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kob131 · 4 years

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1q5Hk7u9aw

Ah FMF, even when you’re not Genwunning RT writing, you’re still not good. So Why am I covering his video on a ‘bad review’ of Netflix’s Death Note? Well this was used in the video of a Youtuber I once respected and I’m pretty sure he started adopting FMF’s bullshit so I’ve decided dissect the video to showcase that he’s bad at this no matter what the subject and why he shouldn’t be listen to.

Before we even begin, FMF begins his video with saying ‘this is just my opinion’ even though his video is titled ‘A response to a bad Death Note review’ and he has a visual counter system for what the original video gets wrong called ‘Wrong/Illogical’ which aren’t opinions. Honestly, it comes off as FMF using this as a shield to prevent criticism.

So his first point against Cosmonaut Variety Hour is that he complains about the pacing, talking about how Netflix Light gets the Death Note 2 minutes in, meets Ryuk 8 minutes in and kills his first victim a little later. FMF says that the anime had Light following a similar path. Which is true...only because FMF cuts off Cosmonaut’s final part: where he states a short while later Light gets a girl friend (Misa/Mia). This completely changes things, as how many minutes into the anime does Light get a girlfriend?

Well, each episode is about 22 minutes long with episode 1 being 23. Light and Misa part ways about 3 minutes 15 seconds into Episode 14. However, about 2 minutes 40 seconds of each episode is opening and ending. So let’s do the math.

22 * 13 + 4.25 = 290.25

2.66 * 13 + 1.5 (the opening is about 1 minute 30 seconds) = 36.08

290.25 - 36.08 = 254.17

Each .01 is .6 seconds. so 17 X .6 is 10.2

the time to getting Misa is 290 minutes and 10.2 seconds. In the movie? Let’s just say 30 minutes for simplicity’s sake (it’s more like 27 minutes and 11 seconds). That’s a net difference of 260 minutes and 10.2 seconds. WELL over double the length of the movie. So Cosmonaut’s point makes sense, if a bit ill explained.

Also in this point, he says it doesn’t make sense because Cosmonaut said ‘I like it wasn’t two hours’ ... when anyone with awareness could tell that wasn’t an actual like, it was a potshot at the movie’s poor quality that it was short.

The next point is that Cosmonaut complains about the movie not fleshing out Light, Mia and Ryuk. FMF says the exposition before finding the Death Note is about explaining Light’s life situation. ... This is a really dishonest response because he cuts off Cosmonaut explaining himself, up to and including how he would have found the few scenes with Light, Ryuk and Mia interesting if they were all more fleshed out. Not only is this stuff not helping because only one third of his point is addressed- Light’s life situation is mostly technical and meant to build up his motivation whereas Cosmonaut is talking about Light and the others as people. It’s reliant on FMF either missing or misinterpreting the point, neither of which is acceptable.

Also, in the bit he doesn’t show, Cosmonaut says ‘I’m not saying make this two hours. For the love of God, don’t make this two hours long’ with an image of a man having a heart attack, which should have informed FMF than part of his previous point was based on taking a blatant joke seriously. ... Yeah.

Next point is...Nothing. No seriously, Cosmonaut says ‘spend some time making your main character likeable or relatable in any way’ and FMF just says ‘You can’t just say there’s nothing to like.’ He doesn’t even give an example whereas Cosmonaut does, showcasing that infamous scream of Light’s (given, FMF cut that part off.) He also considers this wrong by the way. Not in my words, his ‘Wrong’ counter goes up.

His next point is about when Cosmonaut says the logic of the movie is being dumb because Light chose the name Kira. FMF claims that the logic is sound because Light makes a dumb decision and he gets immediately figured out. Issue is that A. He cut Cosmonaut mentioning that Light in the anime never actually choosing the name (setting up how the name choosing is dumb) B. That it doesn’t get immediately figured out until L figures it out (a character meant to be smart) and C. The movie itself never treats the name as being a dumb decision, in fact the police are stated to have fallen for it. Nothing here functions.

The following point is ... another dishonest one. Cosmonaut says that L finding out that Kira’s name is a misdirection doesn’t make him look smart, it makes him look dumber than Light. And FMF responds by saying ‘that doesn’t make sense because L used the death of the first victim to find out where Light was, like the anime version did!’. Thing is, Cosmonaut is saying it makes him look dumb, not that he is. You normally don’t notice this because both involve discussing L’s intelligence, never realizing that FMF is talking about something different. This is a fallacy called ‘pivoting’: you see politicians doing this a lot. He’s being dishonest again.

Before we move onto the next point, I wanna point out that he skips Cosmonaut bitching about the movie giving L a reason to eat candy and how it doesn’t make sense. Thing is, Cosmonaut says that the movie is stating candies can keep you awake for 48 hours but the clip he shows doesn’t say that. It was 41 hours and the topic was keeping his mind focused. You’d think FMF would jump on this since he IS wrong here...but no, he doesn’t. Trust me when I say this becomes important later.

fMF;s next point is another case of cut context. He shows a clip of Cosmonaut saying some scenes were likely cut with an example of Ryuk saying he’s disappointed and that he said Light should give up the Death Note while FMF responds by saying Ryuk already informed him. Thing is, Cosmonaut is talking about Ryuk SAYING Light should give it up instead of INFORMING Light he can give it up like FMF says, playing a clip where Ryuk says as much (’I asked politely but you didn’t hear me: let the note go!’) and Cosmonaut even rebutes FMF’s point, saying what Ryuk did before was inform him of an option but not insisted on it (in fact egging Light on). Again, relying on cutting off his argument.

His point afterward is short but correct: Cosmonaut says L should be surprised Light knows his name and FMF shows that they revealed it earlier. I think it’s also the only point so far that he hasn’t cut off.

The next is one that FMF doesn’t cut off but is still rather sneaky. Cosmonaut says the movie is making the case for Light Turner being smart and FMF says the movie is making the case that Light is poor, has iffy morals ect. This is the scene that most people point to saying the movie says Light is smart here. FMF is trying to disprove that by giving an alternate interpretation. Thing is, why would anyone pay to have their homework partially done by a dumb person? That...doesn’t make sense. And Light has 15 customers at least, since he was found with at least 15 people’s homework on him when he was found after being punched (something FMF tries to use to say ‘see? He was punched for trying to be clever! The movie’s not saying he’s smart!’) so he should know this.

Afterward, he tackles Cosmonaut’s point about Light cracking under pressure by saying the pressure is mounting on him. I could understand this (ignoring how I’ve made this same point to him about RWBY...) except that in the anime even more pressure was on Light and he never cracked like this. Is Light Turner a different character? Yes...but no one mentions this.

