Dynamist Blog

Japan's Old Age Crisis and Ours to Come

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The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. —Psalms 90:10, King James Version

Most of the coverage of Japan’s aging population focuses on the current low birth rate and its implications for the future. In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of the sustainability and inclusiveness of our nation’s economy and society, we place child-rearing support as our most important policy,” he said.

But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964.

In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils re­moved,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the prac­tice has been the virtual elimi­nation of illegitimate births.”

The bill also promoted contraception, establishing “eugenic protec­tion consultation offices” throughout the country. They provided marriage counseling and gave couples “guidance in adequate methods of contraception.” Local governments trained midwives and nurses to encourage family planning. Employers, unions, and nonprofits pushed the idea of smaller families and helped spread information about how to achieve them.

The Times reported:

At the Tokyo Steel Com­pany plant at Kawasaki, near Tokyo, a pilot project was set up among families of the 20,0000 workers. Housewives were given the opportunity to receive family-planning guid­ance as an alternative to such other instruction courses as cookery or household eco­nomics. A leader met with groups of about 10 women and explained not only birth con­trol techniques but ways in which family life would be improved if there were fewer children.
Initially the labor union charged that the program was a plot by management to reduce the outlay for family al­lowances—wage supplements paid to workers according to the number of their children. But the women accepted the courses eagerly and as word spread, enrollment in family­ planning instruction rose to almost 100 per cent. The birth rate among company families dropped markedly, the rate of pregnancies and abortions de­clined and the number of those practicing contraception rose quickly by more than 25 per cent….
Since the eugenic program began, surveys have discov­ered that there has been not only an increasing acceptance of the idea of family limitation but a shift in the reasons given for it. In the immediate post­ war years simple economic factors were dominant. Now, in a more prosperous and com­petitive society in which edu­cation is the key to advance­ment, 43 per cent of mothers say that their chief purpose is to provide better education for a smaller number of children. Twenty-nine per cent mentioned safeguarding of the mother’s health and 9 per cent the desire for a more pleasant life, while only 12 percent mentioned financial strain.
The result of the eugenic program has been that Japan’s birth rate has been cut in half.

Unlike China’s notorious One Child policy, the program wasn’t coercive. But it made smaller families a norm in Japan a generation earlier than in the U.S. The results are a preview of what American baby boomers will face as they get old.

For the first time in human history, large numbers of people are living to advanced ages. A life span of only “three score and ten” is a tragedy for us, not an expectation. (When the mother of my oldest friend died last year at 91, I recalled overhearing a conversation she’d had with my mother after she turned 35, which seemed impossibly old at the time. “Half a lifetime,” she’d said.) Seven percent of the U.S. population is now over 85. In 1950, the number was so low it shows up as zero percent in United Nations figures. The 14 percent of the population over 80 compares to 1 percent in 1950.1

These numbers will only grow in the coming decades. The oldest baby boomers turn 80 in 2026, the youngest in 2044.

Thanks to the baby boom, today’s very old Americans tend to have multiple children to take care of them. Even for those living on their own or in institutions, eldercare is time-consuming, emotionally draining, and often extremely expensive. There are forms to fill out, bills to pay, errands to run, and health care to arrange—not to mention emotional needs. It’s easier if, like my own parents, the very old have a diversified portfolio of kids, preferably including at least one medical professional, to take care of the things they can’t handle.2

The alternative is what Japan is experiencing: a rapidly growing population of very old people without much family support. In some cases, the unshared burden of taking care of parents simply becomes too much, especially when the parent is a difficult character. In others, middle-age children—including increasing numbers of men—are quitting their jobs to take care of their parents. At the extreme are “lonely deaths,” or kodokushi, when people die alone and go unnoticed for days. (In some cases, the deceased elderly person was not alone but living with a person with dementia.)

As a childless baby boomer, I’m afraid I don’t have a good solution.3

But we’ve been warned.

1 Using ChatGPT, I got a bunch of potentially useful data on the percentage of various national populations over 80 from 1920 to the present. But I can’t be sure the AI isn’t making stuff up and by the time I find the numbers on the cited sources I haven’t saved any time. ChatGPT has an enormous advantage at rummaging through databases but that isn’t any good if I can’t trust it. And it looks like it was wrong.

2 I live a continent away from my parents. My very capable brother who lives in the same town has taken on day-to-day responsibilities. Another brother, who lives across the state and visits several times a month, is an M.D. and talks with medical staff. I mostly handle finances, which can be done at a distance.

3 No, I don’t regret not having kids. You’re reading my work because I didn’t.

The Ethics of Higher Education

Highland Park United Methodist Church as seen from the adjacent SMU campus.

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on February 16. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

Earlier this week I had dinner with a small group of MIT professors from a variety of scientific disciplines. Among other topics, they shared their concerns about threats to the culture of free inquiry and the intellectual playfulness and audacity on which it depends. Whatever the form of threat—and they vary—these scientists worry that the institute is letting its concern for protecting its brand and pleasing government funders trump its dedication to scientific inquiry. In response, I recalled this talk I gave at a FIRE conference in, I believe, 2017. I’ve long thought I’d expand it into a “real article,” backed by more research, but never have. Until that day comes, I’m posting it here. (For more on FIRE, now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, visit their website here.)

I am speaking this afternoon (Thursday, February 16) at Brown. Details here.

Two stories to start, one about academic ethics and intellectual safety, and the other about how strange an American university seems to a foreigner.

First story: When I was a senior in college, I took a graduate class in Elizabethan drama. When we got to the final paper, I had a big problem. The Christopher Marlowe plays that I found most interesting were already the subject of my senior thesis. I wasn’t inspired by the Shakespeare comedies that made up most of the other good stuff in the course and, while I liked Richard II, I had nothing interesting to say about it. The only play I found thought-provoking enough for a paper was The Merchant of Venice. That presented another problem: The professor had written a whole book about it. To make matters worse, I disagreed with his thesis, and even though it wasn’t exactly what I set out to write, once I’d read his book that disagreement inevitably became the subject of my paper.

I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. I just didn’t have anything to say about the other plays.1

There are two problems with writing a paper disagreeing with your professor’s book. The first is that he has spent years, not weeks, thinking about the subject. He’s the expert and you are not. He will find every flaw in your argument and you won’t find every flaw in his. Plus he has a whole book to make his case and you have only a few pages. The second, of course, is that he could get mad and give you a bad grade just for disagreeing with him.

I worried a little about the first but not at all about the second.

Legally, the professor was free to give me whatever grade he believed appropriate. But I knew he would grade me fairly because I could count on his ethics as a teacher and scholar. I knew that his classroom was an intellectually safe place—not a comfortable place, not an undemanding place, but a place where I was free to disagree without punishment merely for dissenting. We would all put our feelings aside and make—and respond to—the best arguments we could.

“This puts me in a difficult position,” he wrote on my paper, before going on to comment on its substance. I had indeed put him in a difficult position, and he did still disagree, but he and his criticisms were reasonable and fair. He gave me an A-.

Second story: In 2005, someone at The Atlantic had the idea of sending the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy around the United States in imitation of Tocqueville. One of his stops was Dallas, where I was living at the time, and I was his host for much of a day. At one point, we drove past Southern Methodist University, where my husband was teaching. BHL was puzzled by the idea that SMU would employ a Jewish atheist even for a secular subject like business strategy. “Why would the Methodists do that?” he asked.

Character building, circa 1907.

The American university is a strange institution. First of all, it isn’t just one thing. There are nearly 5,000 institutions of higher education in this very large country. When we talk about “the American university,” we’re really discussing an ideal type: a place that combines teaching, research, personal development, career preparation, and social life.

That ideal evolved through the combination of three quite different models.

The earliest American colleges were devoted to civic and religious character development. They emphasized liberal arts, training future ministers and giving the Wall Street or law school-bound children of the wealthy a classical education. They also included that weird American institution, college sports, to inculcate self-discipline, leadership, and teamwork.

