By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, December 15, 2023
Greetings from the sky. I’m on my way back from a really
terrific Dispatch event in Bellevue, Washington. It’s always
good to be on a panel with Kevin Williamson because it makes me look like a
cockeyed optimist with hair like Stalin. Now I’m on a plane back home. And—fair
warning—I’m a little hungover, a little sleep-deprived, and completely unsure
of what I am going to write about. So let’s find out together. If that’s not
your bag, please feel free to jump ship now rather than go for the ride only to
write in the comments that you were taken against your will.
Anyway, if the Wi-Fi holds up, you’ll be reading this a
few hours from now, or maybe tomorrow morning. I often think about how kangaroos look
like an Island of Doctor Moreau experiment in which deer were crossed with
jacked-up weightlifting bros. But that’s not important right now.
I also think a lot about time when writing this
“news”letter. In my head, I can hear the voice of Don Knotts screaming the
lyrics of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” in a thick Welsch accent. Wait that’s not it. In
my head, I feel like I’m “talking” to you in real time, but I’m actually
talking to you from the past. We don’t typically think of it that way because
the time intervals are so short. It’s sort of like that thing from Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy where we all have an innate ability to tell when
someone is from far away. But because the distances on earth are so small, we
usually don’t notice it. Similarly, if I wrote a note and put it in a time
capsule not to be opened for 10,000 years, the superintelligent muscle-bound
kangaroo people running Earth would experience my note as a message from the
past. And if I rigged it to explode, it’d be a blast from the … never
mind.
Thinking about time as anything other than the unfolding
of reality over, uh, time, can get you into all kinds of trouble. And yet we
all do it.
For instance, when I see the footage of all those
migrants massing at the southern border, I often think of them as time
travelers. In some very real ways, they are traveling from the past to the
future. I mean this mostly in material terms. Imagine you have a rare disease.
Let’s say you know with a great deal of confidence that in 20 years they will
have a cure for it. If you had a time machine you’d use it to go get that cure.
Alas, we don’t have time machines. But for millions of people, their societies essentially
exist in the past. After all, people in very poor countries die from diseases
that either don’t exist or don’t pose a significant problem in the United
States or Europe. For those societies, a boat or caravan might as well be a
time machine. There was a pretty bad movie called Elysium with
Matt Damon, in which a handful of rich people live on a lavish orbiting space
station called Elysium with all manner of life-improving and life-extending
technology, while the people back on Earth lived in overcrowded squalor and
misery. For the desperate poor, sneaking onto Elysium was indistinguishable
from time travel.
You don’t have to buy Hollywood’s dystopian,
warmed-over-Marxist, Morlocks-versus-Eloi sermonizing to see the point. Simply
by crossing the U.S. border, a Latin American laborer becomes vastly more
productive—a point I first learned from From Poverty to
Prosperity by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. They interviewed William
Lewis, the former head of the McKinsey Global Institute, who had this
fascinating nugget:
We compared the construction
industry in the U.S. with construction in Brazil and found that in Houston, the
U.S. industry was using Mexican agricultural workers who were illiterate and
didn’t speak English. They were not any different than the agricultural workers
who were building similar high rises in Sao Paolo, say. And yet they were
working at four times the productivity.
In other words, this isn’t just a statistical artifact of
calculating per capita productivity by dividing total productivity by the
number of workers we have. Our workers are actually more productive because our
system is a multiplier of human effort, and it’s not all about technology. This
is also a function of culture, various forms of intangible capital, etc.
I think we have to secure the border because mass,
uncontrolled illegal immigration is unsustainable for about a dozen different
reasons. But I have great empathy and sympathy for the people trying to get to
the future as they see it. It’s what I would like to think I’d do if there were
no legal options.
But I can already sense some of you are uncomfortable
with this past versus future framing. There are people who understandably get
upset by this kind of talk because it sounds an awful lot like saying, “We’re
advanced and those people are backward.”
