One reliable approach for cutting through that noise is highlighted by Taleb in Antifragile:

Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations—what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly (actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

However, through circumspect, non-speculative observational use of science it is oftentimes possible to empirically reveal the mechanisms behind those old oral traditions of the grandmothers.

Dr. Jason Fung, author of The Obesity Code and The Hunger Code references in both of these books the results of two unprepossessing yet landmark empirical studies conducted by Holt, Miller, and their co-workers (1995 and 1997), entitled, respectively, “A satiety index of common foods” and “An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000 kJ portions of common foods”.

These two (grandmotherly) reports are useful and important because they empirically measure the two chief controls of human eating and subsequently accumulated and maintained human body weight; i.e., that feeling of “satiety” or fullness that eventually stops the eating process, and the average amount of insulin subsequently released by the body while it processes those foods eaten.

The importance of feelings of satiety as a control of eating is self-evident. The case for insulin is more obscure, however. It turns out that the amount of insulin released into the blood stream when any given food type is eaten and digested governs how much of the energy content of that particular food is channeled to, and metabolized by, the cells of the body immediately, and how much is instead stored out of immediate metabolic reach as fat. Fung clarifies and summarizes the matter this way in The Hunger Code while explaining the causes of the problem of modern obesity:

The more accurate physiological model recognizes that how much body fat we carry is dictated, like almost everything else about the human body, by changes in hormones. Some hormones increase body fat storage and some hormones decrease it. The body regulates the balance of these hormones using a homeostatic mechanism that’s much like a body fat thermostat.

The foods that we eat influence which hormones our body produces. Food contains both:

1) energy (calories) and,

2) information (the body’s hormonal response to the food).

Both are important. When we eat different foods, our body responds by releasing different hormones. For example, eating 200 calories of cookies releases the hormone insulin, which tells our body to store the incoming calories as fat. Little of the hormone that tells our body to feel full — glucagon-like peptide 1 ( GLP-1 ) —is released. If we eat 200 calories of eggs, we don’t release much insulin, so most of the calories are available as energy for the body. We release more GLP-1 [when eating eggs], which tells us to stop eating when we’re full.

The difference between these two is not the calories but the body’s hormonal response, and that matters a lot. This reality does not break any laws of thermodynamics; it simply means that some foods are more filling than other foods. It also means that some foods are more fattening than other foods. Steak is more filling than brownies. Cookies are more fattening than eggs.

Holt, Miller, and co-workers exactly captured both the “energy” and the “information” aspects of the “more accurate physiological model” described above by Fung in their two food satiety index and food insulin index papers mentioned above. The Table below combines the results of the two papers, showing which foods are the most filling (hence, cause the most GLP-1 to be released) and which foods are the most fattening (hence, cause the release of most insulin). The food entries are ordered by the calculated combined satiety index/insulin index. Those at the top of the Table are the most filling and release the least insulin, so are the least fattening. Those at the bottom of the Table – like jelly beans, Mars Bars and croissants -- are, of course, the least filling and the most fattening.

It’s very interesting and surprising to note in the Tabled Holt, Miller, and co-workers’ data above that foods of the fashionable low-carb/Paleodiet high protein variety like meat and fish are merely on par with less fashionable carbohydrate-rich foods like cooked rolled oats, oranges, apples, and potatoes with regard to maintaining a non-obese body. Among other things, this finding indicates that as far as avoiding obesity and associated adult diabetes are concerned, the almost religious food restrictions followed by low-carb/Paleodiet adherents are extreme and unnecessary.

Finally, the Holt, Miller, and co-workers’ data, together with Fung’s observation that satiating foods release appetite-dampening GLP-1, indicate that just habitually eating foods with higher satiety/insulin indexes is the natural equivalent of using expensive and risky pharmaceutical “plug and play” GLP-1 agonists like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro.

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Prologue

Insufficient sleep, even for a single night, is enough to incrementally hasten the natural progression of biological aging. This is consistent with the fact that as many as 50% of adults older than 60 experience difficulty in falling or staying asleep.