“‘Lust for power’ is one of the most basic human motivations in the world.” is his next counter argument against Cosmonaut, who says ‘we never learn why Mia wants to kill everybody.” I’m afraid I can’t let the RWBY thing directly slid anymore because this standard could really affect his work: Cinder has the EXACT SAME motivation and no one buys that shit. We don’t buy it because there has to be a reason BEHIND the lust for power. Even Dio had this (he wanted power because of his fucked up childhood.) So he really should be calling this out himself. ESPECIALLY if he’s called out Cinder before.

Next up is FMF going on and on about how the movie shows Light isn’t smart (Err, no. Getting punched was suppose to show how crooked the system was) and how L is making this a game for his ego (he...never prove this beyond showing L refer to this as a game. Nothing for ego) in response to Light being called dumb... And why wouldn’t he be considered smart? He outright says L refers to him as smart and while he says it’s for his ego, not only is the homework thing logically about him being smart but the character Turner is adapted from is notoriously smart so that’s just...logical.

Next one is fucking weird. Cosmonaut says the rule about the Death Note’s burning page makes no sense and FMF says that while he agrees with it, he tries to insert a counter by saying that ‘taking Ryuk at face value, it might not work at all.’ ... The rule wasn’t said by Ryuk, it’s said in the Death Note. Ryuk was saying that he can only do it once. He fucked up a point he says he mostly agree with.

Next part is Cosmonaut saying it’s stupid that Watari only has one name and is using his real name and FMF says that it makes sense as Watari needs to be contacted to get to L...ignoring that you could just have a private number. And before someone complains at me since he says its an opinion: that ‘Wrong’ counter goes up and that ain’t an opinion so I’m not buying it.

The next part brings up that Light got Watari’s name from his dad, something Cosmonaut says L should have known better because L wasn’t a suspect yet while FMF points out that Light wasn’t a suspect yet. ... This is still calls L’s intelligence into question as he was giving out his partner’s name out so it can be researched...and he has the man undisguised with him in the open (which is how Light gets his face).

Next part I’ll give: This version of L is emotional so FMF is right...if he had taken the time to establish this is suppose to be a video looking at the movie on it’s own. FMF, you need to give context.

Next two are basically the same: Cosmonaut bitches about Light not giving a reason for not wanting to killing Watari and FMF cities ‘we don’t kill people’ and ‘survival instinct’ for why he would want to kill L as reasons...which brings up: wouldn’t killing Watari also fall under ‘survival instinct’? Kill L’s ally/possible avenger?

The next point is really stupid. It’s bitching about the moment where Watari dies, Cosmonaut saying that it doesn’t make sense that Watari doesn’t reveal L’s name while FMF says that Ryuk could have interpreted his ‘dealer’s choice’ to kill him without revealing the name to fuck with Light...Ryuk’s never acted to fuck with Light like that before (could have interpreted the names being written to mean [Reveal Light’s name to the world] too) and ‘dealer’s choice’ refers to the type of death, not what everything in it means.

He then mocks Cosmonaut for saying a scene of Ryuk saying ‘dealer’s choice!’ disproved what Cosmonaut said before. Ignoring that I have personally seen him pull this on RWBY- He does this same thing here NUMEROUS TIMES with Cosmonaut. It still doesn’t make sense because Ryuk, when Watari’s circumstances are written down, mentioned the cause of death SPECIFICALLY. That’s why there’s an issue.

Afterward Cosmonaut bitches that Mia can’t get the Death Note because he needs to live it alone for seven days while FMF corrects him as he shows Light can just give it up. Nothing really bad here (in a vacuum). Same with the ‘finding Light’ thing that comes after (in a vacuum).

Next is FMF being suspicious again. He cuts up Cosmonaut’s argument about why there is so many police at the pier and why the are there that he cuts out a part of Cosmonaut’s point (that they found L so there’s no reason for so much force there). And his ‘within reason’ thing pops up again even as he doesn’t afford Cosmonaut that. Same with the ‘L said Light is Kira and he took my gun’ counter to Cosmonaut even though in any other circumstance he would have ignored that.

Next is...confusing AND bullshit. Cosmonaut says that, with Light writing that if Mia takes the Death Note she dies, the Death Note is never shown to have these kinds of deaths. And FMF says that...it wasn’t the Death Note. ... Even though the end, Light did write that down. FMF tries to justify this by saying Mia was forced to do it by the Death Note by referencing her saying ‘I love you so much’ and looking shocked when getting the Death note...what he DOESN’T show you is Light saying ‘If you love me, you gotta trust me. Don’t take the book’ before her line, Light getting distracted by his dad afterward, panicking when she takes it THEN her looking shocked as she said ‘What?’. FMF is pretty much LYING at that point.

Cosmonaut has this really big point about Light’s plan from the movie’s climax where FMF attacks some of the aspects. One is him saying Light needed to discredit L to get off the hook (even though he never shows the part about the criminal being brainwashed into doing Light’s dirty work to clear his name.) He brings up Watari not knowing where L’s orphanage is...even though he could have learned about it off screen.

And we end with him making a technical error: he says that the page L has also has the rules/instructions on it...and I can’t tell what it says. So it’s as good as worthless.

Cosmonaut did make a few mistakes and FMF could have made an actual good video by addressing how he doesn’t explain the points he makes against the movie...but that isn’t what he did. Instead of going for smaller but truthful criticisms, he goes for big, flashy and ultimately fault at the VERY best and disgustingly manipulative at worst. All of this without mentioning his hypocrisy with RWBY (example: he ignores anything that doesn’t happen on screen and gives no logical concessions to the show while demanding Cosmonaut do that.) Even when giving him some credit, the man makes it so his targets always look better out of it because he’s so dishonest and manipulative.

Honestly, no one should look to him for inspiration or good points. Because even with a video as bare bones and basic as Cosmonaut, he makes it look like a work of Robert Ebert.

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tanadrin · 7 years

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Outline for an essay I don’t have the energy to write or sufficiently research right now (all highly speculative!):

Thesis: Colonizing Mars is a bad idea, with very little to gain (except the aesthetic, which for some people--including me--is quite compelling). It absolutely shouldn’t be done right now, and certainly not by Elon Musk.

I. Economic considerations:

A. It’s expensive, of course; but beyond that there is no economic incentive to put a permanent human settlement on Mars. Mars has no resources which can’t be found on Earth, and very many that can’t (including many that would have to be imported, like oxygen).

B. Self-sufficiency would be extremely difficult. Lack of oxygen; lack of Earthlike soil in which to grow plants; lack of a microbiome to support a ground-up ecology; minor equipment failures could be catastrophic. Even if self-sufficiency was attained, a Mars colony would have trouble exporting anything of value to create wealth. Resources would have to be lifted out of Mars’ gravity, and sent all the way to Earth, and any imports back to Mars would be even more expensive (Earth’s gravity is greater, and air resistance is worse). Non primary/secondary sector industries would have to contend with the primitive state of the Martian economy, lag times between Mars/Earth communication, difficulty of establishing a high-bandwidth connection.

