Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Power Of Stupidity

Sometimes, academics and philosophers help us understand widespread human frailties and idiocies. In 2005, The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote “On Bullshit” a book in which he defined bullshit as speech intended to persuade without any regard for the truth. That definition certainly seems pertinent to the current state of our politics.

I’ve read “On Bullshit,” but I was unaware of an earlier, equally pertinent publication written fifty years ago by an economic historian. The title was “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” and the thesis of the book–which an article in The New Republic explained grew out of an essay originally written for some friends–was that “stupid people, as a group, are much more powerful than the mafia, or the military industrial complex.”

Well, that might explain America’s current woes…

I’d never heard of him, but the article described the author, Carlo Cipolla, as a “prolific intellectual,” and his observations certainly seem apt for our current times. As the linked article notes, we are currently witnessing

one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all.

Cipolla outlined what he called “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” in 1976—another time of considerable social unrest. It is described as a mixture of satire and serious scholarship, which he introduced with the following paragraph:

Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.

Cipolla identified four different groups of people: the helpless (or hapless), whose actions–while harming themselves–  benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit both themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves. (The author of the linked article has difficulty deciding whether Trump is a bandit or stupid; he concludes that Trump’s obvious, utter stupidity still can’t match his unadulterated greed, so he puts him in the “bandit” category, but “right beside” stupid.)

According to Cipolla’s 50-year-old book, what must be avoided at all costs is allowing stupid people to gain power, something that endangers everyone. When the intelligent fail to keep the stupid in check, he says societies “head downhill fast.” Anyone paying attention to what’s happened to the United States in the less than two years of Trump II will agree.

The book identifies five laws of stupidity:

  • Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
  • The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
  • A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
  • Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
  • A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Stupidity shouldn’t be confused with a lack of education. As the article notes, a number of stupid people hold degrees from prestigious institutions: Ted Cruz (Harvard), RFK Jr. (Harvard), Sam Alito (Yale), Clarence Thomas (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale).  For that matter, individuals with power and credentials are more dangerous than stupid people who only have power, because “they’re more likely to think they actually know what they’re talking about.”

The linked article contrasts the guardrails erected to limit the threat posed by the Atom bomb to the Trump administration’s refusal to regulate AI, despite the fact that people involved in AI’s development are warning of its dangers. “It’s like we built a hydrogen bomb, then entrusted Gordon Gekko to make a profit off it and Barney Fife to monitor him. What could go wrong?”

I guess we’ll see.

Comments

Early Voting Starts Today In Indiana

Early voting starts today in Indiana. Later today, my husband and I intend to cast our ballots, and I encourage every registered voter reading this in Indiana–or in any state where early voting has begun– to do the same. I’ve previously explained why early voting, preferably in person, is so important this year; a massive early turnout will make it far more difficult for Trump to play games with the midterm results.

Here in Red Indiana, I intend to vote Blue, and I have high hopes that Hoosiers can rid ourselves of the GOP’s culture-war super-majority in our dreadful state legislature. But Indiana’s ballot also asks us to approve two changes to the state constitution. I intend to vote NO on both, and I hope those of you in the Hoosier state will join me in rejecting them.

The first proposed measure is the most pernicious. It would amend Article I, Section 17 of the state constitution. It reads as follows:

Currently, under the Constitution of the State of Indiana, a person charged with murder or treason is not entitled to be released on bail if the proof is evident or the presumption strong. Shall the Constitution of the State of Indiana be amended to provide that a person charged with an offense other than murder or treason is not entitled to bail if: (1) the proof is evident or the presumption strong; and (2) the state proves by clear and convincing evidence that no release conditions will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community.

There are all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea. Courts already have ample tools to protect public safety while accused folks (who are, remember, innocent until proven guilty) are out on bail: supervision, money bail, electronic monitoring, no-contact orders, treatment, testing, and travel restrictions come to mind. Furthermore, available data shows that 98.6% of those deemed high risk do not commit violent crimes while they are out on bail.

It seems unfair to keep people who have yet to be convicted from earning a living during the months between being charged and being tried, but it’s Indiana jails that will face the real problem if this unnecessary measure passes. For more years than I can count, the state’s jails have been so stretched, so over-crowded and under-resourced that they have frequently been targets of successful lawsuits requiring them to expand. When those lawsuits succeed–and most do– we taxpayers shell out a lot of money. In 2024, thirty-one of Indiana’s jails were operating above above the state’s recommended capacity threshold, and eight were above 100% capacity.

