A myth pervades modern economic thinking: that prosperity naturally leads people to have fewer children.

The measured fact to be explained is that fertility rates tend to drop below replacement in countries with a high measured economic output per person. This is both a big long-run problem and a puzzle. Microeconomists typically construe this as rational individual choice, as though people in wealthy societies simply discover better things to do with their time than raising families. But this causal explanation is backwards.

From a microeconomic perspective, if the state wants less of some behavior, it should tax it, increasing its cost, which can be expected to reduce the frequency of that behavior. If it wants more of some behavior, it should subsidize it, reducing its cost, which can be expected to increase the frequency of that behavior. But at least in the USA - and probably in other high per-capita GDP countries participating in the same economic system - fertility is suppressed in large part by the macroeconomic policies with which the state constructs and regulates stores of financial value. If we are rich within this system of account, that means we can demand a great deal of labor from young people who might otherwise be producing and caring for their own children. We cannot pay young people enough to offset this without reversing much of the measured increase in rich-country wealth since 1971.¹

This arrangement did not emerge through open deliberation about how we wanted to arrange our society. Rather, it developed through a series of historical contingencies and power struggles following the closure of imperial frontiers. Fixing this problem would not be a relatively modest technical adjustment to a well-understood system of inputs and outputs, but would constitute a radical change in how our society functions, with hard to predict consequences that would likely seriously disrupt our current modes of governance.

Consider these scenarios:

1. A child grows up with emotionally unavailable parents who never teach them how to regulate emotions or form secure attachments.
2. A soldier witnesses an explosion that kills their comrades and now experiences panic attacks when hearing loud noises.
3. A mid-level manager slowly realizes that everyone in their company is lying about productivity, that the metrics are meaningless, and that showing too much integrity will end their career.

These are fundamentally different experiences, yet our therapeutic culture increasingly groups them all under "trauma."

When Trump appointed Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency, both supporters and critics immediately began telling stories that seemed obviously false. The administration claimed DOGE would save trillions (impossible given its limited scope and two-year timeline). Critics portrayed it as a dictatorial power grab (despite having no actual enforcement authority beyond publishing recommendations).

I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with this smoke screen. If everyone's lying about what DOGE is, then what is it actually doing? And why?

The Musk factor adds another layer of confusion. Is he the central character in this story, or a flashy distraction from the real governance changes happening? If he is the story, what's his actual agenda? The technocratic efficiency narrative doesn't quite align with targeting high-profile aid programs like USAID, but the "right-wing revenge" narrative doesn't explain his data-driven focus.

As I dug deeper, I noticed that this pattern - creating a parallel inspection authority outside normal bureaucratic channels - has historical precedents. And those precedents can tell us something important about what's happening now.

A federal judge has ruled that the President of the United States cannot give his own appointees access to Treasury Department information systems, even though Trump has publicly maintained that during his first term he was denied access to information he needed to do his job effectively by insiders working to neutralize him. The ruling was so broad that another judge had to clarify that the Secretary of the Treasury can access the Treasury Department's data. How can the head of the executive branch be barred from accessing executive branch information through people he trusts? If the President believes the bureaucracy is malfunctioning, how can he reform it without first understanding how it works, if the bureaucracy persistently denies him or his advisors the information they need to evaluate it?

This is certainly not how the government of the United States of America was originally constituted in 1787, nor does it correspond to any of the Constitution document's formally written and ratified amendments. Rather, it demonstrates that since the drafting of the written Constitution, the government has in some other way been reconstituted to create a fourth substantive branch of government, alongside the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Yassine Meskhout asked for an explanation of the recent emergence of anti-Zionism as a left-wing litmus test, especially salient in the aftermath of the October 7th attack in late 2023. In an unrelated conversation, a friend asked me what recourse ordinary people are likely to adopt as the state breaks various promises to them. My answer to the latter developed a surprising answer to the former.

Our system of government has two interlocking features: it refuses to hear an individual making a reasonable argument, and it systematically disrupts collective threats that fall outside mainstream coalition politics. The result is that reasonable arguments about individual circumstances get drowned out by a competition between acceptable collective identities threatening their rivals.

You, the viewer, are the secret illegitimate child of a Presbyterian minister, who, being otherwise conscientious and aspiring to a high standard of decency and kindness, takes time out of his day, every weekday, to spend with you. He uses that time to talk with you about life, and feelings, to show you how things are made, to introduce you to different sorts of people, to play pretend and make handicrafts, and to tell you that he loves you just the way you are.

He meets you in a house that is not his house, but hangs up his jacket and wears a sweater he borrows from the closet. Likewise for shoes.

He speaks freely of families, of divorce, of all manner of difficulties. The only subject that is off limits is the nature of his particular relation to you. If he loves you so much, how come you don't live with him? Why do you only get half an hour, five days a week? Where does he live, if not here? Who feeds the fish on the weekend?

A predator's success depends on exploiting specific flaws in prey - poor awareness, slow reactions, weak social coordination. Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness. A cheetah doesn't catch just any gazelle, but the one that fails to notice and react effectively. Prey get better at evading, predators get better at predicting, each side has to model the other's thoughts more accurately - an arms race that eventually rewards both sides for explicitly modeling the other's perspective, the basis for cognitive empathy. If you're glad you're conscious, no need to thank a predator - somebody else already did - by being eaten.

The main points for ethical veganism as I understand it are:

1. Killing other animals is unjust aggression; you wouldn't like to be killed and eaten, so don't kill and eat them.

2. Factory farming causes animals to have bad lives.

My answer to these arguments:

I hit a communication wall with a crypto-Cathar. The encounter exposed how an ancient heresy's worldview still blocks trust and cooperation. Here's lemonade.

While Calvinism proposed a mechanism by which agency could be recovered from corruption through the intervention of divine grace (Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency), Catharism took the more radical position that material existence itself was inherently corrupting, which means that fully embodied people simply cannot be trustworthy agents.