Review: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard

New York: Macmillan, 1914

As reconstructed by Charles Beard in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States the state legislatures of the United States of America in the period of the "Congress of the Confederation," struggling with an unsatisfactory "first" American constitution, elected by a very limited franchise, appointed delegates--delegates overwhelmingly from urban, coastal and moneyed backgrounds, lawyers and businessmen in the main, and nearly all born well-to-do rather than "self-made men"--to a Convention to amend the Articles of Confederation. Instead, rather dramatically exceeding their mandate, they produced a whole new Constitution, they got it ratified not by the aforementioned state legislatures but going around them by turning over the vote to conventions they set up in each state. The terms of those conventions made it, as Beard explains, "highly probable that not more than one-fourth or one-fifth of the adult white males took part in the election of delegates to the state conventions" (indeed, he thinks that estimate high) while even so getting the "right" results from this limited part of a limited franchise took some strongarming to secure rather narrow wins--with the last two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, compelled by the hard realities of power to accede to the new Constitution after it went into force.

Hardly a triumph of popular sovereignty, Beard quotes John Burgess' remark that "had such acts been performed by Julius [Caesar] or Napoleon, they would have been pronounced coups d'etat"--by, again, the economic elite of the country, in the service of their economic interests. Those invested in public securities, Western lands, manufacturing and money-landing wanted a stable government that would redeem the paper they held at face value, make sure their claims on the frontier were legally secure and militarily protected, defend American industry with a national market walled off with a national tariff and a navy to protect the trade on which it relied, and see that debtors did not get out of paying their debts or slipping out from their obligations to their creditors with "funny money" paper currency schemes (James Madison, in the famous Federalist No. 10, holding "[a] rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts," along with a proto-Communist "equal division of property" to be an "improper or wicked project"). They were also quite happy to make concessions to a plantocracy less interested in these areas than in safeguarding its interest in slavery. Of course, the Constitution they got did indeed correspond to this, by its declaring for Federal responsibility for the public debts in question; its authorization of an army and navy; its denying the states the right to institute tariffs, issue paper money or otherwise come to the relief of debtors, reserving those powers to Congress. (Thus does Section 10 of Article I, "Powers Denied the States," declare that "No state shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any . . . Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts," or "without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing . . . inspection Laws.") And while it put a twenty year limit on the slave trade, it left the Peculiar Institution as such intact. Meanwhile, through an elaborate separation of powers, combined with a heavy reliance on indirect election and appointments (thus were Senators appointed by state legislatures for six year terms, to check the more popularly accessible House), it made amendment of the document exceedingly difficult (the more in as, declining to eliminate state-level restrictions on the franchise using property qualifications) the country still fell far short of universal manhood suffrage (and upheld slavery).

Beard's case, breaking with the tradition of, when not merely piling up facts in a "scientific" fashion, treating American history as a story of Providential or racial (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) triumph, in favor of an "economic interpretation" of events, made this very book a major moment of intellectual life in the Progressive era. If it undeniably outraged some, it was also an inspiration to others, who found it far more illuminating of past and present realities than the schoolbook stuff longer on inculcating patriotism than historical understanding. However, there was a rather predictable assault on it in the 1950s, just as there was an assault on so much of what the Progressive era produced, and in a few years' time Beard's work was treated as, if having any interest at all, being interesting only as a discredited relic from another time.

From what I have seen of the attacks (criticisms of some of Beard's calculations about the weight of financial and landed interest in the country, as if the distribution of power and play of interests and manipulation of the levers of power were no more complex than that) they were less intellectually overpowering than many pretended them to be--the more in as Beard, for all the vast biographical and statistical evidence he assembled in this volume, was himself so emphatic about his book being merely the beginning of a line of inquiry, rather than the last word on the subject. Rather than any scholarly failings on Beard's part it seems that just as literary critics heaped scorn upon novelists such as Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis for having written socially critical works, so did historians of this era attack the socially critical historiography of the earlier part of the century--historians who noticed the existence of class and elite self-interest (Rich people use politics to defend their interests? Heavens no!), especially in relation to anything so foundational as the Constitution, no longer stomached with conflict out and "consensus" in, while the chilling effects of the Cold War on such historiography endured long afterward (just as, broadly, Anti-Communism never really ceased to be the "national religion"), with the result that Beard's reputation, just like that of Sinclair or Lewis, never really recovered. Still, for all that it has been a touchstone for scholars down to the present, with Andrew Bacevich relying on Beard in his critical (if by no means leftist) vision of American history. More recently, seeing the heavy attention to the concerns of creditors in the era of the Constitution's making (not least as reflected in the work of Madison and company) had me thinking again and again of the work of Michael Hudson and David Graeber regarding the importance of the old struggle of creditor and debtor, and how completely the interests of the creditor have tended to prevail in modern times--not only at the level of policy, but even the understanding of morality. However much orthodox ideologues may dislike it, Beard's relevance may have outlasted the reputation they were so desperate to wreck.

Of Neoliberal Realities, Cultural Studies and the Fashion World

Recently writing up my thoughts about how the rise and decline of the supermodel seemed to me very much bound up with the trajectory of globalization--the cultural standing of the supermodel, as an image epitomizing a life of pleasure and beauty, of freedom and mobility and luxury consumption in an integrating, booming, ever more cosmopolitan world brought to us via the hyper-mediation of life by a digital revolution--waxed great when globalization was on the upswing, but suffered as that economic vision ran into trouble. It wasn't the only thing at issue, I thought, the whole world of media and celebrity changing since in ways untoward to it, for example, but it did seem to me a very big part of the story--and an obvious one--and indeed I was surprised that I could not find anyone else thinking along very similar lines.

Instead they mostly repeated the story about a quip from Linda Evangelista that we are told rubbed some people the wrong way as somehow dooming it all (never mind that chronologically speaking this explanation is completely incoherent).

Still, that disparity did set me thinking--about the standard of rhetoric, and how it may have changed over time, but also the frame of mind so satisfied with such lame explanations, and specifically the disinterest of the commentariat in such a thing as globalization when it comes to these matters. After all, consider what we get when we read about "globalization," and especially the neoliberalism for which the term tends to be a synonym, or at least a proxy. Mostly we get hazy references to theories and policies--sufficiently hazy that centrist ideologues (a Jonathan Chait, for example, or a Bill Scher, or Nick Cohen), wanting to deny any substance to the theory, to pretend it was merely an epithet flung at upstanding liberals by Know-Nothing hippies, constantly got away with haziness of their own as they set about doing just that. Indeed, that haziness was what initially prompted me to write about the subject, trying to do better--to define the term "neoliberal" more rigorously, to consider all those things which it has stood for and the relations among them (not just a theory or policies, but a theory which led to the promotion of certain policies, etc.), scrutinize the policy record of major governments and administrations (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton) to see whether they were indeed consistent with such policymaking, delineate a discernible, distinct neoliberal economic model that one can contrast usefully with the "Keynesian Fordism" that prevailed before neoliberalism, and test the claims for neoliberalism's ascent against the evidence for a restructuring of the U.S. economy along neoliberal lines on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the statistical data.

