Something Else War is Good For

Ian Morris has written a book that will be provocative for sure and definitely infuriating to many. The book is War! What Is It Good For?,(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and an excerpt was published in The Atlantic (April 14, 2014) entitled War, What Is It Good for For? These Four Things, Actually.

Morris quotes lyrics from Edwin Starr’s Motown classic “War”

    War!

    Huh, good God.

    What is it good for?

    Absolutely nothing….

And then proceeds to list four things war accomplishes

1. The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently. 
2. My second claim is that while war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. “Lord knows, there’s got to be a better way,” Edwin Starr sang, but apparently there isn't. 
3. My third conclusion is that as well as making people safer, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. 
4. War, then, has been good for something—so good, in fact, that my fourth argument is that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our own age humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible.  

Current trends suggest that robots will begin taking over our fighting in the 2040s—just around the time, the trends also suggest, that the United States, the world’s globocop, will be losing control of the international order. In the 1910s, the combination of a weakening globocop (Britain) and revolutionary new fighting machines (dreadnoughts, machine guns, aircraft, quick-firing artillery, internal combustion engines) ended a century of smaller, less bloody wars and set off a storm of steel. The 2040s promise a similar combination. The next 40 years could be the most dangerous in history. 

And yet, long-term history also gives us cause for optimism. We have not managed to wish war out of existence, but that is because it cannot be done. We have, however, been extremely good at responding to changing incentives in the game of death. For most of our time on earth, we have been aggressive, violent animals, because aggression and violence have paid off. But in the 10,000 years since we invented productive war, we have evolved culturally to become less violent—because that pays off even better. And since nuclear weapons came into the world in 1945, the incentives in the game have changed faster than ever before, and our reactions have accelerated along with them. As a result, the average person is now roughly 20 times less likely to die violently than the average person was in the Stone Age. 

As the returns to violence have declined, we have found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon.

Pretty much all of Morris' arguments boil down to war as a deterrent to trivial group violence. When I was in Bosnia in 1996, we were required to travel in four-vehicle convoys. It wasn't until late in my deployment that I saw the briefing document that explained why. The purpose was to avoid hostage situations and, even worse, small unit defeats. If anybody was going to pick a fight with peacekeeping forces, it was going to be a big fight, big enough to require serious second thoughts before starting something. A single vehicle, on the other hand, might easily be overpowered by a couple of angry hotheads or even a lone sniper. And if the occupants successfully fought off the attack, then you'd have people angry over local civilians being killed. It didn't stop the four-vehicle rule from being a royal pain, but at least it became clear it wasn't simply a capricious military regulation.

Lewis F. Richardson, in "The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels," plotted the casualties of conflicts versus frequency and found a power law distribution. At the lower end of the scale, the rate of conflict, extrapolated down to one or two casualties, merged roughly with the crime rate. This prompted the observation that war is simply crime on a large scale, or crime is just war on a small scale. But the deterrent effects noted by Morris suggest that war may be law enforcement on a large scale. Or maybe that violence in general marks the point where deterrence breaks down and the advantages of violence outweigh the risks of challenging deterrence.

I'd add a fifth "benefit." War is often the only way, or the most effective way, to sweep aside obsolete, corrupt and moribund social institutions. Perhaps the pre-eminent example in Western history was the Thirty Years' War. In the classic 1980 version of Cosmos, two episodes re-enact vignettes from the 17th century. The first, in "Harmony of the Worlds," depicts the life and times of Johannes Kepler early in the century as bleak and superstitious. (Sagan quite overdoes it; by this time America had been known for over 100 years, the printing press had been around for 150, and William Shakespeare was alive. It was hardly medieval.) The other episode, "Travelers' Tales," depicts the world of Christian Huygens late in the century. Although a single long lifetime could have encompassed both, the atmosphere of the two is utterly different. The Holland of Huygens is affluent, enlightened, liberated and inquisitive. With due allowance for the change in locale from Germany to Holland and dramatic license, it was a different world. And the intervening years were dominated by the mega-conflict of the day, the Thirty Years War.

The war has fascinating parallels to World War I. It began absurdly, just as World War I did. The ruler of Bohemia began packing his royal council with Catholics. A Protestant mob cornered two of them and threw them out an upper story window. Miraculously, they survived, either by Divine protection (Catholic version) or landing on a dungheap (Protestant version - even though I'm a Catholic, I favor the Protestant version.) Protestants then revolted, prompting the ruler to call for assistance from other Catholic rulers, in turn motivating nearby Protestant rulers to send in troops to prevent a massacre. Like World War I, a minor local squabble sucked one major power after another into the vortex as each tried to keep the balance of power from tipping. How far the war spread can be seen by looking at the four major phases of the conflict: the Bohemian, Danish, Swedish and French phases. Note there was no German phase; it was an away game for everyone and Germany was the playing field. When the war was over, the population of Germany had decreased by a third, Germany was fragmented into over a hundred tiny statelets that wouldn't be unified until 1871. And German historians still refer to this war as "the Great War."

And it was also the last major religious war in Europe. When the war gasped to a final "peace of exhaustion," the peace agreements settled on the formula "cuius regio, cuius religio" - "whose region, his religion." This had been the formula for the armed truce after the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation a century earlier, only then, nobody really meant it. Everyone was merely biding his time, hoping for the day to come when the forces of righteousness could sweep heresy from the face of the earth (label sides to taste). This time, it stuck. The notion of national sovereignty in the modern sense came into being, and the germ of the idea of freedom of religion. Nations might have established churches, but there were guarantees for other groups as well. The Vatican, of course, was not pleased at formal recognition of the legitimacy of other sects. Pope Innocent X railed against the peace settlements and was roundly ignored. (That in itself was probably a good thing and began the political marginalization of the Papacy.) What seems to have happened is that the parties realized the practical impossibility of redrawing the religious map of Europe, plus realizing that the old fear of religious diversity leading to anarchy and civil war was unfounded, and realizing it was in their own best interests to have a general consensus that internal matters were internal. What was this war good for? It broke the back of theocracy in the West.

Did peoples' values change? No, their perception of the facts changed. As C.S. Lewis once observed, if we really still believed that there were powerful malevolent spirits and some people had sold out to them in exchange for power, we would certainly feel justified in treating them as traitors to humanity. We stopped persecuting witches because we stopped believing they had any power, not because we changed our ideas about betraying the human race. Religious wars stopped in Western Europe because rulers began to realize that religious plurality did not lead to civil strife and anarchy. 

