Marriage and Inequality in Denmark

Economic historian Gregory Clarke has been studying social mobility over the long term. He believes that it is very stable over time and across nations: "if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now." 

One of the things he talked about in his interview with Tyler Cowen was assortative mating, that is, the tendency of people to marry those of their own social and educational status. He notes that in the US and Europe, husbands and wives resemble each other as much as siblings do. 

But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.

One of the remarkable things about Denmark is, education is essentially free until you’re age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision — it’s all available. They’ve compressed the income distribution quite sharply.

There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society. 

The major disagreement between Clarke and Cowen is about how much this matters. Cowen thinks relative inequality is less important than everybody's rising income, but Clarke thinks people mainly care about relative differences:

People are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. So, I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.

Which is an interesting question: could it be that Americans think the economy is terrible because they are comparing themselves to the rich, so we would be happier if we were all poorer but more equal? Does social media increase our dissatisfaction by constantly showing people happier and more beautiful than we are?

Antisemitism Rising among Young People in the US

Multiple polls lately have said that young Americans are more antisemitic than older Americans. Young conservatives are somewhat more antisemitic than liberals, but the dramatic difference is by age.

Some possible explanations:

1. Is the online antisemitism I consider rather silly actually having a huge impact?
2. Is it largely about the changing status of Israel, from small, threatened nation to powerful bully?
3. Is it anti-globalism, anti-international finance attitudes?

Other thoughts?

How Joseph Schumpeter Imagined the End of Capitalism

My quest to understand why Americans are so grouchy despite living through what looks to me like the best fifty years in human history has led me to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Schumpeter prophesied that capitalism would end, not because of its failures, but because of its success.

Schumpeter's theory had two related parts. First, he imagined that ever-rising material wealth would lead people to become more sensitive to the insecurity and constant change that capitalism inevitably causes:

Secular improvement that is taken for granted and coupled with individual insecurity that is acutely resented is of course the best recipe for breeding social unrest.

The second part of the theory has to do with the rise of a large intellectual class. Growing wealth leads to ever more education, and some fraction of people become intellectuals. By "intellectuals" Schumpeter meant what others have called the "chattering classes," the people who have lots of opinions that they constantly share with the public:

Intellectuals are people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs….

By their nature, intellectuals are a critical bunch, and Schumpeter predicted that as capitalism created more and more wealth, intellectuals would become ever more critical of it. One usually sees this argument cited against the post-World War II Left, the "cultural Marxists," all that stuff about the inauthenticity of consumer capitalism and so on. (All the discussion of Schumpeter I have found  this morning comes from conservatives.) But it seems to me that it applies equally to the nationalist right, the people who constantly complain about the decline in manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of small towns left behind by the economy. Capitalism creates constant change; that is its essence. If you are a conservative because you want to preserve what John Boehner called "the world I grew up in," then you fit into Schumpeter's model just as well as Herbert Marcuse.

I find much about this persuasive; if our unhappiness requires a rationale, maybe this is it. I am not sure, though, that there is really anything to explain. Part of me thinks that evolution shaped human nature to be perpetually unsatisfied, and nothing else is really needed to explain why the wealthiest and most free people in history think their society sucks.

Paul Krugman's Last NYT Column

Paul Krugman is retiring as a regular NY Times columnist. In his last column, he reflects on how much America has changed since he took the job in 2000:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.

I agree with this. In fact I was so bemused by the level of optimism (me! the resident optimist!) that a friend and I started designing a series of "Real History" quarters that would showcase the dark side of the American past. Like, California would have the internment of Japanese Americans, Tennessee the Fort Pillow Massacre, Virginia the Second Powhatan War, Kentucky the Hatfields and McCoys, West Virginia the coal field wars, etc.

Anyway.

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.

It was not always thus. Back in 2002 and ’03, those of us who argued that the case for invading Iraq was fundamentally fraudulent received a lot of pushback from people refusing to believe that an American president would do such a thing. Who would say that now?

In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, which sent unemployment in some countries to Great Depression levels, but trust in Eurocrats — and belief in a bright European future — didn’t.

It’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.

Obviously there is something to this, but I think this contrast (which you see all over, not just from Krugman) is way overblown.

I remember the 1970s: stagflation, the rust belt, people paying $5 to take sledegehammer whacks at Japanese cars, widespread fear of environmental poisons. In the 1960s we had the Vietnam War and a vast rebellion against the state's wisdom, hippies and their attack on bourgeois life, terrorists who set off far more bombs than we saw in the 90s or have seen lately. I could go on, but I really don't think there was ever an era when Americans had great trust in experts.

The places I see the biggest change are in the media and in government. In the era of three, highly-regulated TV networks and powerful newspapers the press did a lot of pretending to be neutral and above the fray. There were highly partisan media but they were pretty obscure; one of my friends in middle school came from a family of cranky libertarians and they subscribed to mimeographed newsletters sent through the mail. The big first crack in the wall came with AM talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and so on. Then Fox News, then the internet. 

To the extent that people ever did respect our leaders, it was partly because the dominant media worked hard to create that respect.

The change within Congress has been equally profound. I see this starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, a new breed of legislators who cared only about fighting for their side, nothing set aside for respect of the Halls of Congress or whatever.