C. This doesn’t even get into power generation issues (dust storms and further distance from the sun inhbit solar a bit, but it’s the best option; no fossil fuels unless you ship them from Earth; nuclear fuel also a good choice, but IDK if you’d have to send that from Earth or you could expect to find it in situ; Mars’ atmosphere is very thin, so wind power probably wouldn’t work so well).

D. Any useful resource extraction will be badly outcompeted by much more profitable applications of the same engineering breakthroughs that would support Mars colonization, that is to say, asteroid mining, where there’s only one gravity well to contend with (Earth’s), and you can just schlepp the thing into orbit. Or lunar mining (gravity is still much weaker than Mars, no dust storms or air resistance to contend with).

E. This is more of a footnote really, but: any useful unique scientific breakthroughs to come out of getting a permanent population to mars are more likely to be engineering breakthroughs, with narrow applicability. Good science can be done easier, more safely, and cheaper with robots. Or even with putting humans in orbit of Mars and sending robots to the surface. This is the problem with all manned space exploration, especially as robotics and AI improves.

II. Environmental considerations

A. Mars is a nearly pristine environment about which we know comparatively little. Compare Antarctica; it would be better to preserve it as it is for all of humanity and for future generations, than to colonize it and risk damaging that environment (especially if it has native life!).

(Speaking of Antarctica: Antarctica is much closer, much more hospitable to humans, and we’ve been going there for centuries. Its current population is... a whopping 1 to 5000 depending on the season, roughly zero of which is permanent. This is a good proxy for the actual usefulness of Mars colonization, I feel.)

B. (This part could also go in economics section) No sustained environmental pressure on Earth makes Mars colonization attractive; Earth can support billions more, emigration to Mars would remain expensive and difficult, Mars unlikely to be able to support large human population for decades or centuries after colonization.

C. From a purely environmentalist standpoint: even if Mars doesn’t have life, it’s still an *environment*, if a dead one; it’s as unique and interesting in its own right as any other environment in the Solar System. Wantonly invading that environment is morally suspect (from certain perspectives), especially in the absence of a compelling utility to humanity (”it would be awesome” probably doesn’t count).

III. Political considerations

A. Recapitulating atomistic individualist politics in an environment which will demand high degrees of cooperation is dicey. (I may be very wrong about this, but) Musk’s flavor of intrepidity (is that a word?), while admirable, seems very much based on this outlook.

B. Under this worldview, colonization in an environment where profits are unlikely to be had, disagreement is likely to exist between competing people with highly articulated visions for a future society, and individuals play an outsized role in political organization--but a high degree of cooperation is necessary to be successful--such an enterprise seems dicey at best.

C. Add to this the fact that oversight from existing legal structures will be nil, and actual ability to send people to intervene virtually nonexistent. Compare, by way of example, the political chaos that existed in early colonization efforts in America (h/t to @femmenietzsche‘s podcasts on the subject), where the environment was much *more* hospitable, and economic incentives to colonization existed at least in theory (gold, tobacco, acquiring slaves for sugar plantations).

(Luckily, Mars has no native population, so we can at least be assured that particular kind of monstrosity will not be recapitulated.)

D. There exist forms of political organization, and visions of civil society, that I think would be well adapted to the Martian context (consesus decisionmaking, anarchosyndicalism, even just the comparatively modest reforms to modern liberal capitalism proposed by people like Yanis Varoufakis that would minimize wealth inequality and prevent the emergence of huge social divisions in an early colony). They haven’t been tried at large scale though; I don’t think Musk is a particular supporter of those ideas (could be wrong); and any colonization attempt steeped in atomistic individualism/strong libertarianism is likely to be skeptical of such forms of organization.

E. Incidentally I think any group of initial colonists should be stacked so as to encourage a unique Martian ethnogenesis: it should be diverse, favoring no nationality or ethnic group (as much as possible), but with a strong common ideological reference point. It should try as much as possible to take the positive lessons of historical settler colonialism, while learning from the negatives (again, luckily no natives to displace; but nativism still possible, and the importing of old prejudices from Earth.)

F. But I think it would be better to hold off colonizing Mars at a large scale until we’re better about dealing with political tensions in general, and we can apply well-tested lessons learned on Earth to any attempt to build a new society on another planet.

IV. Miscellany

A. Trying to build human-hospitable environments on Mars is difficult and kinda dumb. Trying to terraform it is even dumber. Better to just genetically engineer humans and Earth biota to survive better on Mars (or at least to survive on a semi-terraformed Mars, or isolated environments that don’t have to be made entirely Earthlike). The energy cost is far lower, for the simple reason you don’t have to move millions of kg of stuff around to accomplish it (or worry about your terraformed atmosphere leaking off into space, because Mars is a low-gravity shithole that only seems attractive for colonization because Venus melts lead).

B. But honestly, if we’re going to go that far, just genetically and cybernetically engineer humans to live in asteroids, or a hard vacuum or something; much science fiction, and actual ambition, around human colonization of other worlds and spacefaring in general is predicated around the assumption we must make the universe hospitable to us; why not make ourselves hospitable to the universe? The essentially good things about humanity are not our number of toes or the spectrum of light we use to see, so there’s no reason to be too attached to them--and if we indeed want to ensure the survivability of our descendants, while being a multi-planet species is a start, being able to exist somewhere other than the very narrow shell of temperatures/air pressures/chemically favorable environments found on the surface of the Earth would be even better.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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K-12: Dumbing-Down Is Not a Good Strategy

Is there a law somewhere which requires that public schools must aim for mediocrity?

Nobody denies that our toys, including games and robots, are smarter than ever. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that we humans are moving in the other direction: dumber and dumbest.

The unanimity of opinion is rather shocking. You see on the Internet a lot of headlines like this: “Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing — and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak.”

As for why, there is a colorful variety of opinion. Some people blame pollution, diet, and/or environmental degradation. Others look for sociological causes, for example, fewer children or too many. Or is there genetic decay? Molecules and genes wear down just because they are old and exhausted.

Star2, a news site, announced: “Science is telling us that we’re getting dumber….An Icelandic study…says we might be headed on a ‘downwards spiral into imbecility’… Researchers at deCODE, a genetics firm in Reykjavik, identified ‘education genes,’ genes that predispose humans to becoming more educated, and noted that there has been a decline over the past 65 years – meaning that the genes that make us want to get educated are becoming rarer.”

A headline in the Daily Mail asks, “Were the Victorians cleverer than us? Research indicates a decline in brainpower and reflex speed thanks to 'REVERSE' natural selection.”

