The Friends of Jeffrey Epstein

I generally have little patience for the news media's hastening to lavish breathless coverage on scandals of the more "personal" type--their doing so almost always an obvious effort to block attention to what is important using what is trivial, with the seediness of the particular trivia they use to this end making it the more distasteful. And certainly we have had even more than the usual of this dreck in the decade since #MeToo hit the scene with its particular version of "the personal is political." The revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his innumerable low friends in high places is no exception--making it the easier for that media to, for example, not report on such matters as the hunger crisis in the country and how an historic interruption of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits worsened it, or the continuing-bloodbath-that-may-mean-it-is-already-World-War-Three in Ukraine it seems to forget is even happening for long periods of time, or the way in which just about every major Western government is doing its utmost to crush all hope in any meaningful address of the climate crisis we feel the more viscerally with the record-breaking heat of every new year. Still, many of the Epstein revelations--not the ones the mainstream media cares to attend to, but evidenced in the material released all the same--show that loathsome figure to have been personally involved in high politics in ways that those who care about such matters cannot ignore. Meanwhile, rather more than is the case with a Monica Lewinsky-style indiscretion, the involvement of a rogue's gallery of senior politicians, business executives and other such Establishment figures is a window into exactly the kind of people they are--and what is far more important than that, the character of the social stratum and the system of which they are examples, representatives, servants. The best and brightest, as the courtiers of these figures tell us? Hardly. Indeed, far from being best and brightest they are by any reasonable measure pretty execrable and dull, perhaps as much so as a human being can get, with their conduct in their personal lives relevant not because it is at odds with their public conduct but because it is exactly in line with it, these "men of affairs," as "men of affairs," living down to a standard in every area of their existences that makes it impossible to speak of anything but kakistocracy as the order of the day.

Take, for example, Lawrence "Larry" Summers. The pseudo-intellectual idiots and bullies of the "But He's So Smart!" brigade invariably rush to his defense when anyone asks the basis of his admirers' high estimate of his intellect--but never have anything to say that would mean much to an intelligent layperson, or for that matter, a professional economist capable of speaking forthrightly about the discipline. After all, can they point to any achievements in his field of economics whose significance they would recognize as meriting the accolades? Of course not. This is partly a matter of Summers' actual career as an economics professor having been so brief before he moved on to "bigger and better" things--but also a matter of the ultra-specialized how-many-entrepreneurs-can-found-a-startup-on-the-head-of-a-pin Scholasticism that characterizes academic economics in our time. (Have you seen the inanities that the Swedish central bank hands out its pseudo-Nobel Prizes for? Yikes.) One can more easily make a judgment on the basis of his career as a policymaker. As it happens, this has consisted mainly of displays of contempt for working people (whose deteriorating living standard is in his view a matter of their being "treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), his ostentatious groveling before Wall Street at even the most inopportune moments (consider what his colleague Joseph Stiglitz had to say about his conduct--and his mentor Robert Rubin's conduct--in White House conferences), and consistent issuance of neoliberal prescriptions whenever it counted as he proved himself wrong on any and every issue of consequence (as Greg Palast shows, backing financial deregulation that paved the way for the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, then undermining government rescue of the economy amid the crisis). Indeed, what we see in Summers is a beneficiary of nepotism which has likely seen him not only derive enormous direct advantages from his "choice of parents" (the son of two Ivy League economists, one the brother of Paul Samuelson, the other the sister of Kenneth Arrow, Summers was born the economics profession's equivalent of a prince of the blood), but very likely some of the "reflected glory" of relations rightly or wrongly thought illustrious within their particular academic community; and building on that foundation, unswerving deference to higher-ups generally and elite interests as the elites themselves see them particularly, such that they can count on his judgments being exactly those that they would want the individual in his position to make (as, of course, the record described above testifies). It is all exactly in line with what, a C. Wright Mills made perfectly clear, makes for a member of "the power elite"--a mediocrity who got the breaks and made the most of them from a careerist standpoint in that way that Mills characterized as the "higher immorality," which attitude toward career is of course apt to be paralleled in the attitudes of those in such strata toward not just other elites "having a good time," but "having a good time" oneself, as revealed in those e-mails he exchanged with Monsieur Epstein. That Larry Summers, not as a callow young man, or coming apart at the seams in mid-life, but a man in his autumn years, endeavoring to pursue an extramarital affair with a "protégé," turned for "dating advice" to his "wingman" Epstein (Summers' term--not mine), seems to me relevant not because it is a shocker but rather because it is, for someone who can see things as they are, the absolute opposite of a shocker, being so entirely consistent with what we have seen of Summers' morality, character, intelligence, judgment (and even discretion)--or lack thereof.

Yet that, of course, is not the story the media tells. Indeed, all things considered it has treated Summers rather gently through the affair compared to how it might have done (for instance, digging into just how far Summers' association with his "wingman" went), with this, too, entirely consistent with what we have seen of their record. By and large the media never hold such figures accountable for "bad calls," or even outright corruption, certainly not for long, and not when they have been supporters of right-wing policies. (Thus Summers' protection of Andrei Shleifer in his time as President of Harvard, his role in the financial deregulation that led to the 2008 crisis, his role in Harvard's losing billions in endowment money in said crisis, did not in their eyes any more than those of the folks of the Beltway and their "campaign contributors" disbar him from his role in the Obama administration as Director of the National Economic Council in the early days of the "Great Recession." Equally his conduct in that capacity--his hostility to counter-cyclical action, and more generally anything that would help working people, in the face of economic downturn, which proved another "bad call" at best--did not keep him from having been in the running for that highest of offices in the financial priesthood, the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve) Relevant to this, too, is how averse that media is to connecting the dots, as seen when one considers how, after in line with its measure of sensitivity to certain forms of identity politics, eagerly reporting the storm Summers raised when explaining the comparative scarcity of female scientists in terms of "innate" differences in "aptitude" he held to be scientifically evidenced, it did not bother to remember this to its viewers, readers, listeners as being of significance for his larger view of the world as a place where people are generally getting what they "deserve," and his brushing off the troubles of the less privileged in those terms, his attitude toward women, in this case, seeming very reflective of his attitude to working people ("treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), and in general everyone outside the all-sure-they-are-there-because-they-are-so-much-better-than-everyone-else-in-every-way "superclass" comprised of the ultra-privileged 0.0001 percent of humanity that considers itself to be the true population of the planet. And of course, for all the hubbub about personal indiscretions of a certain nature, those on journalism's commanding heights are rather less ardent about going after the Friends of Epstein than it is, say, Harvey Weinstein (or even smaller fry like a Justin Baldoni), the figures involved being far more consequential individually, and from the standpoint of what looking at them closely would reveal about things as they are, than is the case with some mid-level (or lower) Hollywood player. Thus have they, for years, respectfully convey the denials of those with which Epstein kept company as they say over and over again "Yes, when I went to his island and flew on his plane there were girls around, but I didn't have anything to do with them. I didn't even have any idea what that was all about. Honest! I was there to raise money for my charity! Charity! Because I'm a philanthropist. PHILANTHROPIST!" (I have never had anything but contempt for the insistence that these people are "the smartest guys in the room" and the people who keep repeating it, but such utterances now convince me that they must be the dumbest guys in any room.) Meanwhile, of course, the fearless reporters of the mainstream media studiously ignore the more substantive of the recent revelations, like the recently released e-mails, precisely because those, again, happen to show that Epstein was involved with much more than "girls." Indeed, given how that media has lionized Summers in the past (exemplary of which good press is how one issue of TIME Magazine back in 1999 had his face on the cover with those of Rubin and Alan Greenspan as the "Committee to Save the World," practically making of him a superhero member of a superhero team, a Justice League of Superfriends--where so many would see instead a Legion of Doom), they will, when all this blows over, doubtless be doing so again, and likely before long. Indeed, Summers may get his crack at the Federal Reserve chairmanship just yet--and precisely because he can be counted on to be the same old Larry while holding that office.