And so that leads us to World War I, the quintessential example of a useless war, according to the overwhelming majority of commentators. Millions slaughtered trying to apply antiquated tactics to modern battlefields, a vindictive peace settlement that set the stage for a sequel, the Middle East carved into arbitrary chunks, Russia plunged into civil war and subjugation to Communism. Surely nothing useful could have come out of such a conflict. Except perhaps the dissolution of the ossified empires that were largely responsible for the war in the first place: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman Empires. And it was pretty much the last war that could produce a pompous twit like Rupert Brooke who could write "Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead." Given the treacly stuff Brooke wrote about the war, one is left with the feeling it would be a positive tragedy for him to survive. And he didn't. He died of septicemia without ever firing a shot in anger. The karma, it stings. World War I was really the last ancient war in which people could pretend there was anything glorious about battle.

But World War I didn't really sweep away the old. Watch the dining room scenes in Titanic, and then watch The Great Gatsby, and see how similar the social milieu is. The European land empires were swept away, but the overseas empires of France and Britain still lingered, and the empire-building impetus still lingered, to be revived shortly by Germany, Italy and Japan. It took World War II to complete the process. Not only did the attempts to build new empires fail, but the groundwork was laid in India, Indonesia and Indochina for the eventual breakup of Europe's overseas empires as well. Films set in the 1930's seem quaint and remote, those set in World War II seem modern, even those made during the war itself. I am convinced that historians a few centuries hence will see World War II as one of the great watersheds in history.

What happens to people who supported the defeated social institutions? The most positive results happen when people had been forced at the point of a gun to support them, and are liberated from oppression. Nobody really felt much emotion for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so nobody has ever tried to revive it. But if the institutions had wide support, what then? Supporters can be killed off, subjugated, marginalized, discredited, die off or persuaded. Killing them all off is impossible and while persuasion is nice, not all will be persuaded. If they are discredited sufficiently so that they eventually die off, then the cure may be permanent, but any other solution will leave a remnant of embittered losers. As time goes by and the post-war world presents its own problems, they'll romanticize their lost world and may attempt to restore it. Thus we find Russians who idealize Communism, Neo-Nazi groups in Europe and neo-Confederates in the U.S. For that matter, we have neo-geocentrists who assert the Church was right and Galileo was wrong.

One common way to clear out moribund social institutions is revolution. But it's disappointingly uncommon to have "clean" revolutions that don't degenerate into vendettas as bad as the old regime: the French and Russian Revolutions being the prime examples. The American Revolution wasn't as clean as we like to think. Portugal's conflict after the death of dictator Antonio Salazar was refreshingly restrained. 

A social system may pose a serious threat to its neighbors, but preemptive action to topple a regime that is merely crazy or morally repugnant is fairly uncommon. Almost always there are more practical motives involved. An attempt to overthrow the regimes of North Korea or Myanmar would almost certainly kill more of the oppressed victims of those regimes than the regimes themselves do, not to mention their would-be liberators. So full scale wars to overthrow morally repugnant regimes are rare, maybe nonexistent. Modern cases fall under one of two types. A regime may be targeted through a coup or through aid to insurgents. One good example is Operation Barracuda, the 1979 French-led coup that overthrew the lunatic tyrant Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic. The other way to attack a regime is through terrorism, which is how Islamic extremists are attacking our system, which they find repugnant.

One of the most common end states is for a dysfunctional social system to trigger a self-destructive conflict. A dysfunctional social system, pretty much by definition, doesn't think straight. The bloodthirsty dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, met his downfall when he attempted to annex a province of Tanzania, triggering an invasion that toppled his regime. More dramatically, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan both allowed their ideologies to lead them into suicidal conflicts. The U.S. Civil War is also an example. Although moral opposition to slavery was a cause, there are a number of avenues the Confederacy could have pursued before fighting. They could have proposed legislation in Congress, or gone to the Supreme Court. They did neither. They wanted a fight. The scene in Gone With The Wind where Rhett Butler tallies the military and industrial balance and is challenged by a young hothead to a duel pretty much tells the story.

The best of all possible worlds is for a decrepit system to collapse internally without major violence, and perhaps the preeminent example in history is the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even better is for a system to evolve, as did Great Britain in the 1830's. The reason the political systems of the U.S. and Canada are so different is that our system is a reaction to a corrupt British system and Canada's reflects a reformed British system. It was during a time of high social unrest in the 1830's that Britain began passing long overdue reform acts. More recently, China and Vietnam have moved away from doctrinaire Marxism to more pragmatic policies. If Tienanmen Square doesn't strike you as "moderate," compare it to Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Sorry Neil, They're Right, You're Wrong

Neil deGrasse Tyson opened his reboot of Cosmos with a retelling of the saga of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy. Critics of the show complained that Bruno was not, in fact, martyred for science, which in turn prompted defenders to label their stance "revisionist."

Well, it's "revisionist" only if it's "revisionist" to say that Indians hardly ever attacked wagon trains, or the Roman navy didn't use galley slaves as shown in "Ben Hur," or that no educated person in Western history believed the earth was flat in the last 2,500 years. In other words, it's "revisionist" only if you've never read much serious history.

Bruno's impact on Western science was described in Scientific American by Lawrence S. Lerner and Edward A. Gosselin in 1986 (28 years before the Cosmos reboot). The Cosmos episode accurately points out that Bruno successfully managed to get excommunicated from three religions. but leaves out the very important fact that he was a follower of the Hermetic Mysteries. These are writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus  (Hermes the thrice-great) and purportedly dating from ancient Egypt. Modern scholars consider them of early Christian vintage, making their alleged prophetic content a bit less surprising.

In simple terms, Bruno was no more a scientist than the average Shriner is an imam, or Jenny McCarthy is an expert on autism. As Lerner and Gosselin point out in their article "Was Giordano Bruno a Scientist?"

But even when correct in their conclusions, Bruno's "scientific'' arguments do not exhibit any understanding of scientific reasoning or purpose. Rather they serve the totally unrelated function of allegorical descriptions of a metaphysical relationship between Man and God as well as Catholic and Protestant. Bruno sees Nature as the signature of God, and he believes that this signature can best be perceived through the hieroglyph of the Copernican theory. 

In contrast, Johannes Kepler, a thorough medieval mystic himself, was nevertheless engaged in serious scientific research, not just on planetary motions, but pioneering insights into crystallography and new discoveries in geometry. Kepler, like Bruno, saw nature as revealing the mind of God, but Bruno was only interested in using nature to bolster his theology, whereas Kepler used his convictions as the basis for believing that order must pervade nature.


Even a stupid squirrel occasionally finds a nut, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even the Religious Right can get something right once in a while. And making a mistake so egregious that even the Religious Right can spot it is something of an achievement.

The new Cosmos has some good moments, but with its insipid elevator music score and comically awful animations, its workmanship is definitely not up to the original.