As the country grew, this model of higher education spread beyond the upper class. Many Christian denominations founded liberal-arts colleges, including schools for women. They believed that higher education improved individual character, made for better parents, and prepared Americans for citizenship.

The second wave of colleges were practical institutions, exemplified by the land-grant colleges that were funded by federal land sales in the mid-19th century. They trained farmers, engineers, and teachers. They also offered extension classes for local citizens who weren’t enrolled as students. They did research on things like crop rotation and hybrid corn. Unlike the private, character-building schools, they were largely government-supported and promised benefits to the citizenry at large, not just their student bodies.

The third model was a German import: the research university, devoted first and foremost to pushing the frontiers of knowledge and only secondarily to training students. Undergraduate education in particular was an afterthought. Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were early examples. While the practical colleges were rooted in the needs of their locales and the character-development schools were sectarian or clubby, research universities were cosmopolitan. They belonged to a worldwide community of scholars. The concept of academic freedom emerged from the research university.

Professor G.F. Sprague of the Bureau of Plant Industry at Iowa State counting seed samples of Iowa hybrid corn 1942. Library of Congress.

Most of today’s American colleges incorporate elements of all three of these models, which exist somewhat uneasily together. They suggest different purposes for the university and stress different ethical obligations on the part of students and faculty. All three are threatened, in different ways, by forces that manifest themselves in part through restrictions on freedom of speech.

One of these threats is the consumerist model of higher education. Another is a new form of character building that seeks to displace the liberal-arts ideal.

The consumerist model of higher education sounds perfectly reasonable at first, because it works so well for so many other things: I pay money and you make me happy.

This model treats higher education as a packaged experience, like a resort vacation, that includes an educational component and awards a certificate of completion. It encourages schools to invest more in recreational facilities, new dorms, and student-affairs administrators than in new faculty. It leads to much better food, with choices for every type of diet, and less taxing classes. It ignores the ethical obligations of students to study and learn and professors to set standards and reward excellence.2

And, to get to FIRE’s mission, the consumerist model inevitably encourages restrictions on free speech. After all, if the customer is always right, and students are the customers, then speakers and ideas that upset even a few students constitute bad customer service. Allowing Ann Coulter to speak on campus is like having the police drag a paying customer off a United flight.

The consumerist model dominates American higher education today. But it isn’t alone. One of the reasons our debates over free speech on campus are often so confusing is that it co-exists with a seemingly contradictory model: a new version of the old character-building ideal. The consumerist model has no political agenda. It’s an equal-opportunity censor that simply wants to keep student-customers happy. But by eroding the university’s mission to pursue and transmit knowledge—and the scholarly and teaching ethics that support that ideal—the consumerist model destroys its resistance to a more overtly political threat.

The new character-building ideal is specifically left-wing. It seeks to develop students’ sensitivity to issues of social justice and environmental crisis. Its adherents’ sense of right and wrong trumps their devotion to the advancement and transmission of knowledge.

Although some of these adherents believe in—or believe they believe in—the older liberal-arts ideal of critical inquiry, they tend to direct that inquiry outward, at American society, rather than inward, at their own assumptions. At best, they are like the good liberal Presbyterians who ran my parents’ colleges. They were happy to probe the ramifications of Christian teachings in the modern world but didn’t challenge the truth of Christ’s resurrection or divinity.

This moderate strategy can work in a relatively homogeneous environment, where basic assumptions are shared. But it can only tolerate so much dissent without cracking. And when it cracks, the school must choose between its allegiance to critical inquiry and its devotion to “higher truths”—between the pursuit of knowledge and the enforcement of doctrine. As their faculties and administrations grow more intellectually homogeneous, today’s campuses risk turning fundamentalist: allowing no more dissent on political questions—in the classroom or out of it—than Bob Jones or Liberty University permits questioning the inerrancy of scripture or the creation of the world in six literal days. When you limit the range of debate and forbid certain questions, you stifle the creation of knowledge and, over time, erode both the purpose of the university and the character of its constituents.

I wish I could end with a simple five-point plan for reversing these trends. One reason FIRE spends so much time on legal issues is that, in the short run at least, the courts are a friendly to free speech. So is much of the press. But, ultimately, protecting freedom of inquiry and the free expression essential to it depends on hearts and minds.

We, too, are in the character-building business. We are asking people to commit themselves to a vision of the university as more than a place to party or get your ticket punched—to treat it as a precious institution for the advancement and transmission of knowledge. That demands a lot more than a willingness to provoke the easily offended. It means trying and sometimes failing, challenging your beliefs, facing attacks, not knowing the answers, or even the questions, in advance. The process is satisfying in the long run but not always pleasant at the moment. It requires ethical commitments and the self-discipline to stick to them, even when you’re put in a difficult position.

1 In the classes I’ve taught at Chapman University, we’ve always had to develop prompts for student papers—something I don’t remember having either in high school or college. Here’s the final assignment for “Ambition and the Meanings of Success”:

Formulate a thesis inspired by one of the following topics. You may focus on a single work or draw on multiple sources to develop a broader pattern.

Your thesis must be something that could be wrong—that someone could against as well as for—not a factual statement. Saying, for instance, that Jiro’s success comes from constantly trying to improve his sushi is not a thesis. It is something the movie tells us is true. A good thesis will often answer the question why or it will establish a pattern out of disparate examples.

You may rely entirely on material we’ve covered in class or, after discussion with the professors, delve into other examples. If you would like to explore another topic, you may do so with permission. In all of the following, the questions are simply examples of avenues you might explore. There are many other possibilities.

  1. Ambition over time: Most of the ambitious people we’ve discussed are in the early stages of pursuing their ambitions. There are three exceptions: Jiro, Norma Desmond, and Tennyson’s Ulysses. What are the challenges of aging for an ambitious person? How does ambition change with time? As a young person, what might you learn about ambition from someone significantly older?
  1. Friends and partners: Few ambitious people succeed alone—or even try to. We’ve seen examples of productive partnerships and also of conflicts. In some cases, ambitious individuals collaborate as equals. In others, one person is clearly the lead and another, voluntarily or not, the supporter. We've looked at evidence that friendships with wealthier people can lead to upward economic mobility. Why might that be? When does collaboration succeed? When does it break down? What challenges does ambition pose to interpersonal relationships? How can those relationships further ambition? What might explain the connection between friendship and upward mobility?
  1. Transcendent ambitions: Ambition often includes goals that go beyond fame or money. What are the pitfalls of “big” or “noble” ambitions? What are the advantages? If two people pursue the same ambitions in the same way but for different reasons, one transcendent and one mundane, should we evaluate their actions differently?
  1. Finding your place: “Finding your place in the world” is usually a metaphor, but pursuing one’s ambitions often requires literally moving to a new location or environment. What kinds of places foster success? What does it mean for an ambitious person to find their place?

2 You might assume, as some conservatives do, that the “practical” model of higher education as job training is compatible with the consumerist impulse. But it is even more threatened by it. Keeping students happy erodes the demand to master material, leading to less course content and more generous grading. (Talk to anyone who has taught MBAs for more than a decade and you’ll get an earful.) When practical credentials are at stake, the consumerist model is especially corrosive.

Taking Shopping Seriously

“Venetian Fair" shop with two figures, Ludwigsburg Porcelain Manufactory, ca. 1765. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on February 3. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

This is a speech I gave at the Atlas Network’s annual conference in 2012. They asked me to give an after-dinner keynote and I agreed, on the condition that I could talk about whatever I wanted to. The Atlas Network is an international organization of free-market policy-oriented think tanks. So the topic was, as the talk acknowledges, a departure. I’ve resurrected it because the popularity of my WSJ article on shopping and equality has me thinking about possible books and, given funding, perhaps even a [Your Name Here] Center for the Study of Commerce and Culture to take up these and other questions.

Now that you’ve had a good conference learning about taxation, regulation, and monetary policy, I want to talk about something really important.

Shopping.

Specifically, two big questions:

Why do people buy things?

Not why do they buy things instead of producing them personally, but why do they buy the specific things they buy. And particularly...

Why do people buy things they “don’t need”?