This is a mode of thinking that cuts across a lot of
ideological fault lines, and can elicit charges of hypocrisy in every
direction. If some progressive “influencer” living in Park Slope described
rural, churchgoing Americans in the South as “backward,” many conservatives
would take offense. But if some right-wing influencer living in Nashville
called migrants from a developing country “backward” many progressives would
take offense.
A lot of this stuff is downstream from what is often
called “presentism.” For historians, this is a huge occupational hazard.
If you read about, say, fascists in the 1920s or early ’30s, it’s really hard
not to keep how the story ends out of your head. The Italian or British
fascists didn’t know they were signing up for a project that would end with
Auschwitz.
If you don’t keep this sort of thing in mind, it becomes
very easy to start thinking people in the past were really terrible people.
Some were, of course. But a lot weren’t— they just didn’t know how the story
was going to end. Just consider the newly buzzy word, “dictator.” It was normal
practice for American newspapers, during the period when fascism was rising in
Europe, to use “dictator” the way we would use “czar” today. You might see a
headline like “FDR Appoints Transportation Dictator.” The term just didn’t
clang off the ear the way it does today.
Since we’re talking about time travel and dictators,
among other things, one of my problems with all of the Trump-will-be-a-dictator
talk is the air of inevitability to it. I think that actually can be dangerous.
A lot of people talk about Trump becoming a dictator as if they have
clairvoyance, a crystal ball, or some other means of seeing the future. The
vast majority of people won’t be violent, but it’s not hard to imagine some
Christopher-Walken-in-the-Dead-Zone type thinking he owes it to the
future to do something terrible. Also, if you say he’ll be a dictator if he
wins, does that mean he can claim a “mandate” to be a dictator?
Spoiler alert: No. But there is a sense in which all of
this dictator stuff can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, I
also think Trump disqualified himself from being president for a hundred
different reasons, only the latest of which is his willingness to talk about
being a dictator.
But let’s get back to presentism. There really are a lot
of people who think that we’re somehow just better than the generations
before us. They confuse the march of time with the march of “progress” as they
define it. There are countless varieties of this stuff—Hegelian, Marxist,
Whiggish, and Christian, just to name a few. (I recommend Robert Nisbet’s History
of the Idea of Progress if you’re interested in this
stuff.)
But there’s also a kind of non-ideological, generalized,
smugness that is part of what I call “the fierce urgency of now”: “We’re so
smart, those people back then were
idiots. Just look at how they lived in black-and-white.”
I sometimes think this tendency might have an
evolutionary component. There has to be some reason why so many teenagers in
every generation just assume their parents are lunkheads who don’t understand
the way the world really is. Maybe that attitude just lingers
as part of the mental architecture for some people.
Regardless, I don’t have that kind of thing in mind when
talking about this time travel stuff. I do think progress is real. Obviously,
technological progress is real. But not all technological progress amounts to a
win for human progress, or human flourishing. I think if you look at the
scoreboard right now, social media has been a net negative. Are there upsides?
Sure. I just think the downsides outnumber them. But that can change.
I’m just not a big teleology guy. For instance, over the
last century or two, there have been moments when the smartest people said that
technology will inexorably liberate humanity or enslave it. And at various
times, one side or the other has had the better of the argument. Technology is
not on the side of freedom in China right now because the Communist Party has
figured out how to use it as a tool of social control. But that could change at
some point in the future. I attribute agency to humans, not to things, by which
I mean everything from tools to systems.
People almost always go wrong when they make
straight-line projections from the present off into the future. This is my
problem with slippery slope arguments. A defeat today doesn’t mean an
inexorable and unending string of defeats for all eternity. Some defeats are
necessary preconditions for future victories because they arouse the desire
among the complacent to change course. Some victories lead to future defeats
because they invite complacency among the victors.
Nothing is written.