Reference

Galileo and the Specter of Bruno, 1986; Lerner, Lawrence S. and Gosselin, Edward A., Scientific American, Vol. 255, Issue 5, p.126.

Was Giordano Bruno a Scientist?: A Scientist's View. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253432071_Was_Giordano_Bruno_a_Scientist_A_Scientist%27s_View [accessed Jan 6, 2016], Originally published in American Journal of Physics, 1973, v. 41, no. 1 p. 24-38.

Growth is a Ponzi Scheme

A persistent theme in conservative literature is the idea that unending population growth is essential to keep the economy and work force growing. A typical example is this by Don Feder in "Feder's Rules For Conservatives (Part I)" (GrassTopsUSA November 29, 2012):

All issues are connected. Abortion isn’t just a social issue or even a moral question. It undercuts the family, which devastates the economy. It also eliminates future workers and consumers, reducing growth.

It's hard to know where to begin untangling the ironies here. We could start with the practice of seeing human beings, supposedly too precious to abort, being valued solely as cogs in an economic machine. But there's a far more colossal irony. It's a trivially obvious mathematical fact that nothing can grow indefinitely in a finite environment, and especially nothing can grow exponentially for very long. The numbers get ridiculous very fast. If you could double a sheet of paper 42 times, the resulting stack would reach to the Moon. If everyone made 10 copies of a chain letter and sent them to friends who did the same, and it took a week per cycle, in a few years the amount of paper would fill the observable universe. So the huge irony is that people who deride Social Security as a Ponzi Scheme insist that the recipe for continued prosperity is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is one where a con man convinces people to invest, and pays them off from the income from new investors. Eventually, the recruitment slackens or investors want to cash out, and the scheme crashes. Bernie Madoff probably didn't set out to run a Ponzi scheme. More than likely, he thought he was really clever enough to out-perform the market. When things went bad, he probably believed the old mojo would soon return. Like a system gambler in Vegas, he thought he was brilliant when he had merely been lucky. On the other hand, there are plenty of Ponzi schemes that are run by outright frauds who count on being able to hide overseas, shielded by bribable governments. Oh, one way to increase your own take is to pose as an investor and pay yourself first.

It's not a Ponzi Scheme if you incur debts in the reasonable expectation of paying them off on legitimate future income:

• Borrowing money for a mortgage is not a Ponzi scheme. It gets borderline Ponzi if you buy a house way beyond your means in the expectation that your salary will increase or the value of the house will skyrocket. But even so, there's a reasonable expectation of actual income. It's risky, but not Ponzi. What makes it emphatically not Ponzi is that sooner or later you will pay off the mortgage. Unless it goes underwater, and you walk away. In which case you're merely a thief.
• It's not a Ponzi scheme to borrow money to expand a business in the hopes that additional income will allow you to pay back the loan. Risky, but not Ponzi.
• It wasn't a Ponzi scheme for the Catholic Church to expect that young nuns could be used to help care for elderly ones. It worked for centuries as long as the flow of new recruits continued, and if women entered convents at the same rate, they could go on forever. The system collapsed when women began to have other alternatives.
• Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. As originally planned, it would be pre-funded, but conservatives, the forerunners of the ones calling it a Ponzi scheme today, balked at the government accumulating such a huge surplus. They insisted on it being a pay as you go system. Right now, the system is stressed by the influx of Baby boomers into the system. But there are sensible proposals to deal with that issue. They are mostly being blocked by people who would like to crash the system. Their plan essentially is to steal the Social Security fund to pay off their own taxes. The only way Social Security can go broke is for American voters to elect people who let it.

It is a Ponzi Scheme if you plan on indefinite future growth:

• Financial Ponzi schemes either promise steady growth or unrealistically high rates of growth. Someone who promises to double your money in a short time obviously has to double the size of his investment fund. It might be a good idea to ask how he plans to do that.
• Unlimited population growth is a Ponzi scheme. All those people will want places to stay, food to eat, and jobs, which population growth advocates say will come from future growth. It's ironic that conservatives resist the idea that population might have limits, since every single threat to their liberties stems directly from population growth: crowding, crime, congestion, demand for services and regulations. The reason Wyoming or Alaska are so different from California is entirely due to low population density. If libertarians want the freedom we had in 1880, we'll have to go back to the population density we had in 1880. At this point someone throws in the Straw Man, why don't you volunteer to leave? Who are we going to kill off? Answer: nobody. Reduced birth rates will do it nicely, and that's happening in most developed nations.
• Pyramid business schemes, where participants are rewarded for recruiting new members, might be legally different from Ponzi schemes (it is possible to profit if you get in early and recruit enough members) but morally they are absolutely indistinguishable. Sooner or later the last level of salesmen down the line will be unable to get anyone else to sign up and will be stuck.
• In the long run, every economic model that assumes unlimited future growth is a Ponzi scheme.

Apart from the unrealistic promise of perpetual growth, most Ponzi schemes have another feature: a phase of deceitful maneuvering designed to conceal the inevitable collapse as long as possible. Bernie Madoff seems to have been quite aware for a long time that he was basically running a Ponzi scheme. He got away with it by mailing out fictitious statements to investors and paying off the relatively few who decided to cash out.

Growth in Nature

Put a few goats on an isolated island. This has actually happened with results that have environmentalists tearing their hair out. The goats eat the vegetation, and with lots of food and no predators, they have lots of kids. They in turn have more, and the population increases faster and faster. This is positive feedback; every change results in yet more change. The growth is exponential. But eventually the goats consume all the available food. The goats are weaker, less able to bear healthy young, more vulnerable to sickness. The baby goats are weaker and more likely to die before adulthood. Growth slows. Now every new goat makes it harder for the rest to survive. This is negative feedback; every change tends to inhibit further change. The growth rate levels off and begins to decline. The environmental factors that obstruct growth are called environmental resistance.

At this point several things can happen. It may be that the goats destroy so much vegetation that they all starve. More likely, the last few litters of goats in the exponential growth phase push the population beyond the level that the island can sustain and there is a massive but incomplete die-off. The population crashes, the vegetation recovers, the population grows again, and it may repeatedly spike and crash. In the most favorable outcome, population growth gradually slows and reaches a limit. A graph of population over time has a steep initial phase of exponential growth, a more or less linear period where the growth rate slows and then declines, and a period of steadily slowing growth. The graph of population over time looks like a slanted S, and a growth pattern of this sort is called a sigmoid or logistic growth curve.

That's what's happening to human population in the developed world. People had more and more kids (back to the human kind, again) to help on the farm, who in turn had kids of their own, and population grew exponentially. But soon population began to encounter resistance. Land became so fragmented it was no longer feasible to farm. Even in the Middle Ages, laws were passed limiting land inheritance to the eldest son. And the others? They went to the towns, which were population sinks. Anyone who looked at parish birth and death records could see, and did, that deaths outnumbered births in the towns. Obviously we have a lot more people now, but that's a topic for the next section.

