Inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 12 JDN 246143

I’ve had a really hard time writing a post this week. Between my late father’s birthday coming up soon (April 15) and the fact that a man with full authority over a full-scale nuclear arsenal threatened to destroy an entire civilization—a literal imminent threat of genocide—and the people with the power to remove him did absolutely nothing, the world just feels like a nightmare I’ve been trying to wake up from.

And yes, it matters that he has authority over nukes. If you’re in a fistfight and the other guy says, “I’ll kill you!” that’s very different than if he draws a handgun and says the same thing. The President of the United States should essentially be treated as always brandishing a deadly weapon, and it is his responsibility to have the decorum to not make statements that can be read as imminent threats.

This means that trying to be topical about current events is just too painful and disorienting for me to write anything that feels useful to say. (I mostly feel like screaming.)

So, perhaps ironically, I’m going to write a post that’s completely un-topical, that could honestly have been written any time between roughly 300 AD and the present, and—much to my chagrin—will probably still be relevant in 3000 AD if humanity survives that long.

It concerns the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy.

Simply put, inerrancy is the belief that divine scriptures (especially the Bible or Qur’an) are without error: That is, that literally every proposition contained therein is absolutely and completely true.


This is not by any means a rare or fringe belief. 55% of Christians in the United States report that they believe in Biblical inerrancy. I was not able to obtain a similar figure for Muslims, but I can tell you that a majority of US Muslims and over 90% of African Muslims believe in the even stronger claim of Qur’anic literalism.

We can set aside the question of copyediting. I don’t care about typos or grammar mistakes. Translation errors are somewhat more serious—as they can affect real doctrines—but I’m willing to set those aside as well. We can say that we are talking about the original texts in their original languages, and idealized so that they do not contain any errors of grammar or typography.

This is already asking a lot, but I am prepared to concede it.

Even so, inerrancy is an absurdly strong claim that no rational person should ever take seriously.

The claim is that this entire text—hundreds of pages by dozens of authors over hundreds of years—is entirely true, without a single false assertion anywhere within it.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: I do not believe that about any text I have ever encountered.

I do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant. I do not believe that calculus textbooks are inerrant. I do not believe that Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity is inerrant.

I can’t point you to any specific errors in these books right now (especially since we haven’t even specified a calculus textbook), but if someone did point me to an error, I would not be the least bit surprised. Even if I combed through the entire text multiple times and didn’t spot any errors, I would still be doubtful that I hadn’t missed one somewhere.

Honestly, I find it improbable that any nonfiction work by human beings of significant length and complexity is completely without errors. (Okay, a 5-page book on counting for kindergartners might actually be inerrant. Maybe.)

Let me try putting it this way. What is the probability that any given proposition stated by a given source is correct? For a very reliable source, it could be 99%, or 99.9%, or even 99.99%. Perhaps you literally trust some sources so much that they must assert 10,000propositions before they get one wrong. (I’m not sure there’s anyone I trust this much—I certainly do not trust myself this much—but I’ll allow it for the sake of argument.)

There are 30,000 verses in the Bible. Many of these verses assert multiple propositions.

Even if each and every proposition is 99.99% reliable, the probability that all of 30,000 distinct propositions is correct is less than 5%. Even if you trust the Bible that much, you should still be 95% certain that it got something wrong somewhere.

In fact, it’s much worse than that, as we know for a fact that there are explicit contradictions between different parts of the Bible. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible counts over 500 explicit contradictions, some relatively trivial (did Enoch die?) but others absolutely core to Christian theology (do Heaven and Hell exist?). If even one of those holds up—and as far as I can tell, most of them hold up, maybe even all of them (though I wouldn’t be surprised if some don’t; are you getting it yet?)—then the Bible is not inerrant. Indeed, just counting contradictions, if 500 of 30,000 propositions are contradictions, then the accuracy of each proposition can’t be more than 99%.

We don’t even need the extensive empirical evidence that refutes the creation stories in the Bible to know that those stories are wrong. The creation stories themselves contradict each other in vital ways.

We don’t need to consider the vanishingly small prior probability that a human being can rise from the dead to take issue with the resurrection story. Simon and Peter can’t both simultaneously have known in advance that Jesus would resurrect and not known that until it happened. Jesus can’t have been crucified to death both before and after Passover.

Some of these kinds of contradictions are exactly the sort of thing you would expect to slip into a historical account that was delivered by oral tradition over multiple generations. (They do not, for instance, give me reason to doubt that there was in fact a historical figure named Yeshua of Nazareth who gathered a group of apostles and was crucified to death by the Roman state. The vast majority of historians agree that this man did, in fact, exist.)

But they are exactly what you are not allowed to have in a book that is inerrant!

A book that is literally without error, without flaw, should not contain even one single contradiction, no matter how trivial—and come on, whether or not Heaven and Hell exist is not trivial!

Inerrancy is not simply saying “the Bible is basically true” or “the Bible is a reliable source” or even “Christian theology is true.”

I believe that The Origin of Species is basically true, and a reliable source, and that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true. But I absolutely do not believe that The Origin of Species is inerrant.

I believe that most calculus textbooks are basically true, and are reliable sources, and that the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is true. But I absolutely do not believe that any calculus textbook is inerrant.

Inerrancy isn’t even simply saying that “the Bible was written by God”! It’s very clear that the Bible is not simply dictated verbatim from On High; there was some kind of human process involved in its creation, and even if you believe that the Council of Nicaea was right about all their choices of the canon, you should still recognize that there is plenty of room for errors to have crept in during this long, convoluted, and controversial human process.

(For the Qur’an, we actually have mostly the original text by the original author—but even then, you should still be doubtful that any document with thousands of claims could be absolutely, 100% true.)

So, please, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else, I am literally begging you:

Please, give up on inerrancy. Admit that your book could be mistaken.

I’m not asking you to give up on your religion. You can keep your theology. You can still mostly believe in the book. But please, recognize how incredibly unreasonable you are being by asserting that it is impossible that anything in the book could ever be wrong.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your book could be mistaken.

A letter from the real singularity

PNRJ computer science, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 5 JDN 246136

I’ve been unable to find it, but several years ago someone famous wrote a sci-fi work entitled something like “A letter from the post-singularity” about how great life is after AI takes over everything. Today I thought I’d write a more realistic take on the path we actually seem to be on.