It may be that the respectful America I grew up in was a unique product of the Cold War and the post-World War II boom, doomed to eventual collapse. Congress was often an ugly place in the nineteenth century, and Yellow Journalism was a real thing. Maybe we're just living through regression to the mean.

Krugman:

So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

Maybe.

David Brooks on MAGA Values

David Brooks in the NY Times:

It’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.

The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.

In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. . . . We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.

MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.

What does heroism look like according the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.

In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.

In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society. He’s not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served. Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle. . . .

The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.

In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”

I would note the connection of this “values system” to a belief that something is terribly wrong with the world. The system has to be smashed because everything is going to hell. Why?

Really, why? So far as I can see, the world is better for most people than it has ever been, and it continues to get better. Why the rage, that insistence on blowing everything up? It isn't just MAGA people, it's anarchists and communists and cultural leftists who think that everything has to be decolonized. You no doubt remember all the people who supported Bernie but then switched to Trump; they said that the world needs a dramatic shake-up, and they don't much care who does it so long as it gets done.

I remember a conversation I had with my sons a few years ago, when they were really down on America. I said, if you think our country is collapsing, you should go to Venezuela and see what that really looks like.

The Perils of Diversity

From the abstract to a new, paywalled paper titled The Misery of Diversity:

Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Exploiting a novel natural experiment in history, we examine the impact of the social environment, captured by population diversity, on SWB. We find that diversity lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB. Diversity-induced deteriorations in the quality of the macrosocial environment, captured by reduced social cohesion, retarded state capacity, and increased inequality in economic opportunities, emerge as mechanisms explaining our findings. The analysis of first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe and the USA reveals that the misery of home country diversity persists even after neutralizing the role of the social environment. However, these effects diminish among the second generation, suggesting that long-term improvements in the social environment can alleviate the burden of diversity.

Somewhere on this site I discuss a paper about a corporation that had 4-6 person offices all over the world; the researchers found that people were happier and more productive when the office was all male or all female. All the studies I have ever seen find that most people are happiest around others like themselves and want to live that way most of the time.

Not that this is the whole story; after all, if immigrants had been happy in their home countries they presumably would never have left. Village life has its own miseries, and people have been leaving their birth villages for the big city for about 5,000 years now. As I have said many times, I personally prefer mixed-sex gatherings to all male ones, although I am finding that men over 50 are less obnoxious in groups than they were when we were younger.

But, anyway, when you are pondering why our vast wealth and long lives have not made us happy, you have to consider the price we pay for having to live and work with people who feel to us like strangers.

(That can apply to distinctions other than ethnicity and sex; I mean, think about how miserable every presidential election makes tens of millions of Americans on the losing side.)

There are also very basic problems with extending the village mentality to a nation. While it might be possible for a country like Norway to maintain ethnic unity, the US has been multi-ethnic and multi-cultural from its beginnings. It was probably Indians in the southeast who first divided North Americans into Red, Black and White, in the early 1700s, and we have been diverse ever since. Attempts to achieve ethnic purity in the US therefore all amount to Apartheid. While I'm on the subject, ethnic unity in many European states was achieved by some combination of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation. Our desire to live among others like us, while understandable and extremely ancient, always has a dark side that we need to monitor.

When one group has most of the money and power, their desire to hang out with each other can also amount to a severe barrier for others; it was for this reason that the men's clubs that used to be so important in the US (Elks, Kiwanis, etc.) were forced to admit women. (Is that part of why they have declined?)

When I write about immigration to the US, I always acknowledge that there are costs. It is simply true that having to deal with people who feel alien "lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB." Many European ethno-nationalists also write about the bad effects this has on immigrants, torn away from what these writers see as their native homes and cultures, and this paper seems to support the notion that immigrants suffer from their status.

But I think the benefits are worth it. I think the US is more vibrant, more productive, and more interesting with millions of immigrants than it would be without them. Immigration also makes the cost of our aging population more sustainable; take away the contributions of recent immigrants and Social Security would already be bankrupt. I also think that in the US it would have always been harder for blacks to achieve equality in a country that was 85% white than it will be in a more diverse situation.

And I think we are much better off with women in public life, doubling our reservoir of talent and energy.

Sometimes when I read liberals going on about the wonders of diversity I cringe and think about the huge literature showing that diversity makes many of us unhappy. But when I consider that we are stuck with diversity, I think that maybe celebrating what we have is the way to go.

A Note on American Careerism

Surveys lately have found that many Americans don't want to be promoted. It's a hard thing to measure, since nobody tracks how many people were offered promotion but turned it down, but I have seen several different results showing that around half of people would refuse promotion if they were offered it. We also had a couple of accidential experiments done when companies tried to bribe people to come back to the office: 

Take Dell, whose executives thought they came up with an ingenious plan to get everyone back into the office. If employees didn't come in at least three days a week, the company announced in February, they would be ineligible for a promotion. The response from Dell's workforce was a collective shrug. Months after the directive, nearly half of employees were still remote, apparently happy to remain in their current roles as long as they could keep working from home. It was a clear sign that in 2024, promotions just aren't the incentive they used to be.