Even with better food and medical care, there are limits to family size. Living quarters get more crowded (making it less practical to have children). Children cost more to feed, and the very growth of adult wages means children cannot really contribute to family income any more. Instead of contributing to family income, children drain it. So people begin having fewer children. The growth curve flattens. The point where population growth stops accelerating is called the Demographic Transition. It's ironic that good old fashioned materialism may just save the environment by putting the brakes on population growth.

Exponential growth, like perfectly elastic collisions, or bodies sliding without friction, or falling without air resistance, does not exist in the real world. It's a mathematical idealization that is useful for modeling some aspects of reality. On our imaginary island, some goats won't have young and some kids won't survive. A graph of goats versus time will be approximately exponential, but not exactly. The decay of a radioactive isotope, which is an example of exponential decay (the exponent on the exponential function is negative), is very close to exponential when there are billions of atoms, but won't be nearly as exact when it comes to the last hundred.

Growth curves won't be exactly sigmoid either, but sigmoid curves will be far more realistic than exponential growth in one all important respect: they remain within finite bounds. True exponential growth doesn't, and the numbers get very ridiculous very fast. An old story tells of a king who wanted to reward a loyal follower, so he asked what the follower wanted. Instead of the princess or half the kingdom, the follower merely asked for a grain of wheat on the first square of a chessboard, two on the next, then four, and so on. The king thought this was a trivial request until the court astrologer did the math and discovered there isn't enough wheat in the world to cover all 64 squares. At which point the king probably had the loyal follower's head chopped off.

But Wait!

I hear you cry. That may be true of goats on an island, but what about compound interest, which does follow exponential growth exactly? Well, the growth does, unless the borrower declares bankruptcy. But more than that, interest cannot grow forever. Imagine you invested one cent in 1 AD at 1% a year and cashed out in 2000 (to keep the numbers round). Your penny would be worth 4.4 million dollars. Well, okay, some extremely rare coins sell for that. But the average Roman coin is worth only a few dollars. Let's say your penny is invested at 2% per year. By 2000 it would be worth $1.6 quadrillion, far more than the GDP of the planet. That would be about 105 trillion ounces of gold, or about 3.6 million tons, far more than has ever been mined. You couldn't demand payment in gold because there isn't that much gold in the world.

So mathematicians have recognized, pretty much since compound interest appeared, that it can't grow forever. Mostly this is an abstraction. Your bank account interest grows until you withdraw the money. Your loan accrues interest until it's paid off. Nobody leaves money in the bank for 2000 years, because no bank has ever lasted 2000 years. But beyond the short term finite nature of most compound interest are larger scale interruptions like default or devaluation. I have an interesting array of valueless hyperinflated currency like a German 2 million mark note from 1923, Greek drachmas from 1944 overprinted with new denominations, a 50 billion dinar note from soon-to-be no more Yugoslavia, etc. When the state that issued it ceases to exist, or the currency is abolished, so does the value of the currency.

Real Growth

The reason we have a lot more people living a lot better than they did in 1400 is we have had centuries of real growth. We've colonized new continents, developed new devices and agricultural methods, and so on. How much growth has there been? Most estimates give a world population of 300 to 400 million in 1400, compared with the roughly seven billion now, so global population has increased roughly 20 fold in 600 years, or about 0.5% per year. 

What about economically? This is harder to pin down, because even the poorest countries have things like cell phones, electricity and automobiles that didn't exist centuries ago. We also have 20 times more people. British economist Angus Maddison estimated the GDP of Western Europe to be about $11 billion in 1100, quadrupling to $44 billion by 1500. The present GDP of Europe is about $18 trillion, roughly a 1600 fold increase, or a bit over 1.2% per year. So with a 20-fold population increase, that means roughly an 80-fold per-capita increase in GDP. Compare the US ($48,000) with Liberia ($600). Not hard to imagine our forebears in 1400 having a Liberia-level lifestyle. An 80-fold increase in living standards in 600 years works out to about 0.7% per year.

So we've had six centuries or so of GDP growth at about 1.2% a year. But wait? What about all those fortunes made by traders and mill operators? Those were big gains that directly affected only a few people. If 10 per cent of the population sees a 10% rise in their wealth, that works out to 1% averaged over the entire population. Still, there is some truth to the trickle down theory and the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, especially once entrepreneurs figured out there was more money to be made in selling to mass markets than catering to the elite.

Prolonging Growth

Some of the earliest innovations in capitalism revolved around shipping. That's where we get expressions like "my ship came in" and "second rate." (The term referred to ratings of seaworthiness by insurers, and second rate was actually not bad. As opposed to sixth rate, which might possibly stay afloat for a while when untied from the dock). You invested in a voyage. If it came back, you got paid off. End of story. You spent the profits or went looking for another voyage to invest in.

But suppose you're running a factory that makes widgets. There's an initial phase of steady (roughly exponential) growth, which is great fun. But eventually, people have all the widgets they need. You sell just enough to replace the ones that wear out and your growth flattens out. The sigmoid growth curve again. So what's to stop you from just being satisfied with the steady income from selling all the widgets people need? It might work. If you pay back all the investors (buy them out). If some upstart doesn't come up with a way of making better and cheaper widgets. If widgets don't go out of fashion, or get replaced by something else. And if you have investors, because you need their money to cushion emergencies and modernize your plant, they'll want steady dividends and they'll want to see the values of their shares increase. If not, well, there's another ship sailing somewhere, and they'll jump ship and climb aboard. In an economy where new ventures are starting all the time, investors can grow their wealth by moving from one to the next. So like it or not, every business in our present economy has to find some way to grow. Kodak, a company that did incalculable good in its day by allowing us to record our memories and our history, is close to extinction because it failed to realize until too late that digital photography would completely demolish its business model. Kodak might have survived indefinitely if film had remained the primary medium for photography. (Although I just bought a Kodak printer that impresses me very much. They may just make it. I hope. All together, now, "Mama don't ta-a-ake my Kodachrome awa...y")

If you can't continue to grow a single business, diversification is one fairly benign way to keep growing. You make sausages, so you make more and more kinds. And you branch out into other meats. And you start making machinery for processing meat. And you buy packing plants. Diversification not only allows growth but insulates against market variations. If bratwurst goes out of style, you fill the gap with other products. A bit less benign is conglomeration. One of the earliest examples of conglomeration was Standard Oil. Why "Standard?" Because kerosene, which is what the principal petroleum product was in the late 1800's, consists of molecules about twice as heavy as gasoline. The lighter the molecule, the more volatile. Too many lanterns and stoves were exploding because many refineries did a sloppy job of distilling off the light molecules. Between the variable composition of petroleum from different oil fields and the sloppy distillation, it was pretty haphazard. John D. Rockefeller realized that to produce a reliable product, he had to control the entire production chain from well to distributor. One of the first big monopolies was created by a robber baron to create a safer product. (It wasn't totally altruistic, of course, because when people realized his kerosene wouldn't blow up, they'd flock to buy it.) Ain't reality a b****? This was conglomeration of related firms, but many recent examples involve companies buying up completely unrelated firms simply to have a place to invest profits. Thus, R.J. Reynolds, which made tobacco products, merged with Nabisco, which made cookies, to become RJR Nabisco. Then, ironically, the tobacco branch was spun off again into a separate company to protect RJR Nabisco from liability for tobacco settlements.