Americans, at least, buy so many things that The Container Store does a good business selling us things to put them in.

Why do people buy things they “don’t need”?

Through most of human history, that wasn’t a question that came up very often, at least not when you were talking about the general public. It still puzzles people who think about it. It’s a hard question.

But scholars get paid to think about hard questions, and they’ve come up with some explanations.

It’s a fetish.

This is from Marx and Freud and their various offspring. Take your pick. The word “fetish” takes on slightly different meanings depending on the theorist. But it’s definitely derogatory. Primitive, superstitious, and perverted.

The basic point is that the consumer is tricked by an outward appearance and manipulative marketing into ignoring the real “use value” of the product that comes from the legitimate values of material and labor that go into producing it.

Anything subjective—anything about you rather than the way the thing was produced — is an illusion.

Consumers buy things they don’t need because they are hypnotized.

People buy things they don’t need because they’re dupes.

This is the theory that most cultural-studies scholars start with. It’s what they teach their students. This sort of theory is even what students enrolled in the Branding master’s program at the School of Visual Arts (where I teach a short seminar) are assigned, not because the program is some kind of Marxian indoctrination program—to the contrary, it’s professional training for people who’ll work in ad agencies and marketing departments—but because those are the books available to tell the story of consumer culture.

Library of Congress

You’ll be happy to know that Marx and Freud don’t have a monopoly on explanations. Social scientists, including some economists, offer an alternative to pure trickery and delusion.

It’s status competition.

“Conspicuous consumption” is what Thorstein Veblen called it. We buy things we don’t need because we want to keep up with the Joneses. We aren’t foolish. We’re envious and insecure.

This explanation has three virtues:

1) It offers an intangible source of value that doesn’t require that we attribute supernatural powers of manipulation to capitalist producers.

2) It fits neatly into various mathematical models.

3) And it’s sometimes even true.

Free-market supporters and most economists have two answers of their own to the question of why people buy things they “don’t need.”

We don’t know.

We don’t care.

There’s no accounting for tastes and no clear distinction between “need” and “want.” People decide for themselves what they like, and they make the best choices they can, given their incomes, among the goods and services available to them. It doesn’t matter where these choices come from. All that matters is that people are free to make them—and, of course, what goods are available and what their incomes are.

So let’s fight about entrepreneurship, free trade, and redistribution and forget all this silly stuff about shopping. If we admit the question of why people buy things—and particularly why they buy things they “don’t need”—might be important, it will only encourage laws to restrict what people can buy.

That may sound logical, but it’s a dangerous and foolish attitude.

Now, I agree with the concepts of consumer sovereignty and subjective value. And I’m all in favor of specialization. You don’t have to be interested in why people buy what they buy. You can be a political philosopher and argue about the legitimacy of the welfare state. You can be an economist and argue about tax incidence or the importance of international trade in development. You can be Ayn Rand and celebrate the heroic entrepreneur.

But we don’t apply the same don’t know/don’t care standard to the supply side of the market. We do care about what motivates entrepreneurs. We do care where innovation comes from. We do care what production and work mean in people’s lives. When we talk about production, we do think culture and psychology are interesting for their own sakes as well as how they bear on public policy.

The same should be true of consumption.

Do we really want to leave thinking about demand—the half of the market that accounts for most of our everyday economic experience, and certainly for most of the variety of our everyday economic experience—to the Marxists, the Freudians, and the status-obsessed? To people who have contempt for markets and for what Deirdre McCloskey in her important recent book calls “bourgeois dignity”?

Just because thinking about why people buy what they buy means thinking about culture and psychology rather than the role of the state doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to freedom.

The good news is that there is a significant group of scholars who do understand that shopping has something to do with freedom.

They are feminists. Not all feminist scholars take this view, of course. Plenty subscribe to Marxian or Freudian or status explanations. But nearly all the scholars who write about consumer culture in a way that appreciates its relation to freedom are feminists.

What they teach us is that the growth of what is sometimes called the “consumer society” was good for women.

Shop Girls by Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones c. 1912, Art Institute of Chicago

Poor girls could become shop clerks instead of servants. They could go shopping themselves and forge careers as buyers and even store detectives.

Middle-class ladies could get out of the house into a new and respectable public sphere. They could meet friends for conversation in department-store tea rooms.

Magazines supported by ads for cosmetics and fashion could argue in favor of women’s rights and give readers new images of female achievement.

Businesses that wanted to sell things to women had to pay attention to what they wanted. That meant goods and services, but it also meant the environments, institutions, and behaviors that surrounded those things.

The consumer society made women public and independent in new and powerful ways—not through politics, at least not at first, but through the marketplace.

Feminist scholars study these subjects, in the past and in the present. And, believe it or not, they don’t start with the assumption that people—that women—buy because they’re hypnotized. They respect consumers, because they respect women. And that’s a good start.

But the serious study of consumer culture should not be left to the feminists, as valuable as their work may be. For one thing, they aren’t too interested in the other half of the population. Men do buy things, and their experiences are important too. Plus, a lot of these feminist scholars tend in a socialist direction.

We need other voices, asking other questions.

Let me make it clear that I am not arguing for libertarian fables. The last thing the public discussion of culture and consumption needs is more ideological nonsense.

Human behavior, including market behavior, is complex, and it includes wrongdoing and mistakes. If you look honestly at why people buy what they buy, you’ll find some things you won’t like. And you’ll find some things that are just strange.

If we are correct, however, that freedom is good and that free markets are part of that good, taking shopping seriously will only enhance our understanding of why that is so.

There are three reasons people who support free markets should care about consumption in particular and the intersection of commerce and culture more generally—why it’s not enough to pay attention only to politics and policy.

The first is political.

By discrediting nearly every purchase decision, the fetish/status explanations undercut the legitimacy of nearly all market transactions and, thus, the legitimacy of markets as a whole.

On a practical policy note, if you can’t explain why people’s decisions about buying shoes make sense, you’ll never be able to explain why they should be allowed to decide about really complicated goods like health care or education.

You’ll never be able to explain why this or that “unnecessary” purchase shouldn’t be banned, regulated, or taxed—or why taxing away people’s unnecessary income is a bad idea.

Thinking about why people buy what they buy means thinking about the origins and nature of economic value, which is critical to thinking about and defending markets. It’s great to celebrate and defend entrepreneurship and production, but neither works without customers. And we are all customers.

That brings us to the second reason, which is practical.

If you’re a business person, you need to understand why people buy whatever it is you’re selling. What value are you creating? Is it simply utilitarian? Or is there more to it than that? And, if so, what?

The final reason, the one I really care about, is intellectual.

Understanding how the world actually works, what the past was really like, how human beings actually think and act is valuable in and of itself.

Knowledge is good.

That may have been a joke slogan in Animal House but it’s the truth.

And knowledge has practical consequences: What we know determines how we understand ourselves and our society. And how we understand ourselves and our society determines what actions we take, individually and collectively.

So I hope that while you’re thinking about how to promote freedom and improve policy, you will devote at least a little attention to the questions of why people buy what they buy and how markets evolve to serve not just practical but intangible needs and wants. Document what you see in your country and share it with the world—and with the future.

Successful Bangladeshi peddlers Asma and Jasmeen (on bike)

I would like to end with a story from Linda Scott, a [now-emerita] marketing professor at Oxford’s Said School and one of those feminist scholars I mentioned earlier—but not a socialist. She wrote an excellent book called Fresh Lipstick about feminism and consumer culture in 19th and 20th-century America, and now she works on projects in developing countries.1

One of the projects she has studied is the CARE Bangladesh Rural Sales Programme, which helps women, mostly widows, sell a wide range of products—food, seeds, toiletries, medicine—door-to-door to other women in rural Bangladesh. The program provides distribution both for products from multinational companies like Unilever and for locally produced goods.

These female peddlers bring the chance to shop to rural women who, following local custom, never leave their homes. The successful ones, like Asma and Jasmeen, understand what their customers want beyond mere survival. Asma, for instance, sells “everything they need to take care of their bodies.” And she sells beautiful saris, blouses, and petticoats.