Most of the judges I know are thoughtful and fair-minded, but there is no reason to give the occasional MAGA rogue additional authority to “lock ’em up.” This ballot question is a solution in search of a problem, and I hope voters recognize that and vote NO.

The second ballot question is less pernicious, and you may disagree with my conclusion that it, too, should garner a NO vote. it would amend Article 6, Section 6, of the state’s constitution. It reads:

Shall the Constitution of the State of Indiana be amended to permit the judge of a city or town court to reside in: (1) the county in which the court is located; or (2) the bordering county closest to the city or town in which the court is located?

I think there are good reasons for judges to reside in the counties inhabited by the people their decisions affect. There are undoubtedly highly competent lawyers in the fancier suburbs of Indiana’s urban counties, but I see no persuasive reason why they shouldn’t confine their desire for judicial status to the counties within which they have chosen to live. Granted, a judgeship in a more highly populated city is likely to produce more publicity and attention, but I personally see no reason to change Indiana’s constitution simply to allow ambitious lawyers to occupy more prominent benches.

Whatever my fellow Hoosiers decide when faced with these ballot measures, I urge you–plead with you– to VOTE EARLY. As I’ve previously argued, early voting allows campaigns to improve their Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Every night, campaigns get a list of people who voted that day, allowing them to focus their efforts only on the people who haven’t yet voted. The larger the number of voters who vote early–preferably on Day 1–the easier it is to increase turnout for one’s candidate. And in this midterm election, massive turnout is essential.

See you at the polls–EARLY.

Comments

What If…??

A few years ago, my husband and I were on a very small chartered boat cruising the coast of Croatia (which is an absolutely beautiful country, by the way). There were only 13 people on board. Two of the other couples were Australian, and one of the Australian women was a retired professor of public policy and management.

We obviously had a lot to talk about and compare, and I was particularly struck by a fact I hadn’t previously known–that in Australia, voting is mandatory. Initially, I was shocked–my instincts tend toward the libertarian, and my first impulse was to respond with something like “If I don’t want to participate, that’s my right!” But I’ve subsequently thought about the pros and cons of such a mandate, and done some research on Australia’s experience.

It turns out that Australia has had compulsory voting for that country’s federal elections since 1924. (Enrollment/registration had been compulsory since 1911.) What the law requires is simply that the voter show up and get a ballot. What that voter does with the ballot is irrelevant– it can be left blank or even deliberately spoiled.

Non-voters–those who don’t show up at the polls–are required to explain. If they lack a valid reason–illness, etc.–they are required to pay a small fine.

So how has this worked?

Turnout for Australia’s elections has consistently hovered between 90-96% of enrolled/registered voters, placing Australia’s turnout among the highest in the democratic world. People who don’t comply get a notice requiring them to either supply a reason or pay the fine.

Rather obviously, when the state demands participation, it has a strong incentive to make voting easy. As a result, unlike in the U.S., voting takes place on Saturdays, and there are multiple and widespread polling places. There is also voting by mail and early voting.

The system has a number of virtues. Thanks to the massive turnout, results have more legitimacy and representativeness than in the U.S. (In the last few municipal elections in my city, something like 17% of registered voters have chosen our mayor…). Research has shown that turnout in voluntary systems skews older, wealthier, and more educated, while compulsory voting flattens that gap. Australian governments are elected by nearly the whole electorate.

There are other virtues: Parties don’t need to pour resources into getting out the vote, so campaigns focus more on persuading swing voters. Mandatory voting also dramatically reduces incentives for the sorts of voter suppression tactics that are a feature of U.S. elections.

When voting is mandatory, it becomes a civic norm, a shared civic duty like jury service. The requirement builds habits of engagement and–by rewarding appeals to the broad middle–helps to reduce polarization.

The arguments against mandatory voting (some of which echo my own initial reaction) include what we might call “liberty concerns”– essentially, that freedom to vote should include freedom not to. There’s also a concern about uninformed voting; citizens who are required to participate may vote randomly, or just for whoever is listed on the ballot first. (Of course, as most of us are aware, uninformed voting also features prominently in the U.S., where participation is not required.)

