iLeave

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

The interaction between big businesses and small countries can be strange. Add in a big, transnational government, and things get even stranger.

Apple is in trouble — largely symbolic trouble — over the taxes it owes to the government of Ireland. Apple insists that it has paid its taxes. The government of Ireland . . . also insists that Apple has paid its taxes.

The European Union is of a different view.

I’m told that “British” is a horrifying term of abuse in the Republic of Ireland, but the ladies and gentlemen in Dublin are getting a good big dose of what made their former countrymen to the east wave a big middle finger called Nigel Farage at the busy-bodies in Brussels and declare their intention to skedaddle right out of the European Union post haste. They might want to follow the British example.

Of course, it’s unlikely that Ireland would leave the European Union.

Apple might.

Applexit? Maybe iLeave?

Ireland has relatively low corporate taxes for a European country, which means that it has considerably lower corporate taxes than does the United States, which for various stupid reasons maintains the highest business-tax rate in the civilized world, which is what this really is all about in the end.

That’s only marginally of interest in Brussels. What Brussels cares about right now is that Ireland has lower taxes than many other EU countries, which creates what the masters at the EU regard as unfair and undesirable “tax competition.” Competition apparently is great for markets (hurrah, choice!) but not for governments (hurrah, monopoly?), at least from the EU point of view. The EU is, after all, a creature of the public sector and of the political movements most closely affiliated with the public sector, and the public sector likes its tax rates high, its revenue streams strong and steady. That the lords of Copenhagen (Danish corporate tax rate: 24.5 percent) should have to compete with the lords of Dublin (Irish corporate tax rate: 12.5 percent) is considered unseemly, even as all of them enjoy their competitive advantage over the grubby little lords of Washington (U.S. corporate tax rate: 39 percent). Competition is for taxpayers, not for tax-collectors.

Apple doesn’t pay 12.5 percent in Ireland. It reached an arrangement with Dublin back in the early 1990s — a perfectly legal agreement that any sovereign state would be entitled to enter into — that leaves it paying a much lower effective tax rate. The ladies and gentlemen in Dublin like this arrangement just fine, because even at a low rate, they get to collect a heap of taxes from a firm that otherwise wouldn’t have much reason to do any business in Ireland other than retail sales, a firm that employs thousands of Irish workers at very good wages and that keeps parked on its Irish books some $200 billion in liquid assets, or about $44,000 for every man, woman, and child in Ireland. That’s one company.

The Irish are said to be charming, but it isn’t good conversation that’s keeping all that Apple schmundo over in leprechaun-land. It’s the 39.1 percent tax bite U.S. authorities would take if those profits were repatriated to the United States. It isn’t the weather, or the infrastructure, or the work force that has companies like Apple and global pharmaceutical giants going big in Ireland, though Ireland can boast of having great assets in all those areas.

It’s the money. Profitable firms like to keep their profits.

Apple engages in some legal and accounting hijinx to make all this happen in Ireland. But none of what it does is illegal, so far as the U.S. government is concerned. None of it is illegal so far as the Irish government is concerned. And it’s not exactly illegal in the European Union’s view — just not the way Brussels would like to see it done. The European Union has ordered the Republic of Ireland to collect back taxes that the Republic of Ireland says are not owed to it. If Ireland is indeed still a republic and not a prefecture of a European superstate, then it has the sovereign authority to make final determinations in such matters for itself. If Ireland doesn’t have that power, then it seems like the Irish went to a great deal of trouble in pursuit of that whole national-sovereignty thing.

Washington is, quietly and sometimes not-so-quietly, on Brussels’s side in this business. That’s because it thinks of that $200 billion Apple has on its Irish books as its own money, at least 39.1 percent of it. It’s a familiar and unedifying process: The geniuses in Washington create enormous and powerfully perverse economic incentives, companies and individuals respond to those incentives in a way that complies with the law, and the geniuses in Washington denounce the taxpayers for following the laws written by the geniuses in Washington. That happens domestically, as when private-equity firms pay the capital-gains tax on their capital gains (weird, right?) instead of the much higher corporate-income tax rate, which doesn’t actually apply to their capital-gains earnings. The people in Washington are by education (“education”) overwhelmingly lawyers, so they usually know better than to claim that anything illegal has been done, which is why we get into speeches on “economic patriotism,” an ancient fascist expression that has found favor among Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama in recent years.

