inequality

The United States has stopped creating jobs—maybe forever?

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

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.

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.

Productivity by itself does not eliminate poverty

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure , , , , , , ,

Jan 25 JDN 2461066

Scott Alexander has a techno-utopian vision:

Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent of infinite post-scarcity, there is, I admit, a tiny shoreline of possibilities that end in oligarch capture. Even if you end up there, you’ll be fine. Dario Amodei has taken the Giving What We Can Pledge (#43 here) to give 10% of his wealth to the less fortunate; your worst-case scenario is owning a terraformed moon in one of his galaxies. Now you can stop worrying about the permanent underclass and focus on more important things.

I agree that total annihilation is a very serious risk, though fortunately I believe it is not the most likely outcome. But it seems pretty weird to me to posit that the most likely outcome is “infinite post-scarcity” when oligarch capture is what we already have.

(Regarding Alexander’s specific example: Dario Amidei has $3.7 billion. If he were to give away 10% of that, it would be $370 million, which would be good, but hardly usher in a radical utopia. The assumption seems to be that he would be one of the prevailing trillionaire oligarchs, and I don’t see how we can know that would be the case. Even if AI succeeds in general, that doesn’t mean that every company that makes AI succeeds. (Video games succeeded, but who buys Atari anymore?) Also, it seems especially wide-eyed to imagine that one man would ever own entire galaxies. We probably won’t even ever be able to reach other galaxies!)

People with this sort of utopian vision seem to imagine that all we need to do is make more stuff, and then magically it will all be distributed in such a way that everyone gets to have enough.

If Alexander were writing 200 years ago, I could even understand why he’d think that; there genuinely wasn’t enough stuff to go around, and it would have made sense to think that all we needed to do was solve that problem, and then the other problems would be easy.

But we no longer live in that world.

There is enough stuff to go around—at the very least this is true of all highly-developed countries, and it’s honestly pretty much true of the world as a whole. The problem is very much that it isn’t going around.

Elon Musk’s net wealth is now estimated at over $780 billion. Seven hundred and eighty billion dollars. He could give $90 to every person in the world (all 8.3 billion of us). He could buy a home (median price $400,000—way higher than it was just a few years ago) for every homeless person in America (about 750,000 people) and still have half his wealth left over. He could give $900 to every single person of the 831 million people who live below the world extreme poverty threshold—thus eliminating extreme poverty in the world for a year. (And quite possibly longer, as all those people are likely to be more productive now that they are well-fed.) He has chosen to do none of these things, because he wants to see number go up.

That’s just one man. If you add up all the wealth of all the world’s billionaires—just billionaires, so we’re not even counting people with $50 million or $100 million or $500 million—it totals over $16 trillion. This is enough to not simply end extreme poverty for a year, but to establish a fund that would end it forever.

And don’t tell me that they can’t really do this because it’s all tied up in stocks and not liquid. UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock. Giving UNICEF $10 trillion in stocks absolutely would permanently end extreme poverty worldwide. And they could donate those stocks today. They are choosing not to.

I still think that AI is a bubble that’s going to burst and trigger a financial crisis. But there is some chance that AI actually does become a revolutionary new technology that radically increases productivity. (In fact, I think this will happen, eventually. I just think we’re a paradigm or two away from that, and LLMs are largely a dead end.)

But even if that happens, unless we have had radical changes in our economy and society, it will not usher in a new utopian era of plenty for all.

How do I know this? Because if that were what the powers that be wanted to happen, they would have already started doing it. The super-rich are now so absurdly wealthy that they could easily effect great reductions in poverty at home and abroad while costing themselves basically nothing in terms of real standard of living, but they are choosing not to do that. And our governments could be taxing them more and using those funds to help people, and they are by and large choosing not to do that either.

The notion seems to be similar to “trickle-down economics”: Once the rich get rich enough, they’ll finally realize that money can’t buy happiness and start giving away their vast wealth to help people. But if that didn’t happen at $100 million, or $1 billion, or $10 billion, or $100 billion, I see no reason to think that it will happen at $1 trillion or $10 trillion or even $100 trillion.

A new Santa Baby

PNRJ current events, development economics, inequality , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 28 JDN 2461038

In the song “Santa Baby”, there are several high-value items requested as Christmas gifts. I’m currently working on a rewrite of the song that compares these items with humanitarian interventions of the same cost, making into a protest song—but so far I’ve had trouble making it actually singable with the meter of the song.