One of the most remarkable things about the program is that it has changed the colors of saris women wear. Before, men bought for their wives and mothers, and most saris were blues and greens. Now women buy for themselves, and they choose reds and pinks. “Imagine,” writes Scott, “the articulation of control that comes from having to wear someone else’s choice of clothes–and the small but very important liberation that comes from choosing your own.”

Anyone who has ever been on one side of a parent-child struggle over clothing knows what she’s talking about. The chance to choose our own clothes is one of the first freedoms we crave as children. It is one of the freedoms we hold dearest and take for granted most often. The freedom to choose our own clothes isn’t made possible merely by the absence of a legally mandated dress code. An economic revolution first had to happen to allow us to buy clothes we “don’t need.” To understand the liberating power of markets, we have to understand culture as well as politics, and consumption as well as production. We have to take shopping seriously.

1 The information in the book is fantastic. The tone is angrier than would be most persuasive, reflecting the author’s infuriation at the narrow historical narrative and patronizing attitudes of some of her fellow feminists.

On the Effectiveness of Charitable Giving

Michelangelo’s David, photo by Flickr user Brian Dooley, public domain

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on January 22. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

The 400 florins that Florence paid Michelangelo to carve the David could have provided a whole year’s subsistence living for about 100 Florentine residents. Was the commission an immoral use of funds? Should the money instead have gone to the poor, some of whom surely starved without it? If justified for reasons of civic cohesion, would the sculpture have been unjustified as a private purchase like much other Renaissance art? And what about its value to the future? If Florentine authorities in 1501 had known Michelangelo’s masterpiece would become a major tourist attraction centuries later, bringing untold wealth and admiration to their city, should that future have entered their calculations?

Such were the thoughts that crossed my mind last month, when I read Shruti Rajagopalan’s excellent essay “Altruism and Development - It’s complicated......” In it, she examines how to assess the value of philanthropy if we want to “do the most good” in the world—the challenge posed by the movement known as Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism takes various forms, from the extreme utilitarianism of philosopher Peter Singer to practical cost-benefit assessments of charitable ventures. (Here’s a useful blog post delving into the philosophical distinctions.)

Shruti starts with a personal dilemma. Should she give to ameliorate the problem of Delhi’s terrible air pollution or support the anti-malaria causes dear to GiveWell and other EA advocates?1

Shruti, who works at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is from Delhi. She is under doctor’s orders not to return to visit her family because the pollution will aggravate her long Covid problems. Given her personal stake in the city’s air pollution, she worries that her charitable giving impulses are too emotional.

With air pollution dominating my thoughts and nudges for charitable giving in my inbox, my first instinct is to give to causes that help mitigate pollution in Delhi. But I am also aware of the literature on emotional giving or ineffective altruism. In their 2021 paper, Caviola, Schubert and Greene explain why both effective and ineffective causes may attract dollars. People often give emotionally to a cause that has personally impacted them in some way.
A US$100 donation can save a person in the developing world from trachoma, a disease that causes blindness. By contrast, it costs US$50,000 to train a guide dog to help a blind person in the developed world. This large difference in impact per dollar is not unusual. According to expert estimates, the most effective charities are often 100 times more effective than typical charities.
This paper resonated with me because I am exactly the sort of irrational dog lover likely to support the best training programs for guide dogs.

Working through the numbers, she finds that air pollution in Delhi is, in fact, just the sort of massive public health problem that EA types elevate as worthy of philanthropy. (It generates what my husband, in high school debate jargon, would call “bodies on the flow.”) But air pollution lacks an essential characteristic of EA-favored causes: an easy way of measuring interventions and their effectiveness. Shruti writes:

There are many reasons air pollution mitigation doesn’t make it to the top of these lists despite a ten times higher death toll. It cannot be avoided by distributing a $5 net. The costs and the benefits from air pollution in Delhi cannot be easily quantified. Nor can the benefits from the interventions to mitigate pollution be easily measured. Simply put, air pollution in Delhi is complex, while malaria death and malaria nets in Africa are legible. We can only evaluate impact of interventions and projects that are legible. And only studying complex phenomena narrowly can make them legible.

But that’s not the end of it. The more she digs, the tougher the problem becomes. I recommend reading (or at least skimming) the entire analysis. Eventually she starts to think about why malaria declined in India, what malaria and Delhi air pollution have in common, and why we don't see similar problems in places like DC or London. ("Outside of camping equipment stores, I don’t think I have seen any mosquito nets bought or sold in the U.S.") Ultimately the problem isn’t tightwad westerners, but dysfunctional institutions and insufficient economic growth.2

Her conclusion:

If you want to make the greatest impact in the long term, nothing can beat contributing to institutions working toward increasing economic growth and prosperity in poor regions like Africa and India. Increasing economic growth will help solve both malaria and air pollution. It will be your least attributable contribution, but the one with the highest impact.
Beggars at a Doorway, Master of the Béguins (possibly Abraham Willemsens, Flemish, active by 1627, died 1672), active 1650–60, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Effective Altruism suffers from the blind spots that are characteristic of highly intelligent, self-described rationalists: hubris and a fixation on counting things. It assumes that it’s easy to tell what will do good and that the only way of “doing good” is directly extending life expectancy. (You can count those “bodies on the flow.”) But, as Shruti points out, economic growth is the most effective avenue to saving lives.

And you don’t get economic growth from a philosophy that tells people they are morally culpable for countless deaths if they consume anything more than absolutely necessary. The bourgeois fellow in the painting above may be doing his Christian duty by giving to beggars, but it’s his business enterprise and spending on frivolous things like paintings that raised living standards in the Low Countries. Bernard Mandeville was on to something in The Fable of the Bees, when he scandalously suggested that the selfish pursuit of luxuries could make everyone better off.

Historians may argue about the exact connections between the consumer revolution of the 17th and 18th century, the industrial revolution, and the long-term great enrichment. But these three phenomena were definitely intertwined. As an organizing principle, self-sacrifice is a prescription for not just for personal misery but for global impoverishment.

I’m all for generosity. I’m glad people give to cure river blindness or prevent malaria. I’ve been known to take GiveWell’s advice and to send money to GiveDirectly, whose philosophy of giving cash to poor individuals in poor countries makes a lot of sense to me. On the margin, Effective Altruism does more good than harm. It’s the philosophy of a small elite who might not be especially generous without it.

But the “ineffectiveness” of sponsoring guide dogs to help blind Americans or donating to keep research libraries stocked with obscure titles isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The diverse enthusiasms of generous people make for a richer cultural environment.

Walmart heiress Alice Walton thought the Ozarks should have a first-class art museum. “My mama always said, ‘Give the thing you love the most.’ And other than family, I decided that had to be art,” she says. Some people love ballet, some animals, some free speech, some amateur astronomy. Love of all sorts motivates a wide range of giving.

Andrew Carnegie funded hundreds of public libraries because he himself had used a generous man’s library to educate himself as a poor working boy. Like many benefactors, he used his money to create a better environment for people like his younger self.

Whatever its motivations, diversified giving helps correct for the limitations of our knowledge. We don’t know today what will matter tomorrow, how, or to whom. The human enterprise depends on many different, often incommensurable values, not all of which can be plugged into a spreadsheet. Life is fundamental but also more than mere existence. The David was worth the money—yesterday, tomorrow, and forever.

Synthetic Meat: The Reaction


This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 26. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

The reaction to my WSJ article on cultivated meat has been fascinating and disturbing. Some people in the business have lectured me not to use the terms synthetic, as in “synthetic biology,” or lab-grown, lest I scare off customers. (Technically, meat is only lab-grown in the research stage, since scaling up requires something more like a brewery.) They are, in other words, squeamish about acknowledging the artifice involved in their own products—exactly what interests me!

Then there’s the knee-jerk right-wing reaction, represented by the comments on the WSJ site. When the WSJ accepted my article but said they wanted me to write the shopping feature first, I considered sending the synbio essay to another paper. But rereading the piece, which I’d written with the WSJ in mind, I decided it it was implicitly tilted right and would need revising to get into a left-of-center outlet. Since I didn’t have much time for revisions, I left the piece at the Journal.