Or maybe we are inflicting this damage on ourselves. According to Charlotte Iserbyt's famous book title, our public schools are engaged in “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” Public education seems to be cunningly designed to render students less intelligent and less capable, most commonly by making literacy and other basic skills harder to achieve.

Progressive education, according to Ayn Rand, was never designed to educate minds but to mutilate them. Public schools these days, though handsome architecturally, seem to be the intellectual equivalent of a crack house.

The theories and methods now used throughout K-12 education do make students dumber. Here’s the triad most commonly seen: students can’t read except in a fumbling way due to Sight-words; they can’t do basic arithmetic and become calculator-dependent, due to Common Core Math; and they don't learn very much factual information, due to Constructivism.

It was once emphatically understood that the role of teachers was to raise the intelligence of their students and make them smarter. But now the role of the teacher is being cut down to nothing. Even if teachers wanted to raise intelligence, they won’t know how to do it. Constructivist theory, now dominating, drives teachers to the margins. Achtung, teachers: No serious teaching allowed. No direct instruction. Don't even try passing knowledge on to the next generation.

ASCD, a big voice in the Education Establishment, has an illuminating article about “the teacher’s role.” Illuminating because it’s an endless article (11,500 words) in no hurry to say very much. This shows what our experts are mired in: jargon, rhetoric, sophistry, propaganda, posturing, mush. A teacher could spend weeks carefully reading this article and end up further away from knowing what the job is or how to do it correctly.

On the other hand, this is what the government of Ghana states is the role of the teacher: “to communicate information.” So brief, so complete, so beautiful. You probably cannot find that elemental truth on an American website. Facts and knowledge, that’s what genuine teaching is all about.

The changes and decline in K-12 may be a case of extraordinarily bad timing. As the environment and many factors work against intelligence, our own Education Establishment is working hardest of all. These people will not give up their sweet socialist dream of everyone being equal, i.e. mediocre.

If all the prophets of doom are correct, our school officials have chosen the worst time in history to diminish what brains we have left. The bad timing is scary, perhaps even suicidal.

Clearly, we need to go on the opposite direction. Our so-called education experts need to run back to the drawing board. We need to make students smarter than ever before because now the bottom is collapsing under us. We are going to get a doubling affect.

It’s shocking to think that a hundred years ago, teachers were constantly pushing, poking and cajoling to make students work harder. There was a dunce cap for students who didn’t study. But now there’s little pressure not to be a dunce. This is a sad shift.

The Education Establishment has achieved its dumbing-down by the simple device of neglecting the traditional truths of education. Namely, teach basic skills and foundational knowledge. Everything commonsensical has been undermined. That's what we have to go back to. And maybe we could start by eliminating the impostors in our school system. These are the emperors with no clothes. They can talk-talk-talk about education but what they really care about is social engineering. We’ve had quite enough of that.

After a stroke, people sometimes have to teach themselves how to write or tell time. You have to start at the beginning and learn skills again. It’s doable; you can come back 100%. This country has, so to speak, been the victim of a weird stroke engineered by our self-appointed experts. Now we have to go to rehab. We have to work to make ourselves healthy again.

QED: Every American needs to learn more about what goes on in our public schools. If you know what's wrong, then you can fix it.

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is “Saving K-12” He deconstructs educational theories and methods on Improve-Education.org.

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tanadrin · 7 years

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Utopia: A How-To Guide

So, I picked up "Utopia For Realists" by Rutger Bregman at Dussman yesterday, somewhat intrigued by its title; based on the blurbs inside the cover and the summary on the back, I was expecting something, well, a lot more utopian: a look at crazy pie in the sky ideas which sound terribly interesting but also are ridiculously impractical. In reality, the book is much more modest. It's basically a 250-page, meticulously footnoted argument for a modest progressive political program, written in an informal and approachable style, which has some (fairly restrained) rebukes in it toward leftism that's more about shoring up the identities of activists, or aiming at poorly defined abstract goals than actually improving people's lives. I don't think many people reading this will substantially disagree with the ideas Bregman presents, but he condenses a lot of persuasive arguments in favor of them into a single place, and in a form which I think is likelier to appeal to the average person interested in politics as opposed to the average rationalist-adjacent Tumblr user.

Notes I made and passages I highlighted:

The opening chapter is basically about how much *better* the modern world is than the world of the recent past; this is probably obvious to anybody who's at all sympathetic to Whig history or interested in technological progress/transhumanism, but Bregman is making a larger point here: a lot of the things that were hilariously impossible Utopian dreams in the past we have achieved, and we've achieved them precisely because people were capable of imagining absurd Utopias, and refused to give up on them until they achieved them. In contrast, Bregman contends, most contemporary politics is patching minor deficiencies in the current system--important, to be sure, but this work doesn't provide a structure for forward progress, and we're in danger of stalling out, and letting runaway income inequality and other issues derail our forward momentum as a civilization--and cause a lot of unnecessary pain in the process. I really like the chart on p. 3, which charts life expectancy and per capita income across the world in 1800 versus today; even the most wretched country in the 21st century is doing better than the most prosperous country in 1800. The Netherlands (Bregman's home) and the U.S. had life expectancies of about 40 and per capita incomes of about $3,000 or less in 1800; even Sierra Leone and the Congo are doing better in terms of life expectancy now, and a large but still developing country like India is trouncing U.S. per capita income in 1800. The world has gotten a *lot* better, in other words, even if it still has a long way to go.

p. 7-8: Bregman cites a figure saying that vaccines against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio, which are notable for all being "dirt cheap", have saved more lives than would peace would have in the 20th century. That's a frankly astonishing figure, if true. His source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-identifies-the-areas-in-which-increased-development-spending-can-do-the-most-good

p.9: For people concerned about IQ, Bregman points out that IQ has gone up an average of 3-5 points every ten years due to improved nutrition and education. This reinforces my belief that any attempt to work out whether IQ actually varies significantly among different human populations due to genetic factors is basically doomed from the get-go, since that information is hopelessly confounded by other factors (and because an evolutionary biologist once told me strongly selected-for traits like intelligence is in humans should be expected to vary by very little in any species; if IQ did vary strongly among between populations for genetic reasons, it would be *very unusual* in that regard).

p. 12-15: Bregman wants to distinguish between two kinds of Utopia: "blueprint" utopias, as he calls them, where you decide what the Utopia looks like ahead of time and how to get there, and then spend all your time and energy forcing society to fit that mold--via revolution, dictatorship, terror, etc., whatever means will achieve your ends--verses a more ideal (idealistic?) kind of utopia that's about broadening possibilities of the future. This is more just about not saying "no" reflexively to weird ideas: instead of saying "Ah, UBI is nice but it's a crazy idea," you look at what it *would* take to achieve it. This also entails being able to criticize your own ideas--and to adapt them when they prove not to be working. Honestly, I don't think this is necessarily utopianism at all: I think this is ordinary progressive politics, seeing a critical flaw in society and demanding we work our utmost to change it rather than saying "good enough." If this feels utopian then it's because our standards for what is achievable have fallen sharply in the last thirty or forty years (more on that later).