So for now, I thought I’d share my cost estimates and what could be purchased with those same amounts:

Sable: $1000 More expensive than most dogs, but really not that bad! In fact, some purebreds cost more than that.

1954 convertible: $28,000; yeah, classic cars are really not that expensive actually.

Yacht: There are yachts and then there are yachts. Could cost anywhere from $300,000 to $500 million.

Platinum mine: Hard to estimate, but with platinum costing $2400 per ounce and mines capable of producing thousands of ounces per year for 20 years, should be worth at least $100 million—and possibly as much as $1 billion.

Duplex: $400,000 or so, depending on the location.

Decorations at Tiffany’s: Depends on what you buy, but easily $10,000 to trim a whole tree; that store is so wildly overpriced that a jewellery box can cost you $2,000 and even an individual Christmas tree ornament can cost $160. (Seriously, don’t shop at Tiffany’s.)

Ring: Depends on a lot of factors; I’ll assume platinum, so that will run you anywhere from $400 for a basic band to $95,000 for one with a huge diamond.

The platinum mine is a clear outlier; unless you buy one of the largest yachts in the world, none of the other items even come close to its price. Aside from the yacht, all the other items add up to less than a million dollars, and even the cheapest platinum mines are clearly worth more than that.

What else could you buy for these amounts?

Well, a malaria net costs about $2, and on average every $3,000 spent saves a child’s life. A vaccine costs about $1-$5 per dose. So for the price of the platinum mine alone, we could buy 50 million malaria nets or 20 million vaccines, and either way expect to save the lives of about 30,000 children.

(Maybe some other time I’ll actually make this into something singable.)

On the other hand, if you really wanna buy a sable or a 1954 convertible, they’re really not that expensive. The former is cheaper than a purebred dog, and the latter costs about the same as a new car.

What we still have to be thankful for

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 30 JDN 2461010

This post has been written before, but will go live after, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is honestly a very ambivalent holiday.

The particular event it celebrates don’t seem quite so charming in their historical context: Rather than finding peace and harmony with all Native Americans, the Pilgrims in fact allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett, though they did later join forces with the Narragansett in order to conquer the Pequot. And of course we all know how things went for most Native American nations in the long run.

Moreover, even the gathering of family comes with some major downsides, especially in a time of extreme political polarization such as this one. I won’t be joining any of my Trump-supporting relatives for dinner this year (and they probably wouldn’t have invited me anyway), but the fact that this means becoming that much more detached from a substantial part of my extended family is itself a tragedy.

This year in particular, US policy has gotten so utterly horrific that it often feels like we have nothing to be thankful for at all, that all we thought was good and just in the world could simply be torn away at a moment’s notice by raving madmen. It isn’t really quite that bad—but it feels that way sometimes.

It also felt a bit uncanny celebrating Thanksgiving a few years ago when we were living in Scotland, for the UK does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but absolutely does celebrate Black Friday: Holidays may be local, but capitalism is global.

But fall feasts of giving thanks are far more ancient than that particular event in 1621 that we have mythologized to oblivion. They appear in numerous cultures across the globe—indeed their very ubiquity may be why the Wampanoag were so willing to share one with the Pilgrims despite their cultures having diverged something like 40,000 years prior.

And I think that it is by seeing ourselves in that context—as part of the whole of humanity—that we can best appreciate what we truly do have to be thankful for, and what we truly do have to look forward to in the future.

Above all, medicine.

We have actual treatments for some diseases, even actual cures for some. By no means all, of course—and it often feels like we are fighting an endless battle even against what we can treat.

But it is worth reflecting on the fact that aside from the last few centuries, this has simply not been the case. There were no actual treatments. There was no real medicine.

Oh, sure, there were attempts at medicine; and there was certainly what we would think of as more like “first aid”: bandaging wounds, setting broken bones. Even amputation and surgery were done sometimes. But most medical treatment was useless or even outright harmful—not least because for most of history, most of it was done without anesthetic or even antiseptic!

There were various herbal remedies for various ailments, some of which even have happened to work: Willow bark genuinely helps with pain, St. John’s wort is a real antidepressant, and some traditional burn creams are surprisingly effective.

But there was no system in place for testing medicine, no way of evaluating what remedies worked and what didn’t. And thus, for every remedy that worked as advertised, there were a hundred more that did absolutely nothing, or even made things worse.

Today, it can feel like we are all chronically ill, because so many of us take so many different pills and supplements. But this is not a sign that we are ill—it is a sign that we can be treated. The pills are new, yes—but the illnesses they treat were here all along.