I'm certainly in that situation; I never had any interest in further promotion once I became a principal investigator, that is, the lead scientist on my projects. When I have accepted management roles it was basically because there wasn't anyone else to do them. I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first. 

But the desire to climb the corporate ladder isn't exactly ancient:

The original work ethic in America — the Protestant one, espoused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin — dates from a time when most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. It was rooted in a rugged individualism that was skeptical of authority and hierarchies, fitting for a country founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny.

That became a problem when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Companies exploded in size, and more and more Americans found themselves working for someone else. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. By 1870, that share had shrunk to 33%. By 1940, it was 20%.

"The moral vision of American society had been based upon the image of the independent, self-employed person," writes Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School who has studied the history of work. "Many social critics feared that people would be less likely to work hard under the wage system and, even worse, that something in their very natures might change." America was facing an identity crisis.

The solution was to forge a whole new work ethic.

That is, the ethic of climbing the ladder. Which is also, of course, related to the decline in hereditary class distinctions and the rise of meritocracy, and to the growth of  huge bureaucracies like those in the Federal and state governments and mega-corporations.

None of the articles I have seen mention this, but I have to think that our ever-growing wealth also plays a role. In our society people like nurses and archaeologists can lead quite nice lives, with houses and yards and the internet and hundreds of tv channels. If you feel financially ok, why seek out a more stressful job?

Like millions of my contemporaries, I think medium chill is the happiest kind of life.

Some Data on the Satisfaction of Trans Teenagers

Via Kevin Drum, here's a fairly large study of teenagers who received "gender affirming" care and mostly felt good about it; of 220 subjects, only 9 expressed regret.

Which is interesting, and this looks like a pretty good study. But:

The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.

Right. This study says nothing about the strange recent surge in "sudden onset gender dysphoria", those teenagers who suddenly have doubts about their genders as puberty kicks in, and who have remarkable levels of other mental health problems. It also only concerns strict gender switchers and says nothing about the non-binary or the gender-fluid.

I mention this partly because I keep meeting older liberals who think they are pro-trans but whose model only concerns people like the subjects of this study, those who have identified strongly since childhood with the gender that doesn't match their biology. When I say to them, ok, but that's not what most trans discourse is about these days, now we have people who think they can change their minds about their genders at any point and should be able to switch back and forth whenever they feel like it, they often react by saying, "That's not trans!"

As I have said here several times, I try not to care about what other adults do; none of my business, really, and I am perfectly willing to be respectful to anyone who is respectful to me. And I don't have any real issues with the kind of children covered by this study. But that doesn't mean there are no questions to ask about the trans movement as currently constructed, particulary on the subject of teenagers with mental health issues, quite a few of whom have sued the people who, as they now see it, responded to their adolescent mental health crises by encouraging them to transition.

But my real beef with trans activists is their habit of insisting "you should think X," to which my response is always, "no." What I think is nobody else's business, and I refuse to engage with anyone who says otherwise.

Désenchantée

So YouTube randomly offered me a French pop song, "Désenchantée" by Mylène Farmer. Curious, I listened. It's an ok song, and Farmer is obviously a star-level performer. The choreographer of the dancers, is, alas, truly horrendous, some real Eurovision-level tripe. 

The video is shot in a stadium full of screaming fans. Farmer sings the song once, then walks out into the audience and has them sing it back to her; thousands of these people know the song by heart.

I can read French, sort of, but my oral comprehension is terrible. So I looked up the lyrics. As you would expect from a song called "Disenchanted," they are pretty grim. 

Swimming in the troubled waters of tomorrows
Waiting here for the end
Floating in the air too heavy
Of almost nothing
Who can I reach out to?

If I have to fall from a great height
May my fall be slow
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well

Everything is chaos next to it
All my ideals: damaged words
I am looking for a soul who can help me
I am from a disenchanted, disenchanted generation

There is a second verse, then he chorus again, and then 

Chaos, chaos, chaos
Chaos, chaos, chaos

But, look around the stadium at the people belting out these words; does anybody look sad? No, they look like this is at least the best day of the month for them, if not the whole year.

It struck that this one of the themes of modern culture: nothing makes people feel as good as singing along with up tempo songs about the collapse of civilization and the misery of existence.

Ambition, Rationalism, and Something Else

Interesting personal narrative by Nabeel Qureshia, a very ambitious young man who went to work for Palantir. (I was able to access this via Marginal Revolution.) He makes it seem cool, people working extreme hours partly because they find what they are doing fascinating and important. "These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun." One of the people who interviewed him had the temperature in his office set to 60 degrees and constantly chewed ice, because of some theory that this improves cognitive function.

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP – your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets. . . .

The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d. As a rationalist-brained philosophy graduate, this particular point was deeply important to me – I wasn’t interested in joining an uncritical cult. But a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going and how software fit into it – existentially – that was interesting to me.