We could decry overseas tax shelters for the next decade or two, and change absolutely nothing, or we could — here’s a crazy idea — be the tax shelter. You know what Ireland, Norway, and Sweden all have in common? Within living memory, all were desperately poor. That’s why there are more Irish Americans than Irish nationals, more Norwegian Americans than Norwegians, and more Swedish Americans than Swedes. Hunger will make you get on a boat. Sweden grew wealthy under a form of laissez-faire capitalism strikingly different from the EU norm today, with lower taxes and a smaller public sector than its European counterparts. Norway did much the same thing, helped along by a great deal of oil (which can be both a blessing and a curse). Ireland eventually got sick of being poor and followed a similar program.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if that strategy were followed by a very rich nation — one that accounts for something like a quarter of the economic output of the entire human race. One need not give in to the fantasy of self-funding tax cuts to consider that there might be some significant growth effects and a great deal of new innovation if a whole lot of business that’s being done in Ireland and Singapore and Korea got done in California and New Jersey and Texas instead. The corporate tax code already is filled with so much crony-tastic favoritism that politically connected firms pay relatively low rates. Why not make it a good deal across-the-board and out-Irish the Irish with a 10 percent flat tax on corporate income? Corporate taxes in total only account for about 11 percent of federal revenue, so we wouldn’t even have to cut that much spending to make it revenue-neutral. There are other tax reforms that should be made, but cutting — or eliminating outright — the corporate income tax isn’t the worst proposal on the books, either.

Don’t fear the tax shelter. Be the tax shelter.

Time to John Birch the Alt-Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Last week saw one of the most remarkable moments of this most remarkable political season. A major politician defended the conservative movement and the Republican party from guilt-by-association with a fringe group of racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists who have jumped enthusiastically on the Donald Trump train: the so-called alt-right.

“This is not conservatism as we have known it,” the politician said. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it.”

The politician was Hillary Clinton, and that’s what’s astonishing. Clinton is normally comfortable unjustly condemning conservatism and the GOP for the sins of bigotry and prejudice, not exonerating it. After all, she coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Her husband’s administration tried – unfairly – to pin the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative critics, specifically radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. Less than a decade later, she revived the charge in her book Living History, tying the bombing to “right-wing radio talk shows and websites,” which “intensified the atmosphere of hostility with their rhetoric of intolerance, anger and anti-government paranoia.” Just last year, Clinton was comparing the entire GOP presidential field to “terrorist groups” for their views on abortion.

This history suggests that Clinton’s attempt to distinguish the party of Paul Ryan from the alt-right was not the product of high-minded statesmanship, but political calculation. The goal was to demonize Trump so as to make moderate voters feel OK voting for a Democrat.

(Trump is not an alt-righter, but his political inexperience, his anti-establishment persona, and his ignorance of, and hostility to, many basic tenets of conservatism created a golden opportunity for the alt-righters to latch onto his candidacy.)

If I were a down-ballot Democrat, I’d be chagrined. By exonerating the GOP from the stain of the alt-right, Clinton has made it harder for Democratic candidates to tar their opponents with it. What’s truly extraordinary, though, is that Clinton is doing work many conservatives won’t.

There is a diversity of views among the self-described alt-right. But the one unifying sentiment is racism — or what they like to call “racialism” or “race realism.” In the words of one alt-right leader, Jared Taylor, “the races are not equal and equivalent.” On Monday, Taylor asserted on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” that racialism — not religion, economics, etc. — is the one issue that unites alt-righters.

If you read the writings of leading alt-righters, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion. Some are avowed white supremacists. Some eschew talk of supremacy and instead focus on the need for racial separation to protect “white identity.” But one can’t talk about the alt-right knowledgeably without recognizing their racism.

And yet that is exactly what some conservatives seem intent on doing. For example, my friend Hugh Hewitt, the influential talk-radio host, has been arguing that there is a “narrow” alt-right made up of a “execrable anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe” but also a “broad alt-right” made up of frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass deportation.

This isn’t just wrong, it’s madness. The alt-righters are a politically insignificant band. Why claim that a group dedicated to overthrowing conservatism for a white-nationalist fantasy is in fact a member of the conservative coalition? Why muddy a distinction the alt-righters are eager to keep clear?