Still, so far as I can tell such efforts remain a rarity (and not particularly well-noticed rarities, either), haziness continuing to prevail unhelpfully, while if the situation in the economics literature is bad it is worse still where study of the manifestation of that political economic model in our cultural life is concerned. A significant part of this would seem to be the extent to which a postmodernist outlook profoundly inimical to rigorous thought about material realities has dominated this side of intellectual life, with those who get on in the academic-media complex dutifully accepting the postmodernist premise and working from there. However, the embrace of postmodernism can seem reflective of the tendency of those most oriented to the culture industries, specifically their proneness to the subjective and impressionistic, and, their insistence on self-expression, certain personal freedoms and inclination to a Bohemianism at which the bourgeois may look askance apart, their proneness to views many would find elitist, conservative, even reactionary, especially when there is little challenge to orthodoxy about. (Disappointing as it is for some of us, where ideas are concerned artists are more likely to follow than to lead.) As the subject was specifically modeling and the fashion world, it also seems likely that this corner of the cultural world, devoted as it is to luxury consumption by an elite, and which sets so much store by display and by imitation, is an especially unlikely place to find people engaging with a concept like neoliberalism--and still more, find themselves allowed to have a career as they do so.

How Did Flip-Flops Get to be Everywhere?

It has long been a commonplace to remark the "casualization" of clothing styles in recent decades, with footwear a common subject of such discussion--particularly the way sandals, and especially flip-flops, have become extremely ubiquitous, with a great many people wearing them in situations where they did not wear them before, often in situations where not merely good taste but simple safety suggests a different shoe (as when people wear flip-flops on the treadmill).

Those looking to explain the matter commonly claim the fashion industry bowed to consumer demand for low-cost, "comfortable," "convenient," clothing, and to suggest that it also reflected society's becoming more casual--less hierarchical, less "uptight," freer.

Anyone who is not a complete idiot should find such explanations highly suspect. After all, in the marketplace the idea that the "consumer is king" is mere neoliberal claptrap. Business offers the consumer what it wants to offer them, take it, or take it, and they certainly have never shown interest in offering consumers low-cost anything. (Consider the terms on which people buy houses, cars, food, medicine and everything else.) At the same time society did not become less hierarchical, less uptight, more free. Rather this has been an era of surging inequality in which the haves lord it over the have-nots as never before, as not just the rich but the more impressionable poor embrace anew many of history's most retrograde ideas and attitudes history, from Social Darwinism to monarchism, while those without wealth and power feel increasingly devalued by society and insecure in their position in it amid a climate of sanctimonious, severe, vindictive, punitive judgment of everything people do. That there are Chief Executive Officers who prefer casual clothes to three-piece suits somehow means a more equal society is just the style-over-substance-exploiting bait-and-switch of market populism--a particular flavor of neoliberal claptrap. And pretending otherwise looks foolish. After all, as women's shoes demonstrate, high-cost, "fancy" dress shoes for formal occasions did not get replaced by more casual shoes, but rather open-shoe styles came to predominate in the selection of high-cost, fancy, dress shoes on the market, a very different thing, all as dress shoes are worn at least as much as ever. (The woman who from the ankles up is dressed casually, or for the office, but wears ostentatiously dressy sandals they are clearly not wearing for reasons of inexpensiveness, comfort or convenience is not an uncommon sight--and consistent with a broad societal pattern of using footwear as a proxy for a broader fashionability somehow impractical in given circumstances.) Meanwhile many of those "cheap" and "casual" sandals sell at anything but cheap casual wear prices on the basis of brand names and the gimmickry of what is often euphemistically called "luxury minimalism."

It makes much more sense to argue that what is going on is business giving the consumer less at more or higher prices in the way that we see everywhere else (all other things being equal an open shoe, entailing less material and less assembly, would be expected to make for a higher profit margin), with this dovetailing with social signals reflecting the extreme opposite of a more egalitarian society. Consider, after all, what expensive sandals say about those wearing them--that compared with others they can afford to spend a lot of money on such a "minimalist" and even flimsy shoe; that they can afford the time and trouble and expense of making the feet they keep showing off to the world in those open shoes "presentable" (more money not just for footwear producers, but everyone making a buck from pedicures and other "maintenance," too); and of course, that unlike the rabble they don't have to do hard labor, don't need to do very much walking, don't go anywhere dirty or dangerous, don't do anything that might require more substantive foot protection in the plush life they lead; in an "in your face" display of the "conspicuous waste" that Thorstein Veblen analyzed so brilliantly over a century ago, which people far from being so privileged mindlessly imitate.

To be frank, all this seems fairly obvious. So why don't we hear more about it? The answer, I think, is not just a matter of neoliberal claptrap being society's conventional wisdom, but also how any sort of intellectual alternative may be especially rare in those corners of the press that address fashion. Even more than is the case with, for example, the entertainment press, the fashion press seem to act as press agents for the business they cover, deferring to their interests and their thinking that much more completely, with it not helping that if artists may on the whole be more inclined to flatter and glorify and pander to the rich and powerful than challenge them, any sort of egalitarian or socially critical thought or feeling may be especially unlikely among those particular courtiers of the super-rich, the couturiers of the rich, who look at the homeless and only see inspiration for "derelicte" (Ben Stiller getting at least that much right). At the same time particularly few outside this world are likely to bother with these issues. To cite an obvious example, leftist publications often do review movies and TV shows and popular music, providing some alternative to the views that prevail among the mainstream critics (for those who are ready to find their way to it, admittedly the web we have doesn't make it easy). They don't write much about fashion, though, leaving the conventional stupidities about it that much less contested.

The Summer 2025 Box Office in Review

I had given some thought to writing about the summer box office before, but because I wasn't optimistic about how the slate would perform, and didn't want to spend the summer on the morbid exercise of picking apart one failure after another, I decided that I would write just one post about the whole lot at the end of the summer (or as close to it as made no difference, which I consider this to be as it is mid-August, with all the big releases well behind us and any surprises now most unlikely). Setting to that task now it seems best to get two things out of the way at the outset.

1. This summer there was no room to explain away poor results on the basis of a thinner-than-usual release slate (as in 2022 and 2024), or the way in which a strike in Hollywood supposedly undermined publicity efforts by nixing actors' promotional tours (as in 2023). This was pretty much a "normal" summer by any such standard, with a crop of blockbusters that looks fairly respectable by pre-pandemic standards, all as the Suits and their courtiers have had no occasion to unhingedly rant about lowly creatives thinking that work should actually be paid and dementedly add the crappy performance of movies no one was going to see anyway to their list of grievances against said creatives.