According to Claude, most research shows that compulsory voting “substantially raises turnout and modestly shifts electoral outcomes and policy toward lower-income and younger voters.” The size of partisan effects is debated. Evidence that it makes citizens more informed or engaged over the long run is weaker and mixed. In Australia, public support for the system has been stable and fairly strong, with periodic surveys showing a majority in favor of retaining the system.

The bottom line is that the law has clearly succeeded at the narrow goal of near-universal turnout, and most Australians–like the professor I met on our cruise– treat it as unremarkable, and certainly not as an infringement on their liberties.

Much of the debate about such laws centers on a simple question: is voting a right or is it a civic obligation. I think the correct answer to that question is “both.”

As regular readers of this blog know, in America’s 2024 election, a greater number of people failed to vote than voted for either candidate. Political scientists and sociologists can make of that statistic what they will, but it is clearly a massive failure of civic obligation.

There is a continuing debate between libertarians and communitarians over the privileging of individualism versus the degree of “embeddedness” in the community. I am firmly with the ancient Greeks, who aimed for the “golden mean” between extremes, and I’ve come to think that the Australians have hit that golden mean when it comes to mandatory voting.

Comments

The Rich And The Rest

I frequently quote Nick Hanauer, the billionaire who regularly warns other super-rich titans that unless they change their ways, ordinary Americans will be coming for them with pitchforks. Hanauer understands something that far too many apologists for our distorted capitalism don’t–that their continued affluence depends upon replacing today’s neoliberal corporatism with a properly understood and properly regulated market capitalism.

Hanauer was one of the first to point out that, far from depressing job creation, increasing the minimum wage and putting discretionary dollars in more pockets increases employment. (If no one has enough money to buy your widgets, you aren’t likely to hire more folks to produce them.)

What I particularly appreciate about Hanauer’s substacks is his defense of actual capitalism, and his recognition how very far today’s corporatism/crony capitalism has departed from that economic model. A recent essay is a good example;  he begins by attributing the emerging popularity of the DSA–Democratic Socialists of America–to the widespread rejection of America’s current economic performance.

Hanauer is not making an argument for the DSA. As he writes,

Anyone familiar with my resume will be unsurprised to learn that I don’t believe socialism is the answer to cure our economic ills. But what all these centrist pundits miss is that the real risk to markets isn’t the rise of DSA candidates, it’s the failure of the policies centrists are still clinging to for dear life. It wasn’t socialism that expanded income inequality by stealing nearly $80 trillion from worker paychecks and handing it off to my fellow plutocrats over the last 50 years—it was a different kind of economic redistribution, commonly known as trickle-down economics.

As Hanauer argues–and as survey research confirms–the American people know the economy isn’t working for them, and many attribute that economic failure to capitalism, not recognizing how far America has departed from a properly regulated and taxed market economy. Gallup recently found that the percentage of the American public holding a positive view of capitalism is 54 percent—an all-time low.

There’s a reason for that. During the past 50 years, the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have lost $3.9 trillion out of their paychecks to the top 10 percent– mostly the top .01 percent.

Had that $80 trillion loss been distributed the way it was before 1975, median incomes today would be nearly double what they are. That’s the scale of what’s been taken from most Americans—not through bad luck, or the hard work of a handful of wealthy CEOs, but through deliberate policy choices made by both Democratic and Republican leaders since the 1970s that purposefully concentrated wealth and power at the very top….

When you exclude the bottom 90 percent from the gains of economic growth, you don’t just impoverish them. You hollow out the consumer demand that drives innovation, you shrink the market that businesses depend on, and you eventually destabilize the entire system.

Hanauer rejects the standard “Econ 101” argument that markets are important because they’re efficient at allocating scarce resources. He argues that what really makes markets valuable is “their unrivaled ability to evolve innovative solutions to human problems. And the more people you include in that process—as entrepreneurs, innovators, well-paid workers, and robust consumers—the faster and more prosperously the whole economy grows.”

State capitalism with MAGA characteristics is no answer to this crisis. Neither is democratic socialism. And neither, frankly, is the tired orthodoxy of the past fifty years that produced this crisis in the first place.