In the 1960s, the fledgling conservative movement was faced with a similar dilemma. The John Birch Society was a paranoid outfit dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists. It said even Dwight Eisenhower was a Red (to which the conservative political theorist Russell Kirk replied, “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer”).

William F. Buckley recognized that the Birchers were being used by the liberal media to “anathematize the entire American right wing.” At first, his magazine, National Review (where I often hang my hat), tried to argue that the problem was just a narrow “lunatic fringe” of Birchers, and not the rank and file. But very quickly, the editors recognized that the broader movement needed to be denounced and defenestrated.

Buckley grasped something Hewitt and countless lesser pro-Trump pundits do not: Some lines must not be blurred, but illuminated for all to see. Amazingly, Clinton is doing that when actual conservatives have not.

Why Is White Pride Creepy When Black Pride Isn’t?

By Rachel Lu

Monday, August 29, 2016

Is it wrong to take pride in being white? This is not meant as a trick question, but it might be a little tricky. Americans generally associate white pride with slavery, segregation, and skinheads. For most of us those are negative associations so, yes, we think it’s creepy to be proud that you’re white.

There’s a complication, though. If whites can’t take pride in our ethnicity, is it okay for blacks or Hispanics to have ethnic pride? Our society looks on that kind of boosterism with a much more tolerant eye. What’s the difference? Have we so succumbed to the siren song of privilege theory that white people are the only ones left who are not allowed to feel good about ourselves?

That Damned ‘Invisible Backpack’

As David Marcus explained in this insightful essay, privilege theory is indeed a real problem. It helped re-awaken tribal loyalties that would have been better left shifting in their shallow graves. Everyone is better off when whites don’t think too much about their whiteness. It should be normal without being normative, and regular without being right. It’s having a one-story house. It’s writing in black pen. It’s Times New Roman.

Liberals, sadly, were not prepared to let whiteness remain Times New Roman. They poked and they prodded, and eventually got the resentful backlash they were provoking. Privilege theory has done real damage, and white liberals should be assessing their mistakes. Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that privilege theory is the only culprit.

When higher allegiances break down, lower ones become more prominent. Everyone wants to fit in somewhere, and that involves finding reasons to align yourself with this group of people, instead of that other one. Group allegiances are not necessarily an excuse for hatred or bigotry (although they can give rise to those evils). They’re about belonging somewhere, and having people you can turn to when the road gets rocky. People need that.

It’s no secret that Trumpism and the alt-right have found their strongest footholds in places where social and economic breakdown are the worst. Family structures break down, church communities dwindle, the economy sags, and ethno-nationalism becomes more appealing.

Proud to Be a (White) American?

Is Trumpism racist? It’s been a contentious question of late. While it’s perfectly evident that Trump does have racist supporters (which he is suspiciously reluctant to condemn), many contend that Trumpism is itself not racist, but merely a justified reaction to the Left’s racial patronage. All Trump’s supporters really want is a properly colorblind society.

It’s not a terribly convincing argument because, among other reasons, Trumpism so obviously represents a desperate cry for group recognition and a demand for group patronage. How has the market been good for us? Bring back our jobs. Even the “America first” motto is clearly focused on a particular vision of America that only a minority of its citizens seem to share.

We may be reaching the point where we need to define more carefully what “racism” really means. To that end, the rhetoric of the alt-right may perhaps be worth examining as an indicator of what some of our “white boosters” are thinking nowadays. There’s admittedly some distance between ordinary Trump supporters and alt-right quasi-intellectuals, but the latter have clearly attracted a non-trivial following in the Trump camp. Alt-rightism shouldn’t be lazily dismissed as a totally detached, insane fringe. It has hit a chord with many ordinary Americans, thriving on the mainstream’s predictable preference for shunning its arguments instead of answering them.

Many alt-right thinkers are willing to argue openly that race matters, that genetics play a non-trivial role in the progression of cultures, and that race is naturally a deep component of personal identity. These arguments can get a lot of oxygen in a world already obsessed with race. Liberals have had their identity politics parties and now alt-righters want theirs, which they expect will be truly amazing because they are in possession of western culture, the best cultural heritage there is.