I don’t see any particular reason to think that Roman plebs or Medieval peasants were any less likely to get migraines than we are; but they certainly didn’t have access to sumatriptan or rimegepant. Maybe they were less likely to get diabetes, but mainly because they were much more likely to be malnourished. (Well, okay, also because they got more exercise, which we surely could stand to.) And they only reason they didn’t get Alzheimer’s was that they usually didn’t live long enough.

Looking further back, before civilization, human health actually does seem to have been better: Foragers were rarely malnourished, weren’t exposed to as many infectious pathogens, and certainly got plenty of exercise. But should a pathogen like smallpox or influenza make it to a forager tribe, the results were often utterly catastrophic.

Today, we don’t really have the sort of plague that human beings used to deal with. We have pandemics, which are also horrible, but far less so. We were horrified by losing 0.3% of our population to COVID; a society that had only suffered 0.3%—or even ten times that, 3%—losses from the Black Death would have been hailed as a miracle, for a more typical rate was 30%.

At 0.3%, most of us knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, who died from COVID. At 3%, nearly everyone would know somebody, and most would know several. At 30%, nearly everyone would have close family and friends who died.

Then there is infant mortality.

As recently as 1950—this is living memory—the global infant mortality rate was 14.6%. This is about half what it had been historically; for most of human history, roughly a third of all children died between birth and the age of 5.

Today, it is 2.5%.

Where our distant ancestors expected two out of three of their children to survive and our own great-grandparents expected five out of six can now safely expect thirty-nine out of forty to live. This is the difference between “nearly every family has lost a child” and “most families have not lost a child”.

And this is worldwide; in highly-developed countries it’s even better. The US has a relatively high infant mortality rate by the standards of highly-developed countries (indeed, are we even highly-developed, or are we becoming like Saudi Arabia, extremely rich but so unequal that it doesn’t really mean anything to most of our people?). Yet even for us, the infant mortality rate is 0.5%—so we can expect one-hundred-ninety-nine out of two-hundred to survive. This is at the level of “most families don’t even know someone who has lost a child.”

Poverty is a bit harder to measure.

I am increasingly dubious of conventional measures of poverty; ever since compiling my Index of Necessary Expenditure, I am convinced that economists in general, and perhaps US economists in particular, are systematically underestimating the cost of living and thereby underestimating the prevalence of poverty. (I don’t think this is intentional, mind you; I just think it’s a result of using convenient but simplistic measures and not looking too closely into the details.) I think not being able to sustainably afford a roof over your head constitutes being poor—and that applies to a lot of people.

Yet even with that caveat in mind, it’s quite clear that global poverty has greatly declined in the long run.

At the “extreme poverty” level, currently defined as consuming $1.90 at purchasing power parity per day—that’s just under $700 per year, less than 2% of the median personal income in the United States—the number of people has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 700 million today. That’s from 36% of the world’s population to under 9% today.

Now, there are good reasons to doubt that “purchasing power parity” really can be estimated as accurately as we would like, and thus it’s not entirely clear that people living on “$2 per day PPP” are really living at less than 2% the standard of living of a typical American (honestly to me that just sounds like… dead); but they are definitely living at a much worse standard of living, and there are a lot fewer people living at such low standard of living today than there used to be not all that long ago. These are people who don’t have reliable food, clean water, or even basic medicine—and that used to include over a third of humanity and does no longer. (And I would like to note that actually finding such a person and giving them a few hundred dollars absolutely would change their life, and this is the sort of thing GiveDirectly does. We may not know exactly how to evaluate their standard of living, but we do know that the actual amount of money they have access to is very, very small.)

There are many ways in which the world could be better than it is.

Indeed, part of the deep, overwhelming outrage I feel pretty much all the time lies in the fact that it would be so easy to make things so much better for so many people, if there weren’t so many psychopaths in charge of everything.


Increased foreign aid is one avenue by which that could be achieved—so, naturally, Trump cut it tremendously. More progressive taxation is another—so, of course, we get tax cuts for the rich.

Just think about the fact that there are families with starving children for whom a $500 check could change their lives; but nobody is writing that check, because Elon Musk needs to become a literal trillionaire.

There are so many water lines and railroad tracks and bridges and hospitals and schools not being built because the money that would have paid for them is tied up in making already unfathomably-rich people even richer.

But even despite all that, things are getting better. Not every day, not every month, not even every year—this past year was genuinely, on net, a bad one. But nearly every decade, every generation, and certainly every century (for at least the last few), humanity has fared better than we did the last.

