top 10-15% of the population. People with 401Ks, owners of real estate, buyers of fancy collectables, and even bitcoin hoarders have benefited. Investable assets have all gone up.

It's a gigantic merry-go-round, spinning faster and faster, that nobody wants to be riding. If the Fed stops QE we'll end up with hyperinflation, which would be much worse than the problems we've got. And if they stop fiscal stimulus, the result will be bottomless deflation which, given the huge global debt overhang would rapidly lead to the biggest credit crunch the world has ever seen. So we're stuck.

Put aside the merry-go-round--which is just forestalling disaster. What really is the big problem that starts the merry-go-round spinning to begin with?

The big problem is deflation--the secular cost of everything is going down. The world is getting cheaper. That sounds wonderful--life on $2/day is sweet. But there are winners and losers in a deflationary world. The big losers are people in debt, since deflation causes real interest rates to go up. That's why we need all the fiscal stimulus--to make sure people can make their mortgage payments. It's hard to live on $2/day when the rent is $1500/month.

(Above I suggested a future problem might be hyperinflation. How can hyperinflation and deflation coexist at the same time? Hyperinflation is a problem with the dollar--too many of them chasing too few goods. The deflation I'm talking about is a much deeper problem, and it is that the costs of goods and services are decreasing in real terms, i.e., independent of whatever unreliable currency unit you choose to measure them with.)

The causes of deflation are much discussed. A big reason is demographics--global population growth is slowing, and in many big economies it is now shrinking. Because baby boomers are aging into retirement, the labor force is shrinking even faster than the population. The result is less demand for everything--food, oil, copper, etc., and accordingly, lower prices.

A second reason is automation--the examples are legion and are now part of everyday life. Just one to illustrate: in the old days a human cashier would ring up your groceries, and then make change for a $20 bill. Today I use the self-checkout (beep, beep, beep) and pay with a debit card (no change required). They still do have a few cashiers at Walmart for old folks who haven't caught on yet.

But we ain't seen nothing yet! Because now we're embarking on the second half of the chessboard. I first encountered that analogy in a book entitled The Second Machine Age (my review here). The analogy refers to the ancient king, proposing as a settlement for some debt, suggesting that his rival put a grain of wheat on a chessboard square. And a month later two grains of wheat on the second square, and then four on the third square, and then, on subsequent squares, 8, 16, 32, 64... By the time you get to the 32nd square, the king is due 4,294,967,296 grains of wheat--still maybe doable. But when you go beyond that, to the 33rd square and more, pretty soon his rival will owe more grains of wheat than there are stars in the universe!

Moore's Law is like that--computer power doubles roughly every 18 months. (While Moore's Law in the narrow sense seems to have reached its physical limits, progress in software and bandwidth continues the effect.) For example: college professors smugly note that Zoom meetings are no competition for the live classroom--and true enough. But 18 months from now, Zoom (or whatever replaces it) will be twice as good. And in 36 months it will be four times as good--so good, in fact, that nobody will ever want to sit in a classroom again (at least not for getting an education).

Community colleges and grad schools are already headed for extinction, replaced by Zoom and YouTube. Four-year colleges are not far behind--the notion that one has to sit in a classroom to get educated is doomed. And with that realization, everything else about colleges collapses: degree programs disintegrate, tuition plunges, campuses sit empty. Everything gets sucked up into the ether.

The ultimate software is artificial intelligence, which is advancing very rapidly. Consider another example: drug discovery. Today, a clinical trial consists of a single drug tested against a single disease. That's all the human brain can process at one time. But given enough data, AI can measure a single drug against all diseases, or for that matter all drugs and nutrients against all diseases, all overlayed on variations in the human genome. In other words, drug discovery becomes vastly more efficient--think about all the scientists who are about to get unemployed.

So here's the rub--where deflation is biting most hard. The real wages of the bottom half of our society are going down (h/t Jeff Booth--paywalled). They're competing against software, and in the end software is vastly cheaper. Software will win--it's eating the world. This is a disaster--society can't survive when half the population--professors, retail clerks, insurance agents, factory workers--are being reduced to poverty. The merry-go-round exists to forestall this cataclysmic event. 

The Fed--which is neither evil nor stupid--is working all out to prevent disaster. But it's got the wrong toolbox--using tools that were invented before software was ever a thing. All it can do is spin the merry-go-round ever faster until the whole thing falls apart.

It's not the fault of the bourgeoisie--who will also eventually lose out to software. Their current increase in wealth comes from the Fed whose merry-go-round pumps money into assets. But when the spinning stops the markets will crash, and only owners of software assets (e.g., bitcoin) will come out on top.

It's not the fault of the Democrats--who are working hard to completely miss the boat, arguing about who is more woke and who deserves promotion in the English department.

It's not the fault of the Republicans--who think if we just cut the budget all our problems will be solved. Nope.

Our Marxist friends have no solution. The proletariat can't stop the march of software anymore than the bourgeoisie. Fretting over the precise nature of the "vanguard party" is a spectacular waste of time.

The only winners will (eventually) be consumers, which ultimately is all of us. We'll all be able to live comfortably on $2 per day.

Further Reading:

• Austerity Comes to Campus
• Robots of the World, Unite!
• Getting Richer While Feeling Poorer

Louis Proyect and "Degrowth"

I have often accused Louis Proyect of being pro-poverty (e.g., here, here, and here).