The year is 2073. Technically we still don’t have true AGI; as far as we can tell, AI still isn’t actually sentient and AIs aren’t people. (Some of us wonder, though. Philosophers debate it.) But that doesn’t really matter, because all white-collar work has been completely automated, and so has any blue-collar work that doesn’t require fine dexterity or unusual expertise. Plumbers and electricians are still doing all right (though they do more of their work at data centers than homes these days); sometimes I wish I’d apprenticed to be an electrician. Then again, the world can still only support so many electricians. AI managers command AI-run asteroid mines to extract ores to transport with AI-run spacecraft to Mars where AI-run factories process those ores and fabricate chips for more AIs that more AI-run spacecraft carry to Earth to be installed in AI-run data centers. And each time one gets sold, some trillionaire’s number goes up, and that’s the only thing people like him have ever cared about in their lives.

There are of course a handful of super-brilliant, super-creative, or just super-lucky individuals who manage to get rich making art or music or books or video games or whatever, but the vast majority of people who do art are still starving artists, just as they’ve always been, I guess. And the AI-generated stuff is good enough now that most of the time people will just use that instead of paying extra for the “authentic” “artisanal” stuff. (And most people can’t even tell the difference anyway.)

Harvard and Oxford still have professors, but most universities have fully automated teaching and most of their administration—and yet somehow tuition is barely any cheaper now than it was in your time, even adjusted for inflation. And if you were thinking of becoming a professor yourself? You should probably just go play prediction markets or something; you’d have better odds. The number of research papers published every year is astronomical, but they’re all written and reviewed by AI, rarely if ever even read by any human being, and so it seems like the actual progress of scientific knowledge has pretty much ground to a halt. (Seriously, how are there still string theorists? It’s been a century.) I guess corporate R&D still keeps on improving those graphics cards somehow; maybe they’ve discovered something important, but if they have, they’re keeping it to themselves. And I keep reading about amazing advancements done by AIs (especially in pure math that I’m not sure anyone understands), but none of it actually ever seems to affect anyone’s actual lives.

As for me, I live on UBI. Like 90% of people do. It’s enough to rent a cheap apartment (but own a home? Are you serious? Only millionaires own homes.), buy basically-adequate food (as long as you don’t eat out too much anywhere that’s not fast food), and pay for all the subscriptions to media services and home assistants and whatnot. What you make on UBI will only buy you the ad-supported versions, so while my fridge will order milk for me (delivered by drone in a couple of hours) and my robot maid will cook breakfast, fold the laundry and put the dishes in the dishwasher, my fridge is also constantly running ads and my maid will intersperse targeted sales pitches into its casual conversation. Sometimes I think I should just get rid of it (her?) and do my own cooking and cleaning myself, so I would never be able to sell it for half what I paid for it. If I could make some extra money, maybe I could at least upgrade to the ad-free subscription for my maid. (The Pro subscription and hardware addons to make her your girlfriend are just gross, but I’m sure they make tons of money.)

Every year, some politician makes a big deal about how the UBI trust fund is draining and will be gone in ten years or whatever; but it’s obvious that all they’d have to do to fix that would be raise the taxes on trillionaires a little bit, yet somehow that never seems to happen. But they also don’t cut UBI payments either, except sometimes to reduce our cost-of-living adjustments. I dunno; maybe they will really cut UBI payments in a few years. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll actually raise taxes for once.

At least I wasn’t dumb enough to move to Mars, where “employment is guaranteed!” but you have to pay a subscription for your oxygen.

My worst days are probably… about as bad as your worst days. Frankly they couldn’t be much worse, because sometimes I just want to die. Like a lot of people on UBI, I feel like a burden on society, like the world would be better off without me. Medicaid won’t cover neuroregulator implants, so I still take pills for my depression; they’re probably better than the pills you could get, but they’re still far from perfect.

My best days are maybe better than yours, maybe worse; it depends, I guess. If you’ve got cancer, your days are probably worse than mine, because we can pretty easily treat most cancers now. But if you’re healthy and you’ve got a steady job and a tight-knit community where you live, I’m guessing your days are better.

I have access to faster computers and faster Internet than you can probably imagine; my understanding was that back in the day you had to wait for downloads sometimes? Or even sometimes wait for webpages to load? What was that like? And your storage was measured in gigabytes, not petabytes? Humanity has never been so connected; human beings have never been so isolated. I theory I can contact anyone in the Solar System at the speed of light, but in practice my friends and I always seem to have trouble keeping in touch. (Oddly, it’s my best friend who lives on a station over Ganymede that I seem to stay in touch with best; we have to write full-length emails, because there’s no way to have a conversation on a ping of an hour and a half. It feels like being an old-timey pen pal, I guess.)

It’s not all bad. Some things are definitely better these days.

People often live to be 110 or even 120 nowadays. (So you might still be alive when I write this.) Rarely does anyone seem to make it past that, though; aging is just… really hard to beat. (The Boomers are finally almost gone, but Gen X is still gonna be with us for awhile yet.) We’ve cured a lot of the diseases that were bad in your time, but not all of them. And sometimes only people rich enough to pay for their own healthcare can afford the cures.

Language barriers are pretty much gone. If I wanna read something that was written in Japanese or Xhosa, I just have an AI translate it, and the translations are good enough now that you’d have to be really deeply-versed in the language to find any problems with it. Like, okay, maybe I’m not getting all the subtle connotations of Japanese literature, but was I ever going to actually learn kanji to read the originals? No. That kind of thing is for people with crazy obsessions.)

Our video games are definitely way better than yours. Characters with AI personalities that adapt in real time to how you behave. Procedurally-generated open worlds that can literally expand to the size of entire planets. (Actually, I vaguely remember reading you had a couple games that did something like the second one? Minecraft and Factorio​, I think they were called? Impressive that you could pull that off on a gigaflop processor.) Worlds and factions that adapt to your actions and provide realistic consequences so that no two players’ experiences of the game are exactly the same. It’s easy to lose yourself in a game like that (especially if you’ve got a VR setup), and when you’re playing in such a rich, interesting world for hundreds of hours. you can sometimes forget how bleak things are back in the real world your flesh-and-blood body lives in. (But then you get hungry or have to pee and you get forced back into reality.)

Economists keep telling us that per-capita GDP and productivity have never been higher, and that we have access to all these wonderful goods and services that previous generations could scarcely even imagine.

But if that’s true, why do I sometimes just want to die?