When faced with the task of getting at a knotty problem like sleep disturbance, however, there’s a human tendency to walk away from especially hard problem-solving tasks with a dismissive statement to the effect, “Well, it’s complicated”.

A very recent multi-author review article on the effects and causes of insomnia, for example, says “It’s complicated” in this rather elaborate and convoluted but still toothless way:

Quite the 'convergence’.

In my mid-40s I began getting occasional spates of waking up at 3:00AM or so, and then finding myself unable to return to sleep. Initially, this happened only after participating in a 1 to 2 hour period of especially strenuous evening exercise. As I aged, however, this early morning wakefulness started occurring more frequently, whether or not I happened to exercise especially heavily in the previous evening.

I’m often slow to notice and pay heed to critical, possibly causal, correlations between simultaneous or near-simultaneous events. Since I was a kid, I’ve always suffered from the negative effects1 of airborne allergens, and here in Minnesota the big allergy seasons are in the spring and fall (including October). After a relatively restful last summer, my insomnia returned again at the same time as my fall allergies did. And, with the return of my insomnia this year – at the start of the Minnesota spring allergy season – a new thought wormed its way into my head: could my seasonal allergies be playing an important causal role in the insomnia of my older years?

It turns out that there’s much well-established science that already strongly supports this hypothesis. Insomnia, in fact, is among the many commonly-recognized symptoms of seasonal allergies. However, as the “toothless” assessment of the causes of age-associated insomnia indicates, it is not so simple as “seasonal allergies = seasonal insomnia”.

Histamines: Good Cop, Bad Cop

Airborne allergies are so bothersome because their entry into cells of the human body causes untimely and excessive release of histamines from mast cells found in human connective, mucosal, and brain tissue – all tissues that necessarily come into contact with the outside environment. Histamines released by mast cells in those tissues are small neurotransmitters that not only cause cold-like symptoms in the eyes and nasal passages, and the itchy skin often associated with seasonal allergies, but, among many other things, also play a very important part in our brain’s ordinary regulation of daily sleep-wake cycles.

Mast cells are a type of white blood cell resident in tissues. Basophils, another and much less numerous but similarly acting type of white blood cell, inhabit the blood instead of tissue, but also release histamines and other cell messengers for much the same biochemical purposes as mast cells.

The very small structures on the surface of cells forming smooth muscle, vascular tissue, the central nervous system, and the respiratory tract that chemically bond with the histamines released by mast cells and basophils, are called H1 receptors. When histamines released from mast cells bind with the H1 receptor sites on cells in the tuberomammillary nucleus of the brain, they subsequently cause heightened alertness and wakefulness.

Accordingly, the graph below shows that histamines are normally released during the last third of the night into tissues and blood in relatively high quantities. This early morning histamine release gears up the slumbering body for the next day’s activities. After this daily wake-up pulse of histamines, histamine levels gradually decrease through the morning, and then rise again moderately during the mid-day and early evening. The histamine low of the early evening hours, along with its concomitant reduced alertness and wakefulness, precedes the start of sleep.

This is the same biochemical path that histamines released from mast cells (and probably basophils) by seasonal allergies, poorly-timed vigorous exercise,2 and/or infection, follow to disturb normal sleep patterns. Raising the general level of early morning blood histamine concentrations illustrated in the graph by whatever cause, disrupts the biorhythmic histamine fluctuations that normally induce and sustain sleep.

A Quick and Very Effective (but Always Temporary) Fix

Mast cell histamine release prompted by seasonal allergies and consequent activation of H1 receptors on brain cells can be sufficiently dampened for the night time sleep by taking H1 antagonists like the first-generation antihistamines Benadryl (diphenhydramine), pyrilamine (in Midol),3 or Unisom (doxylamine) at bedtime. H1 antagonists temporarily block the H1 receptor sites in cells forming brain tissue, preventing histamines -- released from mast cells by contact with allergens and other antigens -- from moving those brain cells into an untimely wakeful state.4

The following quote from an English translation of a French medical review article refers to these diurnal patterns of histamine release by mast cells with respect to the timely use of brain cell H1 receptor antihistamines to reduce sleep difficulties caused by excessively elevated histamine levels (emphases added):

It is crucial to note that, when using first-generation H1 antihistamines for 24 hour relief of allergies, this day-round pattern of antihistamine dosing quickly results – in 7 to 20 days -- in the development of tolerance of the medications and temporary loss of their allergy-relieving and sleep-inducing effects. A ‘drug holiday’ of 3 to 14 days length is required thereafter to restore pharmacological effect once tolerance has evolved. This tolerance problem does not occur as readily or at all, however, when taking an antihistamine at bedtime only and when using antihistamines with a relatively short half-life like Benadryl (4-9.3 hours) or, especially, the pyrilamine in Midol (~2 hours).