Conquering Western Civilization

Hear them roar! Alt-righters love to talk about how smart and strong and savvy they are. (Fun game: count the number of times this article brags about those smarty-pants alt-righters and their incredible intellectual heft.) They usually get away with it because they surround themselves with amateurs, who are unprepared for their juvenile jibes. After Steve King’s offensive implication that white people own Western civilization, Chris Hayes predictably responded with an idiotic remark about Western civilization giving us Hitler.

Try again, Hayes. Don’t validate the white supremacist’s claim to own Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Boetheus, Bonaventure, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Da Vinci, Tolstoy, Columbus, Newton, our Founding Fathers and alright, yes, possibly Hitler. Instead, ask him to justify his emphasis on whiteness as a cornerstone of western thought.

Undoubtedly, white men feature prominently among the heroes and visionaries of the West, and it’s reasonable to conclude on those grounds that white men can’t just be natural degenerates, as some liberals seem to suppose. Still, the greatness of the Western tradition doesn’t lie in its whiteness and maleness. It lies in its breadth, adaptability, and universality.

Terence, great playwright of the Roman Republic, told us “I am a man; nothing human is alien from me.” St. Paul told us that in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female.” The great thinkers of the high Middle Ages were intensely focused on the human condition, not the Italian or French or male condition. No student of the Western canon ever pauses in the middle of “City of God” to ask, “Wasn’t St. Monica born in Northern Africa? Why are we reading this Augustine clown?”

In short, the Western ethos at its best is profoundly un-tribal. To claim this rich tradition specifically for whites, therefore, is to muddy it and betray its core tenets. American whites can absolutely take pride in their Western heritage. They came from the old world and settled this immense, wild place, extending the great traditions of their forefathers to a whole new land. But if we’re going to take pride in our Western heritage, we should understand that legacy calls for transcending xenophobic ethno-nationalism. We shouldn’t need that, and we have something much better.

The downside of the glorious Western tradition, though, is that its perversion can be ugly, raising dreams of totalitarian domination. (Now a Hitler reference would be acceptable.) Especially here in America, a young nation founded by old-world immigrants with classically liberal commitments, there just isn’t a healthy or grounded way to take pride in whiteness per se.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Let’s return to the title question. Why is white pride creepy when black pride isn’t? Shouldn’t we have to choose between a universal ethic of colorblindness, and one that endorses ethnic tribalism at least to some degree?

It turns out that white pride really is categorically different. To understand why, though, we have to think carefully about traditions and their role in lives and cultures. Melanin levels are not in themselves a significant indicator of human character or worth, and whites are not morally inferior (or superior) to any other ethnic group. Nevertheless, cultures do matter, and it could be that “white culture” just isn’t a healthy or organic phenomenon in the way that black culture is or at least can be.

Ethnic pride really isn’t a necessary feature of a healthy psychology, but it can be acceptable when attached to a meaningful tradition that also imposes expectations and requirements. Most of us have probably known kids from Asian backgrounds whose elders are constantly reminding them that their behavior and work ethic will reflect back on their family and clan. That ethos definitely seems to contain an element of ethnic pride. However, it’s incorporated into a tradition and community ethos in such a way as to be a mostly positive influence.

Black pride is connected to a minority subculture that developed in response to intense historical oppression. For most of American history, the non-integration of blacks into mainstream culture was imposed from the outside, so taking offense over the existence of a distinct black subculture would hardly be reasonable. (Of course it doesn’t follow that this culture should be impervious to critique.) It’s an authentic tradition that incorporated an ethnic element for extremely understandable historical reasons. Something similar could be said of most Native American traditions.

Blacks and Native Americans, as the most obviously oppressed ethnic groups in our nation’s history, have also been the most averse to mainstream integration. Other ethnic groups tend to be absorbed more organically into mainstream American culture with the second, third, and fourth generations. They may retain a certain cultural distinctiveness in their names, diets, or cultural festivals, but insofar as they do stand apart, these groups generally adhere to traditions that are substantive enough to keep megalomaniacal urges in check. Ethnic pride isn’t just an entitlement; it’s also an expectation.

Will the Real Cuckservatives Please Stand Up?

White pride really doesn’t have an honorable tradition to call its own. Its claims on Western culture are tenuous, and none of the other reference points (segregation and skinheads) are particularly admirable. So it really does seem reasonable to say that whiteness, although in no way shameful, is not per se a healthy source of pride.