The United States has stopped creating jobs—maybe forever?

PNRJ current events, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Mar 29 JDN 246129

When the preliminary data for our job markets over the past few months were released, they looked all right. But after more careful analysis and better data has allowed us to revise the figures and do more accurate seasonal adjustments, the results are really quite shocking:

The United States has lost more jobs than it created for the last six months.

That is certainly something we’ve done before; it is indeed what tends to happen during recessions. But no recession has been declared, GDP seems to be growing normally, and unemployment still stands at a perfectly-reasonable 4.4%.

What’s going on here?

If you look at the employment level—the absolute number of people employed—it looks shockingly flat since 2023.

From 2009 to 2019, US employment grew from 138 million to 159 million, growing at 1.4% per year. Obviously it collapsed during the 2020 recession, but then it recovered to 158 million by the end of 2022. It now stands at 163 million, only 0.7% growth per year since 2022. Since January 2025 it has actually fallen from a peak of 164 million.

Because our population is growing (albeit not as much as it once was, because immigration has collapsed after Trump’s crackdowns), this actually looks even worse when you consider the employment rate, the ratio between the number of people employed and the total population:

US employment peaked at 61.1% just before the 2020 recession, and has still not recovered to that level. It reached 60% in 2022, stayed around there through 2024, and then since then has actually declined, now to 59.3%. In fact, it was even higher in 2007 before the other big recession of my adult life (you know, it’s starting to feel like the economy hates Millennials in particular), reaching 63.3% before crashing and never recovering.

Yet our GDP growth looks fine!

Sure, it had a huge drop in the 2020 recession, but it grew very fast in the recovery, and since then has fluctuated a bit, but generally averaged about 2.5% per year—which is pretty good for a highly-developed country. We had negative growth in the first quarter of 2025 and slow growth in the fourth quarter, but the second and third quarter both had strong growth to make up for it. Overall real GDP growth for 2025 as a whole was a perfectly respectable 2.1%.

Even our unemployment rate looks fine—though with employment falling, it suggests more people are leaving the labor force instead of looking for jobs at all.

The only major industry that has actually shown strong employment growth over the last year is healthcare, growing 2.4%. Every other major industry grew 1% or less, or even shrank.

What would cause something like this?

This actually looks like what you’d expect to happen under technological unemployment: Productivity-enhancing technology allows GDP to increase even as employment falls.

But we haven’t actually had a surge in productivity. The massive—utterly irresponsible—rollout of AI technology has shown little, if any, effect at improving productivity. 3% of effort saved really isn’t that much, especially since a lot of people seem to overestimate how much AI tools help them.

Overall, our productivity growth looks… pretty normal, by historical standards:

Instead, what actually seems to be happening is what we might call techno-hype unemployment: Employers think that a massive productivity surge is around the corner, and they’ve already stopped hiring in anticipation of that.

Maybe they’re not even wrong about that! There is now some evidence that while initial adoption of AI reduces productivity, eventually it may increase productivity. (But we really haven’t had it long enough to be sure.)

Unemployment isn’t rising very much, not because people are finding jobs, but because people who already have jobs are generally keeping them, while people who don’t have jobs are basically giving up.

The hiring rate is now the lowest it has been since the 2020 recession—and not much higher than it was at the trough of the 2020 recession!

As far as I can tell, on our current path, one of two things will happen:

  1. The current paradigm of AI will work, and genuinely increase productivity.
  2. The current paradigm of AI will fail, and expected productivity gains will not materialize.

It turns out that neither possibility looks good for workers.

If AI succeeds, then businesses seem like they’re gonna just… stop hiring, especially entry-level positions that can be more readily replaced. People who already have senior positions may do just fine, or even make more money; but anyone fresh out of college, or even anyone whose career got derailed and is trying to start again, looks like they’ll just be… out of luck.

It’s every capitalist’s dream: To buy a machine that lets you never have to hire anyone ever again. And maybe, at last, they’ve found that Holy Grail.

On the other hand, if AI fails, the bubble will burst, the huge amount of investment that was previously driving the economy will suddenly dry up, and we will have a financial crisis and a recession. Businesses that were so sure they could replace their workers with AI will want to start hiring again, but won’t be able to, because no one can afford to buy anything and so nobody is making any revenue to pay employees with.

In many ways, the second one appears to be the preferable outcome, because at least it’s temporary. We would, sooner or later, recover from that recession and bring things back to normal. If AI ever actually works even half as well as most of the tech industry claims it will any minute, the most likely outcome seems to be launching us fully into a cyberpunk dystopia where a handful of trillionaires own everything and the rest of us struggle for scraps because our skills can now be replaced by machines.

This didn’t have to happen.

Even if AI is really going to be a transformational technology, we could have prepared for it better. We could have implemented policies that would ensure that people would continue to be provided for even as their labor was more and more replaced by machines. But that would have made the billionaires slightly less rich, and it sounded like “socialism” to ideologues, and the right-wing media convinced millions of people that even moving slightly in that direction would destroy all they held dear.

It’s not even too late! We could still turn it around, if those same people who stopped us from doing the right thing before weren’t still in charge of everything and richer than ever and just as effective as they ever were at deluding the masses.

I don’t know how to be optimistic about the future anymore. It feels like I’m watching the collapse of our entire civilization live in real time.

What would a world without poverty look like?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, education, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 22 JDN 2461122

In my previous post I reflected on the ways that conventional measures of poverty seem inadequate—and that a richer understanding of poverty suggests that it is far more ubiquitous than such measures suggest.

In this post, I will ask: Given this richer understanding of poverty, what would a world without poverty look like? Is it something we can realistically hope to achieve?

In techno-utopian circles (looking at you again, Scott Alexander), it is common to speak of “post-scarcity”: A world where there is no poverty because resources are effectively unlimited.

I don’t think that’s possible.

Not for humans as we know them. Perhaps in a future where greed is a recognized and treatable psychiatric disorder, we could genuinely have an economy where people really just take whatever they want and it works out because nobody wants an unreasonable amount.

But the fact that there are people with hundreds of billions of dollars tells me that among humans as we know them, some people’s greed is just literally insatiable. Give them a moon and they’ll demand a planet; give them a planet and they’ll demand a solar system. Whatever they are getting out of more wealth (status? power? the dopamine hit of number go up?), they’re never going to stop getting it from even more wealth, no matter how much we give them. For if they were going to stop at a reasonable amount, they would have stopped four orders of magnitude ago.