I am fascinated by the kind of intellect represented here. On the one hand, these people are really smart, and they get rich by building cool things. But I always come away thinking that something is lacking. Here is another insight that feeds into my disquiet:

One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book Talent is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person. Tyler himself is of course a great example of this. Any MR reader can name 10+ Tylerisms instantly - ‘model this’, ‘context is that which is scarce’, ‘solve for the equilibrium’, ‘the great stagnation’ are all examples. You can find others who are great at this. Thiel is one. Elon is another (“multiplanetary species”, “preserving the light of consciousness”, etc. are all memes). Trump, Yudkowsky, gwern, SSC, Paul Graham, all of them regularly coin memes. It turns out that this is a good proxy for impact.

Maybe that's true. Mulling over some other major thinkers, it seems to me that Jesus and Confucius both had this talent for generating impressive "memes." So did Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. But is it enough?

Enough for what?

Enough for human flourishing.

I have mentioned here several times that brilliant scientists have a terrible record when it comes to politics. Elon Musk's public self-humiliation seems to me only the latest example of what happens when a person who is brilliant in some technical ways tries to pontificate about something really complex and important, e.g., free speech, or politics. And I don't just mean because he supports Trump, I mean his descent into utter incoherence. To maintain a political position that has ideological content but also deals with reality is, it seems, very difficult, and being smart is not enough to get your there.

But there is more to the rationalist tech-bro thing that one might worry about. For example, the weakness for dumb fads in diet and medicine; the constant search for nootropic drugs that would make them smarter or harder working; the insistence on condensing a thinker like Nietzsche into a meme like "good things are good."

Sometimes, being smart is enough; sometimes great knowledge of the past can be an impediment rather than an advantage. Mathematicians and poets often do their best work before they turn 30.

But in other circumstances shallow brilliance is at best inadequate and perhaps destructive. Sometimes a mind racing forward in a nootropic haze leaves behind all that vague stuff that goes by names like roots and meaning and connection. Hi tech success may be all that some people want or need, but I see the world differently and want a different kind of life.

At the University of Michigan, DEI Satisfies No One

By some measures, the University of Michigan has the most comprehensive program for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the US. But even though the school has spent, by its own reckoning, $250 million on DEI efforts, NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore found that nobody is satisfied. 

Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”

Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.

Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.

Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.

Professors and administrators who spoke critically of the program insisted on anonymity, because, as one administrator (a “woman of color”) put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”

The one measurable outcome of the program has been a rise in disputes:

The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)

Then came October 7 and campus disputes in which both sides accused the other of racism and the DEI bureaucracy did exactly nothing to smooth things over or promote dialogue.

It's a sad tale of bureaucratic overreach and the deep truth that sometimes “fighting” what you hate is pointless or worse.

Disaster Recovery in the Trump Era

CNN Reports:

Aid to several communities impacted by Hurricane Helene was temporarily paused in parts of North Carolina over the weekend due to reports of threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency responders, amid a backdrop of misinformation about responses to recent storms.

Some FEMA teams helping disaster survivors apply for assistance in rural North Carolina are currently working at secure disaster recovery centers in counties where federal workers are receiving threats, a FEMA spokesperson told CNN on Monday.

“For the safety of our dedicated staff and the disaster survivors we are helping, FEMA has made some operational adjustments,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Disaster Recovery Centers will continue to be open as scheduled, survivors continue to register for assistance, and we continue to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”

On Saturday, FEMA workers had to halt their work in Rutherford County due to reports that National Guard troops saw “armed militia” threatening the workers, according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies helping with the response, verified by unnamed federal officials. It’s not clear if the threat was credible.

Rutherford County is southeast of the hard-hit Asheville area, and part of the mountainous region that was slammed by deadly flooding and landslides as Helene carved a path of destruction through the Southeast after making landfall in Florida last month. More than 100 people were killed in North Carolina and thousands of others were left grappling with catastrophic damage.

Some FEMA operations were also paused Sunday in Ashe County, near the borders of Tennessee and Virginia, out of an abundance of caution, Sheriff B. Phil Howell said on Facebook. This included in-person applications for aid in at least two locations “due to threats occurring in some counties,” according to the county’s emergency management office. Those locations reopened Monday, the sheriff and emergency management office announced.

Strange times. Note that I am not assuming the threats are real, just noting level of paranoia, with recovery operations trapped between people who think FEMA is the enemy and people terrified of anti-government militias.

Port Automation vs. Union Jobs

The big issues in the dockworkers strike are 1) pay and 2) automation. International Longshoremen's Association president Harold Daggett has mainly been talking about automation, which drives most economists crazy. American ports are not efficient by global standards, and we all pay a price for that. But it is true that automating American ports would eliminate thousands of jobs. Should we care?

Consider that Daggett once fumed about EZ Pass eliminating the jobs of toll booth workers:

Take EZ Pass. The first time they come out with EZ Pass, one lane, and cars were going through and everybody sitting in their car goes, ‘What's that all about, I'm going to get one of them.’ Today, all those union jobs are gone, and it's all EZ Pass. People don't realize it, everybody's got three cars, everybody got an EZ Pass on the window, and they go through like it's nothing, and they get billed in the mail. They didn't care about that union worker working in the booth. . . . Someone needs to go to Congress and say, ‘Whoa, time out,’ this world is going too fast for us. Machines have got to stop.

And for that I have zero sympathy. Sitting in lines at tool booths is awful, so E-Z Pass has improved my life. If your plan for your own future is all about imposing suffering on others, count me out.