Of Harvard's Excretion of Larry Summers

Larry Summers' ignominious exit from the Presidency of Harvard--not so ignominious, of course, that Mr. Summers wasn't shortly back in the Beltway, exercising a perhaps decisive and certainly unsalutary influence on the Obama administration's poor excuse for an attempt to respond to the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008 that he himself helped cause--is associated by most with his public utterances regarding the relatively low proportion of scientists who are women demonstrating "clear evidence" of the existence of "innate" differences between men and women in "aptitude." That portion of the public attentive to such matters was also likely to have heard of Summers' battles with onetime-Harvard Professor Dr. Cornel West, who ultimately departed for Princeton (a matter sufficiently notorious to have been significantly referenced in an episode of the Law & Order spin-off, Criminal Intent--indeed, the very episode where Bobby Goren first encountered Nicole Wallace).

Of course, this fell far short of exhausting the list of the controversies in which Summers was involved in his time as president of the Cult of the Good School's highest (American) object of worship. There was his "relationship" with Andrei Shleifer, which became a real issue when Shleifer, one of the architects of the catastrophe of '90s-era reform in Russia (Pinochet's Chile got the Chicago Boys, Yeltsin's Russia got the Harvard Boys), got himself sued by the U.S. government for fraud--and Summers saw the school not just pay the fine but let Shleifer keep his job. (Summers accused West of being an "embarrassment" to Harvard for recording a rap album--but to go by his behavior apparently did not think of Shleifer's professional and personal conduct in such terms.) And of course, there was Summers' determination upon a high-risk investment strategy that saw him invest 100 percent of the cash in Harvard's colossal endowment in the stock market--which was to cost the school billions in that financial apocalypse about which he was soon to be "advising" Mr. Obama. But neither of these episodes, nor any others likely them, got nearly so much press as those I cited above, and certainly his remarks about women in science, even though one might see his behavior here as far more problematic in character and consequence.

One may chalk that up to the nature of our coprophagic press, and its addiction to identity politics and Kulturkampf, the more in as the issues are simple and emotive, as Mr. Summers' offense to feminists certainly was, compared with more intricate matters such as financial scandal and the management of university endowments. However, to leave the matter there would be to overlook why the media and the political classes generally are so addicted to identity politics and Kulturkampf, namely that focusing on these conveniently changes the subject from matters of hard material interest and power to something else undeniably less consequential. After all, for a former Secretary of the United States' Treasury whose Washington career was not done yet to make stupid remarks about women's intellects is one thing. For him to be associated with persons compelled under the law to disgorge ill-gotten gains from the catastrophic wrecking and looting of a country--events with all sorts of unpleasant implications about not just the Harvard economists who masterminded Russian privatization, or Harvard broadly, but the economics profession and its relation to the gods of the global economy and the power elite more generally, and especially the nexus between the supposed "scholarship" and "expertise" of the Academy and the catastrophes and crimes of the "neoliberal project"--is quite another. So does it go with the questions about the management of Harvard's endowment, pointing again to involvement with colossal financial interests, as well as making some wonder what is done with all these assets and their associated income, and why institutions so flush should expect needy students to sell themselves into debt slavery to "get an education"--which may set some wondering just why the figure Joseph Stiglitz described to us from his memory of White House conferences was so eager to have the brokers throw every last penny of the billions in liquid assets America's closest thing to an Ancient University could scrounge up onto the glorified roulette tables of high finance, among much, much else that makes an obscene mockery of the "uplifting" rhetoric that is so much a part of higher education's insufferably pompous rituals.

Alas, such territory is where the devils of the mass media fear to tread, today as in the day in which Upton Sinclair wrote of "interlocking directorates" in The Goose-Step, and so instead we hear of Summers' more oafish comments for a time before the brass check earners of the mainstream media get back on their knees to Mr. Summers in exactly that way that has contributed mightily to the contempt in which so much of the public holds them today. Indeed, journalists did not even make much of Summers' remarks beyond their offensiveness to contemporary sensibility. And if this past year Mr. Summers has found the media on his case again it is my expectation that he will soon enough bounce back in their esteem, accountability not really existing for his kind, after all, as rather than retiring into private life he goes on to new positions and honors in the way of so many scandal-ridden "elder statesmen" before him while the commentariat subjects those who call things by their proper names to that cold Supercilious Stare P.G. Wodehouse described so well.

Thorstein Veblen, Riley Gaines and the Politics of Sports Today

In chapters ten, eleven and twelve of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class the great sociologist has a good deal to say about sport--seeing the attraction, inclination, "addiction" (his word) to sport, especially that sort of sport which evokes and involves physical combat, as one of the many survivals of the "predatory" and "barbarian" temperament to which he devoted his book. Some of what he had to say about it may seem fairly obvious to those who have encountered critiques of the values that the supposedly character-building, discipline, teamwork and "leadership"-teaching activity of playing or even just cheering on sports really impart to those who get involved with them--like a valorization of the display of physical aggression and cunning against human opponents in invidious contests of personal prowess making for gloating winners and shamefaced losers, and the tribalistic behavior of fans as well as players, extending to relations of dominance and subordination and status hierarchy between the victorious winners and the conquered and defeated. Thus do many see, for example, football and its surrounding hoopla as a training in militaristic and nationalistic values (even before one gets into the explicitly patriotic ceremony that is so often part of the ritual, such as everyone rising for the playing of the national anthem before the game, and fly-overs by the armed forces' fighter jets).