Viewing the matter in this light, it’s somewhat unsurprising that our alt-right partisans actually seem to pride themselves on being brainy rebels and devil-may-care pranksters. They’re not traditionalists in any normal sense, because they stand outside the circle of ordinary civil discourse, and even take joy in the fact. They’re what happens when traditionalism meets expressive individualism, in a world with too many resentful loners and not enough churches. They brilliantly combine the worst of cosmopolitanism (its rootlessness) with the worst of provincialism (its narrow-minded tribalism).

Just as much as the progressives they loathe, alt-righters are the bad fruit of a collapsing culture, taking pride in whiteness because they’re too alienated from more-substantive cultural institutions (family, church, community) to find a more fitting link to their Western forbears. Will the real cuckservatives please stand up? I don’t think it’s the Paul Ryans of the world who are disgracing the legacy of the West.

As every literate conservative has now realized, the collapse of Middle America is one of the great challenges that faces our society in the present moment. We need to rebuild our families and our cultural institutions so people of all backgrounds can find meaningful community and personal identity. White pride is a bad starting point, however. Let’s not sell our Western heritage for a mess of identity-politics pottage.

The New New Malthusians

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

The human race has a funny way of evading Armageddon. All the best people keep promising us a world-ending catastrophe, and all we get in the news is more Anthony Weiner pics. Admittedly, some would prefer a mass-extinction event to one more photo of Mr. Huma Abedin brandishing his unit at strangers on social media, but, so far, no dice.

The ur case of the-end-is-near thinking (of the non-awesome variety) is of course our old friend the Reverend Thomas Malthus, the adjective-inspiring Georgian economist who reminds us that the two most dangerous words in English are Latin: “ceteris paribus.” The Reverend Malthus calculated that human populations were growing geometrically while farm production was growing at a merely arithmetic rate, hence mass starvation was a mathematical certainty. Malthus, like a surprising number of our so-called free-market Republicans today, was an opponent of free trade and an advocate of the British Corn Laws, believing that if commerce were allowed to follow its own course the British people would starve themselves to death. It was a funny argument, and the eminent contemporary economist David Ricardo thought so little of Malthus’s work that he attacked his rival’s most famous book, Principles of Political Economy, with a book of his own, titled . . . Principles of Political Economy.

Malthus was wrong — ceteris did not turn out to be paribus, and both population and food-production trends evolved over time — but Malthusianism lived on.

For well over a century after Malthus’s death, variations on his prophecy — that growing human populations would eventually overwhelm the world’s natural resources, resulting in famine and other unpleasantries — thrived. They are, in fact, the most popular genre of political writing. Apocalypticism is the great survivor of the world of ideas, mutating as necessary: Many popular modern libertarian figures, natural enemies of the Malthusian creed, make a good living promising that disaster lurks just around the corner, and that it can be best weathered with a large investment in gold coins or freeze-drying equipment for your bunker. A form of Austrian economics (often half-understood) “guarantees” this outcome in much the same way that Malthus’s calculations “guaranteed” mass starvation some years ago.

Malthusian thinking, like a member of the Clinton family, can survive practically any public-relations disaster. In 1980, there was a famous bet between Paul Ehrlich, Malthusian par excellence and author of The Population Bomb, and Julian Simon, a fellow at the Cato Institute, regarding the prices of a handful of widely used metals (chrome, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten). Ehrlich believed that the Earth was running out of resources, and that scarcity would send the price of these metals higher, while Simon believed that human ingenuity and the creative power of capitalism would lead to abundance, and hence to lower prices for those benchmarks. Simon was right, Ehrlich was wrong. But there is almost no price to pay for being wrong if you are wrong in the service of that which is popular — see the case against free trade — and Ehrlich remains an important intellectual figure for progressives, especially for environmentalists.

Not long after the Ehrlich-Simon wager, there began to be a great deal of very energetic, sometimes hysterical, talk about “peak oil.” The intellectual vector will by now be familiar: Progressives, socialists, environmentalists, and sundry anti-capitalists did their best Chicken Little impersonations, argued that world petroleum production was at or near its inevitable peak, and that the steep slope on the other side of that peak would send us all tumbling into Malthusian catastrophe . . . unless we invested progressives, socialists, environmentalists, and sundry anti-capitalists with enormous political power, giving them control over the commanding heights of the world economy. Barack Obama, though usually more measured in his rhetoric, is clearly a product of this school of thought, and has spent a great deal of your money on his friends’ and supporters’ projects to jumpstart a fantastic green-energy economy, the first steps on a long march or great leap forward toward a post-petroleum world.