p. 17-19: Even Bregman is not immune from the occasional tiresome moral panic. Angst about narcissism in a pampered generation; none of this is central to his thesis, though, just shallow culture criticism.

p. 34: Discussion of the Mincome experiment in Canada, which was started by a lefty government in Manitoba, shut down by a righty government that came to power after them, and whose results remained unanalyzed in for decades in the National Archives. The researcher who dug up these files after they sat gathering dust for years and years? Evelyn Forget. You cannot make this stuff up. (@slatestarscratchpad, I know he appreciates this kind of thing).

p. 37-8: I knew about Mincome; I read an article about it a while back, when UBI was just getting into the news. I did not know there were four other UBI experiments in North America around the same time, all in the U.S. The U.S., in fact, for a tantalizing moment in the Nixon administration, was relatively close to implementing something like UBI, as a way of eradicating poverty. For various reasons, including a century-and-a-half old British government report (more on that later), the bill failed; but America came very close to implementing a safety net that by the standards of our present political moment is *very* Utopian. And, I can't stress this enough, this was under Richard Nixon.

p. 55-62: A section entitled "Why Poor People Do Dumb Things," which basically takes various scientific studies and uses them to argue that poverty 1) makes idiots of us all; 2) is self-perpetuating, and as a result 3) is really, really hard to escape unless the immediate cause of the psychological stress it produces--i.e., an acute lack of money--is removed. Also probably a good answer for why poor *societies* continue to be poor; I can't imagine these cognitive limitations Bregman is talking about go away just because more of your society is experiencing them.

p. 58: "So in concrete terms, just how much dumber does poverty make you? 'Our effects correspond to between 13 and 14 IQ points,' Shafir says. 'That's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.'" I don't know much about IQ, but I feel like 13-14 IQ points is *a lot of IQ points.* And again: the fact that this effect is so large makes me think any attempt to search out a genetic source for IQ variation is futile.

p. 59 mentions an interesting experiment to control for individual variation in IQ by comparing the performance on cognitive tests of farmers in India who make almost all their income right at harvest. Just before and just after harvest gives an opportunity to compare differences in performance when cash is tight versus when cash isn't night in the same group of people (the effect found in other experiments, including ones in the developed world, seeemd to hold).

p. 68: Arguments with lefty types like my family often result in somebody bringing up the fact that capitalism necessitates the creation of a poor underclass, to which everyone promptly agrees as if this is the most obvious or well-studied fact in human history. This drives me *nuts*, because it's one of those wild overreaching statements that makes an *empirical assertion* about a facet of economics and society that, being empirical, should be verifiable or falsifiable (or which at least some form of evidence for or against could be acquired). But I've never seen a single study cited in support of this notion; never seen even a lazy historical analogy drawn between societies experiencing similar conditions but with different economic systems to support this argument. It's Aristotle-level laziness about the empirical universe: Capitalism is bad, poverty is bad, therefore capitalism causes poverty. I know I'm the world's worst leftist, but things like this are why: we would rather repeatedly assert a statement which comforts us that we are on the right side of history than critically investigate the assertion (repeated by a legion of leftist political philosophers) that might require us to confront the fact that the leftist understanding of economics is... deficient. To say the least. And that if you are going to make empirical assertions about the structure of society and about its economic organization, you had better know what you're talking about, or you run the risk of creating a leftist empire built on ideology that collapses when it is forced to confront reality. *coughtheentirewarsawpactcough* On p. 68, Bregman cites an *actual* example of an economic system that necessitates the existence of an underclass. It's mercantilism, the system capitalism replaced (and which has been lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty ever since).

Dryly observing the fact that capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, of course, gets you tarred and feathered as a neoliberal or even (inexplicably) a fascist in some leftist circles (like my family). It doesn't matter if you still think capitalism has grievous shortcomings; you must participate in the Ritual of Blaming Everything on Capitalism in order to qualify as a real leftist, apparently, which makes me feel like one of those Dutch atheists in the 17th century who had to say "well of *course* God exists" before being able to make my argument as to why burning bushes aren't real and basing your society on a Bronze age ethnic mythology from the Middle East is a terrible idea.

p. 70-71: It's weird to lump Utah and the Netherlands into the same category, but the two polities in the 21st century who seem to have first discovered how to eliminate homelessness are... Utah and the Netherlands. Spoiler alert: giving people homes is relatively cheap.

p. 79: Speenhamland, which sounds like a budget brand of meat spread you occasionally see in the grocery store but never have the courage to try, is really the source of a lot of our problems around just giving poor people money. We can, strange as it sounds, probably blame an obscure, 170-year-old English experiment in basic income, and the inquiry that followed it, for the failure of the idea during the Nixon administration--and, subsequently, the U.S.'s rightward shift toward welfare 'reform,' a revival of the notion that there is deserving and undeserving poverty, and that if you're poor, it's because you're lazy.

Martin Anderson, one of Nixon's advisors, used excerpts from Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation"--specifically, the bits about the Speenhamland system--to turn Nixon off his plan for the Family Security System in 1969. Polanyi presented a damning indictment of the Speenhamland system based on the parliamentary inquiry used to justify dismantling it, and indeed the original report was harshly critical of the system. Trouble is, the report was mostly written before the results of the inquiry were gathered; and the numerous surveys and interviews conducted during the inquiry were almost entirely aimed, not at the people who actually benefitted from the Speenhamland system, but clergy and landowners who were critical of it from the beginning. The comissioner responsible for the report had written the draconian Poor Laws he wanted to implement before the report was even begun; even the leftist criticisms (from Marx and Engels) of government assistance were based on the lies of Speenhamland, alienating the left from its natural ally when it came to alleviating the condition of the poor, i.e., the only institution in society powerful enough to solve massive coordination issues like wealth redistribution. Lucky for us, modern leftists don't regard Marx and Engels as writers of scripture whom we dare not criticize for their imperfect knowlede of economics that is 200 years out of--wait, shit.

p.88 spells out for the first time in anything I've read what the demographic transition actually entails; I've always been slightly muddled as to why people want to have less kids when they get richer; if nothing else, if people like having kids and they have more money to support them, why wouldn't they have more? I always figured I was just missing something. And I was! People don't have lots of kids pre-demographic transition because they like having kids; they have lots of kids because that's the only insurance they have that when they're old there will be someone to care for them. More children provide more economic stability; so when society is more prosperous, when you can save money to retire on, and when the government implements a safety net, the birth rate drops--down to a level which more closely resembles how much people *actually like* having children. Having birth control available helps; but sometimes it just means people marrying later, or (probably) having different kinds of sex. This implies 1) modernity isn't 'destroying families,' it's just that people don't like having big families nearly as much as either the traditionalists or the evolutionary psychologists would assume, and 2) the demographic transition is probably permanent, i.e., we're not going to see the birth rate mysteriously start creeping upward in a hundred years in rich societies once we've adapted to our current levels of affluence. (Most) people just don't like having kids as much as we might naively assume.