So let’s try to imagine what a world would look like if it really had no poverty, but not by somehow producing such staggering amounts of wealth that everyone could literally take whatever they want.

I think the key is that it would require all basic material needs to be met.

Everyone would have, at minimum:

  • Clean air to breathe
  • Clean water to drink
  • Nutritious food to eat
  • Shelter from the elements
  • Security against theft and violence
  • Personal liberty and political representation
  • A basic education
  • A basic standard of healthcare

(I will note that these resonate quite closely with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Some of these needs can probably never be completely satisfied—there is an inherent tension between liberty and security which requires us to balance them against each other. A society with zero crime is a horrific totalitarian police state; a society with complete liberty is an equally horrific Hobbesian nightmare. But we have achieved, in most of the First World at least, a reasonable standard of security along with a great deal of liberty, and preserving that balance should be of a very high priority.

Even clean air and water would be difficult to satisfy perfectly: even if we pivot our whole economy to solar, wind, and nuclear power (as we very definitely should be doing!), some amount of pollution is probably necessary just to have a functioning industrial society. So we need to establish reasonable standards for what amounts of pollution exposure are safe, and effective mechanisms for ensuring that people are not exposed to pollution outside those standards—we have largely done the former, but seriously fail at the latter.

But probably the most difficult needs to satisfy are actually difficult to even define.

Just what constitutes a basic standard of education, and a basic standard of healthcare?

These seem like moving targets.

Let’s start with education:

Someone who is illiterate and can barely add two numbers together would be considered to have very poor education today, but would be considered completely average among peasants in the Middle Ages. Someone like me with a PhD has education well beyond what anyone had in the Middle Ages: While Oxford was already graduating doctors in the 12th century, those doctors didn’t have to write dissertations, and didn’t know nearly as much about the world as you must to earn a modern PhD. (Most of the mathematics required to get an economics PhD specifically literally had not been invented.)

So it’s conceivable that educational standards will continue to rise over time, especially if we are able to radically improve learning via new technologies. In the most extreme case, if everyone can just download knowledge like in The Matrix, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the average person to know as much as a typical PhD today in dozens of fields.

Suppose that such technology did exist. Would it be fair to consider someone poor if they didn’t have access to it?

Yes, I think it would.

Because if it’s really cheap and easy to give breathtakingly vast knowledge on a variety of subjects to anyone instantly, then letting some people have that while others do not puts those others at a severe disadvantage in life. If you must know how to solve partial differential equations to get a job, then someone who only made it through high school algebra isn’t going to be able to find jobs.

So I think what we’re really concerned about here is inequality: The education of a rich person should not be too much better than the education of a poor person, lest “meritocracy” simply reinforce the same generational inequality it was supposed to eliminate.

Now consider healthcare:

This, too, has radically improved over time. Indeed, I’m not really sure it’s fair to call Medieval doctors doctors at all; they lacked basic knowledge of human physiology and their intervention was as likely to hurt patients as to help them. Surgeons certainly existed: They knew how to amputate a gangrenous limb or suture a wound. (They did so without antiseptic, let alone anaesthetic!) But should you come to them with a fever or a headache, they would likely do you as much harm as good.

So we could imagine a world of Star Trek medicine, where you lie in a bed, get scanned for a few moments, and the doctor immediately knows what’s wrong with you and what kind of painless injection to give you to fix it.

Once again, we must ask: If you don’t have that, are you poor?

And again, I’m going to say yes.

If the technology exists to heal people this effortlessly, and some people get access to it while others do not, the latter are being allowed to suffer when their suffering could be easily alleviated.

But now we must consider: what if the technology exists, but it’s too expensive to use routinely?

Most technologies are like this when they are first invented. Over time, the technology improves (and the patents expire!) and they become cheaper and more widely available.

Unlike education, healthcare doesn’t usually impose large advantages on those who receive it—though it can, especially in a society where disabilities are not adequately accommodated.

So I think I’m prepared to allow “early adopters” of new medical technology, people who are rich enough to pay for advanced treatments before they are available to everyone—within certain limits. If some new treatment grants radically higher productivity or lifespan, then in fact I think we have a moral obligation to wait until it can be universally shared before we give it to anyone—precisely because of the risk of reinforcing generational inequality.

Once again, in our effort to define poverty, we end up returning to inequality: The rich should not be allowed to be too much healthier than the poor.

This definitely makes education and healthcare more complicated than the others.

While we can pretty clearly define how much food and water a human being needs to live, and we could provide it to everyone, and then nobody would be poor in terms of food or water.

But making nobody poor in terms of education and healthcare requires meeting a standard that may in fact increase over time, and it is no contradiction to imagine that someone living in the 31st century could be receiving better healthcare than I ever will and yet is still not receiving adequate healthcare based on the technology available.

Furthermore, that person demanding better healthcare is not being ungrateful or envious—they are quite reasonably demanding that society fairly allocate healthcare so that there aren’t some people who live in eternal youth while other people still die of old age.

Are they richer than I am? In some sense, perhaps. We could stipulate that in every material way they are better off than I am now. But there’s a treatment that could extend their life by centuries, and nobody’s giving it to them, because they can’t afford it—and that’s wrong. That makes them poor, and it makes their society unfair and unjust. It isn’t just a question of how many QALY they have; it’s also a question of what it would cost to give them a lot more.

But with all that said, I do believe that a world without poverty is possible.

In fact, I believe that technologically we could already provide that world, if we had the political will to do so. Maybe we don’t quite have the economic output to support it worldwide, but even that is not as far off as most people seem to think.

Providing an adequate standard of food and water, for example, we could already do with existing food supplies. It would cost about one-eighth of Elon Musk’s wealth per year, meaning that, with good stock returns (as he most certainly gets), he could very likely afford it by himself!

Clean air for all would be harder, but we are moving the right direction now that solar power is so cheap.

Universal liberty and security would require radical shifts in government in dozens of countries, so that one seems especially unlikely to happen any time soon—yet it is very definitely possible, and by construction only requires political change.

Universal education and healthcare would be very expensive, and most countries are too poor to really provide them on their own. They are not simply poor in money, but poor in skills: There aren’t enough doctors and teachers, and so we would need to use the ones we have to train up a new generation, and perhaps a new generation after that, before the world’s needs would really be met. (Fortunately, there are people trying to do this. But they don’t have enough resources to really achieve these goals.) So this is not a technological limitation, but it is an economic one; it will probably be at least another generation before we can solve this one.