Asking pundits to abandon the economic framework that has structured political debate for half a century is like asking a fish to question water. But here’s the thing: if you truly believe that market capitalism cannot deliver the kind of economy the American people say they want—rising wages, affordable housing, healthcare, education, economic security for their kids—then you’re not the right person to defend market capitalism. If you insist that we cannot possibly afford to raise wages, reduce inequality, and adequately address the basic needs of every American—because economics—then either you need to embrace a new economics, or you need to step aside and let a new generation of pundits and policymakers use the tools that can actually solve these problems.

Those pitchforks that I warned about over a decade ago have been sharpened. The only way to stop people from putting them to use is to give them a genuine reason to believe that market economies can actually work for them. Ignoring the problem—and thinly disguised panic over a few DSA candidates—simply isn’t going to cut it.

I couldn’t agree more.

Comments

The Changing Threat?

I recently came across an intriguing essay by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Meyerson was exploring a cultural question that has bedeviled me: given that legal and social changes have altered the way most of us live our lives and define fair play, can the monumental effort being made to take us back to an earlier time succeed? Can MAGA really push the female doctors, Black entrepreneurs, gay married couples and mixed-race and intermarried families back to a 1950s-era status?

Meyerson came at that question from a somewhat different angle, but his observations accorded with my own sense of cultural shift. Essentially, he argues that the “threat” perceived by the Christian nationalists and assorted MAGA racists–the cultural fears that have powered the administration’s frantic anti-DEI efforts and given permission to bigots of all sorts to spew their vitriol publicly–are in the process of being displaced by economic populism.

Meyerson sees a “rumble of a shift in our politics, a hint that some of its tectonic plates are beginning to move.” As he notes, the identity of “the people’s enemy” is a fundamental aspect of popular politics. Who is threatening their values?  He reminds readers that in late-19th-century America, that enemy was the robber barons—the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Goulds—who were seen to be exploiting them and keeping them in or near poverty. The anger at economic elites powered the New Deal policies that created the broadly shared prosperity we enjoyed post World War II.

It was during those three decades, however, that the modern American right took shape, beginning to refocus populist anger on a different elite: a liberal cultural elite that was shoving its cosmopolitan values down ordinary Americans’ throats. That wasn’t the only focus of the right, of course; Americans and immigrants who weren’t white or Christian or male had always been the kind of “others” who could serve as threats to values and hierarchies of power. But beginning with Joe McCarthy and then George Wallace, the right began to define a new elite: the “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” as Wallace called them, the Ivy League leftists like Alger Hiss, whose elitism McCarthy went after almost as much as his Communist leanings.

Meyerson traces the trajectory of that shift from Lee Atwater and “Reagan-age conservatism” and its success in “turning populist ire on the cultural elites who infested big government rather than the economic elites who ran and owned big business” to Pat Buchanan, who identified the central issue in American political life as the need to defeat the “cultural elites who threatened American values.” (References to Buchanan always make me think of Molly Ivins’ great line that his speech at the GOP convention sounded better in the original German…)

It’s hard to argue with Meyerson’s observation that Buchanan’s politics currently define Republicanism, and that Donald Trump is very much Buchanan’s successor.

But then Meyerson gets to his point, which I find persuasive.

What post-Buchanan Republicans failed to realize was that the capitalism they had deregulated created a new generation of oligarchs and robber barons whose misdeeds and depredations could give rise to an economic populism so sweeping that it might just eclipse some or all of the cultural—and racist, religious, and sexist—populism on which the right depended.

There’s mounting evidence of such a shift. Demands to control AI, the pushback to data centers, and especially to the oligarchs who are funding the Republican Party. As Meyerson notes, mass anger about tax breaks for corporations and the very rich has been growing in polling for some time now, and is part of what is propelling America into an economic populism that could-if nurtured–replace the culture-war emphasis of the Right.

Meyerson concludes with a question:

Can the Democrats sense this tectonic shift—if you will, a “techtonic” shift—in America’s political fundamentals? That would require a number of Democrats to turn against the interests of some of their wealthiest supporters, of course—at least by embracing such progressive populist economic policies as wealth taxes. Given the turn in American populism, not to do so would be a form of political malpractice.

Aside from the political implications of such a shift, a return to something approximating New Deal-era economic regulation would be good policy. If we are experiencing such a shift in Americans’ perception of where the “threat” lies, I for one welcome it.

Comments