I did expect pushback at some point--how can a Marxist be in favor of poverty? Surely, I thought, Mr. Proyect would deny my charge and argue that he was indeed for human well-being.

What I didn't expect was a confession--Mr. Proyect explicitly admits to being pro-poverty! He concedes as much in an article entitled A reply to John Molyneux and Michael Lowy on degrowth. (Molyneux's paper is here; Lowy's can be found here.) "Degrowth" is a synonym for "we all need to take a big cut in our standard of living." He offers a succinct definition here:

Degrowth is completely focused on the question of how humanity can not only survive into the 22nd century but how can civilization continue until the planet dies due to astrophysical realities. It poses solutions based on the needs of a modest life-style that while giving up on SUV’s and all the other crap can allow the full development of the human being, who might have to work 10 hours a week while painting landscapes or growing orchids the rest of the time. That means addressing the population question that people like Molyneux recoils from.

The argument is that Joe, by not driving an SUV today, will measurably enhance the well-being of whatever civilization exists a billion years from now. This is ridiculous on its face!

At bottom, Mr. Proyect's philosophy is a death cult.

He makes two assumptions: first, he fails to discount the future--i.e., the comforts of his great-great-great grandchildren two hundred years from now are as, or even more important than our comforts today. This is ironic because I don't believe that Mr. Proyect even has any grandchildren, which renders the whole issue hypothetical. Since part of the proposed solution is reducing the birth rate, putative future generations won't exist at all. How's that for a wonderful life?

Second, he supposes he can predict the future. He knows with unseemly confidence that Joe's SUV is gonna ruin the climate--not just now, but literally for all time! I think he's almost certainly (99.999%) wrong about climate change--whatever that is, it isn't an existential threat, and future generations (much less distant civilizations) will not remember us for our carbon profligacy.

I can't possibly go through all the bullshit in his correspondents' two papers. Lowy's piece is so far detached from reality that it establishes him firmly among the 99% of academics that give the remaining 1% a bad name.

Our authors completely ignore capitalism's benefit to consumers. Capitalism produces the goods and services that we want to buy and which greatly prolong and enhance our lives. Claiming that capitalism's sole benefit is profit for the capitalist is simply not true.

They all maintain that democratic decision making will make for a better environment, arguing that somehow the majority will elevate the interests of future civilizations billions of years from now over those of their own children (or themselves) today. There is no evidence for that. Joe with his SUV gets to vote just as much as Mr. Proyect.

Their claim that capitalism wastes resources is not true. A capitalist wants to cut costs, which means using as few resources as possible. Now there are issues that arise from "the tragedy of the commons," i.e., people passing environmental costs on to their neighbors. This is where government has to step in and why we need an EPA (the purpose of which is not to preserve the environment for the next billion years). But for the most part, capitalism wastes as little as possible, and is therefore much cleaner than rival societies, such as socialist ones.

Most regrettably, our friends want to limit people to working 10 hours per week--they can spend the rest of their time "painting landscapes or growing orchids." But they're not allowed to earn any extra money! They can't start a business--not even a lemonade stand--because somebody a billion years from now might object.

Trading goods and services is a uniquely human trait--no other animal does that. Mr. Proyect calls it "working," and we're now supposed to be forbidden from doing it. This is like being in prison--where they sit around all day painting landscapes.

Somehow Mr. Proyect concocts a wood shortage--mysteriously there is now a dearth of trees. Capitalism is "[s]o efficient at reducing forests to toothpicks." He writes,

Molyneux proceeds to define some of the norms we can expect under world ecosocialism. This one stuck out for me: “The extensive retrofitting of homes”. I am not sure what this means exactly but it would point to the banning of any house or apartment over 3,000 square feet for a family of four. I’m definitely for that but within such an advanced new way of sheltering, how do we create the furniture that people need for a modicum of comfort? We certainly need chairs, tables, beds, desks, and bookshelves, don’t we? Can we have a socialist Ikea that supplies such basics?

In this new ecosocialist utopia, some bureaucrat is gonna tell you "you can't have that end table. We need to save the wood for the folks living a billion years from now."

Some people would prefer to have fine furniture to painting landscapes. Who are these ecosocialist creeps to tell them they can't do that?

One thing I really don't understand about ecosocialists is their fixation on "mass transit." Somehow they imagine that a technology from the early 1900s is the ultimate solution to problems faced by civilizations a billion years from now. I don't get it.

So how do people get to work? In 2019 (before the pandemic), 1.4% of American commuters took mass transit, while 5.3% worked from home. (These are median numbers from a list of 110 US metropolitan areas.) Since then transit's share has collapsed. Ridership in the New York metro is down as much as 90%, while the work from home share has skyrocketed. As of September, 2020, 33% of all employees worked exclusively from home, while another 25% worked from home for part of the week. Only 42% of American workers still go to the office or factory every day.

This trend may partially reverse post-pandemic, but it will never go back to where it was. The number of people working in Lower Manhattan or Chicago's Loop is now permanently reduced.

Please, Mr. Proyect--tell us why you think we need more buses and subways? (And let's forget about streetcars, which average speed is only 19 mph!)

The whole mass transit thing is an anachronism. And the whole ecosocialism thing is a vile religious movement that is very bad for children and other living men and women.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• George Novack Then and Now
• Book Review: The Fall of Rome