What about universal shelter? Now there’s the rub. Even in prosperous First World countries, housing shortages and skyrocketing prices are keeping homeownership out of reach for tens of millions of people, and leaving hundreds of thousands outright homeless. We clearly do have the technology to produce enough homes, especially if we are prepared to build at high density; but the economic cost of doing so would be substantial, and our policymakers don’t seem at all willing to actually pay it. I think as long as housing is viewed as an asset one invests in rather than a good that one needs, this will continue to be the case.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough stuff. It’s that we are not sharing it properly.

What is poverty?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , ,

Mar 15 JDN 2461115

What is poverty? It seems like a simple question, one we should all already know the answer to; but it turns out to be surprisingly complicated.

In practice, we mainly define some amount of income or consumption that is considered a “poverty line”, and declare that everyone below that line is in poverty, while everyone above it is not.

This post is about why that doesn’t work.

The most obvious question is of course: How do we draw that line? Some absolute level, or relative to income in the rest of society? Different places do it differently.

But I have come to realize that there is actually a deeper reason why there will never be a satisfying choice of “poverty line”:

There is no specific amount of income that could ever decide whether someone is in poverty.

It’s not a question of purchasing power. prices, or inflation. It’s not something you can adjust for statistically. It’s a fundamental error in defining the concept of poverty.

The problem is this:

Human needs are not fungible.

This Less Wrong post on “Anoxistan” really opened my eyes to that: No amount of money can make up for the fact that you’re missing something you need, be it a roof over your head, food on your table, clean water to drink, or medical care—or, as in the parable, air to breathe.

The best definition of poverty, then, is something like this:

Poverty is having to struggle to meet basic human material needs.

(I specify “material” needs, because someone who is alone and unloved has unmet human needs, but it is not the responsibility of even a utopian fully automated luxury communist society to provide for those needs. They may very well be miserable, but it does not make them poor.)

Maybe—maybe—in a well-functioning market economy, we can sort of muddle through by making a list of what everyone needs, finding the prices for all those goods and services, adding that up, and declaring that the poverty line. (This is often what we actually do, in fact.) The notion would then be that, as long as you have at least that amount of money, you can probably buy all the things you need.

But this rapidly breaks down if you aren’t facing the same prices as what were used to make that aggregation—which you almost never are, because nobody is the average American living in the average American city. And it also misses the fact that security is a human need, and simply having the necessary income for now is not at all the same thing as knowing that you’ll continue to have the necessary income in the future.

One Libertarian commentator asked me: “Would you really switch places with Rockefeller if you could?”

I had to think about it: I’d be losing a lot of things, for sure. No Internet, no cell phone, no computer, no video games. The quality of my clothes might actually be worse (though my wardrobe would surely be larger). Finding vegetarian food I enjoy might actually be more of a challenge, though I could surely import it from anywhere. Worst of all, I would lose access to many medical treatments I currently depend upon: Treatment of migraines in the late 19th century was considerably worse, and treatment of depression was essentially nonexistent.

Since this is about wealth, I think we can ignore the fact that I’d be moving into a terrifyingly racist, misogynistic and homophobic society. That itself might actually be the reason I wouldn’t really want to make the switch. But you can simultaneously believe that the late 19th century was a worse time than today for everyone who wasn’t a White cisgender heterosexual man, and also that Rockefeller was much richer than you’ll ever be.

But what would I gain? Power, though I have very little interest in that. Opportunities for philanthropy, which I do care about, but they’d benefit other people more than myself. Real estate—I don’t even own my own home, and Rockefeller owned multiple mansions, including, famously, the Casements in Florida.

But above all, I would gain security. Owning an oil company would allow me to live comfortably for the rest of my life, and most likely also allow my heirs to live comfortably for their entire lives, without me ever needing to work another day. I could still take jobs if I wanted them, but no employer would ever have any power over me. If I was unhappy at a job, I could just leave. If I wanted to spend a month, or a year, or a decade, without working at all, I could just do that. That is what it means to be rich. That is what Rockfeller had that I don’t think I will ever have.

The difference between being rich and being poor is security.

As long as anyone is struggling to make ends meet, poverty exists.

As long as anyone is afraid to lose their job, poverty exists.

As long as anyone is choosing not to have children because they don’t think they can afford them, poverty exists.

As long as bosses can abuse their employees and get away with it, poverty exists.

And in fact, it begins to look like poverty in the United States has not been decreasing over the last two generations, even as our per-capita GDP and median income have continued to rise and our population below “the poverty line” have fallen. (Indeed, that particular measure of “unable to afford children” has very clearly greatly increased, and is a very bad sign for our society’s future.)

This is how our economy is failing. It has given us lots more stuff, and made some things available to all that were once only available to the rich; but it has not freed us from the constant struggle to meet our basic needs, even though there are clearly plenty of resources available to do that.

The housing affordability crisis in one graph

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy, statistics , , , ,

The housing affordability crisis in one graph

Mar 8 JDN 2461108

The graph below, constructed from FRED data, provides a simple measure of housing affordability: How many years of median earnings does it take to afford the median home?

From a low of 4.4 in 1982, this rose to about 5.5 and was relatively stable in the 1990s. Then in the 2000s, it began to rise, peaked at 7.2 just before the housing crisis, and then rapidly dropped to back to 5.5 again.

Then in the 2010s it began to rise again, peaked even higher at 7.6 in 2017, and then dropped down to 6.0 in 2020 before beginning to rise anew. In 2023 it reached a yet higher peak of 8.0, and then has been slowly declining ever since—but is still about 6.5, well above its 1990s level.

I honestly expected worse than this, but I think part of what’s happening is that new homes have gotten a bit smaller in the past few years: median square footage of homes sold has fallen from a peak of 1997 in 2019 to 1788 today. (Unfortunately, FRED doesn’t have this data series going back any earlier than 2016.)

If we adjust for that, the price a typical 2019 home today would be about 7.2 years of median earnings, which is about what it was at the peak of the housing crisis in 2007.

Note of course this isn’t actually how many years you need to save up to buy a house. You clearly can’t save your entire earnings, but you also don’t need to come up with the full price, only the down payment. And what you can afford also depends upon interest rates and such. But still, it’s a pretty clear sign that housing is radically more expensive now than it was in the 1980s or even 1990s.

