The Land Battle for States Gives Way to the Cultural Battle for Nations - the Modern World as a Lava Lamp

Imagine a map with all its neat lines and borders, like a giant puzzle where each piece is a different country, clearly marked and separate. That's a state, like the one you live in, defined by those lines on the map.

Now, think about your favorite playlist, the sports you follow, the memes you share, and the beliefs you stand up for. That mix, the feeling it provokes, isn't tied to a line on any map. It's more like the shifting shapes in a lava lamp, always moving, coming together, and breaking apart. That's what a nation is all about - it's the music, the games, the drama and comedy, and the serious stuff that matter to you and yours.
In the 20th century, people fought with tanks and planes over those map lines, trying to say, "This land is mine." But now, the big battles are more about who we are and what we believe in, like sustainability, equality, rules, and investments. These fights aren't about grabbing a piece of land; they're about shaping the world with our ideas. And of course these battles don't end with a flag in the ground. They keep going, evolving, just like the ever-changing swirls in a lava lamp.

I've been staring at this lava lamp for decades. It's mesmerizing.

The Religious Right's Pyrrhic Victory (Or, The Cost of Using Trump As A Representative)

Trump began selling Bibles this week to raise money for his trial for using campaign funds to pay for sex with a porn star.

There is nothing else you need to know about the intersection of for-profit religion, crime and politics in these United States. The religious right got their ban on abortions by making Trump their partner. They have also lost another swath of active church members who've simply walked away from churches in the last few years. (According to a study by Faith Communities Today, the median congregation size dropped from 137 people in 2000 to 65 by 2020. There is evidence that it has fallen further since.)

The religious right may think they are selling bibles. Others may simply see it as selling out.

Kahneman On Substituting Easy Questions for Uesful Questions

Daniel Kahneman died this week. He won a Noble Prize in Economics made remarkable by the fact that not only did he not have a degree in economics, but he never even took an economics class.
Here is a blog post from 2011 that I wrote about one of his key ideas – our tendency to substitute trivial questions for hard questions.

One of the great mysteries of life is how we get sucked into political arguments of no consequence. Can you burn a flag? Can he wear a dress? Can she say that?

Which questions, by contrast, have real consequence? Questions like Will this economic policy make more people rich? Will that economic policy make fewer people poor? Will this political policy give more people rights? Will this policy extend or shorten life expectancies?

I think I found the answer to why we waste so much time trying to sound smart talking about such stupid issues in Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One concept Kahneman shares has to do with our tendency to substitute easy questions for hard ones. For me, this explains why so much airtime in politics is taken up with questions of little consequence.
Kahneman gives an example of an analyst who bought stock in Ford. Asked why, the analyst replied that he'd just been to a car show and left convinced that Ford "sure can make great cars." As Kahneman points out, the real question when buying stock is whether or not the stock is undervalued. But the analyst substituted that difficult question for the simpler question of whether Ford was making good cars. All of us, when faced with a difficult question, tend to substitute a simpler - albeit irrelevant - one.
It seems to me that the big question in politics should be, How do we improve quality of life for more people? That’s a big question and answering it is one that isn’t easy. It is a challenge to feel confident about one's ability to answer it.

By contrast, the little and largely irrelevant questions – silly questions best characterized by whether or not we should be able to burn the flag or use a bathroom that says Woman or Man – are ones for which we have clear answers as long as we have strong opinions. We don't need data. We don't need studies. Answering these questions leaves us feeling confident in our own judgment. Answering the big questions, by contrast, makes us feel uncertain. For most of us, we prefer feeling confident to feeling ignorant. The result? We choose questions because of how they make us feel rather than what their answers will do to improve the world.

And that’s a pity. Just think what we could do with all the attention paid to politics if it were focused on real, albeit difficult, questions. Questions that have the potential to make us more humble and the world better - rather than make us more smug and make the world no better.

Benjamin Franklin's Power over Power

Benjamin Franklin was involved with two great shifts in power: the creation of the world's first modern democracy and experiments that demystified lightning, transforming it from divine judgment into something that could be mitigated by a lightning rod. It turns out that man, and not God, could control or divert the power of lightning or governments.

Money Saving Tip - Hacking into Advertising

Here's a money-saving tip. Next time you see an ad for an enticing product, just re-enact the ad. Skip the product altogether and go straight for the joy the product delivers.
"Should we go shopping?"
"No. Just smile more."

It Is No Coincidence - How the Loss of Aspiring Novelists Has Undermined the Power and Purpose of the Daily Newspaper

Once upon a time, the first draft of history - our newspaper articles that let us know each day about what was happening - was written by aspiring novelists. Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe were a few of the reporters who became famous novelists but the newsroom was full of journalists who aspired to be like them. A story rich with characters and taking its time to unfold was the standard. A world that would - after suspense and confusion - eventually make sense lay behind the daily reports.

One of the reasons that the world feels more chaotic now is that the folks reporting it to us don't understand fiction, don't understand stories. There's always been chaos. News - to make any sense at all - has to construct a narrative. The aspiring novelist - who saw daily events as part of a bigger narrative - were better at that important task.

It's no coincidence that steam-powered presses made daily newspapers popular in the mid-1800s, about the same time that the nation-state emerged. Newspapers gave communities a common narrative, a shared set of interests and issues. They were the source of the ideas from which nation-states were debated and built.
It's no coincidence that we're increasingly divided as newspapers drift into obsolescence and we lose the narrative glue that binds together imagined communities like nation-states.