2. The box office receipts from this "normal" summer only confirmed what had seemed to me increasingly apparent since 2023, namely that the market for theatrically released movies, long slowly shrinking (with the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the dawn of the Age of Streaming), contracted very abruptly and severely with the pandemic. Where even in the 2010s annual per capita ticket sales in North America were in the 3-4 range, these past few years they have stood at just a little over 2, about a third lower than they had been in the late '10s, with the result a year-end box office take fallen from an average of just a little under $15 billion in July 2025 dollars to $8.6 billion in 2022-2024, and $8.8 billion in 2023-2024. Thus far 2025 looks to be headed toward a gross not far from there, in part due to the level of moviegoing we did see this summer. (In 2022-2024 the combined May-August box office, adjusted from the end of summer figure for July 2025 prices, ranged from $3.6 to $4.2 billion, with the average $3.8 billion. As of August 17 the take in 2025 was a bit under $3.4 billion, broadly on track toward the 2022-2024 norm--as against the price-adjusted 2015-2019 norm of $5.6 billion.)

The result is that I find the increasingly distant pre-pandemic period decreasingly relevant as a point of comparison for the box office as a whole, and 2022, and especially 2023 and 2024, more relevant. However, I still think the pre-pandemic performance of specific movies relevant where gauging the response to particular franchises and genres is concerned. (Putting that into more concrete terms: it is not only fair but necessary to understanding the situation to compare how Marvel's movies are doing today with how they were doing back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three when we consider public receptivity, and the viability of the franchise from a business standpoint, however much the press insists otherwise.)

That said, just what was the big picture this time around? Alas, there was little to challenge my low expectations, and make me rethink my holding off until the effective end of the season before essaying an analysis. Indeed, the single clearest pattern was how so many retreads of long-ago hits underwhelmed, or flat-out flopped, proving skeptics like myself right about there being few people were really hungry for more 28 Days Later (2003) or I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, and postmodernist pastiche to begin with) or The Karate Kid (1984) or Freaky Friday (a 2003 film itself a remake of a story first filmed in 1976)--or even the Smurfs. There was also not much more demand than that for more of such recent successes as John Wick (at least, when minus the actual John Wick), or more M3GAN.

Of course, these movies weren't the real "big guns" of the season, but the pattern did extend to those as well. After all, the trio of major superhero films the summer offered fell far short of bringing back the genre's commercial mojo, singly and collectively. The most successful of the lot, Superman--when we adjust for ticket prices--did rather less business than 2013's less than triumphant Man of Steel from the opening weekend forward. (The 2013 film's gross in its first three days, $117 million at the time, was actually $161 million when we compute for 2025 dollars, as against the 2025 film's $118 million, while the earlier film's adjusted final gross of $461 million compares favorably with the $360 million that seems the best the new Superman can end up with.) Meanwhile the performance of Marvel's yet again drawing together characters from its prior movies to form a superhero team in The Thunderbolts was a far cry from realizing the promise implicit in the movie's rebranding as "The New Avengers" (a sub-$400 million global gross, closer to The Marvels than The Avengers), while the only marginally better performance of the Fantastic Four: First Steps made it clear the third time was not the charm for making a durable franchise out of this classic comic book as its performance instead invited comparison with the calamitous reception of Ant-Man 3. Arriving just months after the similarly underwhelming box office of Captain America: New World Order they made clear that the genuinely strong response to Deadpool & Wolverine did not carry over to the Marvel brand as such the way that all those claqueurs shouting "Marvel's back!" presumed that it did, let alone the existence of any great appetite for more superhero films. (Once more: Deadpool & Wolverine was a rare, scarcely repeatable event of an anti-superhero movie, its success almost irrelevant as proof of interest in a conventional take on the form, and perhaps even testimony to people being so tired of it that they will much more readily come out for a spoof.)

Meanwhile the other big action-adventure franchise movies didn't do much better. Mission: Impossible 8 grossed a little more money than the franchise low that was Mission: Impossible 7, but not much more. At the same time the latest Jurassic Park franchise movie's breaking $300 million domestically only looks impressive because of how poorly everyone else was doing, and because few remember the numbers racked up by its three immediate predecessors. (Jurassic World made twice as much--$652 million, domestic, equal to almost $900 million today--while even the ill-received Dominion did rather better than the newest installment, with $377 million collected domestically against the $340 million that is the newest movie's likely finishing figure.) The downward trend bodes ill for any follow-up very soon.

Amid all the (very numerous) disappointments did no one have anything to cheer about? As it happens the backers of the big animation-to-live-action adaptations had some success, with Lilo & Stitch, and in lesser degree, also How to Train Your Dragon. The promised last of the Final Destination series did fairly well by horror movie standards, with a domestic gross a little shy of $140 million. One can argue that there was some affirmation that people were prepared to come out for something different, at least where movies directed at grown-ups are concerned, certainly to go by the genre-bending Sinners, and perhaps the horror film Weapons too, while it may be that something of the same can also be said for the racing film F1 as well (if in a more superficial way). Still, even the apparent successes must be qualified. Last summer not one but two movies broke the $600 million barrier (Deadpool & Wolverine, and Inside Out 2). The summer before we saw Barbie do the same, and the summer before Top Gun 2. This year only one movie broke $400 million, the live-action Lilo & Stitch, and even then not by enough to match the total of April's Minecraft Movie (all as, one might add, Disney had to bear the flopping of Pixar's Elio, which, unlike 2023's Elemental, did not see sustained interest offer some longer-run redemption for a movie that opened poorly). Overall 2025 can look like 2023 without the late season redemption brought by Barbie and Oppenheimer--all as there seemed little rescue by the foreign markets. (Sinners may have performed very well domestically for an unconventional R-rated non-franchise film, but it has not broken $400 million globally, leaving it a far cry from the territory of an Oppenheimer, which fell just a very little way short of the billion-dollar club.)

Altogether it seems to me a reminder that the studios, if perhaps trying to be a little cannier about the way they go about it (certainly to go by their caution with money last year), are still playing the same old game in the same old way at a time when the game just doesn't make sense anymore because that contraction of the market has not just meant a smaller pie to divvy up, but qualitatively different terms for getting audiences to the theater. Once more: putting up the tentpole and expecting to sell a billion dollars' worth of tickets that way we saw reach a peak of sorts circa 2019 (when nine movies made that mark) is less and less reasonable. If you want people to blow one of their two trips to the theater this year on your movie you had better give them a good reason to do so, and it being hard to please all of the people all the time the thing to do is clearly to go for targeted successes--maybe once in a while getting to do so on a blockbuster scale (as with Deadpool & Wolverine) but more often aiming for a more modest gross that will bring a relatively high return on a more modest budget (as with It Ends with Us). Still, obvious as this seems, from what I can tell few anywhere near the industry are talking this way, the industry and its courtiers in denial as they live up to one definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result as they crank out sequels and prequels and remakes no one asked for and find their company getting deeper and deeper into the hole.

