Training Example: Marginal Revolution – Review the Data, Give Your Score & Compare to the Real AI Evaluation

1. Are “dad books” a dying breed? (WSJ)  And are podcasts to blame?
2. Profile of Camille Paglia at age 79 (London Times, gated).
3. Olivier Blanchard: ” I certainly worry about the evolution of US public debt and the size of primary deficits. But, while there is a lot of discussion/worry about the increase in nominal interest rates, the 10-year inflation indexed rate, which is the relevant one for debt dynamics, has remained surprisingly stable.”
4. Revana Sharfuddin: “Uncertainty around immigration policy may have downstream effects on fertility decisions. We probably underestimate how much family formation responds to policy instability.”
6. Nagel on Scanlon.
7. “No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.”  Article here.

Jeff Bezos tweeted:
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
Strangely, a chorus of liberal economists rushed to attack Bezos. Gabriel Zucman replied:
Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.
Justin Wolfers piled on:
If you only count the progressive taxes the U.S. levies, then the U.S. system is quite progressive. But if you also count regressive taxes (payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc), it’s not very progressive.
Bezos called for cutting taxes on the bottom half to make the tax system more progressive and the redistributionists came out swinging–to argue he was wrong about how progressive the current system already is. Own goal. Heretics are worse than unbelievers.
But there’s a second, more interesting thing going on. To make the regressivity case, Zucman and Wolfers have to count payroll payments as taxes. That cuts directly against eighty years of liberal doctrine. Beginning with FDR, the argument on the liberal side has always been that payroll taxes are not taxes but contributions or premiums entitling the payer to benefits as an “earned right.” Here’s FDR to Luther Gulick in 1941:
We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.
That framing isn’t a historical curiosity. It runs straight through liberal social security stalwarts like Arthur Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Robert Ball, and it’s alive today in Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson’s Social Security Works!, which attacks billionaires and insists Social Security benefits are “earned compensation.” The whole political durability of the program–the third rail–rests on this framing.
So the modern left wants it both ways. When the question is whether to cut Social Security, FICA is a premium and benefits are earned compensation. When the question is whether the tax system is progressive, FICA is suddenly a regressive tax. Pick a lane.
Is there a principled way to resolve this? Yes, and it follows Jim Buchanan (see my earlier post here) and Larry Summers who laid out the economics in his classic paper Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits. The principled test is whether a payment reduces labor supply. The wedge between marginal product and the worker’s reservation wage isn’t the statutory rate–it’s the gap between the mandated payment and the worker’s marginal benefit. Sylvain Catherine made exactly this point in reply to Wolfers:
Payroll taxes are not regressive! They are mandatory contributions to a retirement system that offers higher rates of returns at the bottom than at the top.
Consider a forced savings program: everyone must pay 12.4% of income into a 401(k). Is this a tax? For someone who was going to save 15% anyway, not at all. For someone who was going to save 10%, only the extra 2.4% bites. Mandatory does not mean tax. The marginal valuation of the mandated benefit is the key.
Now apply this to the two payroll taxes.
Medicare (HI): Every marginal dollar buys zero marginal benefit. Thus, it’s a tax. Part A eligibility is binary–40 quarters gets you in–and once in, your benefit is whatever Medicare spends on your care. No relationship on the margin. (Moreover, the raw HI schedule is unambiguously progressive: 2.9% flat, rising to 3.8% above $200K/$250K thresholds, plus the NIIT.)
Social Security (OASDI): The 90/32/15 Primary Insurance Amount bend points mean a low earner gets a much better return than a high earner. So the gross statutory rate is flat-then-regressive; but the net rate is progressive. In short, OASDI isn’t a tax for low earners but it is a tax for higher earners, thus the tax is progressive.
So: HI is a progressive tax. OASDI is a contribution at the bottom and a tax at the top. Either way, the Zucman-Wolfers framing—payroll payments as straightforward regressive taxes—is wrong and rhetorically it abandons the framing the left has spent eighty years building to protect these programs.
Personally, I’d prefer a system truer to the old rhetoric–a forced savings program with a closer connection between marginal payments and benefits. But if the left wants to reframe Social Security contributions as taxes, and thus make Social Security all about redistribution to the poor, rather than a wise savings program, roll the dice. Just remember that Altmeyer, Cohen, and Ball spent decades building the “earned right” framing precisely because they understood it was the program’s structural defense against means-testing and privatization. Drop the framing and you drop the defense. I suspect the privatizers at AEI and Cato will happily take that trade but the left may come to regret making it for them.