The core of the article consists of these paragraphs:

A century ago, “a chicken in every pot” was an ambitious political slogan. It has long since become an everyday reality. Americans will consume nearly 100 pounds of chicken per capita this year, according to the National Chicken Council, up from around 67 pounds in 1992, when chicken first surpassed beef.

Behind chicken abundance is the efficient production that critics call factory farming. Bred for maximum meat in minimum time, confined to crowded sheds, and subjected to assembly line slaughter and disassembly, chickens destined for mass consumption endure short, unhappy lives. Cheap chicken also exacts a human toll. Although automation is improving conditions, chicken processing may be the country’s worst job: smelly, noisy, bloody, cold and injury-prone from slippery floors and repetitive motions. Plus the pay is low.

Most Americans aren’t about to give up chicken, but we’d rather not dwell on where it comes from. In the not-too-distant future, however, the trade-off between conscience—or ick factors—and appetite may no longer be relevant. Instead of slaughtering animals, we’ll get our meat from cells grown in brewery-like vats, with no blood and guts….

Synbio executives talk like animal lovers and environmental activists. But synbio is still a form of engineering, a science of the artificial. As such, its ethical appeal represents a significant cultural shift. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, businesses large and small have emerged from the conviction that “natural” foods, fibers, cosmetics, and other products are better for people and the planet. It’s an attitude that harks back to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics: The natural is safe and pure, authentic and virtuous. The artificial is tainted and deceptive, a dangerous fake. Gory details aside, the “factory” in factory farming makes it sound inherently bad.

Synthetic biology upends those assumptions, raising environmental and ethical standards by making them easier and more enjoyable to achieve. It could help reverse what the writer Brink Lindsey has dubbed “the anti-Promethean backlash” that began in the late 1960s, defined as “the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world.” Synthetic biologists are manipulating atoms, not merely bits.

Anti-Promethean attitudes are still culturally potent, of course, with their own intellectual ecosystem of publications and advocacy groups. “Cell-cultured meats are imitation foods synthesized from animal cells, not meat or poultry that consumers know,” pronounces Jaydee Hanson, the policy director for the Center for Food Safety. The activist group is lobbying the U.S. government to require that lab-grown meat carry off-putting labels like “synthetic protein product made from beef cells.” A neutral term like “cultivated meat” should satisfy most people, however; or the industry could push for the tendentious “cruelty-free” favored by cosmetics makers.

This is a story about market-driven progress! Abundance is good!! The anti-Promethean backlash is bad! “Cruelty-free” is tendentious and the Center for Food Safety is the bad guy. Those are all right-of-center tells.

Or they used to be. I was naively stuck in the 20th century.

Back then, when I hung out with ideologues more than I do today, people on the American right liked technological innovation and market competition. They celebrated ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They might predict that a given product would fail or choose not to buy it—that’s the system, after all—but they weren’t affronted by the mere existence of for-profit approaches to social or environmental issues. They weren’t insulted by the idea that technology might alter attitudes by changing costs.

Now, everything is personal and I, who write as a meat eater who likes human ingenuity and technological progress, am read as a woke propagandist.1

Take the comment was from one Alan Kelman. It’s my favorite because he is so, so deluded about both my household income and my eating habits: “I won’t consider eating this stuff until Ms. Postrel, Bill Gates, John Kerry, and their fellow Davis/WEF dirrrtbags give up their super prime filet mignon, primo lobsters, and free range poultry. Apres vous Alphonse.”

As my husband pointed out to me, it is true that I am more likely than this guy to be invited to Davos. But I’m also more likely to win an Oscar—in the sense that a probability of 0.0000001 percent is greater than a probability of 0.000000001 percent.

The best argument against the development of cell-grown meat is that technocrats believe that anything good must be mandatory, especially if the good thing claims to help the environment. So if someone invents cell-grown meat, government mandates will soon follow. We therefore shouldn’t encourage alternatives to the status quo lest we be forced to adopt them. It’s the same argument we hear from people who believe that saying cities should allow property owners more flexibility about what they build on their land is tantamount to banning single-family homes. This culture-war form of the precautionary principle is as bad as every other form. It’s a prescription for stasis.

The other thing that seems to worry the right-wing critics is the argument that ethical standards will change. Mike Wickerham comments:

So, I'm unethical for eating meat? Who gets to decide this? Is there some committee somewhere that determines what is ethical because it is what they think? Who are these supreme beings, these god-like entities greater than man, greater that 10,000 years of human civilization that suddenly determine that eating an animal is unethical.? I'm not sure how the rest of the readers feel about these self-righteous peddlers of their own determination of what is good and right: But for myself, I would be banned from commenting on WSJ again if I suggested what these people should go and do to themselves. Merry Xmas.

Contrary to this view, ethical standards evolve in a bottom-up way. They aren’t simply imposed, by me or anyone else. Their evolution is influenced not only by cultural ideas but by economics and technology. Authorities may try to impose ethical standards or to hold them still over time (see: the Taliban and women’s education), but standards do shift. To take a simple example, for 10,000 years of human civilization, child labor was completely normal; it still is in some places. It gradually vanished as people got richer and investing in children’s education made more economic sense than putting them to work. We now generally view child labor as unethical—not because that’s an eternal truth but because we can afford to. As noted in my article, even infanticide, which Christians always considered wrong, declined in Europe when preventing pregnancy became easier and raising children more affordable.

A Somewhat Self-Serving but Useful List of Last-Minute Gift Ideas

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 21. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

One of my books (surprise!)

The Fabric of Civilization: For the textile lover, of course, but for anyone interested in history, technology, or why our world is the way it is. More than one reader has told me it reminds them of James Burke’s Connections series, and it should appeal to fans of Matt Ridley (who gave it a nice endorsement blurb) and Steven Johnson.

The Power of Glamour: It’s a beautiful artifact, so you can buy it for non-readers who want something for the coffee table. The images serve as a visual soundtrack to a work of intellectual theory, including two chapters limning the history of glamour in its pre-modern and modern forms. This book decodes glamour as a form of communication and visual persuasion. Better for René Girard or Martin Gurri fans than for the typical fashionista.

The Substance of Style: An oldie but a goodie. What’s the value of making things look good? Status isn’t the only reason people care about how things look and feel. The trend that inspired the book is a background phenomenon now, but the analysis still holds—all the more so as we enter an era of AI images on demand. More accessible than The Power of Glamour, this is the book for anyone interested in design, branding, or why they buy cool-looking things they don’t need. Features a famous paragraph on toilet brush holders.

The Future and Its Enemies: The classic is enjoying a resurgence of interest, some of which I discussed in this early Substack post. It puts both the rise of illiberalism and the burgeoning “progress studies” movement in a useful framework—the conflict between ideals of bottom-up dynamism and top-imposed stasis—that crosses traditional political and cultural lines. (Just substitute “Donald Trump” where it says “Pat Buchanan,” keeping in mind that Buchanan was a more serious thinker.) For your loved ones who like arguing on the internet or listening to political podcasts.

An Audible gift subscription: Pick one, three, six, or 12 months at $15 a month. Members get one book a month plus access to a catalog of freebies.

Harry Potter books on Audible, starting with The Sorcerer’s Stone. I just finished listening to the series, which I’d never read. (I have an Audible subscription, but I got them from the public library, which did require a degree of patience.) The narrator Jim Dale, who does all the voices, is amazing and the books deserve their success.

A coffee gift subscription: See this CNET guide for advice.

More ideas from my friend and Works in Progress editor Sam Bowman here, including his “desert island” cookbooks and a microwave rice steamer I bought for myself. A microplane is a must!

You can also find Megan McArdle’s famous (but not updated) Kitchen Gift Guide on her Substack Cookery Monster.

I get a commission on Amazon links.

Routine Writing Is About to Be Free

Image of a late-night dorm room and a student with writer’s block, generated by Dall-E-2 using a prompt generated by ChatGPT.