Of course, as might be expected of him Veblen goes further still. He notes the aspect of conspicuous leisure in sports that require lots of practice time and lots of costly specialized equipment, and the tendency to "make-believe" (all too evident in the characterization of football players as warriors, I should think). However, there is also what is bound up more subtly with that predatory, barbarian schema of life, not least the stress on personal prowess and invidiousness and status, namely an "animistic" conception of the world, with the former interacting significantly with the latter. Those whose mental horizons are shaped by the predatory scheme of life define themselves by their struggle against and triumph over active opponents, as against the merely passive things of this world--the animate which they live by dominating, as when hunting big game, or preying or dominating on other humans (the farmers whose villages they raid, the serfs over which they are lords), as against the inert and passive with which those that they dominate interact (like the grass the buffalo they hunt eat, the soil that those farmers they lord it over till). This has them conceiving of not just living things but "striking natural phenomen[a]" such "as a storm, a disease, a waterfall . . . as 'animate,'" with these things, if not "living" in the biological sense, having wills of their own, acting towards ends of their own, effectively personifying them in line with that view of life as a struggle between animate forces. At the same time, in line with their bent to hierarchy, they think of those things which they cannot compel to submit to their will as higher powers to which they must in their turn submit--and placate. All of this, moreover, extends beyond concrete things of the natural world like storms and diseases and waterfalls to a belief in "luck," "the barbarian imputing a quasi-personal character to factors" with cause and effect linked not in a rationally comprehensible fashion but rather "a preternatural interposition" that can readily be identified with "the arbitrary habits of the" higher powers. Going with that belief is "an instinctive shaping of conduct to conform with the surmised requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand, and a more or less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the divinity on the other hand"--the propitiation of the higher powers that interfere with them. Thus do barbarians, and the latterday barbarians who are sportsmen, have their rituals and their talismans--for instance, the athlete who always goes into the game wearing a pair of "lucky socks" they never wash. The result is that participation in sport, and its habituation of those who participate in it to predatory ways and predatory thinking, goes hand in hand with the predatory individuals' superstition--including that type of superstition often dignified with the name religion, such that (especially as Veblen held all this to be part of a common package) those who are inclined to sport are more likely to be inclined than others to "devoutness" in relation to "higher powers," and the devout more inclined than those who are not to sport (with a team together praying for victory before the game--praying for it as if they were warriors actually defending their people from enemies meaning them harm--seeming to both bespeak and reinforce that tendency). The result is that sports is not just an inculcator of militarism and nationalism, but, if in the more obscure manner described here, religiosity as well.

Veblen noted that many thought sports' encouragement of militaristic, nationalistic, religious attitudes in individuals salutary--that, indeed, organizations which sought to promulgate religion, if perhaps having only a vague grasp of the relation between sportsmanship and religiosity, nevertheless made deliberate use of the former to promote the latter. However others, not least Veblen himself, were more inclined to see these attitudes less positively, to regard them as (at best) out of step with the practical needs, or even the natural tendencies, of an increasingly technological and integrated world economy with requirements better met by cause-and-effect rationalism, cosmopolitanism and peaceful, "industrial" values; and indeed even regarded the prominence of athletics in college life with dismay.

As with so many other divisions evident in Veblen's time, the division would seem to endure today, though unevenly. It seems significant that today those who divide America between the "Red" and the "Blue" tend to think of the culture of sport, and especially the higher-profile sorts of team sport, as stronger in the martial, nationalistic, religious--"conservative"--"Red" states than in the more pacific, cosmopolitan, secular-skeptical "Blue" states, and in said states' rural spaces rather than their more Blue-skewing metro areas (such that Friday Night Lights is set in small town north Texas rather than metropolitan San Antonio). Yet it also seems significant that even in the Blue states one hears little in the way of the old critiques of the values that team sports inculcate, anyone likely to have a mainstream platform likely to treat claims for sports as a "character-building," discipline, teamwork and leadership-teaching activity with total respect. Rather what dissent we hear regarding the place of sport in contemporary life has to do with its "inclusiveness," the dissenters arguing not against the unsalutary influence of sport, but that the organization and playing of sports fall short of their standard of "inclusiveness" as these demand equal moral and material private and public support for sports for young women as well as for young men, from kindergarten all the way up to the professional level--all as this, in turn, has interacted with the question of just who counts as a "young woman."

Altogether the situation is a reminder of the effective exclusion of leftist thinking from the mainstream and centrist accommodation of the right; the extremely big business sports has become and the media's fear of offending against that business, the more in as it is so invested in it; and the identity politics factoring into every issue as it pours gasoline on the fires of the culture war. Indeed, consider just a little of what you may have noticed just attending to what the press did report --and how it reported it. Where the gore-chasing Nightcrawlers of our press ordinarily love nothing better than a mass shooting, they showed little interest in a major one in Manhattan out of apparent fear that attention to it might revive the controversy over the connection between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. There was the series of vile incidents entailing the tossing of "marital aids" at Women's National Basketball Association games (to promote crypto , wouldn't you know it). And of course, the swift ascent of Riley Gaines as an activist, such that the venerable Leadership Institute named a center after this very, very new and junior figure on the political scene in testament to both the extreme fashionability of the cause of excluding the transgendered from women's sports in this quarter--and, it must be admitted, Ms. Gaines' merits as a spokesperson for their causes. Altogether that seems to pretty well sum up the discourse about sports today--and everything else as well in this benighted era.

Of "Medical Conspiracy Theory": Some Thoughts

These days we hear a great deal of what some deride as "medical conspiracy theory." Perhaps not the most important but certainly the most striking example of these is the idea that the rich and powerful are keeping a great many discoveries to themselves, with the most "interesting" such example their supposed use of devices like the sarcophagi we saw in the Stargate franchise for rejuvenation purposes.

The conventional response is of course to sneer at such claims. Yet one can argue that, fanciful and unlikely as they may be, they reflect, in a distorted way, a great many important realities that receive nowhere near so much public attention as they should. There is the sheer volume of resources poured into medical research--underscored by how spokespersons for Big Pharma insist endlessly that obscene prices for medication and insane notions of the legitimate extent of intellectual property rights are not merely justified by but necessary given their spending on "research" to develop that medication. There is, at the same time, the constant claim that the relevant researchers are making "revolutionary breakthroughs every day," given concrete expression by the daily headlines of world-changing cures being just over the horizon--combined with the reality that none of these ever seems to produce a product that makes much difference. (How long have they promised humanity that a "cure for cancer" is just around the corner?) One may add to this the extreme contrast between the health care the general public gets, and the health care the Davos crowd gets, all of which may not be the only factor but is at least a factor in the significant and growing difference in longevity and health to be found between the poorest and richest in even "First World" societies, to say nothing of the planet as a whole.

Faced with all that it is easy enough to imagine that the immense resources being poured into medical research and enabling "revolutionary breakthroughs every day" are simply being kept off the market, enjoyed by the rich and powerful who at ages that the "common" man and woman cannot reasonably expect to reach going by the statistics, still seem almost youthful in looks and movement and alertness, all as the rest of the public is going bankrupt purchasing the far more meager standard of care that endlessly makes the "god in a white coat" pretension of the doctors providing it so insufferable--the lousy care at outrageous prices part of the system of exploitation that makes the rich so rich. Indeed, this is all the easier to picture in a context in which the same rich and powerful people who have the benefit of all that so openly despise the public off of which they live as "takers" from the "makers" they believe themselves (and only themselves) to be, and indeed are openly determined to take away their meager health and pension benefits as they usher them toward exercise of the "right to die."