SEP. 2 2025 UPDATE: Broadly in line with the projection from before the U.S. box office grossed $3.6 billion over the May-August period (at the low end of the range seen in recent years). Still, there was a minor surprise late in the season when, in spite of its getting a mere two days of theatrical release, the singalong version of KPop Demon Hunters managed to be #1 at the box office on the weekend of August 22-24. The movie, for which Boxoffice Pro did not even put out an estimate in its published forecast that weekend, can seem yet another reminder that if you want people to go to your movie you had better give them a reason--and that once more going for a limited but really enthusiastic fan base is likely to pay off better than betting on broad but lukewarm interest.

Why Isn't Cyber-Security Fatigue a Household Term?

It seems that the term "cybersecurity fatigue" has been in use for a decade, if not longer. However, it also seems that in all that time the term has been used mainly by experts on the subject of cybersecurity in specialist publications--mostly in reference to cybersecurity professionals. All this implies that it has yet to reach the mainstream press, even though one would think it very relevant to the mainstream, and likely to get a strong reception there, given that this long ago became a problem not just for professionals, but also for the world's billions of non-specialist, non-professional computer users. After all, barring those who leave dealing with "tech" to others (like old retirees who can rely on helpful younger relatives), users of "technology" find themselves constantly coping with highly involved demands as they go about their computer shopping (Buying your new Windows 11 PC, did you make sure it has TPM 2.0? Did you make sure of which build of Windows 11 it had, that it wasn't the 23H2 build which will be cut off from support about the same time that Windows 10 is so that with just that build, if the upgrade doesn't take, which is not a negligible risk, you'd be no better off than if you stuck with Windows 10?), ceaseless updates, any and every one of which might brick their computer (the "experts" never acknowledge that, somehow, but everyone knows it happens because so many have been through it), and when things go wrong as they constantly do, forcing a stop to their life to engage in the umpteenth round of "troubleshooting" in which they spend hours and hours and hours going through trial-and-error procedures apparently written by and for idiots ("Update your drivers" they say. Can anyone remember the last time this worked for anybody?) as they fear that they have lost their computer for good, and will have to undergo the nightmare experience of getting a new one, again, and starting with it from scratch--all as, even doing everything right, without the machine on the fritz, they may have got to the point where they approach every login with dread, whether because the anti-virus program may well have missed something (there's always that under 1 percent chance), or the tortuousness of the wretched multi-factor authentication procedures (better have your cell phone on), or the fear of mistakenly opening an e-mail they shouldn't (and they get so much e-mail, no matter how clean they keep their noses, or how high they turn up their spam filters), or some other unknown unknown getting them (because there is always something new to be afraid of, the media makes sure to scream that in their faces at a volume of 130 decibels).

Why don't we hear more of all this in the mainstream? The plain and simple reason seems to be that there is no way of bringing up the issue without pointing out the reality that Big Tech has, from the standpoint of security, created a horrible mess that it has not the least interest in fixing (indeed, it is relentless about making it worse with every one of those updates and their installation of ever more privacy-violating features; no, we don't want your damn cloud services, no we don't want "ads relevant to us," we want to NEVER SEE ANOTHER [EXPLETIVE DELETED] AD AS LONG AS WE LIVE), as they have left the ordinary user to cope with the situation or not--and making accusations against Big Tech is something that business-owned, ad-selling, flak-fearing and generally "elite tool" Mainstream Media just doesn't do. It much prefers to live down to the lowest expectations any intelligent individual has of it by giving the public a narrative about "personal responsibility" which, completely oblivious to the existence of any such a thing as a "systemic failing," holds that it is up to you, you, YOU! as an individual to look after yourself as best you can, for after all no right-thinking person would imagine any other course, would they? ("Don't blame other people for your problems," adults tell one in childhood in severe tones, and many mindlessly adhere to the teaching even when other people are very clearly to blame for their problems.) They also hold that you can best do that by dutifully heeding the prescriptions of so-called experts--who may as well be in a different universe where their understanding of what is practical or even possible for the non-specialist individual whose time, money and energy are limited, and indeed appear utterly indifferent to the fact that most people get computers in order to use them rather than spend their whole lives servicing them, such realities being far, far beyond their vaunted "expertise."

A Word on Behalf of Answer Engine Use

It is a commonplace today to say that the use of answer engines is leading to less traditional online search, with many content creators seeing less traffic to their web sites accordingly--drastically, business-killing less. I know of nothing to contradict this claim, which I must admit I find intuitive and plausible, not least because I myself find myself using answer engines more and "traditional" search less--not least because I often get more satisfactory results. Consider, after all, the following two facts:

1. When we use an answer engines we can ask a question, even a complex, multi-part, highly nuanced question, and almost instantly get a complex, multi-part, highly nuanced answer. If it works, when it works (and my experience is that it often does work), it beats typing in keywords hoping a search engine will lead us to some piece of "content" that may contain something in some way relevant to the concerns that led us to enter those keywords into that search engine.

2. Long before the answer engines appeared traditional search was becoming an intolerable experience. One need not belabor the causes. What matters is that whether this was a matter of sleazy "gaming" of search engine algorithms by spamdexers and other such scum, "enshittification" of the service by the grifters of Big Tech, or simply the search engine technology so revolutionary in 2000 not being up to the challenge of making the web of 2020, let alone 2025, navigable, the point is that even in an Establishment butt rag like The Atlantic you saw pieces that (if only in their lame Establishment way) acknowledged the lousy experience. Meanwhile when the search process gets you to anything that seems worth clicking what you are likely to get more than ever are paywalls, adblock blocker popups, clickbait-packed margins, irrelevant and unwanted autoplay videos, etc., etc.. Subjection to even a very little of this is quite enough to make many people seethe--and doing much searching means being subjected to much, much more than just a little. By contrast the answer engine is likely to give you just the answer you want, providing the searcher control and protection from the vileness that the web has become.

All this is very, very good for the Internet user.

Of course, there are objections to their doing so. There is the objection that the answer engines' reliability is far from perfect, to which I can personally attest. What they seem to give us is an assessment based on a round-up of the content of the more accessible Internet search results, which can be much more useful and efficient than our personally searching the web, but which also has its pitfalls. For example, perhaps properly answering us requires information that is just not conveniently available on the web.

But then we wouldn't find that anyway through a regular search.

Another pitfall is that the answer engine might not always do as good a job as we would of sifting that content.

But in fairness you always had the responsibility of making sense of what you read, while the better answer engines make it easy for you to check the sources from which they derive what they tell you, commonly providing documentation in the form of very serviceable endnotes. Knowing something about the subject you are investigating is likely to be helpful, if not essential, in using an answer engine effectively--but so was it always helpful, if not essential, in using Internet search effectively.

Still another objection is that the answer engines are essentially parasitic, reliant on information others publish but which they get no benefit from since the answer engine is sucking up the traffic by which they live.