The subtitle is The Politics of Feasible Liberalism, and the author is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.  The author wishes to argue for liberalism as opposed to statism, a very good book.  And unlike many authors, Deirdre also tells you what she thinks of everyone else’s views.  Due out in November.

The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.
In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:
1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.
2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.
3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.
4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.
It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with.  My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se.  For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism.  I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well.  Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not?  I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming.  It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises.  Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.
But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?  Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.

1. Fortune covers my AI talk for Sana in NYC.  Plus my NBA predictions, made Thursday a.m.
2. SGA does seem to flop more.
3. Marc Andreessen on AI.
4. Thomas Sargent lectures on YouTube.
5. Why Japanese companies do so many different things.
6. Fresh Knausgård.
7. ““The Boys of Dungeon Lane” is absolutely the best album ever recorded and released by a rock star in his 80s.“

This was a great failure of the most recent philanthropic era. At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads. But there was no real legacy when it came to physical infrastructure — no great beautification campaigns, no beloved architectural landmarks, no equivalent of the Gilded Age’s expansions of museums and libraries and concert halls, and few personal expressions of extravagance (like the Newport mansions or Hearst Castle) for future tourists to admire.
At the beginning of the 20th century, philanthropic dollars had already helped build the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall, the campuses of Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago, a network of urban parks, various impressive churches and an array of private homes that would themselves become public spaces within a few generations. Tastes vary, but I do not think that the monuments raised by today’s superrich are in any way comparable.
Here is the full NYT piece.

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Chase and Charles Koch have a new book out, namely Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader: 41 Principles to Build an Enduring Business.  And for background here is Wikipedia on Chase Koch.  So what should I ask him?

Ten notable facts from India’s new SRS Statistical Report 2024 published two days ago:
1) India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.88 (rounded up to 1.9 in the figures) in 2024 from 1.92 in 2023.
2) This drop is roughly the historical speed of the last few decades. India’s TFR was 4.3 in 1985 and it has been falling around 0.06 per year since then.
3) For those who think “smartphones are the reason for the fall of TFR,” there is not much change in India’s TFR after their introduction. Of course, this might only apply to India.
4) India’s sex ratio at birth continues moving toward natural levels. It has grown from 907 girls per 1000 boys in 2018-2020 to 918 in 2022-2024. Without sex selection (e.g., selective abortions), it should be around 952.
5) Nonetheless, this bias still means that India’s replacement rate is around 2.15, not 2.1 as in other advanced economies.
6) Hence, India is already 0.27 children below the replacement rate and the gap continues growing.
7) However, this figure hides large regional differences. Kerala is at 1.3, well below the U.S. and approaching Italian and Spanish levels (Delhi is even lower, at 1.2, but it is a peculiar case), while Bihar remains at 2.9.
8) In terms of the rural/urban divide, rural India is at 2.1 and urban India at 1.5.
9) From everything I can see, India’s TFR will continue to fall, and it should reach 1.57 (the current level of the U.S.) around 2031 unless something significant changes.
10) Having said that, India’s data has a non-trivial margin of error, and a new Census might change our reading of the situation. In summary, India is following the same path as everyone else. No Indian fertility Sonderweg!
That is all from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde.

As Mark Lilla, a recovering Straussian, once remarked, they [the Straussians] were like craftsmen building a house brick by brick on a foundation that Leo Strauss had laid.  But they would never become architects of that house, or decide that the house was too small for them to comfortably live in.  Moreoever, Strauss disparaged social science and what he considered naive forms of positivism prevalent in American universities.  This led some of his followers to disdain merely empirical accounts of current events.  If you are more of a Hegelian, you need to pay attention to actual history if you are to give an account of how ideas play out in the real world.
That is from Frank Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, recommended of course.