Of course, this is far from the only explanation. After all, perceptions of the funding of medical research are wildly exaggerated, not least by the Big Pharma spokespersons--the reality that the business, just like every other, leaves others to pay the great bulk of the research bill as they keep the benefits (while, again, insisting that they are makers while the public and academic funders of the research are takers). Moreover the system for distributing the research monies is horrifically broken, yielding lousy returns for what money is spent, with it not helping that the short-termist shareholder value-minded scum who run the operation have no interest in curing any real disease anyway (not a "sustainable business model," you know), just taking the public for all it can get. (Consider, for instance, their extreme disinterest in developing long-needed but not particularly profitable new classes of antibiotics as against the less-than-half-measures for chronic problems forcing lifelong use of their product we see so much peddled in the commercials.) Indeed, the disgusting picture is all too consistent with the reality that a neoliberal economy is a generator of hype about INNOVATION, rather than the real thing. And indeed even the rich often suffer for it as their doctors, more highly paid occupants of plusher offices than those you are likely ever to see, bestow on them the same professional arrogance, the same impatience, the same shabby treatment the rest of us get in exchange for their exorbitant bills.

Alas, the mainstream media rarely tells those stories--at all, let alone properly. The result is that, once again, if "fake news" flourishes online this is because of the ways in which the mainstream media has itself promulgated fake news and a false image of the world, all while earning the extreme distrust of the public it so disdains. But of course the mainstream media never admit that as they instead they demand more public deference to the grifting eyeball-chasers and propagandists for Big Business of the Establishment outlets, and applaud any and every move that will strangle the flow of any and all information, opinion, analysis not admitted through its carefully kept gates.

Inequality in Aging--and Death

We live in an extremely unequal society which is in a great many ways becoming more so all the time, not least socioeconomically. Those favored by that inequality are on the whole not much troubled by the fact--even from a standpoint of conservative alertness to how extremes of inequality can be destabilizing to a social order. (Those forms of conservatism which entail such enlightened self-interest, let alone noblesse oblige or paternalism, have not been much in vogue with the powerful for a long time--even to the extent of rendering them lip service--as instead those to whom life has been most generous flaunt their selfishness with a swagger that would be unbecoming in a simian.) However, those disfavored by that inequality--the vast, vast majority of even the population of the "First World" most certainly included--are not so at ease with it. Naturally we see constant, massive, effort to both justify that inequality, and at the same time downplay the practical significance of that inequality in various ways, telling us, for example, that the poor are only relatively so, that their sufferings are mainly psychological because society esteems others more than they.

This is, of course, a shabby, cynical and quite stupid evasion because the overwhelming evidence of every type shows that even in the aforementioned First World countries where people stand within the social scale has a determining and often decisive effect on the most fundamental aspects of their life from birth on--starting with the fact that the wealth or poverty of the family they are born into factors into their chances of surviving childbirth and infancy. That same inequality of fortunes has a determining and often decisive effect on the quantity and quality of the nutrition and education they have in childhood and youth--whether they are given mere rudiments in a rudimentary fashion, or permitted the opportunity for more, whether their education is intended to prepare them to give orders or only to follow the orders others give them, with all that means for the formation of their minds. It has a determining and often decisive effect on whether at the end of their formal schooling--what they actually learn in which, contrary to the stupidities spoken by the floggers of meritocratic myth, counts for next to nothing against personal and familial networks and the capital they inherit or raise (Does mommy hobnob with Fortune 500 CEOs through her "charity" work? Do your relatives and close friends have the kind of scratch that will mean you can hope for a couple of million dollars from them with which to get that startup going?)--they will have a fair chance of a career in which they can thrive, or will struggle for a job that will let them do no more than survive (and that if they are lucky). It has a determining and often decisive effect on their options with regard to friends, romantic partners, spouses, their possibilities regarding leisure and culture, recreation and pleasure, the extent to which they will have good health, the rate at which their minds and bodies will age because of the kind of work they are forced to do in order to live and how well or how poorly they can take care of themselves ("What's that in poor years?" is a question we should be asking much more when we hear of chronological ages), and ultimately the length of time they will have on the planet--with the difference here possibly measured in decades rather than years when we compare the least well-off to the most privileged. Only a complete idiot would trivialize all of that--and it is testimony to the number of complete idiots in the world that so many do so, while also significant that when they are forced to face the hard facts those who are not quite complete idiots abandon the trivialization of the lot of the have-nots in favor of a strategy of stony-faced, shrugging callousness, or outright embrace of the (sadly) ever-popular role of apologist for and admirer of injustice, misery and brutality.

Considering that profound womb-to-tomb inequality and all that it means it is the later part of the story that interests me now, and how modern societies are dealing with it amid graying populations, sharpening talk of dependency ratios, and the return of euthanasia to the discourse--and how completely the mainstream ignores the difference between rich and poor when it speaks of them. It is, after all, not the old and rich that those eager to attack pensions and health care system are concerned with taking things away from, but the old and poor whom they see as a burden, especially insofar as they are poor. The working people whose toil has kept the world running and in the process aged them before their time, while also leaving them with very little to offer an employer in their later years, and little to live on when they can no longer work (as they are much more likely than their more affluent counterparts to have spent their most productive years doing the hard, physical, work that only the able-bodied young can do, and never had much chance to learn the more productive sorts of work the old can do, while not having been well-compensated for it)--all as, precisely because of what time and conditions have done to body and mind, they require care if they are to exist at all. Even in the years when they contributed most seen not as makers but takers by the elites who regard themselves as the only ones deserving of the "maker" label, said elites despise them even more when they are less able to make the rich richer, and get nastier still when should anyone protest their making such judgments (demoting those society treats least well from taker to "scavenger," and even to "unhuman"). Thus is it the case that, as a world-breaking pandemic lowers certain inhibitions and the demographic profile skews ever grayer at a rapid clip (in 1980 in North America and Europe the median age was 30.8, in 2023 a decade higher, and the percentage of the population 65 or older doubled from a tenth to a fifth in the same time frame), Mr. Burns-style talk of "death with dignity" returns to the conversation, with Britain's situation seeming to sum it up. Prime Minister Keir Starmer long ago discarded his party leadership election promise to replace the Tories' hated Universal Credit with something like the less ungenerous older system of social provision with all it meant for the right to live--but on his watch Britain's parliament has passed a law recognizing the right of the elderly to die. Rather than respect for the individual's right to determine their fate, especially when they face a situation in which, as the Fat Man explained in Samuel Shem's House of God, modern medicine can keep a person's body alive in the legal sense even as everything that was ever human in them has hopelessly gone forever, Britain's "leaders" seem to be hoping the country's poor elderly will exercise their "right" for the benefit of its rich, as these, like their global counterparts, look forward to living forever.

The Aging of the World in a Neoliberal Epoch

The panic over aging populations that has been with us since today's sixtysomething was a twentysomething, of course, began with the neoliberal turn; and would seem to have reflected less any actual imminence of crisis than neoliberal hostility to the welfare state, and the readiness of neoliberals to lay hold of any club that they could use to attack it. Still, there is no question that, in line with the neoliberals' continued stranglehold on the discourse the insistence never went away, the more in as the cost of the health care system that was such a big part of the social safety net and especially its usage by the aged, just kept rising. The result is that even those unsympathetic to the neoliberals' Agenda had reason to worry that, especially with the system structured as it now was, the continued aging of the population (and the signs all pointed that way) would eventually mean challenges to that social safety net's viability that society would have to meet one way or the other in a way unlikely to be mere "business as usual."