A lot of bonus stuff in this part from people like Malthus who woefully misunderstood the psychology of poverty. And, sadly, their ideas are actually not all that out of date.

p. 91-2: "Now and then politicians are accused of taking too little interest in the past. In this case, however, Nixon was perhaps taking too much. Even a century and a half after the fatal report, the Speenhamland myth was still alive and kicking. When Nixon's bill foundered in the Senate, conservative thinkers began lambasing the welfare state, using the very same misguided argumetns applied back in 1834.

These arguments echoed in 'Wealth and Poverty,' the 1981 mega-bestseller by George Gilder that would make him Reagan's most cited author and that characterized poverty as a moral problem rooted in laziness and vice. And they appeared again a few years later in 'Loosing Ground,' an influential book in which the conservative sociologist Charles Murray recycled the Speenhamland myth. Government support, he wrote, would only undermine the sexual morals and work ethic of the poor.

It was like Townsend and Malthus all over again, but as one historian rightly notes, 'Anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction.' Even former Nixon adviser Daniel Moynihan stopped believing in a basic income when divorce rates were initially thought to have spiked during the Seattle pilot program, a conclusion later debunked as a mathematical error."

p. 95: "Lately, developed nations have been doubling down on this sort of 'activating' policy for the jobless, which runs the gamut from job-application workshops to stints picking up trash, and from talk therapy to LinkedIn training. No matter if there are ten applicants for every job, the problem is consistently attributed not to demand, but to supply. That is to say, the unemployed who haven't developed their 'employment skills' or simply haven't given it their best shot."

Related: every time I see somebody say something about how all we need to do is train West Virginia coal miners to code, I want to bang my head on a wall. Look, I've never met any West Virginian coal miners, but I have known middle aged people from the South who use a computer maybe for an hour a week, and maybe from within your bubble computer skills are something anybody can easily acquire, because everyone you know is comfortable in that environment and easily navigates the metaphors of, say, object-oriented programming and smartphone interfaces, but I *promise* you the problem is so much harder than you understand. It's a proposal that is at once condescending and infuriatingly naive, and unfortunately it's a general pattern that applies to a lot of the bandaid solutions people have for the growing American precariat. Just give them money. Let them decide what they need. Just give them money!

p. 104: Bergman is frustrated by the shortfalls of GDP as a measure of a country's prosperity--and don't worry, he's not impressed by Bhutan's "Gross National Happiness" either. "Bhutan rocks the chart in its own index, which conveniently leaves out the Dragon King's dictatorship and the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa." (p.118)

He makes some good points--GDP is a more subjective measure than people like to admit; it's hard to measure the produce of certain kinds of work, like Wikipedia which provides tons of practical value to society but is free; in GDP terms the ideal citizen is a compulsive gambler with cancer going through a drawn-out divorce he copes with using massive amounts of antidepressants.

p. 106: "Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime - in terms of GDP, the more the better [because fixing these problems generates economic activity]. That's why the country with the planet's highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems. 'By the standards of the GDP,' says the writer Jonathan Rowe, 'the worst families in America are those that actually function as families - that cook their own meals, take walks after dinner, and talk together instead of just farming the kids out to the commercial culture." OK, there's a little bit of moral panic here, but the broader point is that if your policy goal is maximizing GDP, you're not necessarily maximizing the things people want in their day to day lives; and if the GDP is growing, people aren't necessarily seeing consistent improvement in their lives. The real issue here is careful and nuanced construction of policy, which is probably doable, but kinda tough; Bergman isn't advocating a single alternative to the GDP, and admits even the GDP has its uses (though it most useful moment was probably during World War 2, when measuring the material amount of stuff the country could produce was most urgent).

This chapter also touches nicely on another annoying rhetorical reflex I find among lefties, the whole "resources are finite, the GDP can't grow forever." The GDP isn't a measure of the consumption of finite resources; it's a measure of money moving around in the economy (and hopefully of wealth being created). Non-tangible goods with no or very high limit on the resources they consume, like video games or hours of representation by a lawyer or sex work, all contribute to the GDP, and in an increasingly service-oriented economy the GDP can indeed continue to grow without necessarily substantially increasing resource consumption--especially if we're also making better use of the resources we harvest through, e.g., recycling and renewable energy. You know, things we've been pursuing eagerly for the last half-century. Seriously; do you even *care a little bit* about actually understanding what terms like 'GDP' mean?

p. 107: "The CEO who recklessly hawks mortgages and derivatives to lap up millions in bonuses currently contributes more to the GDP than a school packed with teachers or a factory full of char mechanics." Though I'm not sure how to correct something like this.

p. 108: More on the shortcomings of the GDP, and how in rich countries it's a poor correlate to actual prosperity. In developing countries, though, GDP is still mostly pretty good.

p. 117-119: Some alternatives to GDP, like Genuine Progress Indicator and Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which incorporate measures of pollution/crime/inequality. "In Western Europe, GPI has advanced a good deal slower than GDP, and in the U.S. it has even receded since the 1970s." Might explain why America feels so crummy compared to Europe whenever I go back there. Like, I don't deny that some parts are fantastically prosperous, but I don't see how anyone who isn't upper middle class can begin to afford to live in most of the U.S.

p. 120: On the absolute limits of economic efficiency. "Unlike the manufacture of a fridge or a car, history lessons and doctor's checkups can't simply be made 'more efficient.'" Well, maybe; there definitely are things in society that can't be, though I think those two are weak examples. He also talks about Baumol's Cost Disease, though in a way different from how I understood it when @slatestarscratchpad was discussing it; if I am understanding him correctly, Bregman says the phenomenon of prices increasing in labor intensive sectors doesn't reflect those sectors actually getting more expensive so much as society choosing to spend more money there, because we have more money to spend as a result of other sectors becoming more efficient.

"Shouldn't we be calling this a blessing, rather than a disease? After all the more efficient our factories and our computers, the less efficient our healthcare and education need to be; that is, the more time we have left to attend to the old and inform and to organize education on a more personal scale. Which is great, right? According to Baumol, the main impediment to allocating our resources toward such noble ends is 'the illusion that we cannot afford them.'