On the other hand, let's imagine a future in which machines can do pretty much all work. What happens then?

I have no idea. So I tend to think we should be careful about these decisions.

Who bears the cost of inefficient ports? Mainly working and middle-class people, since we spend a lor more of our incomes on stuff than the rich do. American manufacturing companies also pay, since they use a lot of imported parts and materials. So this isn't a transfer from the rich to the poor, more a general tax on all of us.

I think what I would like to see here is the port workers getting a nice raise in exchange for accepting automation, but I can't manage particularly strong feelings about it.

Thoughts on Office Life

I cleaned out my old office in Washington, DC this week.

I've had an office in Washington since 1993, so this was the end of a long saga. My old employers moved into our current space in 2010. I was in a cubicle for a few years but some time around 2013 I moved into a big double office that I shared with one of my colleagues. The space was big enough for three desks but there were only two computer connections, so we got a good deal. On the other hand, the extra space meant that we started accumulating stuff. In particular, books; all the books that anyone purchased for particular projects ended up on our shelves. (It sometimes happens that you have a project in, say, Lynchburg, and the most convenient way to get information you need is to buy a copy of a book like Lynchburg: An Architectural History.) Then my boss retired and all of his stuff descended on us, including thirty years worth of American Antiquity. Then our Richmond office closed and we got all their books. Plus all the old cameras people weren't using any more.

Then my old company was purchased by a much bigger firm, and we suddenly had a lot more offices. My old company had rather few, so (for example) all the cultural resource people in the Washington-Baltimore area were in one office. But the new company has six offices within the region, and people started going to the one closest to their homes. Around 2019 my office mate, who lives in Baltimore, started going to the office in Baltimore instead of commuting to Washington. We held onto his desk, though, because we were in the middle of hiring multiple new people, and we thought at least one would end up in Washington. None did. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home. 

At some point we were ordered to return to the office two days a week, but when I did I immediately got Covid-19, and anyway that experiment in part-time office work ramped up very slowly. For a long time the office was completely empty on Mondays and Fridays. I never really got back into the habit of riding down to Washington, and one thing about a long commute is that is a lot easier when you rigidly make it part of your routine. Plus, with no other cultural resources folks in DC the rationale for commuting down there seemed dubious; with whom was I supposed to interact? For long stretches I had no projects working with anyone else in DC. (Instead I have projects in Orlando, New York City, Palo Alto, the Great Smokies, the Mojave Desert, and all across Virginia and North Carolina, and I have never seen most of the people working on these projects.)

I went to the office less and less; I think until this week I had been in the office twice since June. But other people have been going back, and space now is tight, and last week they asked me to surrender the large space I have been occupying alone for more than four years.

I am ambivalent about this. I don't miss commuting down to my office to turn on my computer and interact with people across the country in exactly the way I would from home. I do miss when I was part of a group of people with similar skills and interests, who worked for the same clients and often worked together on projects. That was great.

I also wonder about young people starting out. I learned an enormous amount just being around my old boss, and being together with other archaeologists and historians, and I think we have had some significant mentoring failures since our office broke up. It seems to be much easier to do things that have become routine to you via the internet than to learn to do them.

So when I think about the question of whether working together in an office is important or "worth it," my own experience compels me to ask: working together with whom, and doing what?

The Crisis of Culture

I have recently read two reviews of French intellectual Olivier Roy’s  book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms: Tyler Cowen, Ian Leslie. Roy argues that culture in the traditional sense of understandings shared at a barely conscious level is dying out, replaced by defined “norms” that we constantly fight over. Cowen: “There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings.” Leslie:

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.

I agree that something like this is happening. Local accents are declining, as are regional variations in dress and idiom.

But I think we commonly exaggerate the degree to which cultural understandings were widely shared; "I didn't get the memo" and similar phrases go back to the nineteenth century. The world has, after all, been changing rapidly for about 300 years now, we have seen multiple major shifts in our expectations of public behavior. The rowdy eighteenth century gave way to the swooning Romantics and then the prim Victorians; the Twenties roared; the Fifties bopped, the hippies turned on and tuned out; etc. We may feel a bit more adrift than some of our ancestors, but it's a difference of degree.

To whatever extent our ancestors were more secure than we are, that was because they interacted only with a limited set of people and put a lot of time and energy into fitting in.

We should also remember the extent to which "culture" was used to exclude people from charmed circles where only people with the right understandings were welcome, and the extent to which the powerful used it to manipulate others. For example women's equality in the workplace has come with a major assault on Mad Men-style office sexuality. Much of American southern culture was straight racism. Elite culture all over the world required the mastery of elaborate lore – dueling etiquette, foreign or dead languages, proficiency in rowing or tennis. A great deal of our most wonderful art was created to put distance between the rich and everyone else, since only they had the time to learn its intricacies.

So I would expect a more democratic and open society to be, in some ways, less diverse and more boring. I understand that this has costs, but I think we can find ways to keep various kinds of culture alive. For one thing, in a world as rich and populous as ours, you only need 1/100 of 1% of the population to sustain a pretty good movement, which can be as arcane as you like. (Furries) 

To the extent that we have replaced implicit understandings with stated norms, we have made the world much more open to everyone not raised in the right sort of family.