In my view, this is the affordability crisis.

Gas prices really aren’t that important. Car prices are relatively stable. Food prices are volatile but don’t have a bad long-term trend. We do still have serious problems with affordability in education and healthcare, but we have obvious solutions available (that several other countries are already doing successfully); we’re just not doing them because Republicans don’t like them. But housing? We have no clear solutions on the table, certainly not anything that would be politically viable. Fundamentally, we need to build more housing in places people want to live—a lot more housing—and force the price of housing down.

And with our society structured the way it is, when you price people out of housing, you price them out of adulthood. Millennials are not having kids at anywhere near the rate of previous generations, because raising kids requires living space. Especially with immigration collapsing after Trump, this housing affordability crisis is going to turn into a population crisis.

I guess what I’m hoping for at the moment is just consciousness-raising, making people see that this is actually a problem. For some reason, everyone agrees that rising prices of goods are a bad thing, except when it comes to housing.

Inflation in food? An urgent crisis that must be immediately resolved.

Inflation in gas prices? So terrible it’s worth invading other countries over.

Inflation in housing? No, somehow that’s good actually, because it makes homeowners feel richer (even though they actually owe more in property taxes). We treat housing like an asset instead of a good, which is something we should absolutely never, ever do with a good that people need to live.

How could we make job search less of a nightmare?

PNRJ core principles, market failure, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 1 JDN 2461101

This has been my “career” for the last two years:

I search through thousands of job postings, which, despite various filters and tags on my searches, almost none of which are actually good fits for me—in part because the search engines simply do not contain a great deal of information that would be vital, like “LGBT friendly”, “supportive of neurodivergent employees”, or “good at accommodating disabilities”. Instead it’s all sorted by “job title”, which at this point is clearly an arms race of search-engine optimization, because I keep getting listings called “tutor” which are actually some sort of interactive training of yet another large language model nobody actually needs. (Actual tutoring of actual human students often is a good fit for me—though it pays much better if you’re freelance than if you work for a company, because the companies take a huge cut of what the customers pay.)

But, after an hour or two of searching, I find a few that seem like they might be worth applying to. They’re never a perfect fit, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I decide I’ll go ahead and apply to them.

They ask for a resume. No problem. Perfectly sensible, I have one handy; maybe I’ll tweak it a bit, but if it’s an industry I often apply to, I may already have a tweaked version ready to go.

They ask for a cover letter. Okay, I guess. There usually isn’t much I can really say there that isn’t already in my resume, but occasionally there’s something worth adding, and it’s only maybe half an hour of work to update an existing cover letter for a new application.

Then, they ask me to input my work history in their proprietary format on their website. WHAT!? WHY!? I just gave you a resume! You aren’t even willing to read it? You want to be able to automate the reading of my resume, so I have to enter into your proprietary database? But okay, fine; beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself. So I enter everything that’s in my resume again.

Then, they ask me what salary I want. I know this game. You’re trying to make me reveal my preference in this bargaining game so you can gain bargaining power. So I look up what kind of salaries companies like them usually offer for jobs like this, and then I hike it up a bit as the opening bid in a negotiation.

Then, they ask me to fill out some questions that are supposed to assess… something. Some kind of personality test, or “culture fit”, or something similarly fuzzy. I try to interpolate my answers between my genuine feelings and the kind of hyper-obedient corporate drone they’re probably looking for, because I’m not an idiot who would answer honestly (I’m not that autistic), butI wouldn’t actually want to work for anyone who required the very topmost corporate-drone answers.

And then, what happens?

Absolutely nothing.

No response. Weeks pass. At some point, I have to assume that they’ve filled the position or closed it, or maybe that the vacancy was never real at all and they posted it for some other reason—likely to give some sense of searching when they in fact already have someone in mind. (Apparently over a third of online job postings are fake.)

I have done this process over two hundred times.

And in doing so, I have chipped off pieces of my soul. I feel like a shell of the person I was. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it all.

I am not even unusual in this regard: Recruiters often complain that they are swamped because they get 200 applicants per posting—but that means, mathematically, that an average job-seeker must apply to 200 postings before they can expect to get hired. (And which is more work, do you think: Writing a cover letter, or reading one?)

How could we make this better?

There are a lot of problems to fix here, but I have one very simple intervention that would only slightly inconvenience recruiters, while making life dramatically better for applicants. Here goes:

Require them to show you the resume of the person they actually hired.

There should be a time window: Maybe 30 days after you applied; or if it’s a position like in academia where they don’t do interviews for a long time after the application deadline, within 7 days of them starting interviews.

Anonymize the resume appropriately, of course; no photos, no names, no contact information. We don’t want the new hire to get harassed by their competitors. (And this takes, what, 5 minutes to do?)

But having to send that resume solves several problems simultaneously:

  1. It means they have to actually respond—they cannot ghost you. It can be a two-line form letter email with a one-page attachment that’s the same for all 200 applicants—but they have to send you something.
  2. It means they have to actually hire someone—the posting cannot be completely fake. If they are for some reason unable to fill the vacancy and have to close it, they should have to tell you that, and give a reason—and that reason should be legally binding such that if you ever find out it’s not true, you can sue them.
  3. It means that person had to actually apply—they couldn’t have been someone’s nephew who was automatically given the job and the posting was only made to make it look like there was a hiring process. At the very least, said nephew had to actually cough up a resume like the rest of us.
  4. It allows you to compare qualifications—you can see how you stack up against the new hire. If they are genuinely far more qualified? Well, fair enough; perhaps this job was a stretch for you, or it’s a very rough market. If they are about as qualified, or better in some ways, worse in others? Well, you surely were to apply, but you can’t win ’em all. But if they are far less qualified? You now have the basis for a lawsuit, because that looks like nepotism at best and discrimination at worst—and they had to give you that evidence, in writing, in a timely fashion.

The penalty for failing to comply with this regulation could be a small fine, perhaps $100—per applicant. The more people you ghost, the more you have to pay up.

This is clearly a very small amount of extra effort for the recruiters. They already have the resume—hopefully—and all they need to do is anonymize it, grab a standard form letter rejection email, BCC all the applicants to this position (which are—again, hopefully—already stored in one place in the company’s database), attach the anonymized resume, and click Send. We’re talking 15 minutes of work here, regardless of the number of applicants. In fact, it could probably be automated so as to require almost zero marginal effort for each new job: Just check the box next to the name of the person who was hired in the applicant tracking system, and it does the rest. (And if the person you hired wasn’t in the applicant tracking system? That sounds like a you problem, because you’re clearly not treating the other applicants fairly.)