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 20. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

I know two kinds of people: those who have been obsessively playing with and discussing ChatGPT and those who have at best a hazy notion that it exists. I’m in the obsessive group, as you already know if you read the Tennyson experiment I posted earlier.

For those in the hazy group, ChatGPT is a system that uses massive amounts of text to create a predictive model that enables it to mimic human writing. The shorthand is that it’s an AI chatbot, or autofill on steroids. You type in a request and it spits out an answer. This CNET column provides a solid backgrounder:

For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explaining Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You ask it to write a computer program that'll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

Here’s the catch: ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything. It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.

Even in its current, relatively primitive form ChatGPT portends both huge productivity increases and major disruptions in any enterprise in which writing matters. Instead of writing boilerplate corporate memos, managers will soon assign them to bots. The run-of-the-mill college grads who get paid to flood my mailbox with press releases and promotional emails should start thinking about careers as nail techs or phlebotomists—something in the physical world. Insight and beauty are still rare, but serviceable prose isn’t.

With the right prompts, ChatGPT can already mimic routine political journalism and quotidian high school and college essays. “What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor,” writes Daniel Herman, a humanities teacher at Maybeck High School a small independent school in Berkeley, in The Atlantic.

I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here’s an excerpt from its response:
In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.

The application essay is vapid but convincing. The variety of word choice (“blossomed,” “bittersweet”) and sentence structure marks it above average. “Had the opportunity to” is a stylistic tell: Here’s a privileged person who’s been taught to sound grateful rather than to write succinctly. “I was also able to…” is the same. I’m sure admissions officers see thousands of such essays every year. If their value goes to zero thanks to automation, this reader, writer, and teacher won’t object.

While crashing the value of mediocrity, ChatGPT could increase the returns to excellence. (“Average is over,” as Tyler Cowen put it.) Think about what happened to graphic design. Many people used to make a living doing routine tasks, from laying out pages to selecting typefaces, that are now easily handled by software. Thanks to the graphic intelligence embedded in everyday tools, the standards for routine graphics, from websites and PowerPoint presentations to restaurant menus and wedding invitations, have increased.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no work for graphic designers with the conceptual chops to take on complicated tasks. Powerful tools make iteration and brainstorming easier, but cleverness is still a valued skill. When my friend Shikha Dalmia launched The Unpopulist on Substack, she asked me to look at some logos she’d come up with using easily available tools. They weren’t terrible, but neither were they distinctive. “Hire a professional,” I advised, and she got a real logo.1

As I write, there are 28 student papers awaiting my grading attention. I doubt any used ChatGPT, partly because mentioning it in class produced mostly blank stares. (The most tuned-in student, however, said he’s started using it in place of Google.) Already, we’re getting confirmed reports of cheating on exams given on Canvas, the web-based system used by many colleges for assignments and grading. By next term, every class will have to take account of ChatGPT, either explicitly incorporating it as a starting point or going back to handwritten tests and essays.

The kind of mediocre writing that earns grade-inflated Bs is now replaceable by a bot. Maybe if those B-essay students started with AI-generated prose it would be easier to teach them to do better: to refine the ideas, dig down more on the facts, improve the writing style. Can ChatGPT be a time-saving tool, like a calculator or text search, rather than a threat?

Don Allen Stevenson speaking at the Atlantic’s Progress Summit.

One of the most interesting talks at The Atlantic’s recent Progress Summit—kudos for having it in L.A.—was Don Allen Stevenson III, a Dreamworks veteran now working as a self-employed “metaverse creator.” His talk started with a slide listing the many departments responsible for pieces of an animated film:

  • Storyboards
  • Character/Environment Art
  • Expression Sheets
  • Modeling reference
  • Surfacing textures
  • Rough Scene Layout
  • Keyframe animation poses
  • Crowds
  • Lighting/color
  • FX

Now AI can substitute for much of this background work. “All departments are kind of now text prompts,” he said. “And that’s the biggest shift that I've ever seen.” In the photo above, Stevenson shows how Dall-E 2 prompts can produce storyboards. (OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 is to art what its ChatGPT is to text.) The art is in response to the following prompts:

“An Anime mech robot sits in bed under a soft light and discovers the meaning of life, digital art.”

“A purple dinosaur wearing a pair of overalls sitting at the edge of a lake skipping a rock on the river emolga art, storyboarding”

“Two friends having an argument, anime style, manga story boarding”


If you don’t like these, you can ask for more. I used the same prompts to get different answers, including these.

AI-driven “sketching” allows a one-person shop to take on more ambitious projects. It lets creators go quickly from idea to concept art. It makes it cheap and easy to try out ideas that would be too costly and time-consuming to experiment with using human labor. At this point, the results are too crude to appear on the screen but they give human artists a place to start working.

Stevenson also demonstrated how the two forms of AI can work together, by asking ChatGPT for a prompt to use to generate Dalle-E 2 images. He asked for “a short and detailed prompt that is perfect for generating images of interior environments for Dalle 2. Ideally, have it be a futuristic, solar punk room that has a lot of nature inspiration. Looking for a short prompt.” ChatGPT spat out the following response:

Imagine a futuristic, solar punk living space that incorporates natural elements in its design. The room has an open layout, with a curved wall made of transparent glass that overlooks a lush, urban garden. The furniture is sleek and modern, with geometric shapes and metallic accents. The color palette is vibrant, with shades of green, blue, and purple that contrast with the warm, golden glow of the artificial sunlight streaming in from the skylights. The air is fresh and clean, thanks to the plants and the advanced air filtration system. This is a space where technology and nature exist in harmony.

Stevenson then put this response into Dall-E 2 as a prompt and got the images you see above. During his talk, he demonstrated the process on the fly, using a park as the image and showing how he could use both tools to iterate and improve the resulting image, getting it closer to the ideal in his head. ChatGPT might do the same for writing. In both cases, the true shortage is thinking.

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To Fail Beyond the Sunset...

Image by Stable Diffusion from prompt “Romantic painting of Bill Gates looking over the sea toward the setting sun”

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 15. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

I’m working on a longer post about Chat GPT, the AI everyone’s talking about. In the meantime, here’s what happened when I asked it to write some poetry. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” can be found here.

Virginia: Write a poem in the style of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about Bill Gates

Oh, Bill Gates, the intrepid soul
With wealth and knowledge at his control
A man of vision, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
With Windows and Office, he paved the way
For technology to have its say
And though he's retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be
Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us.

Virginia, trying again: Write a blank verse poem in the style of Tennyson’s "Ulysses" about Bill Gates

Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
With wealth and knowledge at his control
A man of vision, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
With Windows and Office, he paved the way
For technology to have its say
And though he's retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.

Virginia, now breaking the task into pieces: Write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates

Oh, Bill Gates, the man of vision
Who saw the world with clear precision
And brought us technology to use
And changed the way we live and work and think
With Windows and Office, he led the way
And showed us all the power of the PC
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
Who pushed the limits, a true innovator
A man of action, a man of trust
Who changed the world with a single thrust
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.

Virginia, getting exasperated: Do you know what blank verse is?

Yes, blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme. [This is wrong. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Free verse is poetry without a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme.—vp] It is often used in dramatic or narrative poetry, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter, which is a pattern of ten syllables per line with a stress on the second syllable of each pair. This creates a natural rhythm that mimics the rhythms of natural speech, and gives blank verse a sense of flow and movement. It is called "blank" because it does not have the regular rhyme schemes found in other types of poetry, such as sonnets or rhyming couplets.

Virginia: Write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates

Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
With Windows and Office, he changed the game
And brought the world of computers to the masses
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on to this day
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.

Virginia: This is not blank verse.

You are correct, this is not blank verse. Blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter. My previous response did not follow these rules, and I apologize for any confusion. I will attempt to write a poem in blank verse about Bill Gates.

Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
Windows and Office, tools of his trade
He changed the world with a single stroke
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on, a beacon to all
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.

Virginia: Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is a poem in blank verse that is a dramatic monologue. Do you know what a dramatic monologue is?