Something I Agree with 100%: Pennies

Caity Weaver in the NY Times:

The penny may seem like a harmless coin. But few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than our inability to stop making this worthless currency. . . .

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

There are about 240 billion pennies in America, many of them sitting in jars. There are so many, and they weigh so much, that the government sometimes worries about what would happen if people suddenly decided to bring them to banks or otherwise use them. We couldn't cope with the resulting logistical nightmare. Incidentally that 240 billion is only a fraction of all the pennies ever minted; most have undergone a mysterious process the government calls "disappearance." The US penny is probably the most widely minted coin ever, and that portrait of Lincoln by far the most widely reproduced work of art.

US officials have been calling on the government to stop minting pennies for fifty years. Everyone with a brain knows this is stupid, but we can't stop.

I think, though, that Weaver is missing the real reason we don't do this. I don't think it is just inertia or lobbying by the company that makes the blanks. I think we don't do this because a minority of cranky Americans, the same ones who keep calling for us to go back to the gold standard, would cry bloody murder and call it a conspiracy to steal our money, probably hatched on Jekyll Island by the Jews who run the Federal Reserve, etc. And nobody in Congress cares enough to risk the wrath of those people.

Hating on Capitalism

This tweet perfectly sums up how many left-wing Americans feel about capitalism:

Because, I mean, how is that any different from life under socialism? (If you're going to tell me that Europeans get longer vacations, that's true, but all European societies are capitalist.)

Loved this response:

It really seems to me that many people say "capitalism" when they mean "life." What kind of system wouldn't involve most people going to school and getting jobs and going on vacations and dying? Anarchists die, too, and if they want to eat and have roofs over their heads, they have to work. Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast.

I remember during the weird riots in Portland some people tried to take over a city park to plant a food forest, saying that once we had free food we wouldn't have to work any more. Sigh.

Having or Not Having Children

Interesting interview with two philosophers, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, who wrote a book around the question of whether to have children. To start with, this:

Anastasia Berg: When people think about the way in which the role of children in human life, especially in the West, has changed, they often think in terms of children no longer conferring the same advantages. They’re not useful in the same way that they used to be, say, economically. And people talk about the rising cost or sacrifices that they demand. On this model, having children is a possible choice that was more advantageous before and has become less so now. But we think there’s been a far more radical shift in the role of children in our lives. In the past, children were understood as an essential part of a well-lived human life. Human life was understood, essentially, to be intergenerational. It wasn’t just that an individual happened to be related to people, it was essential to who you were. What’s new is not that people find kids are less advantageous, but that they’re considered one possible project among many that one can choose. And once they’ve taken on this framing, compared to the other things one can pursue in life, and considering the costs and sacrifices and risks that, historically, children almost always implied, it’s not surprising that people are finding it hard to justify.

I think this is exactly right. All the stuff about affordability is nonsense; my wife and I have raised five children as nurse and an archaeologist. Some people don't have children because they never find a partner, but married people who don't have children have just decided to do something else.

The interviewer asks:

You speak specifically about a societal evolution that you call the end of “the motherhood mandate.” And you quote a pair of sociologists who say that the “oughtness” that used to be associated with parenthood has been removed for a substantial number of people. 

To which Berg, again, responds with a little discourse about how the argument among feminists over whether motherhood enslaved or empowered women ended with a sort of truce: every woman gets to choose.

In their book Berg and Wiseman note that anti-natalist arguments are ancient. Asked about this point, Berg says:

From the early days, when people asked any philosophical questions, they asked whether human life is so miserable and so full of harm and tribulation that perhaps it is better not to perpetuate it. This argument took two guises. The first is the argument from suffering: human life is full of unhappiness, whether actual or potential, and of so many risks that from the standpoint of the individual, it’s better to never have been born. And from the standpoint of a prospective parent, it is outright irresponsible, maybe morally negligent, to subject another human being to such a fate. There is also the argument from evil. This starts not with the premise of human suffering, but of human character: human beings are bad and evil and harmful. In a theological register, we talk about fallenness and essential corruption of the human heart. And from this, we’re led to the conclusion that it would be morally irresponsible to have more of these beings—whether because we’re perpetuating evil in the world or, in the environmental register of today, because we’re harming the planet.

We bring this up not just to historicize our present moment. We want to show that what is experienced as a contemporary concern is, in fact, pointing to a deep philosophical question: that of the value of human life in the present and future. We also want to point to what is unique about our moment today. While this question was raised historically, it was raised theoretically, abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. What’s different today is that people feel they need to justify that choice in the face of these arguments.

I generally think of childbearing as a personal choice and I wouldn't judge anyone for not having children. But when I think about the universe, I absolutely do see a positive role for humanity in the future. We are the ones who know. Other species are in amazing in their own ways, but we are the ones who have mapped the galaxy, parsed the atom, and walked on the Moon; we are the ones who write epics and build cathedrals and come up with theories about how everything came to be. It may be that we will eventually hand this role over to others, to conscious machines or human/machine hybrids. But it seems very sad to me to imagine a universe with no inhabitants that can appreciate its scale, its intricacy, and its wonder. I think we belong here.