What if we just banned banks?

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, financial fraud, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 22 JDN 2461094

I got a mailer from Wells Fargo today offering me a new credit card. The offer seemed decent, but the first thing that came to my mind was: Why is this company still allowed to exist?

In case you didn’t know, Wells Fargo was caught in 2016 creating millions of fraudulent accounts. They paid a fine of $185 million—which likely was less than the revenue they earned via this massive fraud scheme. How am I supposed to trust them ever again? How is anyone?

It’s hardly just them, of course. Almost every major bank has been implicated in some heinous crime.

JP Morgan Chase helped Jeffrey Epstein conceal assets, rigged municipal bonds transactions, and of course misrepresented thousands of mortgages in a way that directly contributed to the 2008 crisis.

Bank of America also committed mass fraud that contributed to the 2008 crisis.

A case against Citi is currently being tried for failing to protect its customers against fraud.

Capital One is being sued for failing to pay the interest rates it promised on savings accounts.

And let’s not forget HSBC, which laundered money for terrorists.

If these were individuals committing these crimes, they would be in prison, probably for the rest of their lives. But because they are corporations, they get slapped with a fine, or pay a settlement—typically less than what they made in the criminal activity—and then they get to go right back to work as if nothing had happened.

I think it’s time to do something much more radical.

Let’s ban banks.

This might sound crazy at first: Don’t we need banks? Doesn’t our whole financial system rest upon them?

But in fact, we do not need banks at all. We need loans, we need deposits, we need mortgages. But we already have a fully-functional alternative system for providing those services which is not implicated in crime after crime after heinous crime:

They are called credit unions.

Credit unions already provide almost all the services currently provided by banks—and most of the ones they don’t provide, we probably didn’t actually need anyway. There are already nearly 5,000 credit unions in the US with over 130 million customers.

Credit unions almost always fare better in financial crises, because they don’t overleverage themselves. They are far less likely to be involved in fraud. They don’t get involved in high-risk speculation. They offer higher yields on savings and lower rates on loans and credit cards. Basically they are better than banks in every way.

Why are credit unions so much better-behaved?

Because they are co-ops instead of for-profit corporations.

Customers of credit unions are also owners of credit unions, so there are no extra profits being siphoned off somewhere to greedy shareholders whose only goal in life is number go up.

Free markets are genuinely more efficient than centrally-planned systems. But there’s nothing about free markets that requires the owners of capital to be their own class of people who aren’t workers or customers and make their money by buying, selling, and owning things. That’s what’s wrong with capitalism—not too little central planning, but too concentrated ownership.

As I’ve written about before, co-ops are just as efficient as corporations, and produce much lower inequality.

For many industries, transitioning to co-ops would be a major change, and require lots of new organization that isn’t there. But for banking, the co-ops already exist. All we need to do is ban the alternative and force everyone to use the better, safer system. Come up with some way to transfer all the accounts fairly to credit unions, and—very intentionally—leave the shareholders of these criminal enterprises with absolutely nothing.

In fact, since credit unions are more likely to support other co-ops, forcing the financial system to transition to credit unions might actually make the process of transitioning our entire economy to co-ops easier.

It may seem extreme, but please, take a look again at all those crimes that all these major, highly-successful, market-dominating banks have committed. They’ve had their chance to prove that they can be honest and law-abiding, and they have failed.

Get rid of them.

Love in a godless universe

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 15 JDN 2461087

This post will go live just after Valentine’s Day, so I thought I would write this week about love.

(Of course I’ve written about love before, often around this time of year.)

Many religions teach that love is a gift from God, perhaps the greatest of all such gifts; indeed, some even say “God is love” (though I confess I have never been entirely sure what that sentence is intended to mean). But if there is no God, what is love? Does it still have meaning?

I believe that it does.

Yes, there is a cynical account of love often associated with atheism, which is that it is “just a chemical reaction” or “just an evolved behavior”. (An easy way to look out for this sort of cynical account is to look for the word “just”.)

Well, if love is a chemical reaction, so is consciousness—indeed the two seem very deeply related. I suppose a being can be conscious without being capable of love (do psychopaths qualify?), but I certainly do not think a being can be capable of love without being conscious.

Indeed, I contend that once you really internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, “just a chemical reaction” strikes you as an utterly trivial claim: What isn’t a chemical reaction? That’s just a funny way of saying something exists.

What about being an evolved behavior? Yes, this is a much more insightful account of what love is, what it means—what it’s for, even. It evolved to make us find mates, protect offspring, and cooperate in groups.

And I can hear the response coming: “Is that all?” “Is it just that?” (There’s that “just” again.)

So let me try phrasing it another way:

Love is what makes us human.

If there is one thing that human beings are better at than anything in the known universe, one thing that most absolutely characterizes who and what we are, it is love.

Intelligence? Rationality? Reasoning? Oh, sure, for the first half-million years of our existence, we were definitely on top; but now, I think computers have got us beat on those. (I guess it’s hard to say for sure if Claude is truly intelligent, but I can tell you this: Wolfram Alpha is a lot better at calculus than I’ll ever be, and I will never win a game of Go against AlphaZero.)

Strength? Ridiculous! By megafauna standards—even ape standards—we’re pathetic. Speed? Not terrible, but of course the cheetahs and peregrine falcons have us beat. Endurance? We’re near the top, but so are several other species—including horses, which we’ve made good use of. Durability? Also surprisingly good—we’re tougher than we look—but we still hold no candles to a pachyderm. (You need special guns to kill an elephant, because most standard bullets barely pierce their skin. And standard bullets were, more or less by construction, designed to kill humans.) We do throw exceptionally well, so if you’d like, you can say that the essence of humanity is javelin-throwing—or perhaps baseball.

But no, I think it is love that sets us apart.

Not that other animals are incapable of love; far from it. Almost all mammals and birds express love to their offspring and often their partners; I would not even be sure that reptiles, fish, or amphibians are incapable of love, though their behavior is less consistently affectionate and I am thus less certain about it. (Especially when fish eat their own offspring!) In fact, I might even be prepared to say that bees feel love for their sisters and their mother (the queen). And if insects can feel it, then our world is absolutely teeming with love.