Pseudo-Growth: When Real Growth Falters

Eventually the growth slackens. It's at that point that business practices start to take on Ponzi traits, resorting to gimmicks to forestall the realization that the ride is about to end. One option for keeping things going might be called churning (a term that's actually used in the financial business). Churning in the stock market consists of making lots of unnecessary transactions that don't benefit the client much but do generate commissions for the broker. Cell phone and internet providers convince customers to switch plans (and in some cases switch them without their consent) simply to generate new business. Planned Obsolescence is a time-honored variety of churning. All products have finite lifetimes, but those lifetimes could be extended substantially by better manufacturing, availability of replacement parts, and so on. The profit from selling a car with an expected lifetime of 20 years, including replacement parts, doesn't equal the profit from selling two cars for ten years each. The cost of building a rustproof car of stainless steel might be twice the cost of a standard car but the impact on profits from having cars that lasted for decades would be far greater. A homemaker is much more likely to buy a new set of china if it's impossible to buy single pieces of the old style.

Software development has pretty much reached the end of innovation and is mostly churning. Why did Microsoft try to replace the perfectly functional Windows XP with Vista? And then with the okay but only marginally better Windows 7? And then try to replace Windows 7 with Windows 8? None are significantly better at the user level than XP, and the real improvements in functionality have been internal and visible only to software and security specialists. So why weren't they simply released as upgrades? Because Microsoft has long since reached the end of real growth. If they simply released upgrades, they'd be limited to selling occasional new copies of XP and releasing updates. They'd have a handful of employees and a fraction of their revenue. The only way to maintain the illusion of continued growth is to pretend minor upgrades are really new products. And most software has reached this point. Once you have a text editor that can do any typographic task, what's left to do? Once a spreadsheet can handle any calculation, what new features are there to add? Most software is plagued by "feature creep," the continued addition of new features that may appeal to a few users, solely to avoid the obvious conclusion that software evolution for established products is pretty much stagnant.

You can also try to take over part of an already viable market by stealing market share. All those school kids who come to your door on fund raising ventures are merely trying to cut into the market pioneered by the Girl Scouts, or they're selling products already sold by local dealers, like pizza. They have nothing new or innovative to contribute, and indeed many are supplied by commercial firms whose sole business plan is to try to take market share from already existing retailers. The most flagrant cases these days involve software. Google is about as efficient as a search engine can get. The only thing it could do to improve would be to stop collecting, storing, and sharing search results. So what do Bing and Ask.com have to offer as rivals? Absolutely nothing. They exist solely to try to grab some of Google's market, and with it, advertising dollars. Even worse are some of the fly-by-night search bars that can infect your desktop. Many of these actually use Google to do the searching. Their sole purpose is to steal market share. Why does Apple feel the need to create a mapping feature when Google's is well developed and better? Because Apple needs to fend off admitting that it's stagnant.

One way to keep growing, at least a little bit, is to try to whip up demand. Advertising has degenerated into a frenetic scrabble for ever diminishing returns, as advertisers seek to target consumers ever more precisely in the hopes of snaring a few new ones. In the process, media degenerate from vehicles for entertainment and information to mere advertising outlets.

When Growth Stops

Sooner or later, the opportunities for real growth stop. What then? The first step, like with someone on a starvation diet, is to eliminate fat. So all those middle managers who were axed had to go. Then you consume muscle. Pension plans disappear, health benefits shrink, compulsory overtime increases instead of hiring new workers. You hire workers for 30 hours a week to avoid paying benefits. The good jobs are abolished when workers retire and the new jobs pay less with fewer benefits. All those cool, employee-friendly dot-coms that crashed around 2000, with the climbing walls and the employee day care and the flex-time were consuming muscle even in their prime.

Of course, the ultimate in consuming muscle is simply to butcher the cow and barbecue it. And lots of investment capital firms do just that. They buy up functioning companies, sell off the assets, kick the employees to the curb, and keep the profits instead of paying shareholders. Mitt Romney's old employers, Bain Capital, were infamous for these practices.

One strategy to forestall an end to growth is parasitism. A business can seek to keep revenue flowing by demanding continuing payments for what used to be one-time purchases. Recently some real estate developers have proposed that each house sale impose a fee to be paid to the developers, so that not only does the developer profit from the initial sale of the house, but from every sale thereafter. Performing artists have pushed for royalties from radio stations each time their works are performed (and not, as they properly should, from the record labels). Adobe's decision to make Photoshop a subscription-only product rather than a licensed product is a classic example of parasitism. Indeed, all software licensing is parasitism. If you owned your copy of Windows 97 outright and could sell it to someone else, why would anyone buy a new version?

Why "Speaking Truth to Power" is a Crock

The expression "speaking truth to power" is one of the more smug and pretentious sayings around. We can see how effective it is by observing how ruthlessly corporations suppress any films that portray corporations in a negative light.

Except for a few that slip through. Like:

Avatar: The RDA Corporation strip mines a planet to satisfy Earth's energy needs, destroying the home of the native intelligent species.

Blade Runner: The Tyrell Corporation makes sex and combat androids with a lifetime of four years, giving them human intelligence and emotion, but no hope.

District 9: Multi-National United pretends to assist stranded aliens while secretly adapting their technology for weapons.

Office Space: Initech isn't evil on a global scale, just personally

Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Corporation keeps sending Sigourney Weaver and her expendable crewmates to hostile worlds in search of alien life to weaponize.

RoboCop: Omni Consumer Products takes a cop's brain and transplants it into a robot, while an especially evil executive plots to use fully robotic but faulty machines.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Corporation unleashes a zombie apocalypse on the world.

Soylent Green: The Soylent Corporation performs the ultimate in recycling, by recycling people into food wafers. Contemplate the thermodynamic impossibility of this plot. (Soyent Green II is coming out: Tag line: "Soylent Green is still people!")