Of course, where that was concerned those who shrank from more than "business as usual," especially in circumstances where the neoliberals so consistently had the upper hand, had some room to hope that "something would come along" to simplify the problem--perhaps enough so that the issue might be pragmatically negotiated without too much "drama." It seemed possible to them that the fertility rates, which of course have ups and downs across any significant length of time, would at some point recover to a more acceptable level, at least for a while, slowing the accumulation of fiscal or economic stress to the point of making significant reforms unavoidable that much longer. Possible that medicine would achieve breakthroughs that would extend the years of health and life and let the elderly work longer while needing less support and care from the rest of society. Possible that in the absence of that, or on top of it, productivity would rise dramatically, and the economy grow dramatically, making such burdens more affordable (by way of, for example, extensive robotization). Alas, none of this actually happened, birth rates staying down, as contrary to the stupid hype in the area, decade after decade went by without any grand breakthroughs in the relevant areas of medicine--or any other technological area--in an era of technological hype rather than technological progress, one reflection of which was that if the prevailing economic model enabled the rich to amass vast paper fortunes growth was on the whole anemic, just as skeptics of the model that elites have so relentlessly supported knew it would be. Indeed, things were so disappointing that way that even as the neoliberals steadily eroded the social safety net, and that quite enough to cause society's most vulnerable a great deal of pain, those stubbornly low fertility rates and that painfully slow economic growth (and of course, the absolute ruling out of any change of the tax code to the disadvantage of the privileged) sufficed to mean that the social safety nets' burden on the budget and the economy kept catching up with them as their publics only got older. (In North America and Europe the Total Fertility Rate, still a near replacement level of 1.9 in 1980, fell to 1.7 in 2010--and 1.47 in 2023--which fact helped raise the median age from 30.8 to 38.4 over 1980-2010, and then to 40.9 by 2023, and the proportion of the population over the age of 65, not much above a tenth here in 1980, was more like a fifth of it in 2023, with, again, every sign pointing to things only continuing in that direction.)

The result, as has so often been the case in this period, has been that rather than the problem being simplified it has been set before the public more starkly, with the situation in France exemplary. There the country's President provoked a constitutional crisis and nationwide protest with a neoliberal offensive whose most controversial feature was its raising the retirement age. He got his way in that fight, but like so much else to which he has been given, has also fed into a crisis of French democracy that has only worsened amid calls for elections that showed the center it cannot hold as Prime Ministers came and went in a manner more evocative of the tragic history of the Third Republic rather than what was hoped for from the Fifth; what pass for defenders of the social and economic rights of working people inspiring very little confidence indeed in said working people that they can offer any alternative; and those to the right of a center that has from the first been right-wing in all but name display every expectation that like their predecessors at Vichy, rise to power very, very soon.

The Return of Euthanasia to the Discourse

Not long ago I raised the matter of the debate over euthanasia, and how it had seemed to disappear at the turn of the century. My reading of that situation was that that was a particular battle in the culture war that the right had won, and that after that, the more easily in that it is the concerns of the right that get press, it fell by the wayside as other issues came to the fore--of which there were no shortage in the conflict-ridden twenty-first century.

However, the subject seems to be sneaking back into the discourse--for reasons that have little to do with the culture war, and much more to do with what is always behind the culture war in the end, hard economics. Simply put, if policymakers of a certain ideological background had long lamented the aging of the populations of the industrialized nations (whether sincerely or strategically, as an excuse for attacks on a welfare state they despise) the trend is today much more advanced, and the costs of an older population (lower work force productivity, the pension and health care bill) weigh the more heavily after an epoch of miserably slow economic growth by even the officially favored yardsticks, such that those who regard the situation as economically or fiscally intolerable are that much more ardent in their view, that much more insistent that the situation has reached the point of "crisis."

At the same time this century's horrors have tended to make what a short time ago was unsayable increasingly "normal" in those societies that so pride themselves on their respect for human rights, with this most certainly including the idea that society would be better off if it just got rid of a lot of people who are from the standpoint of those who hold power a burden--with the COVID-19 pandemic a major moment here. Thus did assistant editor of the Telegraph Jeremy Warner write in a piece titled "Does the Fed Know Something the Rest of Us Do Not With Its Panicked Interest Rate Cut?" that from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents"--all of which, together, can be taken as a suggestion that in seeing the virus as a beneficial reduction of the burden of the elderly on society he was only saying what a great many of the policy elite were thinking. And certainly said elites acted as if this were indeed what they thought as they consistently opposed public action to address the crisis--downplaying the seriousness of the problem (cases going down, this will pass, disappear when it was just getting going), making every effort to reduce such action as was to be taken on the problem to "personal responsibility" (patronizingly telling individuals to "wash their hands," "not touch their face," and use "social distancing"--yes, that'll save the world!), and then when the pressure on them to do more became inescapable belatedly and less than half-heartedly implementing ill thought-out, inadequate, leaky, little-enforced measures they abandoned altogether at the first chance as the media helped make COVID-19 part of the culture war and its extreme stupidity, denigrated public action ("hygiene theater"), derided those who took a different view (as "lockdown addicts"), and played up any "out" they could (not least, widely publicizing overoptimistic studies of vaccine effectiveness that encouraged a "Just get yourself vaccinated and all will be well" narrative) on the way back to the "herd immunity" policy those elites wanted all along and quickly got as they took a "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" attitude, and sneered at those who refused to be part of the piles as pathetic little cowards deserving of public contempt. ("Suck it up!" said the billionaire to the schoolteachers, as the press applauded his "leadership.") In spite of the fact that, contrary to their herd immunity pseudo-science, the pandemic did not simply pass but became endemic with mutation after mutation of the kind that lockdown pooh-poohing Establishment "experts" said couldn't, wouldn't, happen, and against which the highly touted vaccines turned out to be far less effective than the initial reports promised (instead of 95 percent effectiveness rates, long-term efficacy and robustness in the face of mutations, the vaccines have been more like a typical flu vaccine in the level of protection they afford), translating to one new wave of infection after another, they hastened to declare the pandemic over as the media spoke of the public simply choosing to get on with their lives as normal, and in extreme contrast with the "worthy" victims of those tragedies that, being useful to its Agenda, Authority insists on fulsomely commemorating forever such that at the mere mention of said tragedies anyone concerned for the "good opinion of society" is obliged to pull the "smelled a fart" face the stupid equate with gravitas, the pandemic's victims--the billions sickened, hundreds of millions suffering prolonged and even possibly permanent damage and disability and shortened life expectancies, and even at the undercount implied by the gap between official deaths to disease and "excess" deaths during the period, the millions who died directly of infection (and those left behind, the widowed, the orphaned, and all the rest, among many, many others whose suffering went beyond the conveniently, countably bodily)--were ignored and quickly forgotten, the passing of even the rich and famous victim of the disease scarcely remarked so that one only learned their fate later when they thought "I wonder what happened to them . . ." and looked them up in an object lesson in what it is that makes for the unworthy victim.

Amid that extraordinary devaluation of human life one can hardly be surprised if the idea of the aged being enabled--and maybe encouraged--to do away with themselves as they cease to make the rich richer were made respectable again, with little outcry from the kulturkampfers of the right. All as, of course, the super-rich make it very clear that they will not be the ones "going home," they, unlike the mere serfs, having every intention of living forever, indeed ascending to godhood, with their anticipation of that outcome seemingly reflected in their investment in artificial intelligence creating the biggest bubble in the history of the world.