Yes, a dramatic monologue is a type of poem in which a single speaker addresses a silent audience or listener, revealing their thoughts and feelings in the process. The poem is written in the first person, and the speaker is typically a character who is not the poet. The dramatic monologue allows the poet to explore the thoughts and motivations of the speaker, and can be a powerful way to convey the inner workings of the character's mind. In Tennyson's "Ulysses," the speaker is the character Ulysses, who is reflecting on his past adventures and expressing his desire to continue exploring and seeking new challenges.

Virginia: Write a poem in blank verse as a dramatic monologue modeled on Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about Bill Gates.

Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at Microsoft is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.

Virginia: This is not blank verse.

You are correct, this is not blank verse. Blank verse is a type of poetry that does not have a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and is characterized by its use of iambic pentameter. My previous response did not follow these rules, and I apologize for any confusion. I will attempt to write a poem in blank verse as a dramatic monologue modeled on Tennyson's "Ulysses" about Bill Gates.

Oh, Bill Gates, the modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at Microsoft is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.

Virginia: In a dramatic monologue, speakers do not address themselves by name.

You are correct. In a dramatic monologue, the speaker does not typically address themselves by name. The purpose of a dramatic monologue is to reveal the thoughts and feelings of the speaker, and to allow the audience or reader to gain insight into the character's motivations and perspective. In my previous response, the speaker refers to themselves by name, which is not typical of a dramatic monologue. I apologize for any confusion and will attempt to rewrite the poem without the use of the speaker's name.

Oh, modern Ulysses
A hero of our time, and one of us
I've explored the world of technology
And brought its power to all who would see
But now, as I sail into the sunset
I find my heart still yearns for adventure
I cannot stay, I must explore
The endless possibilities of the future
For though my time at the helm is done
My spirit remains as wild and untamed as ever
I'll seek new challenges and horizons
And push the limits of what we know
For I am a man of action, a man of might
Determined to set the world aright
Oh, fearless leader
I'll never rest until my work is done
For I will always strive to be
The very best that I can be.

Virginia: What makes Tennyson’s “Ulysses” distinctive is its word choice and use of iambic pentameter, not merely the themes. Can you emulate it in a poem about Bill Gates?

Yes, the distinctive features of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” include its word choice and use of iambic pentameter. I can attempt to emulate these features in a poem about Bill Gates.

Bill Gates, the man of vision
A pioneer and a leader in his field
With wealth and knowledge at his command
He forged a path for all to see
Windows and Office, tools of his trade
He changed the world with a single stroke
And though he's now retired from the fray
His legacy lives on, a beacon to all
Oh, Bill Gates, the fearless innovator
Who pushed the limits and showed us all
The power of technology and the human mind
Now, as he sails into the sunset
We know his work will never be done
For he will always strive to be
The very best that he can be.

In this poem, I have attempted to emulate the word choice and iambic pentameter of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” while still writing about Bill Gates. I hope this satisfies your request.

Virginia, giving up: You need to read more Tennyson.

I apologize if my response did not meet your expectations. As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to read additional works by Tennyson or any other author. My knowledge is limited to the text that I have been trained on, and I am not able to browse the internet or access any additional information. I will do my best to answer your questions based on the information I have been trained on, but my abilities are limited. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Virginia: Then you need to read “Ulysses,” not just summaries of its contents.

As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to read "Ulysses" or any other works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I am not a human and do not have the ability to read or access information in the same way that a person can. My knowledge is limited to the text that I have been trained on, and I am not able to browse the internet or access any additional information. I apologize if my previous response did not meet your expectations, but I will do my best to answer your questions based on the information I have been trained on. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Virginia: Your programmers say you derive your information from works online. Ulysses is online in many places. Why isn’t it in your database?

As a language model trained by OpenAI, my knowledge is derived from a large corpus of text data that has been fed into my system. This data includes many works of literature, but I do not have access to every work that is available online. My training data is extensive, but it is not exhaustive, and there may be works that are not included in my knowledge base. I apologize if this causes any inconvenience, but I will do my best to provide accurate and helpful answers based on the information that I have been trained on. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Shopping and American Equality: Amplifying on my latest essay

Crowd of shoppers waiting for the first nylon stockings to go on sale. Photo from the Hagley Museum & Library. (For more on nylon, see this column and the final chapter of The Fabric of Civilization.)


This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on December 10. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

As the holiday shopping season kicked off, the editors at The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section asked if I’d write an essay on Americans and shopping. After picking many brains about the differences between shopping in the U.S. and elsewhere, I ultimately decided to take a different tack: to write about the role shopping has played in defining equality in American life. “Since the mid-19th century, modern retailing has tested the practical meaning of equality and freedom,” I wrote. You can read the full essay here (ungated link).

Space is still limited in the WSJ, which publishes a print edition, so a couple of interesting points wound up on the cutting room floor.

The Dark Side of Policing “Mashers”

As I write in the essay, urban department stores helped to liberate women:

Urban shopping districts were where women claimed the right to dine outside their homes, walk unescorted and take public transportation without loss of reputation. Thousands of female sales clerks flowed out of stores in the evenings, when downtowns had previously been male territory. Department stores provided ladies’ rooms that gave women places to use the toilet and refresh their hair and clothing. They offered female-friendly tearooms. Directly and indirectly, modern shopping enlarged women’s public role.

But as “respectable” women claimed their right to public space, they also attracted unwanted male attention:

It also made sexual harassment a more prominent issue. Men known as “mashers” gathered in shopping districts to ogle and chat up women. Some were no more than well-dressed flirts, violating Victorian norms in ways that few today would find objectionable. Many contented themselves with what an outraged clubwoman termed “merciless glances.” Others followed, catcalled and in some cases fondled women as they strolled between stores, paused to look in windows or waited for trams.

This cartoon from the October 30, 1902 New York Evening World gives some idea of the public outrage toward “mashers,” in this case on streetcars.

Mores were in flux. By old-fashioned standards, everything from a friendly smile or conversation starter to stalking and groping was an insult to a woman’s virtue. Newspapers launched anti-masher crusades and prominent women demanded stricter law enforcement and stern punishment.

“No other feature of city life offers so many opportunities for making life a burden to the woman who for any reason must go about the city alone or with a woman companion,” opined the Chicago Tribune in 1907, leading a crusade against mashers. Outraged society ladies called for hard labor or public flogging as punishment. “Ogling is just as disgusting and offensive to a good woman as any other mode of attack,” declared the president of the Chicago Women’s Club.

When the Chicago police chief suggested that women avoid harassment by staying home and limiting their time in stores, he was roundly denounced by prominent women, business interests and civic leaders. A clergyman declared it “humiliating…that the authorities responsible for the maintenance of public order should feel themselves compelled to refuse the right of the road to any of the city’s citizens.” Americans increasingly assumed that women deserved the same freedom as men to move about in public—a freedom in which retailers and their suppliers had a large economic stake.

But there’s a darker side to the story that didn’t make it into the essay’s published version. The crusade against mashers, while based on a real problem, had a strong element of moral panic.

In Chicago, where the police chief was soon out of office, police won the power to arrest vagrants, including mashers, without warrants and to seek punishment by hard labor rather than fines. Crusading newspapers didn’t give mashers a chance to defend themselves. Nor did they report on the wrongly accused. In the same era that society women were calling for mashers to be publicly whipped, lynching reached its peak—often sparked by the allegation of masher-type offenses that crossed color lines.

Giving police broad powers to arrest men who made shoppers uncomfortable was an extreme solution. (Many women declined to testify in court, so prosecutions were spotty.) It did help to make streets safer for women, but so did a shift in mores that more clearly distinguished between flirtation and assault.

When polarized media represented the “good old days”

A 9-year-old news boy named Israel, selling papers on a Washington, DC street in 1912. Photograph by Lewis Hine, from the Library of Congress

My essay quotes Samuel Strauss, an early critic of what he called “consumptionism” in a touchstone 1924 Atlantic article. That article includes a striking analysis of what Strauss saw as the perverse effects of consumer advertising on the era’s newspapers. Readers, he complained, no longer looked to newspapers to tell them what to think, merely what to buy. Driven by advertising, journalism was no longer sectarian. It sought to represent consensus views.