But then, some would say, so are many of the "content producers" they draw their information from, when they offer anything that could be considered informational at all. (Good journalism costs money, insist those who repeat Big Media's whine--while forgetting that this is one reason why Big Media gives us so little of it, "sourcing" its content, while in more recent years passing off opinion pieces as news, with these often the worse because the editors so often put out the deliberately bad just to make you click.) Those who worry about the news business would do better to look to its failures--all as they ought to remember that the complaints about answer engines' claiming their traffic do not in the slightest diminish the present obnoxiousness of the user experience glancing at the web editions of the more authoritative periodicals. (You have the right to put up a paywall. You have the right to tell the web surfer to turn off the ad-blocker if they want to read what you've got up there. But facing that the web surfer also has the right to click the back button--and never visit your site again.)

Given all that my advice would be to save your usage of the answer engines for those complex questions that demand some figuring out, rather than the kind of easy answers you can get just going straight to some familiar source. Want to know how NVIDIA's stock did these past five years, for instance? That information's simple enough to get with even the decrepit search engines with which we make do today. But an explanation of why it did how it did, and what we are to make of that? You may have a lot of web-searching ahead of you if you want to understand that--and the answer engine might just offer an advantage here. Should you take that route, phrase your questions carefully, read what you get in response critically, check up on anything that looks suspect in the answers and the citations, and be ready to ask follow-up questions (calling the answer engine out on an answer that is factually wrong, unsupported by the cited sources, etc. often gets better results), all while preferably bringing to the table some knowledge of what you are interested in. (Please, crack open a book at least once in a while.) Doing so you will probably find yourself getting further than you would simply sifting and clicking pages and pages of low-quality search rankings, possibly replacing hours of searching that in the end leave you with nothing with a comparative few minutes of more involved and deliberate activity more likely to give you something to show for the effort. I admit that not everyone is up to the relatively sophisticated usage I have described here (I suspect most people are just as lazy and sloppy in their use of answer engines as they are search engines), but I doubt you would have read all the way to the bottom of this post if you were one of them. The result, I think, is that not just the lazy but also the discerning, who anyway are the kind who do have complex questions to ask, will increasingly favor answer engines over search engines for their more involved research as time goes on.

The U.S. News Media is Basically Michael Scott

Considering the mainstream media, and especially the mainstream news media, it seems to me that it is basically Michael Scott from the U.S. version of The Office.

Like Scott it is a paid shill for a failing business. Like Scott it is very ill-informed about the world at large, and spends much less than one percent of its time engaged in critical thinking, while mostly believing what it wants to believe, regardless of the facts, and telling it to others as if it were the truth. Like Scott its principal talents seem to be distraction and misdirection, while it never really seems to do any real "work," or let anyone else get any real work done either. Like Scott it is a narcissist that is always trying to make itself seem more impressive than it really is in ways that just show how awkward it is, but thinks it has succeeded in achieving the elevated standing it regards as its right to go by its wildly exaggerated idea of its own standing in the eyes of others, reflected in its demands that everyone pay attention to it at all times and not anyone else. Like Scott it is also prone to feel underappreciated when its wildly unrealistic expectation of others' attention and respect are (unsurprisingly) disappointed, and very prone to self-pity, though after wallowing to its satisfaction invariably reverting to its inflated notion of its importance, no introspection required. Like Scott it presumes to be concerned and conscientious and a pillar of humane and tolerant values when it is usually the extreme opposite, not least in regard to matters like race--posturing as enlightened, while being exceedingly bigoted and exceedingly offensive in doing so, all as it indulges fascist nitwits to an extreme degree. Like Scott it is prone to react in wildly disproportionate fashion when it goes on the attack against someone it has deemed an enemy, while being as incompetent as it is irresponsible in that attack (ever ready to do the equivalent of Scott's planting "weed" on Toby). And like Scott, no sane person with sufficient lucidity to understand what it does wants to have anything more to do with it than they can possibly avoid, with that unavoidable minimum likely to be far more than they find bearable, and quite enough to force on them a situation in which they cannot help saying what they really think. (Stanley, you speak for all of us.)

Really the only time when the media isn't like Scott is in those moments when Scott surprises us with a display of significant, useful knowledge, insight or skill, or genuine human consideration for others. No, that we definitely do not see, the media's consistent loyalty to its masters (or at least, its functionaries' consistent loyalty to the protection of their phoney-baloney jobs) far too great for that to ever happen.

Remembering "Homer's Enemy"

I recall watching the Golden Age Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy" and being struck by its treatment of the figure referenced in the title, one Frank Grimes. Abandoned at the age of four by his family, depriving Frank of a normal childhood in ways he was never allowed to forget (as the relevant wiki article has it, he had to work as a delivery boy "presenting gifts to children from wealthy and loving families"), at the age of eighteen he suffered the additional calamity of having a silo fall on him, putting him in a full body cast. The recovery and rehabilitation from the accident were long and hard, but through it he managed to earn a degree in physics, making his life the kind of story of "overcoming adversity" that moralizing idiots love to fling in the faces of the discontented--such that, sure enough, it made the local news as a human interest piece. Happening to see it, it impressed Mr. Burns enough that he was moved to offer Frank a Vice-Presidency at the plant--only for (in another cruel twist of fate all too characteristic of poor Frank's life) Burns to forget all about him in his fascination with the protagonist of the next story, a heroic dog, to whom he gave the Vice-Presidency instead (!), as he had Smithers fob Frank off with a job "somewhere out of the way" in Sector 7-G, where, of course, he encountered that other Sector 7-G worker, Homer Simpson.

The intelligent, conscientious and hard-working Frank thus ended up constantly face to face with a man who was the opposite in every respect, a profoundly underqualified, incompetent, irresponsible and lazy man who nonetheless had "everything" (apparently living the "American Dream" in the suburbs--and a Grammy-winning astronaut to boot!). That was more than Grimes can bear, drove him over the edge of madness--and before the credits rolled, to his death.

One of the series' darker episodes, it seemed an indictment of something, but of what exactly? Some seem to see it as an indictment of the universe's absurdity. But that fails to explain the sheer meanness the episode itself seemed to display toward Grimes. Through the entire story Homer's endless financial, legal, health and family problems, which do see him constantly suffer from the stupidity and irresponsibility that so offend Frank, are conveniently forgotten, so that nothing disabuses Grimes of his illusions about just how good Homer apparently has it, while no one ever shows Grimes the slightest sympathy or empathy for his situation, the writing stacking the deck in favor of Frank's being not just made to feel even worse than before about his unhappy lot, but that having a problem with it he is the crazy one until eventually he does become crazy.