Total Recall: Poor Arnold Schwartzenegger. He can't put on his socks without being attacked by an evil corporation. In this case, Rekall can give you a dream vacation full of false memories, except it also monopolizes air on Mars and uses Ahnold to try and ferret out the resistance.

The 6th Day: Replacement Technologies is plotting to replace humans with clones. Ahnold again.

The Running Man: ICS pits prisoners (Arnold, of course) against trained assassins.

The Terminator: Cyberdyne Systems creates Skynet, which launches a nuclear war and then builds robots to exterminate the survivors. Arnold is an evil robot in the first one and a good robot the next time around.

The Truman Show: A TV network keeps a man in a perpetual studio set for his entire life, and the viewing public is apparently okay with that. At least when Truman finds the way out, they don't send henchmen to stop him.

Wall-E: The BuyNLarge corporation chokes the earth with waste, strands a cute little clean-up bot on Earth to clean up the mess, and sends humanity into space, where it becomes bloated and indolent on a comfortable ship.

Silkwood: Based on the story of Karen Silkwood, who died before she could deliver the goods on a real live corporation, and who apparently never heard of Xerox machines, safe deposit boxes, and mailing backup copies of her information to multiple destinations.

Cloud Atlas: A whistle blower and a plane load of innocent people are blown up and an investigative reporter almost killed because the whistle blower apparently never heard of Xerox machines, safe deposit boxes, and mailing backup copies of his information to multiple destinations. Or e-mail.

Idiocracy: In a world ruled by idiots, the Brawndo ("It's got electrolytes") Corporation rules. My beef with this film is it went for the usual soft, non-controversial targets. Not a hint that religious cults and political lies might play a role in dumbing down society, or that just being comfortable makes people lazy. But corporations are okay to portray as evil. Because speaking truth to power.

China Syndrome: Jane Fonda reports on the possibility of a nuclear meltdown, which the evil nuclear power plant is trying to suppress.

Network: Not even TV is safe. A network news anchor goes nuts on the air and threatens to blow his brains out, and when ratings skyrocket, the network eggs him on.

Jurassic World: Ingen, the dinosaur cloners, has an executive who wants to weaponize raptors.

Wow, "speaking truth to power" really works. Because corporations are absolutely terrified about being portrayed as evil.

Five Terrible Ideas from Progressives and Conservatives

A recent article in Rolling Stone inspired a conservative writer to offer his own take on the piece. It's an nice demonstration of the fact that neither right nor left have a monopoly on bad economics. First, the liberal recipe.

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

Jesse A. Myerson,  Rolling Stone, January 3, 2014

Guaranteed Work for Everybody

Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector.

Actually not a bad idea, except for that one qualifier, "everyone who wants to contribute." Because as we see in the next topic, not everybody wants to. And a lot of the stuff we need done is decidedly non-glamorous

Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions.

Chances are, if you know enough to be useful teaching or tutoring, or paint a decent mural, you won't be part of this work force. Urban farming and cleaning up the environment won't be all that fulfilling and the "stupid tasks bosses need done," like sweeping floors and cleaning, will still need to be done in the public sector, too. How does "cleaning up the environment" differ from "picking up trash?"

Okay, so what do we do with people who just plain won't work? No money? What if they have kids? Because if just plain not working is an option, well, read the next point.

Social Security for All

Actual human workers are increasingly surplus to requirement – that's one major reason why we have such a big unemployment problem. A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."

Put another way: A universal basic income, combined with a job guarantee and other social programs, could make participation in the labor force truly voluntary, thereby enabling people to get a life.

This takes us to the fringiest areas of progressive economics, the idea that work should be purely voluntary. Nobody says it better than Washington City Paper's inimitable Franklin Schneider. God, how I love this guy. If he didn't exist, I'd have to invent him, except I would never insult leftists by accusing them of thinking like this. If I simply attributed his words to leftists, I'd be accused of creating a straw man. I couldn't begin to parody leftist thinking this brilliantly, except he's for real. Either that or he's the greatest genius troll ever. Anyway, here's "Doing More With Less: In defense of creative loafing" (Washington City Paper, March 7, 2008)

I’ve been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was exhausted. I didn’t even try to get a job; it was a paid vacation. This is somewhat unusual from what I can tell. There’s a deep vein of antipathy in this country toward collecting checks from the government, especially in precincts that tend to skew rightward. Politicians imply that it’s un-American for an individual to milk the government, all while jacking up corporate welfare for their campaign contributors.

This brand of puritanism has gained traction among the gullible masses, including those I count as friends. .....Most of them stayed on unemployment for only a few scant weeks before getting another shit job they immediately began bitching about. When I asked why, they muttered various reasons like “not wanting to be on welfare” or “wanting to work for a living.” One even fretted about “what her parents would think.” 

Given a choice between getting a check every week for doing nothing and getting a check every week for flushing 40 hours of the prime of their lives down the toilet, they chose the latter. I mean, what kind of self-hating, masochistic Protestant bullshit is that?

Not only do I feel no guilt whatsoever about sucking from the state’s teat, I feel that I’m absolutely entitled to it. First of all, the employer that fired me pays for half of my unemployment, and fuck them.

Second of all, it’s really my money in the first place. See, your employer never pays you what you’re worth—there’s a surplus, some of which goes toward overhead and various other business costs, and the rest of which is kept as profit. (This is what Marx was referring to when he talked about “exploitation of the workers.”) A tiny fraction of this surplus—which, again, has been skimmed off of my labor—is put into a government-mandated account to go toward unemployment checks for fired workers. So yeah, it’s my money. Give it back. And since most people’s lives are so devoid of meaning that they’d rather go directly into another shitty job than be forced to confront the sheer emptiness of their existence, most of that money never even gets distributed.

There's simply not enough room here to analyze this gem in depth. As Gunther Stent noted in "Paradoxes of Progress," when people have their needs satisfied, they find not working to be a very viable option.

Take Back The Land

The most mainstream way of flipping the script is a simple land-value tax. By targeting wealthy real estate owners and their free rides, we can fight inequality and poverty 

Fascinatingly, this is identical to the conservative recipe below, with one teensy-weensy difference. Myerson wants it in addition to existing taxes and Mathews below wants it to replace existing taxes. Myerson is apparently unaware that there are already property taxes, which often enough have the effect of driving people out of their homes when their property values rise because of nearby development.

Make Everything Owned by Everybody

There's a way easier way to collectivize wealth ownership than having to stage uprisings that seize the actual airplanes and warehouses and whatnot: Just buy up their stocks and bonds. When the government does that, it's called a sovereign wealth fund.

Well, gotta give Myerson props for not calling for violent revolution. Buy up all the stocks and bonds. So simple. With what? Tax dollars? Or just print money? Ignoring for the moment the inflationary problem, let's say we buy up $50 trillion of stocks and bonds. Now, "we the people" own $50 trillion in stocks and bonds. In other words, pieces of paper. And the people who sold them now have $50 trillion in cash to buy ... land? buildings? water rights? mineral rights?