1. One reason why child care is so expensive in the U.S.
2. “For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” Link here.
3. Redux of my 2021 Bloomberg column on the ideal university.
4. 15-minute weird Brazilian album.
5. History of social science funding at the NSF.
6. Furman and Laibson on Harvard grade inflation (NYT).
7. Who gets laid off first?  The measurers?
8. Work from home may be the problem for young workers, not AI.

You can find them here: https://x.com/theblackvault/status/2057800997012197428?s=61

Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, aiming to show how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map buried archaeological sites beneath desert sands, combining advanced remote sensing technologies to preserve endangered cultural landscapes and transform archaeological discovery in arid regions.
Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, aiming to make discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible for researchers worldwide.
Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, aiming to make archaeological research faster and more accurate.
Again, I am very grateful to Yonatan Ben Shimon for making this support possible.  And there remains a modest amount of money left in the fund.

The third type of weapons are invasion ships – this is the classic science fiction trope, however actual invasion ships have one fundamental weakness – they need to slow down at the destination galaxy. This has two effects. Firstly, energetically getting invasion ships to the opponents galaxy is substantially less efficient than sending RKVs there. This is because of the tyranny of the rocket equation. While the invasion ships can be accelerated to relativistic velocities at origin galaxy, to slow down, it cannot be assumed there is an equivalent infrastructure at the destination. Instead, the invasion ships must carry their own braking fuel with them, which must then also be accelerated and so on.
The second fundamental problem is lack of stealth. When accelerating your exhaust points away from your target, when decellerating your exhaust points towards it. Essentia

Marginal Revolution is the blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, both of whom teach at George Mason University. MR began in August of 2003 and there have been new posts daily since that time. In numerous reviews and ratings over the years Marginal Revolution has consistently been ranked as the best or one of the best economic blogs on the web, but it is more (and less) than that, also representing the quirks of its authors.

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

A dedicated writer and communicator of economic ideas, Tyler is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media. He writes a column for The Free Press and was previously a columnist with Bloomberg View and the The New York Times. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Ethics, and Philosophy and Public Affairs.

Tyler is the founder of Emergent Ventures, an incubator fellowship and grant program for social entrepreneurs with highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society.

Tyler is also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.

Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Along with Tyler Cowen, he is the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author with Tyler of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook. He gave a
TED talk in 2009. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

[H1] Category: Books

The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.
In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:
1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.
2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.
3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.
4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.
It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with.  My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se.  For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism.  I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well.  Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not?  I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming.  It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises.  Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.
But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?  Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Chase and Charles Koch have a new book out, namely Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader: 41 Principles to Build an Enduring Business.  And for background here is Wikipedia on Chase Koch.  So what should I ask him?

As Mark Lilla, a recovering Straussian, once remarked, they [the Straussians] were like craftsmen building a house brick by brick on a foundation that Leo Strauss had laid.  But they would never become architects of that house, or decide that the house was too small for them to comfortably live in.  Moreoever, Strauss disparaged social science and what he considered naive forms of positivism prevalent in American universities.  This led some of his followers to disdain merely empirical accounts of current events.  If you are more of a Hegelian, you need to pay attention to actual history if you are to give an account of how ideas play out in the real world.
That is from Frank Fukuyama’s forthcoming memoir, recommended of course.