As long as we can keep that up, we still have much to hope for—and much to be thankful for.

What is the cost of all this?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 23 JDN 2461003

After the Democrats swept the recent election and now the Epstein files are being released—and absolutely do seem to have information that is damning about Trump—it really seems like Trump’s popularity has permanently collapsed. His approval rating stands at 42%, which is about 42% too high, but at least comfortably well below a majority.

It now begins to feel like we have hope, not only of removing him, but also of changing how American politics in general operates so that someone like him ever gets power again. (The latter, of course, is a much taller order.)

But at the risk of undermining this moment of hope, I’d like to take stock of some of the damage that Trump and his ilk have already done.

In particular, the cuts to US foreign aid are an absolute humanitarian disaster.

These didn’t get so much attention, because there has been so much else going on; and—unfortunately—foreign aid actually isn’t that popular among American voters, despite being a small proportion of the budget and by far the most cost-effective beneficial thing that our government does.

In fact, I think USAID would be cost-effective on a purely national security basis: it’s hard to motivate people to attack a country that saves the lives of their children. Indeed, I suppose this is the kernel of truth to the leftists who say that US foreign aid is just a “tool of empire” (or even “a front for the CIA”); yes, indeed, helping the needy does in fact advance American interests and promote US national security.

Over the last 25 years, USAID has saved over 90 million lives. That is more than a fourth of the population of the United States. And it has done this for the cost of less than 1% of the US federal budget.

But under Trump’s authority and Elon Musk’s direction, US foreign aid was cut massively over the last couple of years, and the consequences are horrific. Research on the subject suggests that as many as 700,000 children will die each year as long as these cuts persist.


Even if that number is overestimated by a factor of 2, that would still be millions of children over the next few years. And it could just as well be underestimated.

If we don’t fix this fast, millions of children will die. Thousands already have.

What’s more, fixing this isn’t just a matter of bringing the funding back. Obviously that’s necessary, but it won’t be sufficient. The sudden cuts have severely damaged international trust in US foreign aid, and many of the agencies that our aid was supporting will either collapse or need to seek funding elsewhere—quite likely from China. Relationships with governments and NGOs that were built over decade have been strained or even destroyed, and will need to be rebuilt.

This is what happens when you elect monsters to positions of power.

And even after we remove them, much of the damage will be difficult or even impossible to repair. Certainly we can never bring back the children who have already needlessly died because of this.

In Nozicem

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

Nov 2 JDN 2460982

(I wasn’t sure how to convert Robert Nozick’s name into Latin. I decided it’s a third-declension noun, Nozix, Nozicis. But my name already is Latin, so if one of his followers ever wants to write a response to this post that also references In Catalinam, they’ll know how to decline it; the accusative is Julium, if you please.)

This post is not at all topical. I have been too busy working on video game jams (XBOX Game Camp Detroit, and then the Epic Mega Jam, for which you can view my submission, The Middle of Nowhere, here!) to keep up with the news, and honestly I think I am psychologically better off for it.

Rather, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got around to.

It is about Robert Nozick, and why he was a bad philosopher, a bad person, and a significant source of harm to our society as a whole.

Nozick had a successful career at Harvard, and even became president of the American Philosophical Association. So it may seem that I am going out on quite a limb by saying he’s a bad philosopher.

But the philosophy for which he is best known, the thing that made his career, is not simply obviously false—it is evil. It is the sort of thing that one can only write if one is either a complete psychopath, utterly ignorant of history, or arguing in bad faith (or some combination of these).

It is summarized in this pithy quote that makes less moral sense than the philosophy of the Joker in The Dark Knight:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p.169)

I apologize in advance for my language, but I must say it:

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.

At worst—at the absolute worst, when a government is utterly corrupt and tyrannical, provides no legitimate services whatsoever, contributes in no way to public goods, offers no security, and exists entirely to enrich its ruling class—which by the way is worse than almost any actual government that has ever existed, even including totalitarian dictators and feudal absolute monarchies—at worst, taxation is like theft.

Taxation, like theft, takes your wealth, not your labor.


Wealth is not labor.

Even wealth earned by wage income is not labor—and most wealth isn’t earned by wage income. Elon Musk is now halfway to a trillion dollars, and it’s not because he works a million times harder than you. (Nor is he a million times smarter than you, or even ten—perhaps not even one.) The majority of wealth—and the vast majority of top 1%, top 0.1%, and top 0.01% wealth—is capital that begets more capital, continuously further enriching those who could live just fine without ever working another day in their lives. Billionaire wealth is honestly so pathological at this point that it would be pathetic if it weren’t so appalling.