The successful sovereign wealth funds have a source of income, like oil. Creating one out of thin air will be an interesting feat.

A Public Bank in Every State

The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market. It doesn't play around with incomprehensible derivatives and allow its executives to extract billions of dollars. It just makes loans and works with debtors to pay them off.

No, the public bank in a state with a total population less than a medium-sized city probably won't, at least not now. Care to bet the City Bank of Detroit or the State Bank of Nevada won't? And just wait till politicians sell enough taxpayers on the idea of borrowing from the bank as opposed to raising taxes.

So as counterpoint, we have this piece, written in rebuttal to Myerson's.

Five Conservative Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

Dylan Mathews, Wonkblog January 7, 2013

End the long-term unemployment crisis

Kevin Hassett, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute who was one of Mitt Romney's lead advisors during his 2012 run, has proposed that the government directly hire the long-term unemployed. This could be implemented  by simply paying businesses to bring on more workers, and then phasing the subsidy out over time.

Mathews tweaks Myerson's idea a bit. Subsidize businesses to hire workers and then phase out the subsidy. Since when has a subsidy ever been phased out? And when the subsidy is phased out, how long before the workers are unemployed again? Hint: look at the cities that have given subsidies to businesses to locate there, only to have the business fold, be sold, or move a few years later.

Tear down the welfare bureaucracy

Food stamps must be spent on food, but what if the family receiving them needs help on rent more? Why should the government tell them how to spend their money, any more than it should tell the rest of us? Worst of all, the current, hugely bureaucratic system props up a class of unionized government workers who can't be fired and who pension costs are bankrupting our states and cities.

He can't resist the talking point that pension costs are bankrupting our states and cities. No they're not. Not paying debts on time is bankrupting our states and cities. If states and cities had funded their pensions all along, they wouldn't be in trouble. They deserve no more sympathy than a homeowner who can't make his mortgage payments because he blew the money in Las Vegas.

Wonderful idea, and right in line with observations by progressives that poverty is simply lack of money. Mathews observes that food stamps give people help with food, but what if the critical need is rent instead? Ahh, but this reform comes with a hook in it. Just look at the complaints from people who see food stamp recipients buying junk food. Or the anger at the revelation that some people figure out how to swap benefits for sex, drugs, or alcohol. (Basic Econ 101: anything of value can be traded for anything else of value. The workarounds to evade restrictions on how the money can be spent add inefficiencies, and guarantee the middlemen will get a hefty chunk, while the welfare recipients will get a lot less buying power, is all.)

I guarantee that if welfare recipients had to go to a warehouse and pick up sacks of rice and beans for food, within hours somebody would be buying them at 75% of their market value, and the money would be spent on other things. Then, when the hunger began to pinch, they'd re-sell the rice and beans at 110% of market value to those same people.

So just imagine we give all welfare recipients unrestricted cash equal to the value of their present benefits. Then someone finds, about a nanosecond later, that some have spent it on booze, drugs or sex, leaving their kids hungry. Cue the calls to abolish welfare entirely in 3, 2, 1 ....  And of course, the kids who aren't being fed properly will have to be assisted, eating up the savings from eliminating the welfare bureaucracy, which will end up being re-established to make sure money intended to aid the poor actually reaches its intended recipients.

"Why should the government tell them how to spend their money, any more than it should tell the rest of us?" Because we have a lot of Puritanical voters and politicians who insist on it.

Eliminate job-killing income, payroll, and corporate taxes

Mathews' plan is a single tax on land, an idea that has been floated around forever and not implemented for reasons that have been obvious forever.

The most obvious reason why we don't have a single tax of any kind is that people would put all their money into non-taxed sectors. Go ahead, tax my land. I'll live in a bungalow on a small lot and make all my money from capital gains, which are not taxed, and when I want elbow room, I'll winter in Aruba. Meanwhile, farmers, with lots of land, get taxed like crazy, and end up selling to developers. The developers in turn subdivide, build houses and pay no taxes at all on the sales. It works that way whatever is your single tax. Tax gold? Fine, I'll put it all in art. Tax stocks? I'll hold gold. 

Another problem is that there's a limit to how much tax you can collect on land. Unlike, say, corporate profits, which keep coming in, land doesn't produce additional value. So the total amount of taxes that can be collected will be so small as to starve the government (gee, I wonder if they thought of that) or force landowners to sell, most likely at depressed prices, leaving land in the hands of a very small number of large landholders (gee, I wonder if they thought of that, too).

The other principal objection here is, what assurance do we have that the money freed up by eliminating income, payroll and corporate taxes will actually go into creating jobs? For that matter, where exactly is the proof that income, payroll and corporate taxes really cost jobs at all, apart from the unsupported claims of people who want to ban these taxes? Give me the computer code. Show me a computer model that accurately tracks the U.S. economy and show that it predicts job gains if we repeal taxes. You want that rigor for evidence of global climate change. Fine, produce an equally rigorous forecast for the economy. Put up or shut up.

Have Social Security invest in the private sector, not the government

This is a wonderful idea. Let's establish a few ground rules:

• The value of Social Security accounts can never decrease.
• No company that receives investments from Social Security may declare bankruptcy, and the FTC can suspend trade in that company's stocks if investors begin to bail.
• No officers of any company that Social Security invests in may declare personal bankruptcy and they are personally liable for all losses.

Help small businesses grow

Mathews nearly repeats Myerson's argument for public banks, even going so far as to praise the same example. This actually makes me suspect it's the lone idea in these pieces that's viable.

Mathews, though, doesn't want the public banks to compete with private banks, but partner with them. So presumably that means not undercutting them on checking and ATM fees, just like banks bitterly resent the paltry competition from credit unions. And if public banks give out loans that private banks won't, isn't that competition?

So if public banks really take off and seriously cut into the business of Bank of America or CitiBank, look for pressure to mount on Congress to rein them in.

There's a Reason the Laws are Complex

Reality is complex. Simple solutions invariably create loopholes you can fly a 747 through.

Carnival Cruise Line and the Problem of Evil

No, fun though it might be, this isn't a cheap shot at Carnival, which had some very embarrassing moments in 2013. Nevertheless, millions of people have had millions of pleasurable moments and gained millions of pounds on Carnival cruises.

One of Carnival's mishaps spawned some of the most bizarre theological discussions ever. A small child drowned in a pool with dozens or people around, none of whom saw him until too late. The account mentioned onlookers praying for him, which in turn prompted a lot of snarky comments on the inefficacy of prayer, plus questions about why God would allow such a thing to happen. 