And it's no coincidence that coincidence is not enough to hold our attention or hold us together. For that you need a story.

The Whimsy and Magic of Physico-theology

Physico-theology, an idea that gained prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries, refers to a theological doctrine that seeks to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God through the observation and study of nature.

This from Ritchie Robertson's book on the Enlightenment.

"In Germany, physico-theology gave rise to a large number of specialisms praising different aspects of creation, such as ichthyotheology (fish), petinotheology (birds), testaceotheology (snails), melittotheology (bees), chortotheology (grass), brontotheology (thunder) and sismotheology (earthquakes), each of which had at least one book devoted to it. The Netherlands produced also theologies of snow, lightning and grasshoppers."

How could anyone read this and not be left wanting to know more about the theologies of bees, snow or grasshoppers? What DO bees believe?

Trump Threatens a Bloodbath

Trump warned that if he is not elected there will be a bloodbath. A clear threat to again resort to violence as when he lost in 2020. Later he claimed that he was talking about what would happen to manufacturing jobs if he lost.
Here's a little reminder that every time we have Republican presidents in office - every time - the number of manufacturing jobs goes down. As it did with Trump. And by contrast, every time a Democrat is in the White House the number of manufacturing jobs goes up. As it has with Biden. Republican policies haven't created manufacturing jobs in a century.
So, he might be threatening violent mobs if he loses, Or he might be lying about how another Biden term will destroy manufacturing jobs. If the first, he's assuming that Americans are cowards; if the second, he's assuming Americans are stupid. Me? I'm assuming that in either case he's just projecting.

California - land of the most successful capitalists in the history of the world

At today's market close, the 50 most valuable companies around the world had a combined market cap of $27.9 trillion.

Portion of total from companies founded in

• the US: 89% ($24.8 trillion)

• the West Coast: 64% ($17.7 trillion)
• California: 44% ($12.3 trillion)
• California's Bay Area: 43% ($11.9 trillion)

One of the weirder things about the Republican Party is how they've convinced their base that California is the land of socialists when it is so demonstrably the land of the most successful capitalists in the history of the world.

The Stark and Persistent Labor Market Difference Between Democratic and Republican Presidencies

Those of you who find this kind of thing interesting might find this fascinating.

What is good? A negative number. It shows that the unemployment rate dropped during that presidency.
What is bad? A positive number. It shows that the unemployment rate rose during that presidency.

Red bars indicate a Republican presidency.
Blue bars indicate a Democratic presidency.

There is a stark and persistent difference.

These are not random. Post-FDR, Democratic presidencies have made labor markets a priority when making policy. Republicans continue to make capital markets their priority.

4 Year Anniversary of COVID in the USA - and how deadly it was to be an American during the pandemic

4 years ago today ...

President Trump declared a national emergency in response to coronavirus on March 13, 2020, to provide emergency funding of up to $50 billion to state and local governments. (The US ended up spending $1.6 trillion on the COVID response in 2020. So, slightly more than first estimated.)

10 months later, 25,000 Americans a week were dying. About 1.2 million Americans have died of COVID.

Trump never did take responsibility for responding to COVID, insisting that states manage the response to this global pandemic.

The US death rate was awful in comparison to other countries. As of February 2022, Canada had fewer than 1,000 COVID-19 related deaths per million people, with a total of 919 deaths per million. Japan was noted for having the fewest deaths and infections among the G10 countries, with 156 deaths per million, despite having the oldest population and imposing the mildest restrictions. The United States had a significantly higher rate, with 2,750 deaths per million, which was the highest among the mentioned countries.

So, to repeat, per million death rate from COVID
Japan - 156
Canada - 919
US - 2,750

Which is to say, Americans died from COVID at 3X the rate as Canadians and at 18X the rate as the Japanese. It was pretty deadly to be an American during the pandemic.

Trump Refers to the US as a Third-World Country - Unclear if That's a Campaign Promise or Threat

Trump is the first president to use the words bleed, carnage, stolen, tombstones, and trapped in an inaugural address, a man who tried to overthrow democracy to stay in office after losing outside of the former confederacy by more than 10 million votes. This week he referred to the US as a third world country and made it clear that he doesn't want any Republicans in the party who had supported apostates like Romney or Liz Cheney, people who failed to treat him with all the reverence accorded to Jim Jones. (Trump famously does not drink alcohol. He prefers to serve Kool-Aid.)

Republicans get all excited by that sort of talk - still recovering as they are from the trauma of the "great doubling of egg prices in 2023."

One Reason a Nation Might Turn to a Tyrant

A simple - possibly flawed - explanation for Trump's appeal: when people are frustrated with institutions they turn to a tyrant to blow up the bureaucracy.
People who don't know any history might actually fall for that offer and think that trading sclerotic bureaucracies for an unchecked despot is a good trade. It never is.

Another Sign the Job Market is Cooling: Wage Hike for Job Switching Has Dropped From Its All-Time High

On average, you get a wage hike for switching jobs. August of 2022, though, offered by the far largest premium for switching jobs, an average of 2.8% bigger raise than if you'd stayed in the same job. These last couple of months, though, that premium has returned to normal, suggesting that the job market is cooling.