But what sets humans apart, even from other mammals, is the scale at which we are able to love. We are able to love a city, a nation, a culture. We are even able to love ideas.

I do not think this is just a metaphor: (There’s that “just” again!) I would as surely die for democracy as I would to save the life of my spouse. That love is real. It is meaningful. It is important.

Humans feel love for other humans they have never met who live thousands of miles away from them. They will even willingly accept harm to themselves to benefit those others (e.g. by donating to international charities); one can argue that most people do not do this enough, but people do actually do it, and it is difficult to explain why they would were it not for genuine feelings of caring toward people they have never met and most likely never will.

And without this, all of what we know as “human civilization” quite simply could not exist. Without our love for our countrymen, for our culture, for our shared ethical and political principles, we could not sustain these grand nation-states that span the world.

Yes, even despite our often fierce disagreements, there must be a core of solidarity between at least enough people to sustain a nation. Even authoritarian governments cannot sustain themselves when the entire population stops loving them—in fact, they seem to fail at the hands of a sufficiently well-organized four percent. (Honestly, perhaps the worst part about fascist states is that many of their people do love them, all too deeply!)

More than that, without love, we could never have created institutions like science, art, and journalism that slowly but surely accumulate knowledge that is shared with the whole of humanity. The march of progress has been slower and more fitful than I think anyone would like; but it is real, nonetheless, and in the long run humanity’s trajectory still seems to be toward a brighter future—and it is love that makes it so.

It is sometimes said that you should stop caring what other people think—but caring what other people think is what makes us human. Sure, there are bad forms of social pressure; but a person who literally does not care how their actions make other people think and feel is what we call a psychopath. Part of what it means to love someone is to care a great deal what they think. And part of what makes a good person is to have the capacity to love as much as possible.

Love binds us together not only as families, but as nations, and—hopefully, one day—it could bind humanity or even all sentient life as one united whole. Morality is a deep and complicated subject, but if you must start somewhere very simple in understanding it, you could do much worse than to start with love.

It is often said that God is what binds cultures, nations, and humanity together. With this in mind, perhaps I am prepared to assent to “God is love” after all, but let me clarify what I would mean by it:

Love does for us what people thought they needed God for.

How are this many people in the Epstein files?

PNRJ current events, ethics, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 8 JDN 2461080

It’s been obvious from the start that Donald Trump had something to hide in the Epstein files, but the list of famous people mentioned in the Epstein files absolutely staggers me.

Just listing people I had previously heard of, even aside from Donald and Melania Trump:

Woody Allen, Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak, Richard Branson, William Burns, Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, Bill Clinton, David Copperfield, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson, Thorbjørn Jagland, Lawrence Krauss, Elon Musk, Mehmet Oz, Brett Ratner, Ariane de Rothschild, Kevin Spacey, Lawrence H. Summers, Peter Thiel, Robert Trivers, and Michael Wolff.

There are of course more people who are famous for various things that I simply wasn’t familiar with, such as Anil Ambani, Peter Attia, Todd Boehly, Andrew Farkas, Brad S. Karp, and Brian Vickers. And more names may yet come out as the saga continues.

Now, some of these connections are more damning than others: At the milder end, we have Bill Gates, who doesn’t appear to have actually received (let alone responded to) the emails addressed to him, and Thorbjørn Jagland, who was planning to visit the island but apparently never actually did so. At the worse end, we have Richard Branson, who introduced Epstein to his “harem” (Branson’s word), Noam Chomsky, who had extensive exchanges and received $270,000 from a mysterious account (he claims Epstein had nothing to do with it), Lawrence Krauss and Robert Trivers, who both continued to publicly defend Epstein even after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes against children in 2008, Peter Thiel, who received $40 million from Epstein, and of course Donald Trump himself, who is mentioned in the Epstein files some 38,000 times. (That we know of.)

Even the damning ones are largely not conclusive; the documents that have been released don’t appear to be sufficient to prove anyone guilty of crimes in a court of law. But given that Donald Trump is President and is probably doing everything he can to suppress and redact any such evidence that does exist (at the very least against himself), this absence of evidence is not particularly strong evidence of absence. The best we can really say at this juncture is that it looks very suspicious about an awful lot of famous people.

I guess it’s honestly possible that some of these people knew Epstein well but really didn’t know about his secret life sexually abusing children. Sometimes monsters can hide in plain sight. But several of these people have been credibly accused of sex crimes of their own, and many of them circled the wagons to defend each other whenever new accusations came out. And once someone pleads guilty and is convicted (as Epstein was in 2008), you really should stop defending him.

It honestly seems like QAnon wasn’t entirely wrong after all! There was a secret cabal of famous, powerful people sexually abusing children! They just got some (okay, nearly all) of the details wrong, and for some reason thought that Donald Trump was going to bring that cabal down, rather than do everything in his power to suppress and redact all files related to it and still end up being mentioned in said files over 38,000 times. But honestly, the whole idea sounded crazy to me, and apparently it was basically correct! (Even at least one Rothschild seems to have been involved!)

I am particularly disturbed by the academics on this list: Chomsky, Hawking, Krauss, Summers, and Trivers. These men are (or were) taking up scarce tenure slots at highly prestigious universities, while at best being guilty of very bad judgment, and quite likely actually guilty of serious sex crimes. Even if they aren’t actually criminals themselves, keeping them on at prestigious institutions—as several top universities did, for years, after much was already known—besmirches the reputation of those institutions and is a disservice to the many qualified academics with better reputations who would happily replace them.

To that list I might add Chopra, who has also taught at extremely prestigious universities, but doesn’t actually do much credible research, preferring instead to peddle pseudoscientific nonsense. I don’t understand why universities ever let him teach at all—frankly it’s an insult to every other applicant they haven’t hired. (Having applied to many of these institutions myself, I take it quite personally, as a matter of fact. You think he’s better than me?) Chopra’s associations with Epstein are just one more reason to cut ties with him, when they never had any reason to make ties with him in the first place.

I am not optimistic that releasing these files will accomplish very much. Like I said, none of it seems to be conclusive. Even if evidence of crimes did emerge, they’d likely be beyond the statute of limitations. All the secrecy surrounding Epstein and his cohorts actually seems to have been pretty effective at protecting them from facing punishment for their actions.

But please, please, I’m begging here, for the sake of all that is good in the world, could this at least make people stop supporting Donald Trump!?