This wasn't a typhoon slamming into the Philippines, or a shoddy building catching fire or collapsing in some Third World slum. This was as close to a Garden of Eden existence as you can hope to find on this planet. Nobody was in want, nobody was hungry, nobody was cold, nobody lacked shelter, nobody lacked any material need, nobody was afraid, nobody was acting malevolently. Everyone was in a good mood, and probably even people who could be very nasty in everyday life were mellow and minding their own business. And yet a small child drowned in full view of all of them.

The obvious answer is complacency. Nobody expected a drowning, and nobody imagined that someone could drown in such a crowded setting without somebody spotting it in time. Very likely everyone assumed that any children in the pool were being watched by parents as required by posted signs, although this child was unsupervised. If it had been someone going for a 2 A.M. drunken dip, people would no doubt have expressed regret, but nobody would have been especially shocked. But this happened in broad daylight with a crowd surrounding the pool. Probably every onlooker would have tried to assist or at least alerted the crew had they seen it, but nobody was specifically watching for trouble, and so nobody spotted it until too late.  It doesn't help that drowning people don't fit the stereotype of the thrashing, struggling swimmer. Drowning people struggle quietly. They're too busy trying to push their heads above water to thrash, and too busy trying to gulp air to yell.

Once upon a time, people in America felt it was safe to leave doors unlocked, with the inevitable result that other people began taking advantage of easy access to peoples' belongings. During the Sexual Revolution, people enjoyed carefree sex, until herpes and AIDS spoiled the fun, because micro-organisms are very inventive. But criminals and disease are agents of evil, which in an ideal world would not exist. When people ask how a good God can permit evil to happen, what they often actually mean is "why didn't God make the world like Disneyland, or maybe a Carnival cruise?" And the answer is, look what actually did happen on a Carnival cruise.

So let's try to imagine a perfect world where nothing bad can ever happen. There is no disease and no crime, and no harmful animals or plants. But you can still get hurt. You can get hit by lightning and falling rocks, and you can fall off cliffs. What would happen? With no disease, people would probably get very casual about hygiene. What about leaving food out? Would it spoil? Waaah, why would a good God let my food spoil? Build your home on the edge of a cliff or too close to the water? Waaah, why would a good God let my house fall off the cliff? Waaah, why would a good God let my house be flooded? Would God let you float to the ground if you jumped off a cliff? Would God pop food into your mouth if you failed to feed yourself? In Exodus, God fed the Israelites with manna, but they still had to go out and collect it (and they got bored with it, eventually).

A good example of people living in a too-comfortable world (apart from one very big problem) is H. G. Wells' Time Machine. In this future world, humanity has evolved into two races, the surface dwelling, hedonistic Eloi and the subterranean, technological and cannibalistic Morlocks (the one very big problem I mentioned). The good film version (1960) displays starkly just how contemptible the Eloi have become. When a young woman is swept into a stream, the other Eloi make no effort to aid her (Saving Yvette Mimieux? A no-brainer.). When the Time Traveler asks where their fruit comes from, one answers dully "It grows." When he expresses a desire to learn about them, the Eloi asks "Why?" in a tone of voice as if to say "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of." The Time Traveler is shown a library of books that crumble into dust when touched and berates the Eloi for wasting humanity's legacy.

But we don't need science fiction, because it's happening all around us. The better the world gets, the worse we get. America has the lowest crime rates in decades, yet we see people calling for ever more draconian punishments, and demanding the right to carry guns wherever they go. We periodically go into frenzies over imaginary crime waves. It seems the safer we get the more frightened we get. The more powerful our medicine gets, the more prone we are to complain about the cost and accuse doctors of withholding miraculous medicines. In fact, the more benefits of any kind we get, the more we see people accusing the very providers of exploiting them. Our Eloi have the civility and empathy of Morlocks, and our Morlocks are actually the civilized ones.

But it's an old story. Adam and Eve awoke in a world capable of supplying their every need. Everything was provided to them solely out of benevolence, or grace, as the theologians call it. And in short order they were convinced that God was scheming to withhold something from them that they had a right to (the first conspiracy theory?). "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Up to this point, Adam and Eve have contributed nothing to the world, and yet they think their rights are being infringed. Just like people who know nothing about science are convinced that science is lying to them about the age of the earth, or climate change, or the need for vaccination, and people who know nothing about economics are convinced that the rich or welfare recipients are robbing them blind. 

Ever think the Garden of Eden story is so unfair? I mean, why do we get kicked out of Eden because Adam and Eve screwed up? Well, the good news is, we do get born into the Garden of Eden. And the bad news is, before we can talk, we fall for the snake's pitch and exile ourselves. Think about it. You have no worries, no responsibilities, and everything you need is provided for you. And before you can even crawl, you flunk the first test. The world does not provide you with instant gratification. No matter how diligent your Mom is, she'll be doing something selfish like putting out a grease fire when you want to be fed now, or she'll fail to divine what's making you cry, or, cruelest perfidy of all, maybe she and Dad will be collaborating on another sibling. 

A little later on, when you develop some motor control, the snake slithers back and springs a second test on you. You want a toy. There's one across the room, and another one much closer in the hands of another toddler. What to do? The easy thing, of course, grab the toy away from the other child. And when we develop language skills, we do exactly what Adam and Eve did in the Genesis story. When confronted with wrongdoing, we lie, excuse ourselves, and accuse others. Game, set, match. Exit through the gate past the angel with the flaming sword, please. We don't have a lovely parting gift for you. 

And there's one final thing we do: we blame reality for our problems. My parents are to blame for sending me to my room. My Teacher is to blame because I failed. That stupid cop went and gave me a ticket. The System is to blame for sending me to prison. Care to bet Adam and Eve spent a lot of time complaining that God was such a tyrant? I mean, what's one lousy piece of fruit anyway?

There is, of course, a solution. It would require that human nature itself change so that we all exercise good judgement. We don't build houses in dangerous places. We accept that storms are a necessary force for flushing wastes and replenishing shorelines and wetlands, and we build suitably. We accept that earthquakes and volcanoes are part of the price for having the mountains that make the world beautiful and we exercise prudence. In short, there is no Original Sin.

It's pretty clear that the kind of world many of the "Why would a good God ...?" people envision would end up with God intervening constantly to save people from the consequences of their laziness and carelessness. And since I've seen comments from people who more or less explicitly assert that "compassion" means not allowing consequences of any kind, that's no exaggeration. God would effectively become a concierge and a janitor. The Garden of Eden on a cruise ship is sustained by lots of people, roughly one for every three passengers, working all the time, and enjoying a much less than Eden existence themselves. 

Why didn't God make the world like a Carnival cruise?" Because, look what actually did happen on a Carnival cruise.