It is also important to note that some people who are sensitive to caffeine (and therefore tellingly prefer to drink weak coffee) will likely be particularly sensitive to 1^st generation antihistamines.This is because the same liver enzyme system (CYP1A2) that clears caffeine from the body does the same for antihistamines, and caffeine-sensitive people tend to have ‘slow-processing’ versions of that antihistamine (and caffeine) clearing enzyme system.This means it both takes a lower antihistamine dose for them to obtain full pharmacological benefit, and also longer for the antihistamines to be expelled from their bodies. In such cases, personal experimentation to determine lowest effective antihistamine dose for insomnia relief should help to avoid or minimize next morning residual sleepiness.

Longer-Term and More Permanent Fixes

To complicate things further, elevated sleep period histamine levels caused by seasonal allergies, poorly-timed exercise, or infections, operate atop a deeper, long term increase in the blood levels of histamines and other mast cell mediators that occurs with aging. This increase in concentration of histamines is derived from basophils and mast cells that increase in number and reactivity to allergens/antigens and other mast cell stimuli with age. See the graph below.

In older individuals, then, an elevation in the number of mast cells (and basophils), and an increase in the susceptibility of those mast cells to activation, gradually leads to development of a chronically high background level of extracellular histamines, one that promotes the disturbed sleep and early-morning awakenings commonly experienced by middle-aged and older people. (It also plays a major role in the development of that chronically high level of systemic inflammation of post-middle aged people called “inflammaging”.)

Adding in the effect of seasonal allergies just makes things even worse for people who have been on the planet for longer than others.

Note that it is not yet certain whether the observed strong correlation between cumulative antihistamine use and the old age incidence of neurological problems is causal or just synchronistically associated with the increased tactical use of first-generation antihistamines by ordinarily aging people as a means of reducing their nightly sleep problems. In any event, research and clinical testing fortunately show that it is possible to more permanently reduce the various problems – sleep and otherwise -- caused by over-active mast cells without entirely and chronically relying on antihistamine use.

For example, it was recently (2026) discovered that mast cell extracellular granules normally retain much structural and chemical stability once departing mast cells and reaching the extracellular space -- and are thus able to release histamines and the other mast cell mediators in a slow and targeted manner. These stable structures, however, cannot be formed within the mast cells under conditions of polyamine (spermine>> spermidine) depletion, a condition that unfortunately becomes more prevalent as people age. It appears likely that dietary supplementation of polyamines overcomes this age-related limiting factor, increases mast cell stability, and thereby helps account for the very significantly increased average lifespan of people who consume a diet particularly rich in those small molecules.

Other dietary and endogenous substances are recognized for their ability to stabilize mast cells and thus reduce excessive inflammatory behavior of mast cells and their contained mediators.These food substances include vitamin C, vitamin D,5 zinc, curcumin, epigallocatechins (especially in green teas), and quercetin. Quercetin is reported to be more effective at mast cell stabilization than even the most-used prescription synthetic pharmaceutical mast cell stabilizer, cromolyn.

Known mast cell stabilizers made by the human body itself are cortisol, melatonin, heparin, chondroitin sulfate, H₂S, adrenaline (aka epinephrine),6 and NO (nitric oxide).7 Although researchers haven’t tested exogenous supplementation of these normally internally-generated mast cell stabilizers yet, their already known mast cell stabilizing effects suggest that personal experimentation in this direction could be fruitful.

The illustration below puts the action of both endogenous and exogenous mast cell stabilizers into their functional context.