The "Gen Z Stare": An Unconventional View

First hearing of the so-called "Gen Z stare" (this phenomenon actually has its own Wikipedia article) my reaction was dismissive. Adults have always been critical of the courtesy and social skills of those younger than themselves, and the great majority of them quite stupid enough to imagine that these deficiencies are a matter of the current cohort of younger persons being somehow less virtuous than their predecessors. (Because each and every last one of them was a perfect model of proper etiquette in their own youth.) This was all the more the case as the description of the stare sounded so much like the look of disrespectful bewilderment that I suspect people have had to endure ever since the communication of human stupidity in a visually recognizable way began in the remote past.

Yet it seems that the term refers to something more specific. It does not refer to, for example, the offensive response of the ignoramus to a somewhat more educated person's use of a "big word" of the kind that has added greatly to the bitterness of the intelligent and intellectual since time immemorial. Rather it refers to a certain blankness of expression in response to what people of conventional mind regard as the ordinary and even necessary demands of human interaction--the niceties, the lubricants, the "small change" of that interaction--that is apparently indicative of discomfort or disinterest, and perhaps a subtle protest against the demand. The conventional response is to see this as a function of inadequate socialization of "THESE KIDZ TODAY!"

I will not pretend to you that a generation of young people growing up without knowing what it is to not have a screen in front of them providing entertainment is somehow a good thing. Yet one should allow for the situation, like every other, being more complex than what is implied by the lazy "THESE KIDZ TODAY!" reaction, with the fact of the discomfort evident in this a starting point. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that human interaction often is stressful in manifold ways--not least, the "cognitive labor" of figuring out what another person is looking for from them, which is often something they cannot give, all as admitting as much is not always easy given the foolish pretensions they must deal with. Accordingly a great many people do avoid it when they can, with this affirmed by how a person's accessibility to others is inversely related to their power and status. The ordinary office worker may have to sit in an open-plan area, without even the gesture toward privacy that is the low walls of a cubicle. By contrast the boss has their own office, the door to which they feel quite free to lock, all as seeing them means getting past their secretary. The conformist idiot will rush to argue for this insulation from human contacts as a necessity given "how hard they work," but anyone sensitive to how society doles out its perks knows full well that what people get has little if anything to do with their needs as workers or anything else, and everything to do with what they can demand for themselves, with the insulation from contact with other human beings one of those things they are quickest to demand.

The avoidance of human contact here is the more striking because in a highly unequal society--and certainly the unequal setting that is the workplace--as the rules of interaction generally protect those higher up in the hierarchy in such contacts by shifting as much of the stress of the interaction as possible onto those lower in the hierarchy; from those who have position and power onto those who have none (for it is the latter who bear the principal burden of figuring out what this person is looking for as the other party gets to be self-centered and graceless, all as they are in less of a position to say "No" to the unreasonable than the higher-ups). If even with their advantages bosses still want to hide behind a locked door with a secretary acting as guard dog, then how is it for the lower-level workers on whom they can swoop down at any time, and fire for any reason at all (as they cannot afford to forget for even a second if they want to stay employed), and who are obliged to give deference rather than receive it during the interaction? They bear that much more of the burden of interactions--while they are also far less able to protect themselves from the weight of that burden--in a situation which, far from being at all fair, amplifies and accentuates the essential unfairness of the situation which makes the whole thing a demand for "convenient social virtue" backed up by the threat of retaliation for non-compliance. Think, too, of how given the way the world of work is arranged, with those low-level employees often compelled to be the company's point of contact with the broader world, the customer service representatives required to deal with angry customers they have no authority to satisfy as those who made the company policy that caused them to be so angry hide behind those locked doors, and how this leaves them with that much less of the mental and emotional reserves needed for coping with the costs of additional social interaction (especially amid the Great Enshittification making for so many more angry customers dealing with personnel with so much less power to placate them).

Of course, even acknowledging the reality that social interaction has its costs for all concerned, and that these weigh most heavily on those disadvantaged in terms of power and status, there is still the fact that none of this is new. Indeed, three-quarters of a century ago C. Wright Mills wrote of the white collar worker's being obliged to present a smiling face to boss and customer as yet another of the great alienations of labor alongside the four great alienations of the worker already long discussed before him (others' control of the productive act and its product, the way they compete in a battle of all against all to survive, and the way they are required to set aside the whole rest of their human needs, drive potential as they work, machine-like, in line with the employer's precise demands). Of course, that does not in and of itself explain why a new generation should be less intolerant of the demands that their elders bore--and indeed those of conventional mind will rush to the conclusion, again, that they are simply less virtuous than those who came before them, and that this has more than a little to do with the problems of their socialization, giving them a chance to (once again) malign the "lockdown" of the pandemic period (it isn't the pandemic that destroyed so many millions of lives that bothers them, just the ways the attempt to curb it inconvenienced business), and then say something about the time they spend interacting with screens as well. However, they would do well to consider the possibility that those experiences may have left them more questioning of others' taking for granted their acquiescence in their inconvenient and unfair and frankly unnecessary demands, perhaps the more in as they are subject to so many inconvenient, unfair and unnecessary demands in a time in which it seems less and less the case that they are to get very much from living up to the received expectations, entirely in line with the broader tendency to retreat altogether from the society making those demands, their elders' cluelessness about all of which speaks volumes. After all, far from this being a matter of just how the young think and act, and the ways in which their social skills may have been compromised by their technologically intensive upbringings, one would do well to remember that their supposedly wiser and more responsible elders are these days themselves a pack of screen-obsessed wackos themselves with the shriveled social skills to match, such that dealing with them is that much less bearable, and the burden of bearing the unbearable, again, dumped on those younger persons with their own problems whose being raised in front of a screen, by the way, was their elders' doing. In short, it's not them, old farts. It's YOU! You people, the disrespect implicit in the use of the second person plural to address you here entirely intentional because it is entirely deserved. And facing up to that ought to be a prerequisite for shooting one's mouth off about the supposed deficiencies of "the younger generation."

Unpacking the Term "Crisis of Masculinity"

It is in the character of today's gender politics that those given platforms by the mainstream media from which to speak of such matters refer to the feminist ideas associated with "woke gender politics" as if they were indisputable material facts that only the most stubborn denier of reality would find at all disputable--even as those ideas are so ill-described that even academic specialists are not terribly clear on what they mean, frequently rest on a host of highly contestable and oft contested premises, and frequently fall apart quickly under any sort of rigorous examination. Thus does it go with the way in which certain proponents of these politics throw around the term "objectification" and its derivatives--a little digging into the matter readily exposing it to the charge of being an abuse of philosophical terminology for questionable political ends (at its worst, making of male heterosexuality a thought-crime).