Free Speech and Riots in Britain

The prosecution of people who made inflamatory posts during Britain's recent anti-immigrant riots has led to a lot of anger and angst over speech. Some people – notably Elon Musk, but he is far from alone – have accused the British government of setting up an oppressive police state for things like this:

Some people have also objected to a 15-month prison term for Julie Sweeney, 53, of Cheshire. After seeing a photo on Facebook of people helping repair a mosque that was attacked during a riot in Southport, Ms. Sweeney posted: “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” She pleaded guilty to a charge of sending a communication threatening death or serious harm. Her lawyer argued for leniency, saying she was her husband’s primary caregiver. But the judge, Steven Everett, said, “Even people like you need to go to prison.”

As I see it, many people treat the internet as a sort of fantasy world where they can say anything because there are no consequences. They want Twitter/X to be just like sitting with their mates in the pub, with freedom to say whatever pops into their heads. And, indeed, the internet is where many, many people have most of their conversations.

On the other side, government spokesmen say things like:

I don’t see why the internet should be regarded as any different than when someone stands on a soap box and addresses a raging crowd.

That is, a place and situation where words matter a lot.

The liberal establishment has a deep fear that bad things are happening on the internet, that dangerous ideas are circulating and getting into the heads of impressionable young men, and that this will somehow lead to a civil war or right-wing takeover. My sons, who spent a lot of time in online swamps as teenagers, are frankly baffled by this attitude. They think the whole business is a grand joke, just kids experimenting with their freedom to say shocking things. The notion that anyone would take it seriously is just weird to them, like thinking that Dungeons and Dragons is training kids to become sword-wielding assassins.

And then the riots broke out in Britain, fueled by false rumors that a knife-wileding killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, riots in which people were hurt and property destroyed. On the one hand it was a farce, a bunch of grouches larping at revolution, easily crushed by the government. On the other hand, a hotel full of asylum seekers was surrounded by an angry mob that threatened to burn them alive and beat up the cops who tried to stop them, and that doesn't strike me as something we ought to tolerate.

But I have to say that new PM Keith Starmer's comments make me nervous:

“We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder.” He also applauded the courts for sentencing people for their online behavior, not just for taking part in the riots. “That’s a reminder to everyone that whether you’re directly involved or whether you’re remotely involved, you’re culpable, and you will be put before the courts if you’ve broken the law.”

What does "remotely involved" mean? You can just glance at Russia or China to see how far certain governments have stretched the definition of "remotely involved" in lawbreaking.

The case that has drawn the most attention is that of the woman accused of starting the furor, Bernadette Spofforth, 55, described by the NY Times as "an online influencer and mother of three." She was arrested and released on bail but has not been charged. The Times:

Disinformation researchers say she appears to have been the first to falsely claim on X that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker, in a post suggesting that his name was Ali-Al-Shakati. By the time she deleted the post later that day, it had been viewed almost 1.5 million times and reposted by prominent conspiracy theorists. Ms. Spofforth, who has previously spread misinformation about Covid-19 and climate change, told The Sun, a London newspaper, that she had copied and pasted the post, and “fell into the trap of sharing misinformation.”

Love that little gloss about Covid-19, because so far as I can tell spreading false information about the pandemic is a charge that could be leveled against almost everyone on the planet, starting with the CDC and all the people who said we had to close the schools.

I'm not posting about this because I think I know the answer. In a situation like the British riots, the line between free speech and incitement to riot is both hard to draw and important. But I want to put myself down as being very suspicious of any plan to arrest people for "remote involvement" in violent acts they had nothing to do with planning or committing.

Chirs Murphy and the Weird Malaise

The statistics, and most economists, say that the US economy is doing great. But many Americans disagree. In one NY Times poll from a few months ago, only 3 percent said the state of the economy is "excellent," while 51 percent opted for "poor." The most interesting question asked how much change people want to see in the "political and economic system in America":

2%    The system does not need changes
27%  The system needs minor changes
55%  The system needs major changes
14%   The system needs to be torn down entirely

Trump's lead in that poll was, I think, mostly explained by the finding that 45% of voters thought he would make major changes if elected, vs. 11% for Biden. 

Which brings me to this NY Times piece on Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. Murphy has ben getting a lot of attention lately for saying things like this:

The signs are clear, and we shouldn’t be afraid to see them. The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.

Not because of simple economics; like anyone who can read a graph, Murphy understands that in basic numerical terms the economy is fine:

The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical. They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.

Ok, fine, if there is such a thing as a metaphysical crisis, maybe America is having one. But how, exactly, does one address a metaphysical crisis with "practical policies'?

Murphy's plan for fighting the crisis seems to be, as near as I can tell, the same as those of Trump and J.D. Vance: "A pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism," coupled with an attack on "massive concentrations of corporate power." Come to think of it, that is pretty much Biden's plan, too. I mean, whatever else you may think of Biden, he has made the support of union factory workers the centerpiece of his politics for 50 years.