As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you're obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it's difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don't realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they're viewed as a disease.

Yet unless we prefer to run our schools and hospitals as if they were factories, we can be certain that, in the race against the machine, the costs of healthcare and education will only go up. At the same time, products like refrigerators and cars have become "too cheap". To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of its costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroyed an equivalent of seven pounds in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of twelve pounds in terms of health and sustainability."

p. 122: "Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia." I actually disagree here: I think governing by numbers is in principle a fine idea. What's a terrible idea is governing by bad, ambiguous, or useless numbers. A bad measure of national well-being is no better than *no* measure; but you have to have some kind of yardstick or you're just guessing. Responsive policy has to have *something* to respond to.

p. 123-4: On the disillusionment of the inventor of GDP, Simon Kuznets, with the GDP.

p. 134: "But the most disappointing fail? The rise of leisure." I do believe that's the first time I've ever seen "fail" as a simple noun in print. Language marches on, lol.

p. 135-136: On the failure of the workweek to continue getting shorter, even once the size of the labor force increased upon women entering it. I admit that when it comes to a shorter workweek, I have Questions. In principle, yes, a more productive economy means more resources to spread around which means people having to work less; in practice, short of a basic income funded by big taxes on productivity, people working less means less taxable income for the government and less personal income. Nonetheless, the work week getting shorter from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the 70s or 80s or so was accompanied by an *increase* in people's incomes as wages rose. In other words, I'm saying I don't have a good understanding of the economic issues at play here, and I wish I understood them more clearly.

p. 139-140: On the shorter workweek increasing productivity. Henry Ford saw big productivity gains by decreasing his employees' work week from 60 to 40 hours, due to his workers being better-rested and happier. W.K. Kellogg, of cornflakes and masturbation fame, decreased the work day to six hours in 1930 at his factory in Battle Creek; productivity increased so much he hired 300 more people and reduced the accident rate by 41%. "The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight." Nonetheless, there has to be a limit on the gains achievable by this sort of thing? Like, you wouldn't expect a half-hour workday to be commensurately more productive (or even productive at all).

Also the example is given of Edward Heath shortening the workweek to 3 days in 1973 in the U.K. in response to government expenditures rising, inflation, and mining strikes. "On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three-day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days' electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. When the five day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%."

So there is a limit; but it's much lower than I expected. But if you gradually reduced working hours even to the point where productivity began to stagnate a little, this could have positive environmental benefits: one reason we have to worry about global warming is that our fossil fuel consumption is so high. So I dunno, even a really short work week like 3 days might not be such a bad idea, if it was approached gradually.

p. 143-144: Social benefits of less work. Apparently men who take paternity leave not only do more laundry and more housework as a result, but the effect is permanent even after they return to work. An unusual solution to a gender imbalance in unpaid labor, perhaps.

p. 150: For people who worry that lots of leisure time will make people lazy, there's a good Bertrand Russel quote here about how one reason people seem lazy these days when they're not working is because work takes up all their energy: i.e., if you work eight hours a day at a stressful job, maybe all you have the energy to do when you get home is play video games or watch TV. If you want people to do more and more interesting things with their lives, have them work less.

p. 154-155: Another way of looking at Graeber's "bullshit jobs" is as jobs which don't create wealth, but merely move it around.

p. 158-159: Fascinating historical case of a bank strike in Ireland in 1970. "Overnight, 85% of the country's reserves were locked down. ... businesses across Ireland began to hoard cash. ... At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill."

Spoiler alert: not much happened. The economy continued to grow; the expected paralysis from lack of available money did not appear. Contrast this against the strike by a group more useful to society (garbagemen in NYC) which paralyzes the city in less than a week, this strike lasted six months, and was entirely uneventful.

"After the bank closures, they continued writing checks to one another as usual, the only difference being they could no longer be cashed at a bank. Instead, that other dealer in liquid assets - the Irish pub - stepped in to fill the void. ... 'The managers of these retail outlets and public houses had a high degree of information about their customers,' explains the economist Antoin Murphy. 'One does not after all serve drink to someone for years without discovering something of his liquid resources.'"

Basically, a new, decentralized monetary system appeared overnight, built on the country's 11,000 pubs. The thing that served to help create paper money in Europe in the first place--personal promissory notes and informal networks of trust--served well enough during the strike to maintain the essential institution of paper money, and while it limited the availability of large loans for things like construction projects, it did rather undercut the claim that the financial sector performs some kind of utterly indespensible service the economy can't do without.

p. 161-162: In other words, just because something is difficult and concentrates wealth as a result (finance, say), doesn't mean it's necessarily valuable to the economy as a whole, or that it's creating wealth itself.

p. 165-6: Explicit invocation of Graeber's bullshit jobs. Look, I'm not entirely satisfied with Graeber's notion of the bullshit job; I'd like a more formal examination of how the economy could produce whole industries which are somehow superfluous to its operation. But it's striking how consistently people are willing to declare that, yeah, their own job is essentially bullshit, and thinking about how much genius and skill and knowledge is being soaked up by sections of the economy we could probably do without, and which could be applied to more important problems of human flourishing (like eradicating disease or ending poverty) is kinda terrifying.

p. 169: Bregman's contention is that badly-constructed policy seems to drive the creation of bullshit jobs, like taxing the wrong thing. "A study conducted at Harvard found that Reagan-era tax cuts sparked a mass career switch among the country's brightest minds, from teachers and engineers to bankers and accountants. Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a live devoted to research over banking, twenty years later the balance had flipped.... The upshot is that we've all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elswhere in the economic chain." A financial transaction tax, Bregman argues, would get people doing work that's more useful (would create more wealth).

p. 169-171: Bregman touches briefly on one of my pet peeves, in education. The trend of education being tailored to what jobs are in demand (banking, accounting, middle management) and in general treating education like job training, either in the tulip bulbs sense or in a more direct practical sense like the editorial pages of the Economist tend to do, have the tail wagging the dog: education is a means to shape society in positive ways, and we shouldn't necessarily be training people to be accountants unless we think our society is poorer for having fewer accountants. The rule of law, Bregman notes, is not seventeen times more effective in the U.S. than it is in Japan, even though the U.S. has seventeen times the number of lawyers Japan does per capita.

p. 173: Nice coda to his NYC garbage collector strike story: people *really* want to be garbage collectors in NYC these days, because it pays well, even though the hours are long and the work is hard.

p. 195: "Of course, the laborer William Leadbeater may have been exaggerating slightly when he predicted that machines would be 'the destruction of the universe,' but the Luddites' concerns were far from unfounded. Their wages were plummeting and their jobs were disappearing like dust in the wind. 'How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?' wondered the late eighteenth century clothworkers of Leeds. 'Some say, Begin and learn some other business. Suppose we do; who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task; and when we have learned it, how do we know we shall be any better for all our pains; for... another machine may arise, which may take away that business also.'" But teach coal miners Java!