So does it go with the ubiquitous "crisis of masculinity," a term that must sound strange to many ears. After all, the term "masculinity" is definable as what is characteristic of males and therefore by definition existent as long as males are around. How could that be "in crisis?" Certainly it seems strange if we think in terms of maleness as a matter of biological sex. However, those insistent that there is such a crisis in that "indisputable material fact" way think not in terms of biological sex but socially constructed gender instead--of masculinity as a role that one learns, and performs. They also hold that recent changes in social life, particularly the advances women have made in widening and deepening their participation in the labor force and gaining societal acceptance of their exercise of many personal freedoms, have deprived men of their traditional "script," leaving men directionless and increasingly dysfunctional, claims they substantiate by pointing to men's poorer educational outcomes in comparison with women in recent years, and the numbers of men "dropping out of society" by failing to land steady jobs, move out of their parents' homes, marry and form households and families of their own--"becoming hikikomori"--and we are told,

The insistence on gender and not sex, on men having had a script and being unable to get by without it but having lost it, are not claims everyone would agree on, while even the sympathetic will note the inconsistency of this thinking. Theorists of the matter are strident about male heterosexuality being constructed, learned, performative, but rather less insistent on this in regard to any and every other gender identity they recognize--all as one doubts they would be very amenable to being told that women "need" to follow a societally-established and approved script for their own lives, with, indeed, the rejection of such a script for woman at the heart of feminism. Thus does it also go with the premise that male troubles are a "crisis" for that gender specifically, and that this crisis is specifically rooted in gender relations. After all, men are hardly the only ones having a tough time these days--women having their own problems, among them many of the same problems, likely in even worse degree in cases. (That more women graduate college than do men probably means that women even more than men are suffering from the crushing student debt loads and the underemployment of the college graduate so widespread today.) Meanwhile one may plausibly see the troubles of both men and women as a matter of changes that have nothing to do with gender per se, such as the neoliberal turn of economic life with its associated financialization, deindustrialization, socioeoconomic inequality, that are making the life course cultural authority insists upon as the middle class norm in a society where middle classness is supposed to be the norm less and less practicable for the young, of whatever gender, as the gap between the cost of living and people's actual, real, inflation-adjusted incomes just gets wider and wider, and any hope of comfort or security plummets.

It is as telling as it is appalling that the discourse should ignore that--those leading it speaking as they do of gender precisely so they can avoid speaking of class, and a crisis of masculinity so they can avoid speaking of a bigger crisis of contemporary society, identity-status politics-minded "bourgeois" feminism here being very, very bourgeois indeed, all as its bourgeois conservatism seems evident in the fact that contemporary gender theory is hardly the beginning of this discussion. After all, a half century ago George Gilder, before becoming the most notorious of shills for the prevailing claptrap about the entrepreneur as God on Earth and Silicon Valley as the embodiment of their entrepreneurship via his appallingly sacrilegious propaganda, was writing book after book about said crisis--and one might add, in those books Gilder as strident as any gender theorist about the "instability of male identity." The difference was that Gilder thought the solution to the crisis was turning back the clock on "women's liberation" and the social safety net in favor of an insistence on traditional family structures--on women following the old script so that men could follow theirs. Still, in spite of the feminist's stance that turning back the clock is out of the question it can often seem that proponents of this theory are hostile to the idea of men going too far in rejecting the old one. Thus while feminists staunchly support the right of women to choose whether to marry or not, have children or not, and regard those who look at the situation and choose not to do these things as having made not just a valid choice but a valorous one, they see something very wrong and worrisome in men claiming the same right, in men looking at marriage and deeming it unattractive and accordingly "going their own way"--such that they hasten to identify any male inclining this way with the alt-right reaction about which they are in a state of moral panic (while finding said alt-right influence a convenient explanation for political developments they find untoward, plausibly or not). Amid the muddle one can argue that the best they can offer is that men should still expect to follow the old life path, but without expecting in return for its sacrifices (which would appear to be rising) any of the traditional compensations that went with being able to say like Ulysses Everett McGill, "I'm the pater familias!" all as they hold that those frustrated in this path should not just direct the blame solely at themselves, but submit to the disapprobation of the community in a display of what a certain social scientist of an earlier generation would have characterized as "convenient social virtue."

The Mainstream Media's Hypogamy Narrative: A Critical View

These days we are hearing a LOT about "hypogamy," in which women are faced with the choice of either "marrying down" from the standpoint of status and its determinants--such as income--or not marrying at all, as a result of the existing socioeconomic terrain and the associated mating market.

Does this narrative hold up? Not really. As is usual with the media we have it substantiates its claims rather poorly, with our commentators ceaselessly referring to the fact that the percentage of women getting college degrees has significantly outstripped the percentage of men doing the same, but not going much beyond that. Alas, this muddy thinking is instantly debunked by the figures regarding what people really make. Consider the figures presented at the DQYDJ web site. Presently showing the statistics for 2024 these indicate that in the U.S. in that year women in the 50th income percentile made $47,000, men in the 50th percentile $60,000--28 percent more than women do. As a result to have a male partner who makes less than she does a woman would have to be with a man in the 38th percentile--12 places down in the chart, a significant drop. And indeed, moving up the percentiles the gap between what women and men make tends to widen significantly. At the 60th percentile men make 36 percent more than women in the same position, at the 80th 38 percent more, the 90th 40 percent more, the 95th 45 percent more, and the 99th percentile 62 percent more. One may argue over the reasons for this, but what is fundamental for the purposes of this particular analysis is the empirical proof that the higher proportion of women who gain degrees is not facing college-educated women with a "dating pool" comprised of men making less than they do as a result of the educational gap because a significant proportion of men without degrees are making as much or more than a great many women with degrees. Quite the contrary, one may expect that marriages between college-educated women and non-college-educated men will tend to see women "marrying up" according to this metric, often by a significant margin. (Indeed, one can even argue that, looking at the less tangible aspects of contemporary social hierarchy, like the stupid snobberies people of conventional mind espouse regarding occupation, they will not necessarily even be marrying down. After all, do Americans generally feel that a nurse who went to college who marries a plumber or electrician who attended a trade school and did an apprenticeship is marrying someone "beneath her?")

Why then is the media so insistent on a claim that is so demonstrably flimsy? There is the fetish that the professional classes have for education, and especially the four-year college degree, as a great social and economic divider--which is significantly a matter of evading a great many hard facts of life, like all the factors that have nothing to do with education or merit in any sense of the term in making for individual "success," and the preference for emphasizing "opportunity" over outcome in economic life as they promulgate "aspiration" that has them thinking sending people to college will magically solve all of society's economic problems. Thus is it the case that they slight such matters as high underemployment among college graduates (a year after graduation 1 in 4 are not working in their fields, even those with the most in-demand degrees), the low returns on many degrees (like the arts and humanities), and the extent to which many degrees that confer high earning power initially do not do so for life (as with many in information technology)--as they overlook the earning power of those who manage to establish themselves in the skilled trades. Alongside this there is the gender politics of the narrative, specifically the media's attraction to Ra-Ra narratives of feminist triumph, male failure, and female grievance, the more in as the "crisis of masculinity" narrative specifically has been so popular as of late. The "college-educated women stuck with a dating pool of non-college-educated male losers" story is a winner on every count. Thus does the title of the MSN item at the top of my list of search results read "Hypogamy, the Increasingly Common Romantic Choice Among Brilliant Women" as it goes on to, yes, bring up the matters of education and especially college, and while if this particular piece is comparatively upbeat, there is an implicit the-bums-aren't-even-finishing-school and men-are-failing-women-yet-again current in the media coverage evident even in this item.