Why don't we do this? It is within the power of the US government to adopt a program of economic nationalism: higher tariffs, subsidies for domestic manufacturing, more training in skilled trades and less for college academics, etc. We could bring more manufacturing back to the US. The thing is, the first impact of such a policy would be much higher prices for goods. It just costs more to have things made by Americans earning middle class incomes than buying them from China or Bangladesh. And as recent events reminded us, there is nothing Americans hate more than inflation. Rant about neoliberalism all you want, it is world trade that makes things like furnature and clothes affordable for working class people. If people really want both a return of industry to America and continued low prices – which is what polls say – they are in la la land.

Another angle on the issue comes from Julius Krein, a new right figure who supports Trump. Krein and Murphy have

a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people. This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.

What kind of "things," exactly, do we need more of? So far as I can tell, we are awash in things. I constantly fantasize about throwing half of mine away. People complain about infrastructure, like high speed rail, or a better power grid, but we don't have those because people fight hell to keep them away from where they live. I suppose more good housing is an option, but most of the country has plenty of housing, including almost all the counties that went for Trump in 2020. Housing shortages are only a thing in certain big cities where a lot of people want to live so they can earn a good money doing soulless jobs. And is there any category of people Americans hate more than "property developers"?

Again, Biden agrees with all of this, and this generation's biggest single government act designed to fight the shift from making stuff to extracting rents was his "CHIPS and Science act." Somehow, though, this actual attempt ("practical policy") to bring more middle class factory jobs to the US failed to resonate. It was too complicated, too abstruse, to high tech:

“Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Democrats had failed to explain what they wanted it to achieve. “Symbolically, politically and culturally, Biden announcing three new steel plants in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio might have done more than the entire CHIPs act combined, because it would have showed that we were listening,” Mr. Krein said.

“Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”

So, I guess, Americans are only interested in industrial policy if it is stupid and counterproductive? WE DO NOT NEED MORE STEEL MILLS.

Or is this just more longing for the Great Leader who will somehow fulfill us and make us proud? Bah to that.

I think this is all baloney. This whole fantasy of bringing back American manufacturing is a silly attempt to explain our lousy mood. I don't think our malaise has anything to do with steel production; I don't think it has much to do with economics at all. If it did, we would be happier. 

I think the root of the problem is a pervasive sense that ordinary life is just not good enough. That a life of going to work and getting paid and buying things and having "fun" when we can is empty and pointless and just too hard.

I think this is a very widespread human problem, which is why we have never been a happy species. Certain modern Catholics seem to think that medieval people were happier because they knew who they were and had a rich religious life, to which I say, plague-pogroms-riots-revolts-murder-suicide-misery. People like David Graeber seem to think life was better for hunter-gatherers or primitive farmers, but so far as I can tell they do a lot of bitching about their own lives, and when offered the chance to try "civilization" as an alternative, most of them took it.

As for our particular situation, I will list some factors I think contribute to our bad mood. None of these apply to all Americans, and some apply onto to a minority, but I think they all contribute:

1. Immigration and racial change; many Americans miss the days when all their neighbors looked the same. I think immigration is great because it makes this a more vibrant and exciting country, but I understand that many others disagree.
2. Declining religious faith and church membership.
3. Rapid social change, e.g., gay rights, the decline of the patriarchal family, trans identities, etc. Many, many people just hate change and want things to stay the way they were. Meanwhile people who support these changes often wish they would go further and hate it that other people oppose this.
4. Ecological doomsterism.
5. The absense of an obvious foreign enemy to hate.
6. The rewriting of history to bring out slavery, racism, and other crimes and evils, undermining a happy narrative of We Are the Good Guys.
7. Changes in the news media. The new motto of the news is "panic sells." And it isn't just Fox News or other right-wing sources; CNN's policy seems to be to lead broadcast with the Fear of the Day, whether it is "new, more deadly" strains of monkeypox, shoplifting flash mobs, microplastics, or what have you. (How would you adress this with "practical policies"? Mandate that 68% of news stories be positive?)
8. Economic inequality. This really does seem to bother many people, including many who oppose all the measures we know of that might reduce it, like higher taxes.
9. Constant exposure, via television and social media, to people whose lives seem to me much more exciting, fulfilling, and less of a druge than yours is.
10. Angry fights between political parties and figures that make people think half the country is their evil enemies.
11. Too many drugs.
12. We are social mammals, and for all social mammals, fights about status and struggles for material advantage are fundamental to existence.
13. Evolution shaped us to desire, not to be content.

So far as I can see, people are mainly unhappy with beds we have made for ourselves. Social media constantly teases us with a "better", more exciting life because they is what gets followers. Our political media are angry because they is what gets people to pay attention. There are moderate news sources and moderate bastions on social media, but you've never heard of them because nobody cares. There have been various attempts at creating "good news" web sites, but all have failed. We have conflict because, at some level, we love it.

Americans refuse to be satisfied. Maybe that is, in a way, our greatness. We have had such a big part in building the modern world because we can't sit still and enjoy what we have. The economy may be better than ever before, but it is still not enough. Having opted for one way of life, we keep looking around and wondering if some other path would have been better. Modern humans are the richest, safest, longest-lived people in history, but so far as we can tell, we are not any happier for it.

My program for addressing this malaise would be this: Stop hating. Don't lose sleep over what you cannot control, and focus on what you can. Don't waste energy being angry that somebody else has more. Learn to love what you have.