Even setting aside the historical brutality of slavery as it was actually implemented—especially in the United States, where slaves were racialized and commodified in a way that historically slaves usually weren’t—there is a very obvious, very bright, very hard line between taking someone’s wealth and forcing them to work.

Even a Greek prisoner of war who was bought by a Roman patrician to tutor his children—the sort of slave that actually had significant autonomy and lived better than an average person in Roman society—was fundamentally unfree in a way that no one has ever been made unfree by having to pay income tax. (And the Roman patrician who owned him and (ahem) paid taxes was damn well aware of how much more free he was than his slave.)

Whether you are taxed at 2% or 20% or 90%, you are still absolutely free to use your time however you please. Yes, if you assume a fixed amount of work at a fixed wage, and there are no benefits to you from the taxation (which is really not something we can assume, because having a good or bad government radically affects what your economy as a whole will be like), you will have less stuff, and if you insist for some reason that you must have the same amount of stuff, then you would have to work more.

But even then, you would merely have to work more somewhere—anywhere—in order to make up the shortfall. You could keep your current job, or get another one, or start your own business. And you could at any time decide that you don’t need all that extra stuff and don’t want to work more, and simply choose to not work more. You are, in other words, still free.

At worst, the government has taken your stuff. It has made you poorer. But absolutely not, in no way, shape or form, has it made you a slave.

Yes, there is the concept of “wage slavery”, but “wage slavery” isn’t actually slavery, and the notion that people aren’t really, truly free unless they can provide for basic needs entails the need for a strong, redistributive government, which is the exact opposite of what Robert Nozick and his shockingly large body of followers have been arguing for since the 1970s.

I could have been sympathetic to Nozick if his claim had been this:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with [theft]. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing [goods he has purchased with his own earnings].

Or even this:

[Military conscription] is on a par with forced labor. [After all, you are] seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Even then, there are some very clear reasons why we might be willing to accept taxation or even conscription from a legitimate liberal democratic government even though a private citizen doing the same fundamental activity would obviously be illegal and immoral.

Indeed, it’s not clear that theft is always immoral; there is always the Les Miserables exception where someone desperately poor steals food to feed themselves, and a liberal democratic government taxing its citizens in order to provide food stamps seems even more ethically defensible than that.

And that, my friends, is precisely why Nozick wasn’t satisfied with it.

Precisely because there is obvious nuance here that can readily justify at least some degree of not only taxation for national security and law enforcement, but also taxation for public goods and even redistribution of wealth, Nozick could not abide the analogies that actually make sense. He had to push beyond them to an analogy that is transparently absurd, in order to argue for his central message that government is justifiable for national security and law enforcement only, and all other government functions are inherently immoral. Forget clean water and air. Forget safety regulations in workplaces—or even on toys. Forget public utilities—all utilities must be privatized and unregulated. And above all—above all—forget ever taking any money from the rich to help the poor, because that would be monstrous.

If you support food stamps, in Nozick’s view, there should be a statue of you in Mississippi, because you are a defender of slavery.

Indeed, many of his followers have gone beyond that, and argued using the same core premises that all government is immoral, and the only morally justifiable system is anarcho-capitalism—which, I must confess, I have always had trouble distinguishing from feudalism with extra steps.

Nozick’s response to this kind of argument basically seemed to be that he thought anarcho-capitalism will (somehow, magically) automatically transition into his favored kind of minarchist state, and so it’s actually a totally fine intermediate goal. (A fully privatized military and law enforcement system! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like private prisons are already unconscionably horrible even in an otherwise mostly-democratic system or anything!)

Nozick wanted to absolve himself—and the rich, especially the rich, whom he seemed to love more than life itself—from having to contribute to society, from owing anything to any other human being.

Rather than be moved by our moral appeals that millions of innocent people are suffering and we could so easily alleviate that suffering by tiny, minuscule, barely-perceptible harms to those who are already richer than anyone could possibly deserve to be, he tried to turn the tables: “No, you are immoral. What you want is slavery.”

And in so doing, he created a thin, but shockingly resilient, intellectual veneer to the most craven selfishness and the most ideologically blinkered hyper-capitalism. He made it respectable to oppose even the most basic ways that governments can make human life better; by verbal alchemy he transmuted plain evil into its own new moral crusade.

Indeed, perhaps the only reason his philosophy was ever taken seriously is that the rich and powerful found it very, very, useful.