Still, I didn't give all this much thought until I read a piece about the writer who had the story credit on this one, John Swartzwelder. TV writing can be very collaborative, and the convoluted way in which the industry hands out credit means that a writer who has writing credit on an episode of a show may not have actually had much, or even any, input into that particular episode of that show. (I recall the quip in Toby Young's The Sound of No Hands Clapping by one Hollywood figure that he'd won Emmys for TV episodes he hadn't even seen, let alone written.) Still, Swartzwelder was notorious for fussing to get more of his material into an episode than his colleagues, while he has also been much remarked for his right-wing, libertarian, politics, which suddenly seemed significant. It is, after all, the right which insists on those who have been unfortunate gracefully stomaching not just misfortune generally but unfairness specifically, with this insistence, indeed, what defines their ideology (conservatism is in the end a defense of the status quo and those privileged under it against those who are not), with this reflected in how a very large part of what is conventionally presented as wisdom, morality, religion and personal "maturity" is stomaching unfairness without inconveniencing the comfortable, the powerful, those in Authority--not getting mad, not getting even, not protesting or trying to get redress in any way, just enduring it with a "good attitude." Indeed, the indoctrination in this accommodation to unfairness, from the first sneer of a grown-up that "Life isn't fair" in a child's face, is so intensive that at the first sign of objection to any unfairness people of conventional mind fall all over themselves trying to shut down the "whiner," and indeed, many gleefully embrace the role of "apologist and admirer of injustice, misery and brutality." It is also the right that gets outraged when people don't display the expected "convenient social virtue" and accept unfairness with grace, and denounces them as immoral, envious, self-pitying, even insane, and certainly dangerous--potential Pol Pots the lot of them (Homer's deciding that his flaws have nothing to do with the situation, that it's just Frank being "a crazy nut," obtuse and oafish as it sounds, perhaps not to be dismissed too quickly here as the Message).

Especially given the stress on the contrast between competent and conscientious but ill-rewarded Frank and a Homer who is the opposite on every count it seemed to me that the ideas of that particularly important figure in the libertarian tradition, Friedrich von Hayek, were specifically relevant. Where so many apologia for "things as they are" make much of meritocracy as a legitimator of inequality (and promise the disappointed that if they are frustrated now, if they are worthy, they will eventually get their share of the good things in life), von Hayek, in The Constitution of Liberty, rejected meritocratic justifications in no uncertain terms. As he emphasized, a system of private exchange distributes rewards not according to "merit" (What would the standard of merit be? How would we assess merit?) but to the extent to which one's services have provided "benefits" to other participants in that system. One may imagine that all other things being equal the intelligent and hard-working will create more "benefits" by way of their services than those who are not, and be rewarded commensurately, but merit and service remain two different things nonetheless, all as other things are not all equal, with Hayek indeed stressing the importance of "accident" in life, and the maximization of the room for accident to happen as indispensable to civilization's progress, and even sustenance (to say nothing of freedom as he understands it). The result is that there would be outcomes unexplainable in terms of merit, that are when judged by that standard, and perhaps any other, unfair, but simply have to be borne--with all that implies about what that Statement of Aims of the Mont Pelerin Society signatory and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher thought about the proper attitude toward those who did not simply accept unfairness the way they demanded. (I might add that it does not seem irrelevant that in giving Grimes a stereotypically nerdish appearance the show could seem to evoke certain well-known stereotypes about those the right has long perceived as disproportionately numbered among threatening malcontents.)

For his part Swartzwelder disavowed any sophisticated rationales behind the story of "Homer's Enemy" (the issue instead that Grimes "didn't approve of our Homer" he said in an interview a few years ago). Still, taking it altogether it can look an awful lot like a man to whom life has been generous punching down at the Frank Grimeses of the world and their sympathizers from the position of a cushy writing gig. And accepting that reading of the episode it also looks like a reminder of how pop culture tends to be a lot less "liberal" than many across the political spectrum constantly insist it to be, even a show as "liberal" as The Simpsons delivering its share of right-wing Message. Those racking their brains for another example of such a moment may find one in what seems to me the particularly anti-populist-with-a-whiff-of-Cold-Warrior story of Swartzwelder's later "A Tale of Two Springfields" (not so subtly having the revolt of the have-nots against their "betters" produce physical division behind an analog to the Berlin Wall, with the have-nots in a failing economy and society behind it), though venturing nowhere nearly so far through the episode guide one could find another Message and Agenda-heavy episode--in the immediately prior episode Swartzwelder got writing credit on, which aired just two weeks before "Homer's Enemy," "The Old Man and the Lisa."

Remembering "The Old Man and the Lisa"

Reading about John Swartzwelder's time on The Simpsons had me looking anew at not just the famously divisive "Homer's Enemy," but also another, less notorious, episode of his, "The Old Man and the Lisa," frankly for the same reason, its being a piece of right-wing satire. After all, consider what we have in the episode--a billionaire losing his money, but totally regaining his fortune by episode's end on the basis of plain and simple "entrepreneurship" on an implicitly "level playing field," with the result that where we all know Monty Burns to have been born to wealth and privilege, here he is "reborn" as a "self-made man." As Kurt Vonnegut might have had it, the episode makes making a dollar look very easy--so that those who haven't done so well at that game are left with nothing to do but "blame and blame and blame themselves" for the fact, perhaps the more in as far from being able to attribute it all to under-handedness on the part of an evil man, Montgomery Burns this time around is presented as a kindly, honest individual who means to make the world a better place, and deal fairly with the little girl to whom he owes the idea he used to make it all happen.

It seems fair to describe this course of events as a paean to the Social Darwinistic notions of the inherent superiority of the rich at the money-making that they hold to be the ultimate test of a man's mettle, the cult of the "entrepreneur," the validity of "bootstraps" ideology, the idea that everyone of any merit who is not a billionaire is only "temporarily embarrassed" that way, and to capitalism more generally, while it is also a blow against the tendency to villainize plutocrats so much a bugbear of the right to boot (the more obviously so as Swartzwelder's writing credits on the show include the episode in which Homer's more fully self-made half-brother Herb managed an even earlier return to riches after "losing it all," and other episodes which showed a softer attitude toward Burns such as "Rosebud," or more respect for Burns' abilities, like "Homer the Smithers").

However, on top of that there is also the specific entrepreneurial project Burns used to regain his wealth--a colossal "recycling" plant using giant nets woven together from disused six-pack holders to, via the most destructive fishing technique imaginable, collect vast amounts of biomass that the plant then turns into canned "slurry." Accelerating the destruction of the oceans rather than saving them--all, again, with the best of intentions, as Burns shows when he presents the operation to Lisa and, in his present state of fair-mindedness presents her a check for her share of the proceeds--Lisa can do nothing but reject the project and the money in horror, all as, in contrast with many an episode of the series, the usually much more gently treated Lisa is not given the slightest cause to dry her tears by episode's end.