Petroleum production did not go into steep decline. A bunch of high-tech nerds led and inspired by an old-fashioned Texas oilman figured out how to pull oil and gas out of shale. Oil prices sunk so low over the past several years that the Saudis started talking like The Architect from The Matrix — “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept” — and, for a while there, you could get a really good deal on a mansion in Houston.

The peak-oil gang had all sorts of crazy proposals, none of which will surprise anybody old enough to remember that a few decades before global warming was going to kill us we were all supposed to be dying in a new ice age, and that the same enviro-nannies had proposed covering the Earth’s polar ice caps with soot to raise global temperatures. We are, in retrospect, glad that we did not do that. Others proposed banning private automobiles, a Puritan-Malthusian reflex that was echoed in post-9/11 calls from the likes of Arianna Huffington to curtail Americans’ enthusiasm for big trucks and SUVs. Many are glad we didn’t do that, either.

But the internal-combustion engine may be going dodo nonetheless. Mike Fox, executive director of Gasoline & Automotive Services Dealers of America — i.e., the boss at the trade group that represents filling stations — recently told the Wall Street Journal that if the new Tesla 3 lives up to its promise, then his industry is going away. Tesla, which currently is building the fastest production car in the world and recently unveiled a new battery pack, intends to bring the price of its cars down from the $100,000 range to the $35,000 range. “If Tesla can deliver on its current promises with the Model 3, gas vehicles are history,” Fox said. “It’s horse and buggy days.”

The predominance of the gasoline engine is a minor question. But the major questions have a way of working themselves out, too. The Malthusians proposed all sorts of invasive and occasionally nasty measures to limit population growth: Eugenics programs often were justified on population-control grounds, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously made some pretty creepy eugenic arguments for abortion rights, that they keep down the “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” We didn’t do very much of that, either, but most of the forecasts currently predict that the population of the world will peak around 2050 or 2055, and will decline slowly after that.

That’s going to be hard on the Malthusians.

So, meet the super-neo-reverse Malthusians!

The Reverend Malthus worried that natural resources would not keep up with population growth, that there would not be — could not be — sufficient production. Akin Oyedele, writing in Business Insider, is raising the alarm about “peak energy” — not peak production but peak consumption. With population growth slowing and then reversing, services playing a relatively larger role in advanced economies that had once been dominated by energy-hungry heavy industry and manufacturing, and technology producing advances in energy efficiency, the per capita consumption of energy (in real or cost terms) has been stagnating, and even declining at times. “There isn’t much more growth in the amount we can consume,” Oyedele writes.

We’ll see about that.

The super-neo-reverse Malthusians mainly are concerned with a different commodity: labor. We are getting so good at making things, they say, that there simply won’t be enough jobs in the future. Which is to say, they believe that we are going to make ourselves poor through abundance.

It may be the case that nothing in this world is truly unlimited, but one thing that certainly appears to be close to unlimited is the capacity and variety of human desire. What do we want? More. More and better material things, bigger and broader experiences, more extravagant and rarefied leisure, more more. If I were a betting man, I’d bet on our finding some use for all that energy that’s supposed to be sitting around doing nothing, and for all that labor, too.

What will those jobs look like? Nobody knows, any more than the Reverend Malthus could know what a modern farm would look like. In the 1950s, my father was employed as a butcher. If you could go back in time and explain to him that in 2016 there would be such a thing as a “celebrity butcher,” or that the smart and chic young things in Brooklyn and Los Angeles would spend their generous allowances on a chance to spend an evening with one, he’d have thought you insane. He probably still thinks that’s insane. But in the 21st century, we have a major industry based on the odd fact that men in white-collar jobs like to go home at night and watch men do blue-collar jobs, in automotive shops and pawn brokerages.

Reality television is one of the great indicators of our age of abundance. Naturally, one of its popular subgenres is shows about Armageddon, which is always right around the corner, after a brief word from our sponsors.