There’s a fun economics brouhaha unfolding. Some very
respected economists (Gerald Auten of the Treasury Department and David
Splinter of the Joint Committee on Taxation) claim to show in a new paper that
all of the gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth about inequality in America
was overblown.
Recall for the last couple decades, we’ve been told that inequality was getting
worse. Thomas Piketty argued
in Capital in the Twenty-First Century not only that it was getting
worse, but that it was inevitable that it would only get worse if the market
were left to its own devices. (I wrote a very
long cover essay on all of this for Commentary at the
time.) Markets don’t self-correct, Piketty contended, because “there is no
natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces
from prevailing permanently.” Without state intervention, the 1 percent would
own everything. This new paper says, “nope.”
Now, I can’t really weigh in on all the math in this
fight, though given my skepticism about Piketty, you can probably guess where I
come down. But here’s the basic disagreement according to The Economist:
All in all, [Auten and Splinter]
find that after tax, the top 1% command about 9% of national income, compared
with the 15% or so reported by Messrs Piketty, Saez and Zucman. Whereas the
trio conclude that the share of the top 1% has sharply increased since the
1960s, Messrs Auten and Splinter find practically no change.
Yes, those two sentences explain literally decades of
snarking about inequality as “the defining challenge of our time” in
Barack Obama’s words.
Just to be clear, maybe Piketty et al. are right that
inequality has increased since the 1960s. Maybe it had. That doesn’t sound
wildly implausible to me. Though no one ever answers the question why in and of
itself this is bad. What is the right share of national income that should go
to the top 1 percent? Why is 9 percent okay, but 15 percent eeeeevil? Lurking
behind such arguments is essentially an aesthetic judgment masquerading as
something science-y that justifies the state redistributing resources as it
sees fit.
And that points to my two biggest problems with the
inequality obsessions.
First, people are obsessing about the wrong things. My
AEI colleague Michael Strain has a good
column on all of this. He writes:
The discussion has mostly centered
on how much of the economic pie each group gets. But the size of the pie is not
fixed. Since 1962, real economic output in the US has increased by
499%, leading to significant improvements in living standards and human
welfare. The percentage of Americans in poverty has decreased substantially,
new medicines and therapies have greatly enhanced people’s quality of life, and
more women have entered the
workforce.
Imagine for a moment that President Kennedy went on
national TV in 1962 and said, “My fellow Americans, I have consulted with
Karnack and seen the future. If we agree to make the richest people in America
richer, we will also make all of you much richer too. We will increase economic
output by 499% and pull millions out of poverty.”
Maybe you wouldn’t take that deal. But it doesn’t sound
like a bad one to me. Certainly, reasonable people can disagree on whether this
trade-off is desirable?
Of course, that’s not the deal.
Which brings me to my second, and more relevant, problem:
the claim that there is some iron law to capitalism that leads inexorably to
the rich getting richer, and getting richer faster, than everybody else. This
is the “central contradiction of capitalism” according to Piketty. “Once
constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past
devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth
distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the
divergence in wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.”
This idea that the “past devours the future” as prior
investments behave like the temporal Pacmen of Stephen King’s The
Langoliers always struck me as preposterous.
But this is how so many arguments on the left and right
work these days. Everyone thinks they’re prophets with perfect knowledge of
what the future holds if you don’t listen to them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t
prepare for various challenges. But the catastrophizers—whether on climate,
wokeness, racism, inequality, Trump’s dictatorship—start from the position that
their predictions are irrefutable and so therefore if you disagree you must be
in favor of whatever calamity they predict. “Oh, so you want the polar bears to
die?” “I guess you’re fine with Warren Buffet owning the world?” “So you think
white people should rule the earth?” “Oh, so you think it’s okay for Trump to
be a dictator?”
This sort of bullying is always in service to the real
aim—to justify breaking or suspending the rules so the doomsayers can have
their way without having to do the hard work of persuading people. A
crisis is a terrible thing to waste, even one that hasn’t happened yet.
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