In saying that it is only fair to admit the ease of pointing out mainstream media failures in reporting on such matters, and that it is harder, as well as more useful, to provide a proper corrective by figuring out what is really happening in the world. Still, one doesn't have to seek very far for it. After all, if the "crisis of masculinity" may be a dubious conception, there are certainly plenty of crises quite relevant to this situation, like a crisis of higher education that has people speaking of a "bubble" in college degrees; a crisis of the cost of living after a half century of the price of essentials rising relative to incomes, affecting even people ordinarily thought relatively well-off; and with it a crisis of what has passed for "middle class" in our time (what I call the "quasi-middle class"). But of course that is exactly what the media does not care to report, as Justin Wolfers instead tells us "Don't worry, be happy" regarding rising prices, and Idrees Kahloon tells us "Americans can't believe how rich they are," while whatever ails us, whether a lack of affordable housing or anything else of the sort, Ezra Klein and his wife Annie Lowrey tell us, isn't the policies of the last half century--to use that term verboten in the mainstream media, neoliberalism--but our not having had enough neoliberalism, so here comes neoliberal Abundance to save the day!

Does all this mean there is nothing to the view that college-educated women are finding it harder to find economically attractive partners? Not necessarily. I suspect that the problem is that rather than "marrying down"--as the figures above show is probably not happening much--the unaffordability of the basics of a "middle class" life mean that finding a partner making enough money that in combination with their own income the two can have the financial foundation for a secure and comfortable life really has become more challenging. Because just so much money is now necessary. Think of it this way--where once the expectation was that one income would provide for a middle-class family, later two were the conventional requirement, and now that is becoming less and less adequate in a sign of the harder times. And so the marriage market is frustrating, just not in precisely the way that we were told it was. Of course, that story, less congenial to the prejudices of the mainstream media, is one they aren't telling.

The Lameness of TIME's "Person of the Year"

In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen held that the "habit of invidious comparison" was part of the package of barbarian rather than civilized thinking. Unsurprisingly in an age in which all that he described as barbaric makes up the "common sense" of contemporary life, not least inegalitarianism; and Big Media is living down to Veblen's view of them as a reactionary force in The Theory of Business Enterprise in promoting the tendency; said media subjects the public to ceaseless claims about who is the "richest," the "most powerful," the "most influential"--purveying a pornography of status calculated to appeal to the garbage that are the overlords of our polycrisis-ridden world and their certainty that they and they alone are the real population of the planet, the other eight billion people sharing it with them mere Non-Player Characters in the game in which they alone are players (the more easily in as a portion of those eight billion, without dignity or self-love, are happy to play their part in that lunacy).

Perhaps the single best-known, most-coveted, such distinction is TIME Magazine's "Person of the Year," the choice of which is almost always Establishment in perspective, as a result almost always lame, and thus almost always ridiculous to people possessed of any intellectual faculties. Thus in this year in which we have seen the hype about artificial intelligence become--short of genuine full-blown Singularity being imminent, and even Ray Kurzweil doesn't claim that--utterly unhinged, possibly to very dangerous consequence given that the financial bubble generated by the gap between the hype and the meager reality may well make the crash of 2007 look like nothing--they hail the "architects of AI" as the "person of the year" 2025 in what (again, they are Establishment, and lame) is yet another act of that idiot Silicon Valley worship that has long since lost credibility with the broad public. If different portions of that public dislike the tech elite for different reasons they are still all pretty well united in the sentiment of dislike, at least, while a significant portion of it would seem to have recognized the butt fugly faces of the tech overlords the media so loves shoving before their eyes as specifically the butt fugly faces of a brazen twenty-first century totalitarianism--and would do well to remember that TIME previously accorded Adolf Hitler the same honor back when it was still, the concession to gender-neutrality not yet made, "Man of the Year," all as one would be foolish indeed to forget just how many in high places looked upon that figure with approval before, for a time, but only a time, fascist sympathies ceased to be a thing that those desirous of respectability expressed in the open. Which time came to an end not least because of that crash of '07, of course, with all that implies about what lies ahead.

Remembering Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law

For me one of the high points of American science fiction history was Horace Gold's tenure at Galaxy magazine. Mr. Gold may not have been the most personable of editors, but the work that ended up in the pages of his magazine was consistently spectacular, such that perusing the contents of old numbers of the publication it can seem as if the magazine only published tales worthy of becoming classics (as so many of the pieces are). The place where Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, and Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. all appeared, the magazine's roll of honor certainly includes the collaborations of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. The best known of these, The Space Merchants, presents a world where admen are on top in a globalized world economy where capitalism run amok (it didn't take it long to dispose of Soviet socialism, without a world war) has produced mind-bogglingly corrupt oligarchy, and with it social and ecological catastrophe on a worldwide scale--this in 1953, a vision of the future that has proven far more relevant than the Cold Warrior fever dreams about what they so euphemistically called "totalitarianism" that so dominated the period then and our memories of it since. Not that the book or its authors get any credit for that from our literary or ideological gatekeepers, of course, who do not even speak of a book like The Space Merchants when the matter of "dystopia" comes up, that label reserved only for the dramatizations of the nightmares of the right, of course.

The authors' subsequent Gladiator-at-Law (1955) treads the same path, and if in respects less tightly imagined (it feels to me like Pohl and Kornbluth, instead of running with one big theme the way they did in The Space Merchants were running with a grab-bag of several here, not all of which get even treatment), it may in its way be even more ambitious, and some of its ideas if anything more striking in their uncanniness at hinting what lay ahead. Here the legal profession dominates an America where an immiserated public is kept distracted by the vulgar stupidities of reality TV as, the suburban dream rotting away, the enjoyment of decent housing has become a privilege enjoyed only by the few--another vision that rings true as we look back from our outrageously overlitigated present, where reality TV is indeed making society dumber (that one now hears of "Kardashian supporters," and that others not only defend this stupidity but attack those who have a critical word to say of the loathsome Kardashian phenomenon, isn't even the worst of it, not by a longshot), and those who seek homes to satisfy the human need for shelter rather than as a speculative investment are having a very hard time of the matter indeed. Not only is it the case that the cost of housing has, like the price of nearly everything, risen steadily relative to incomes for half a century, worsening the lot of a mortgage-slave, but instead of the independence and security home ownership was supposed to mean people find themselves under the thumbs of homeowner associations that with their fees and rules make them feel less like owners than renters--a fact that along with the dark trinity of condemnation, eminent domain and gentrification mean that even with the mortgage totally paid off and their taxes paid up one's home is not their castle. It is the worst of both worlds, the cost and responsibility that go with ownership, combined with the lack of control or security that goes with being a renter, and indeed a renter kept on a very short leash under a regime ever on the side of the landlords. Indeed, not only do the visions of Pohl and Kornbluth in their treatment of such matters remind us of the foolishness of the haste to dismiss genuinely thoughtful science fiction writer having something meaningful to say about where the world is going, but it seems that if anything their imaginings, outrageous as they may have seemed when Eisenhower was in the White House, were in cases outstripped by the reality, not least because so many displayed that stupid flippancy toward their visions when they should have thought long and hard about them instead.