Of course, the episode doesn't seem to have been taken that way when it aired. Different people explain this in different ways, but it seems to me that the reason for that is that when this episode came out in the '90s, environmentalism (like "political correctness") seemed so secure as societal conventional wisdom that it appeared harmless to mock at it, the more in as there was that "'90s irony" that had people of limited intelligence dealing with anything dissonant by taking it as meaning the opposite of what the speaker actually said, or even nothing at all, the more easily for the tendency of many who ought to know better to "convert narrative gaucherie" into "irony," as Ian Watt had it. So did it go with that contemporaneous piece of narrative gaucherie par excellence, South Park. However, while South Park has since undergone a measure of (long overdue) reevaluation that has had many accepting that many of the nihilistic or reactionary stances the show took were not meant at all ironically, no such reevaluation has happened with The Simpsons, or even just the episodes of the now famously right-wing (and anti-environmentalist) Swartzwelder, so that they assume there is a "liberal" sensibility is at work even when what they have in front of them is very obviously a right-winger giving them the middle finger.

The Virtues of the Good Old Landline Phone

The old landline phone was simple, durable, reliable. Buy one, just about any one, install it, and you might find yourself still able to use it perfectly well decades later, without having to do anything but keep paying your phone bill. You could even use one when the electricity was out--something people learned to appreciate in disaster prone-areas (which just about every area seems to be these days). These are considerable virtues from the standpoint of the sane non-idiot--and when personal computers exploded in the 1990s, seeing how little of these virtues those devices displayed, they may have hoped that computers would become more like phones this way. Instead computers remained just as problematic as before, and indeed got worse in various ways--in significant part because the ballyhooed "entrepreneurs" of Silicon Valley realized that making them into Orwell's telescreens would be a profitable proposition, and the government they pretend to despise even as it invented and subsidized everything that made them rich (as they take all the credit to the thunderous applause of their claqueurs in the media and the rest of the commentariat) of course had no problem with their using them this way (wink, wink). In the process, rather than making computers more like phones they turned phones into computers, with all their enduring and even worsening defects actually magnified (at least the user of a wired PC--never mind a landline phone user--doesn't have to worry about battery charge and signal strength and the security of their "Wi-fi," or fumble with tiny and hyper-delicate SIM cards and touchscreens with all their annoyances and maintenance demands), all as, even twenty years after the unveiling of the smart phone, a mobile phone still can't give you the reliability and clarity of an old-fashioned landline call, not that people will be able to make the comparison for much longer. Telecom companies which love taking your money but hate paying for infrastructure and everything else relevant to service are working hard to make the landline a thing of the past, not by making it superfluous but by making it legally possible for them to simply not offer the facility.

I, for one, appreciate the technological progress of the last two decades. I feel no nostalgia whatsoever for dial-up Internet, preferring gigabit broadband and all that it enables--like streaming video. I hink being able to query a chatbot with a complex question far superior to typing strings of unconnected keywords into a search engine. And I certainly think it a good thing on the whole that portable communications devices exist. But it is dishonest or stupid to pretend that every change has been for the good, that the bad was all the necessary "price of progress," and that the changes were all a matter of "consumer choice." Here as everywhere else the consumer is not king. Business offers the consumer what it wants to offer them, take it, or take it, all as "simple," "durable, "reliable," "long-lasting," "low-maintenance," "straightforward," "cheap" and "user-friendly" are not only not at the top of their lists, but things the Waste Makers fight against with every fiber of their being as a mortal enemy to their divine right to take the consumer for as much as possible as they give them as little as possible in return, all as they smarmily tell them "You've never had it so good."

"The Stupid Person's Smart Person": A Few Thoughts

It is not uncommon these days to hear this or that "public intellectual" dismissed as a "stupid person's smart person"--someone who, perhaps not really a "smart person," conforms to certain conventional expectations of how a "smart person" appears and sounds and may therefore be taken more seriously than they ought by the credulous.

But what goes into that really?

Let us start with the oft overlooked reality that high intelligence tends not to be a very "showy" trait, apt to manifest itself only in relatively small and subtle ways, at least in casual social contacts and other comparable, everyday, situations--a certain alertness or nuance or quickness with words or numbers, for example. Such things are unlikely to register with and make much impression on a "stupid person"--their "smart person" having to display evidences of intelligence in a much more conspicuous, even bombastic, way. I can think of at least two types of such evidence:

1. The Appearance of Authority.
The society we live in is vehement about treating intelligence as the defining trait of, foundation of the authority of, indeed even monopoly of, society's elite. (As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in his handy essay, the presumption is that the bourgeoisie is in charge because "they are the smartest.") This is underlined by how any suggestion that those who are not of the elite have any intelligence is dismissed--most famously in the vulgarian sneer "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" (utterance of which phrase is as good a piece of evidence of the speaker being a "stupid person" as I know of). The result is that the "stupid person" will expect the "smart person" to display the trappings of elite status and the Authority that goes with it in spite of the fact that these may testify to privileged social background rather than actual intelligence--such as evidences of wealth, position, and an education at far-flung and exotic-sounding institutions of learning (which education is not likely to be had without one's having come from money, regardless of their intelligence, such that it is a surer testament to the former than the latter). Consistent with this is the arrogant and even rude demeanor that those who have had privilege and position so often display regardless of intelligence (perhaps, as evidence of its lack)--the respectful, indeed, apt to speak of them that foolish phrase "He did not suffer fools gladly."

The actual "smart person" will see right through the trappings, the demeanor, and judge whether the person in question really has anything to say worth hearing (and are thus not a "stupid person's smart person," just a "smart person" lucky enough to have what it to takes to impress the stupid that they are such). However, as (in lieu of Naming Names, however easy it may be to come up with many a name deserving of mention here) the list of the more prominent public intellectuals of our times indicates, there don't seem to be many of these around, least of all in the mainstream media, given its profoundly uncritical, indeed often exceedingly deferential, treatment of figures who acquire such status--in spite of the fact that they so rarely do have anything to offer.

2. A Tendency to Unnecessary Obscurity.
People react very differently to what they do not understand depending on the circumstances. Much of the time, confronted with the unintelligible, they will assume that it is also unintelligent. However, when the unintelligible is backed up by Authority the more credulous--those of whom we speak as "stupid persons"--will very readily believe that it is all simply above their heads, whereas a "smart person" may reserve judgment, and indeed be skeptical, for the truth is that the greatest feats of intelligence are apt to involve making what may seem overwhelming comprehensible. (To take an easy example, thus do scientists derive laws of nature from the phenomena of the universe.) Indeed, unintelligibility is apt to bespeak confusion, whether the speaker's being confused, or their deliberately trying to confuse their audience to intimidate them--with their effort to do the latter apt to take such forms as a flinging about of empty buzzwords, a propensity for mathematical statements that mean nothing at all, a penchant for arcane diction and obscure quotations for their own sake, perhaps even a proneness to just speak very fast, so as to conceal the banality of their ideas, and even their not having any ideas at all, behind seemingly ostentatious intellectuality.