p. 200: Bregman doesn't say it, but the impression I get from this book is that we solve a lot of these problems *now*, when maybe--just maybe--they're tractable, or we suffer a lot as things get worse for the next 50 years and end up having a much more chaotic and terrible time trying to fix things once they've broken down beyond our ability to maintain the status quo.

p. 210: On whether it's better to give away mosquito nets or sell them cheaply. Seems to be better to give them away; people used the nets regardless, and even people given nets for free would later buy them if they had the opportunity, i.e., people get used to having nets, not to getting handouts.

p. 215: On the historical recentness of closed borders. Before World War 1, borders seem poised to disappear; border controls were rare, passports seen as a tool of backward countries like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and people predicted railroads would erase national distinctions. The war, and the closing of borders to prevent spies crossing them, seems to have put the kibosh on that.

p. 216: Let's say you lifted all trade barriers in the world; the productive gains from doing so would be approximately one thousandth that of general open borders. That is a hard number to argue against.

p. 221 ff.: A list of pro-open-borders arguments. Standard fare here: notable stuff includes a discussion of criminality among migrants. It's been noted in some countries, like the Netherlands, immigrants have higher crime rates than the native population, in contrast to countries like the U.S. and the U.K, where the crime rates are lower. "For a long time, research into this question was put off by the dictates of political correctness. But in 2004, the first extended study exploring the connection between ethnicity and youth crime got underway in Rotterdam. Ten years later, the results were in. The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. ... Youth crime, the report stated, had its origins in the neighborhood where the kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities."

Bregman also argues that, contra Robert Putnam, immigrants don't undermine social cohesion. "Putnam's findings were debunked... . A later retrospective analysis of ninety studies found no correlation whatsoever between diversity and social cohesion." Putnam apparently didn't take into account that African Americans and Latinos report less social cohesion no matter where they live, and controlling for this undermines Putnam's results. Poor communities have less social cohesion, yes, but it's not attributable to the presence of minorities or immigrants.

Another good points is that more open borers promote immigrants' return: when the U.S. patrolled its southern border less strictly, ca. 85% of illegal immigrants who crossed it eventually went back. Seems kind of obvious in retrospect: if you want illegal immigrants to leave... just let them?

I have this prediction that the first developed country that tries open borders is going to get a massive competitive economic advantage against the rest of the world, but I think it'll be a long time before this actually gets tested. Personally, I'm betting on the Canadians.

p. 237: Bregman is willing to discuss some of the doubts he has about his own positions, which is much more than I was expecting from a book of this type. I really, really wish more authors would do this.

p. 240: Bonus Asch Conformity discussion.

Bregman wants to know, can people actually be convinced? And how? His answer's not especially encouraging: it takes a crisis, like 2008. The problem with 2008, though, was that there wasn't a strong counter-narrative in place: there was no alternative to try. Movements like Occupy were nebulous and didn't have a clear set of goals. What was needed was a preexisting political movement or position that was placed to take advantage of people's openness to new solutions. This book is, I suppose, his attempt to spread some of these "utopian" ideas, so when the next crisis hits, they're available as solutions for people to advance. That's a modest goal for a book allegedly about utopian politics, but I don't think he's wrong; opinions change only slowly, and having a realistic view of how to go about changing opinions is important.

p. 254-255: Discussion of the Overton Window, and the left's role in nudging it around. Plus, a slogan I like: "Be realistic! Demand the impossible!"

p. 256: Discussion of leftist parties that seek to quell "radical" sentiment inside their own ranks in order to try to (so they think) remain electable. This is a pattern I see happening repeatedly: in the SPD in Germany, in Labour in the U.K., in the Democrats in the U.S., leaders like Pelosi and the bigwigs of New Labour who think that they have to go as middle-of-the-road as possible and avoid upsetting the status quo, ignoring that the strength of the left is often in expanding peoples' understanding of what society can achieve. It's depressing as hell, and it's not surprising that people are turning toward formerly obscure politicians like Corbyn and Sanders who are willing to actually try new ideas. Trouble is, Corbyn and Sanders have been minor politicians for a long time for a reason: they're charismatic as a couple of day-old fish, and they're not actually that good at uniting their parties.

p. 257-8: "'There's a kind of activism,' Rebecca Solnit remarks in her book "Hope in the Dark," 'that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results.' One thing Donald Trump understands very well is that most people prefer to be on the winning side. ... Most people resent the pity and paternalism of the Good Samaritan. Sadly, the underdog socialist has forgotten that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress. By that I don't mean a narrative that only excites a few hisptes who get their kicks philosophizing about 'post-capitalism' or 'intersectionality' after reading some long-winded tome. ... What we need is a narrative that speaks to millions of ordinary people."

And he's not wrong. Bregman argues for reclaiming 'the language of progress,' i.e., meeting the current (neoliberal?) worldview on its own terms and explaining how these goals fulfill its aims, rather than contest them. I'd add to that that I'd like to see a left that actually cares about asking what constitutes effective activism, what actually changes people's minds, and what actually wins election and helps shapes policy, rather than just feeling good and laughing when Richard Spencer gets punched. That second vision of the left isn't just shortsighted; it's depressing, it's small-minded, and it's vicious. It's also selfish: it's about being secure in your own identity rather than *helping people,* and the fact it claims the moral high ground in a lot of debates is just repulsive to me.

All in all, the program Bregman seems to advocate for is startlingly modest, and delightfully specific: he wants UBI, a 15-hour workweek, a financial transaction tax, and open borders; and he's willing to be as incrementialist as possible on all these points. There are some other goals around the edges--a clearer and more purposeful vision of education's role in society, for instance, and a new approach to politics--but these too don't seem to require moving heaven and earth to accomplish them. In some ways, this book disappointed me: there's nothing here that fundamentally upends social or economic relations in the developed world, and it's all pretty consistent with a vision of historical trends in progress just extrapolated a little further into the future. But Bregman writes lucidly and engagingly on these subjects, and he condenses a lot of sources into a single volume. What this book is probably ideal for is giving to your centrist or left-leaning cousin or friend, who might be sympathetic to UBI or a financial transaction tax, or someone you know who is just curious about interesting new policy proposals in general.

Bregman's program would be suitable for a center-left political party in Europe, or a movement within the Democratic Party in the U.S., especially if it was helmed by someone who could talk cannily about these ideas in the public sphere. This book is proof these ideas *aren't* actually that utopian, and *can* be talked about in a way that makes them seem plausible--we just need more people doing that.

#utopia for realists #rutger bregman #basic income #open borders #things i hate about the left #i am the world's worst leftist

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