I spoke on a panel at AEI with Nobelist Al Roth about his new book, Moral Economics, which covers “repugnant markets,” from prostitution to surrogacy to kidney exchange. A fun book!
My case study was acting. Acting was considered repugnant for over 2,000 years. In Rome, actors could not vote, hold office, or be trusted to give an oath in legal proceedings. So why don’t we find acting repugnant today?
One lesson: weighing costs and benefits is not enough. Roth discusses empirical research showing that legalizing prostitution cut STDs and sexual assaults—against prostitutes and others. But evidence alone won’t shift a repugnance norm. You also have to reframe the activity. Acting, for example was reframed from body rental to a skill requiring intelligence, training and ability. So I went out of my way to say that I am a fan of Aella—though not her only fan—and that I see no reason why escorting should not be considered a skill, requiring intelligence, training, and ability. I can think of few better ways of raising social welfare than making sex 10% better!
I also spoke on human challenge trials. Roth and I agree: challenge trials could have sped up COVID vaccines and saved tens of thousands of lives. We should be angry this didn’t happen. Why didn’t it? Even though most people think human challenge trials are a good idea, there was a repugnance bottleneck because the minority who did find human challenge trials repugnant were in charge. I discuss how to change this.
Al leads the discussion. My comments start at 25:15.

1. Mikhail Fishman, The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin, and the Decline of Modern Russia.  One of the best books to read on how Russia moved from “had some democratic elements in place” to autocracy, on a step-by-step basis.  The story is told using the career of Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2014, as a lens.  The author has biases of his own, but they do not detract from what is valuable here.
2. Siri Hustvedt. Ghost Stories: A Memoir.  About her history with her now-deceased husband Paul Auster, and how she dealt with his death.  Moving and insightful, recommended.
3. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, a new translation by Ritchie Robertson.  An imperfect, problematic work, too caught up with its own Germanness, and lacking dramatic tension.  Still, an important work and this new translation is much better than the old one.
Elsewhere, here is Beeple on AI and Monet, for the terminally online only.

When asked what secondary literature Nolan consulted in working on his epic magnum opus masterpiece, he said none. None save Benardete’s The Bow and the Lyre. “It was my muse” —Christopher Nolan,
@RollingStone
, April 2026.
Here is the link.

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
Excerpt:
SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.
And this:
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
And:
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.

1. David Narrett, The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840.  An excellent book, one of the two best books on a single Native American tribe I have read.  The book actually aims at explaining the Cherokees and enlightening the reader – how rare.  In 1700, there were no more than 20,000 Cherokees, mostly in the southeast, so it is amazing what the author was able to come up with.  Will make the year’s best of non-fiction list.
2. Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions.  A very good look at the negotiations behind the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and just how driven by national self-interest they were, including colonial motives from the major colonial powers, who wished to retain stronger rights to put down uprisings.  The Soviets wanted strong protections against torture (!), as they thought this might limit the power of the United States to bomb their population into submission.  Yet nuclear war ended up being permitted, largely at the insistence of the U.S.  And so on.  The colonial subjects of course had not much say in any of this.
3. Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World.  An excellent and engaging book, which even serious fans can learn from.  The first time Paul McCartney heard the music of Bob Dylan he called it “folk crap,” to his brother Mike.  Dylan and McCartney grew closest in 1971, when Paul was making the Ram album in NYC.  Music from Big Pink is one of Paul’s favorite albums of all time.  Thingumybob, first composed by Paul in 1968, later received accretions from Harrison and Dylan and became an odd three-party composition, albeit never released on a recording.  And here is Paul’s account of bumping into Dylan at the airport.
If you wish to think about the Roman Empire more, there is Pliny & Co., How to Make Money: An Ancient Guide to Wealth Management.
Thomas Asbridge, The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity’s Most Devastating Pandemic is a good overview.
There is also Devon Cox, Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent.

The author is Juan Marsé, this novel is set in 1956, first published in Spain in 1966, and only now appearing in English.  Here is the Amazon link.  Marsé is one of the handful of great authors who has no real presence in the Anglo world, Bioy Casares would be another.  You can think of the story as covering class conflict, romance, and their intersection in the Barcelona of the 1950s.  Definitely recommended, I am excited to see this finally out and am reading it avidly (in Spanish it is too difficult and slow for me).  Here is one review out of a very small number in English.

The subtitle is How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies.  Here is Ryan doing a podcast with Brink Lindsey.  As Brink writes:
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Ryan contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect.
I am pleased to see “thought books,” as one might call them, headed in this direction and I was happy to blurb Ryan’s latest effort.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with  sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.
JFV:  I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory.
What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.
I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.
Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.
Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.
But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies.
I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric info

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