Faced with such the actual smart person will, if given a proper chance, be able to tell the difference between someone whose explanation is difficult because the material is genuinely difficult (and they, again, not a "stupid person's smart person" but a "smart person" period), and someone who is pulling a con--but again, there don't seem to be many of these around, least of all in the mainstream media.

Taken together what we get from this is that the prototypical "stupid person's smart person" is a personage displaying the trappings of Authority who wraps up vacuity in a show-offy pseudo-erudition, or possibly both. In doing so such a stupid person's smart person also makes themselves "the smart person's stupid person," one who is the more deserving of being labeled a stupid person because they worked so hard to earn the opprobrium, and because when they have become public figures their claptrap is so often so pernicious in its effect--not that the criticisms of such persons by the truly intelligent and learned amount to much anyway, just about never slowing down a racket of this kind once they have got it properly going.

The Media Ignores a Hunger Crisis. (Food Prices and the News Media Today.)

Recent years have seen what has been universally acknowledged by all but the most idiotically committed deniers of hard quantitative fact as spiking food prices, with an effect on the public worse than what is usually reported given the reality that the cheapest items are susceptible to higher-than-average price shocks (the margins were already slight to begin with), with all that means for those who can afford prices least; and what a great many consumers report as a degradation in the quality of many familiar food products (for example, supermarket bakery bread increasingly stale, prone to rapidly molding, etc.), such that the value for the money has fallen relative even to the higher price; neither of which situations gets much coverage. (The price shock at the bottom end of the market tends to be a side remark in the news story if it rates a mention at all, while the signs of lower quality going with the higher prices are the kind of thing you see consumers discussing so much in fora like Reddit or TikTok that "everyone knows" that it's "not just me"--but so far the media hasn't deigned to acknowledge it in any significant way, and at least as yet no attempt at a comprehensive government or academic or other research study has substantiated it.)

Also not getting much coverage is what this really means for the consumer. The media treats us to plenty of grumbling about the price of staples like eggs--but just grumbling, as if it were all a case of essentially comfortable people irked at having to shell out a little more cash for superfluities of life ("You don't really need that!" they are ever quick to tell us), and (certainly if you believe the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" line the editors of the Times shovel out to you) this mostly a matter of their being clueless or graceless because incomes have gone up with prices, leaving them no worse off than before. However, far from incomes always marching in lockstep with prices the reality tends to be more complex, such that it is only logical to expect that many, maybe most, will see prices running ahead of income--the more in as the latest price shocks comes on top of a half century of the American worker's purchasing power consistently falling relative to the essentials of everyday life (halved or worse in relation to the price of a home, the price of transportation, the price of health insurance, etc.), such that one would expect these latest rises to mean more hardship out there. And indeed that expectation has actually been affirmed by the statistics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show the proportion of U.S. households suffering "food insecurity" (and the more severe "very low food security") in 2021-2023 shooting back up toward the level we saw in the wake of the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, all as there is reason to think things got no better in 2024. (Indeed, given the trend in income among the less affluent, cutbacks to the social safety net, and associated factors, they probably got even worse.)

Even granting that the news media has, in line with its Big Business character, elite staffing, pandering to the affluent reader and viewer, centrist-neoliberal prejudices and general obsequiousness to the powerful and the status quo they favor, never taken much interest in the lot of those who would be represented in the figures just discussed, its disconnect with economic reality seems ever more extreme, and ever more blatantly Agenda-driven. For even as the public faced the sort of hardship that hit it in the immediate wake of that Great Recession that never truly ended their functionaries sneered in our faces "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"--when it is really the case that the measure of stupidity is one's readiness to believe their propaganda.

Europe Rearms. Or Tries To. Sort Of?

Trying to follow a news story from day to day you are apt to find the news media--especially the mainstream news media--deluging them with little bits, typically presented without connections or context, all as what passes for help in making sense of them is the platforming of some Establishment functionary not looking to help you think things through for yourself, but rather eager to tell you what to think, which, because they are an Establishment functionary, is likely to be what they want you to think, irregardless of its relationship to reality (with which Establishment functionaries tend not to be on speaking terms, even though they often know enough to realize that it's not what they are saying). You can only make sense of things when you step back from the onslaught of pseudo-information and put the bits together for yourself--or let someone unlikely ever to get much of a mainstream platform talk you through it properly (as many genuine experts of the kind you won't ever see on the panel shows are perfectly happy to do).

So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less each "going their way" rather than pulling together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for the bigger, more powerful, militaries of their fantasies. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)

Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Show Business for Ugly People"--the performers in which Show Business never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be de Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)

All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk about the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.

Is the Relevance of "Democratic Peace Theory" Declining in Our Time?

It recently seemed to me that we hear less of "democratic peace" theory than we used to do, and indeed I decided to test this impression by checking the frequency of the term's usage logged by Google's Ngram. As it happened, Ngram logged a 37 percent drop in usage of the term between 2013 and 2022--in contrast with the 1139 percent rise it logged in the term's usage between 1986 and 2013.

This surge between the late 1980s and early 2010s, and plunge in the subsequent decade, seems to me very telling, a rough measure of the credence that Fukuyamaesque "liberal triumphalism" enjoyed between the signs that the Cold War was drawing to a close in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Great Recession that, in spite of much stupid rhetoric about the world having quickly got over it, the event being past, dealt the global economy a blow from which it is still reeling. The result has been the halt and erosion of the global economic integration so evident in the 1986-2007 period, more conflictual relations between the major powers, and of course, more illiberal domestic politics. Indeed, many Establishment commentators openly worry about the polarization of their countries' publics, the collapse of established political parties and the ascent of extremist figures to the national stage, and the propensity of chief executives to invoke emergency measures to get their way. And so now we hear less of democracy's spread, let alone any supposed pacification of the world by it--as instead those who talked much but understood nothing strike tough guy poses as they traffic in old-fashioned realpolitik.

The Decline of L.A. Film Production--and Hollywood's Mystique With It

Looking at the place of film in contemporary culture few would deny that it is less central than it was a few decades ago in what some call "the age of movies," all as Hollywood would seem to have lost something of its romance, something of its glamour. Certainly part of this has been the advent of television and its implications, from the decline of the "theatrical experience," to the collapse of the old studio system "dream factories" with their larger-than-life bosses and "last tycoon" underlings and their More Stars Than in the Heavens and the whole world-within-a-world they seemed to constitute. (Just ask yourself this: can you picture any filmmaker of today doing with the Hollywood of a quarter of a century earlier--the Hollywood of 2000 A.D.--what the great Billy Wilder did with the then-quarter-of-a-century-older Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard? I doubt even the most stubborn contrarian out there would actually try to argue on behalf of a "Yes" answer--while considering this it seems no coincidence that even the makers of new movies about Hollywood are drawn to that earlier period, as Damien Chazelle clearly was in his tale of silent-era Hollywood of a couple of years ago, Babylon.)

That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.