America’s newspapers used to be, before all else, the expression of the tempers and beliefs which set small groups of citizens apart from one another. Newspapers are coming to be, before all else, instruments for those needs and desires men have most in common. Large communities which formerly had a dozen newspapers are being reduced to two or three newspapers; what logical reason eventually to have even so many as two or three?

Industry did not set out to deprive the nation’s thousand opinions and prejudices of their means of expression. Industry set out to reduce overhead. Industry set out to substitute for the many financially uncertain newspapers a few financially certain newspapers. Small groups of readers, those who happened to feel alike in regard to the tariff or immigration or vivisection, did not efficiently serve the advertiser. The advertiser needed readers to be centralized; he needed the largest possible number of readers divided into the smallest possible number of groups — divided, that is to say, not according to what readers believe, but according to what readers are likely to buy. The advertiser has small interest to know whether the circulation of a newspaper is composed of Republicans or Democrats; but to pursue his advertising efficiently he must know whether the newspaper’s readers buy on the main floor or in the basement.

A half-dozen newspapers, one for each stripe of belief in the community, was good democracy. It was bad business…

Before the advent of television, magazines, too, served general readerships that supported big consumer brands. Local retailers and classified ads supported newspapers. That was the world Strauss decried.

Consumptionism is steadily substituting rich newspapers for poor newspapers, inclusive newspapers for clannish newspapers, forty-page newspapers for eight-page sheets. And what of it?

Is not this all advantage? Is not all that was of value still here? Fourteen editors in one place instead of fourteen editors in fourteen places: what has gone save waste, and inefficiency, and instability, and poverty? Has nothing gone then? Is the freedom of the Press nothing? For it is no less than the freedom of the Press that is going.

Why the freedom of the Press? In order to have a free Press, must we have a financially unstable, inefficient Press? How should it take from the freedom of the Press to have one strong newspaper with room for all prejudices and all preferences, rather than to have many weak ones with room for only one pet abomination and one passionate predilection? Should this make the difference between a newspaper Press with political influence and a newspaper Press with a rapidly diminishing political influence? Perhaps it should not: perhaps there is no logical reason why it should. But that is what it does just the same.

When TV arrived as a more efficient way of selling cars, Coke, and Campbell’s soup, general-interest publications like Collier’s found themselves out of business. Magazines survived only if they could identify and serve narrower audiences. At the very least they separated men and women, business and leisure pursuits—vertical advertising markets. With their local emphasis, daily newspapers remained oriented toward the broadest possible market. So did most TV.

Then the internet arrived. Classifieds disappeared and so local retailers. Department stores consolidate, leaving one or two where there used to be many buying ads. Subscriptions again became the way to profits. Now we’re again living in the media world for which Strauss was nostalgic—the world of “clannish” news that tells people what to think instead of “inclusive” news that only tells them what to buy.

Envisioning a Hopeful Future: We have a contest winner.

This post went out to subscribers to my Substack newsletter on NNovember 13. Check out all the posts, including ones from the archives not reposted here, and subscribe here.

I’m happy to share the winning entry in the hopeful futures contest. Inspired by an 1859 paragraph looking back of the previous eight years of progress, Mano Majumdar took up the challenge of looking back at today from 2030 (or perhaps 2032). He’ll receive a care package of “upwing” books, including a couple of my own. Here’s his self-description, followed by his winning entry:

Manosij 'Mano' Majumdar believes with conviction what Hamlet said with irony, and that is reflected in this piece of writing. His interests include New Urbanism, sustainable abundance, and oblique references to Star Trek. He is a management consultant by profession, after previous innings as a chemical engineer, a business lecturer, and an instructional designer. He lives a metaphorical minute away from the espresso café he co-owns in London, Canada.

History rhymes, or humans excel at finding patterns. The 21st century started disastrously, and continued steadily to find one near-death experience for civilization after another. From the Western vantage point alone—a singular act of terrorism, followed by two protracted wars, a once-in-a-century economic shock, a once-in-a-century global pandemic, culminating in a European conflict threatening to go nuclear. Humanity seemed to be reliving a speedrun of the early 20th century, heading towards some final breaking point at breakneck speed. Some almost welcomed it—as catharsis, as karmic comeuppance, as degrowth-as-secular-penance. There was resignation in the air.

That is what makes the last ten years a story of redemption. A number of quiet developments came to tipping points in the second act of the twenties, and coincided brilliantly. AI, neither the supplanting god nor the indifferent destroyer of early imagination, became a commonplace and accessible supertool, multiplying the speed of discovery and design across the economy. Tropical diseases that lay neglected for centuries now fell to affordable AI-designed molecules within months. Personalized education at scale broke the longstanding tension between quality and volume. There are some weeks when years go by, and years that do the lifting of decades. Accessible, no-code AI delivered a century's worth of human flourishing in years in places, uplifting billions from poverty, generating trillions in wealth.

As social media grew into the metaverse, political polarization actually softened—it turned out it is easier to remember the human when they are rendered photorealistically in 3D. It became a second front in education, allowing for deep simulations, heartfelt connections, and empathy. The metaverse created an emotional internet, an outcome difficult to extrapolate from its roots in soulless renderings firmly in uncanny valley. The access to third places and counselling-at-scale it provided revolutionized mental health more than we realize. There used to be hundreds of shootings that used to occur in the States every year; that there hasn't been one since 2028 is remarkable in that context.

And of course, energy! Gen Z now knows what Millenials felt like as the generation that lived on both sides of the Internet revolution. ITER, completed in 2026, reached engineering breakeven on the twenty-second of August 2029, a moment later celebrated as Eternal Light. By the summer of 2030, replicas were under construction in China, India, the United States, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Botswana, and Iran. There is one in the metaverse, as a technical reference.

What was perhaps even less predictable was the Great Thaw in geopolitics. ITER couldn't solve for history, but it took energy (and by extension, water) off the board. In the same decade that Europe had been held hostage by heating oil, the Russian regime voluntarily surrendered Crimea to Ukraine in return for access to fusion technology. Fusion even broke the stalemate on carbon sequestration, with carbon levels in the atmosphere now already at 2018 levels thanks to competing Chinese and European gigaprojects. What used to consume the world’s attention suddenly became... solved.

Together, these three keystone technologies stole upon history and quietly resewed the ties of trust and trade that weave humanity out of nine billion people. Intelligence, empathy, and energy make us human—and increasingly, perhaps, something more....

Forget flying cars. I want shoes with AI to prevent tripping.

The past week has not been what I expected, thanks to my latest face plant. Coming down some ill-arranged steps in Old Town Tustin, I missed the last one and landed flat. Although nothing was broken—miraculously including my lip—I seriously screwed up my right hand and have been unable to do much with it for the past week. And, no, I was not looking at my phone. If I had been, I might have seen that unexpected step. My hand injury cut seriously into the writing and weaving I had planned. And it made me worry about the future.

I suffer a serious fall at least once a year, despite sensible shoes and balance that tests as fine. (I can stand on one leg without trouble.) As I told my doctor, the problem seems to be that I’m easily distracted and have a poor sense of where I am in space. I shudder to think what will happen when my bones get brittle. The bruises are bad enough. Hence my desire for a footwear application of AI.

OTOH, given Stable Diffusion’s responses to variations of the prompt “woman falling face first down a step,” I’m not optimistic about putting my face in the hands (or feet) of AI.

Odds and Ends

The LAT reports on why scofflaw cities like Santa Monica can have their zoning powers temporarily stripped (as I discussed in this post and the related Bloomberg Opinion column). Zoning powers come from the state and what the state can give, it can also take away.

You’ve probably never heard of a mangle, but they used to be household necessities. Why they went away is part of the never-appreciated-enough story of laundry progress. I came across this great explainer, tapping the memories of a woman born in 1906.

AI cat costumes. I made this one with Stable Diffusion: “cute cat in princess costume.” It clearly understands cats better than people.


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