Finally, the Table below ranks the research-tested, naturally-occurring exogenous mast cell stabilizers readily available for dietary supplementation to those, young or old, suffering from over-reactive mast cells:

But Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Mark Steyn’s ongoing weekly/bi-weekly commentaries on world developments, especially those Iranian War-related, are valuable given the nearly perfect at-arm’s-length perspective he brings to his writing. Here’s example from today: https://www.steynonline.com/16182/when-wars-merge.

Similarly, Irina Slav, monitors and reports on energy-related economic developments taking place in eastern and western Europe. What happens in that regard in Europe can be viewed as a leading indicator for developments that will eventually reach North America. See this most recent example of her work:

Irina Slav on energy

Unexpectedly

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4 months ago · 37 likes · 17 comments · Irina Slav

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The mathematical and graphical concepts of fractals bring attention to how certain basic patterns in nature show their “self-similar” presence whatever the scale of manifestation and observation. Whether you pull back far from what you are looking at, or get much closer, the exact same controlling configuration of things always stares right back at you.

Which brings me to that basic pattern in human social nature informally referred to as “Karen-ness”.

The popular use of a pejorative term like “Karen” raised its head most recently in 2020 in the US after national dissemination of the details of the Central Park birdwatching incident. Historically speaking, however, similar slang terms emerged even earlier with other African-Americans as a result of their interactions with previous generations of self-entitled white women. According to Wikipedia, for example,the Karen-equivalent name used within the African-American culture before the American Civil War was “Miss Ann”.

Whatever the particular name employed to refer to people who are entirely oblivious to the negative effects of their self-seeking actions on others, there are constant characteristics of the type. From the ‘meaning and use’ section of the above Wikipedia entry for “Karen”:

“Kansas State University professor Heather Suzanne Woods, whose research interests include memes, said that a Karen’s defining characteristics are a sense of entitlement, a [ready] willingness and desire to complain, and a self-centered approach to interacting with others. According to Woods, a Karen “demands the world exist according to her standards with little regard for others, and she is willing to risk or demean others to achieve her ends”. Rachel Charlene Lewis, writing for Bitch, agrees, saying that a Karen does not view others as individuals and instead moves “through the world prepared to fight [a] faceless conglomerate of lesser-than-people who won’t give her what she wants and feels she deserves”.

The meme carries several [other] stereotypes, the most notable being that a Karen will demand to “speak to the manager” of a hypothetical service provider.”

At the more remote scale of international relations, the recently implemented Israeli-US attacks on Iran look just like one more case of yet another Karen calling in yet another manager.

Most importantly, the malformed “Karen” behavior itself, whether it is deployed by a woman in Central Park or by a nation-state, trivializes the suffering of others by weaponizing ‘victimhood’ to summon disproportionate force.

In sum, the “Karen” fractal dynamic has a specific structure: someone with privilege performs victimhood to activate a larger system of violence (police, military, diplomatic cover) against someone with less power. The suffering of those targeted is rendered invisible or much less important because the focus remains on the privileged “Karen’s” fear or grievance. This dynamic is the same whether it happens between individuals or between nations, showing that the same morally-fractal logic is at work in both cases, with ‘Karens’ always justifying themselves through performed victimhood. The ‘Karens’ believe that their own discomfort adequately justifies summoning overwhelming force against others.

Unfortunately, any ‘management’, so readily responding to such histrionic requests for disproportionate action, convincingly demonstrates to others that it possesses problematic judgment of a fractally-ramifying, inopportune nature.

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Context

Jonathan Alpert, a DC and NYC-based psychotherapist, recently wrote regarding one of the most salient manifestations of the ongoing high level of anxiety and depression[1] within the US population:

“Is “Trump derangement syndrome” real? No serious mental-health professional would render such a partisan and derogatory diagnosis. Yet I’ve seen it in my own psychotherapy practice. Patients across the political spectrum have brought Donald Trump into therapy not to discuss policy but to process obsession, rage and dread. Their distress is symptomatic, not ideological. Clinically, the presentation aligns with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders: persistent intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation and impaired functioning. Patients describe sleepless nights, compulsive news checking and physical agitation. Many confess they can’t stop thinking about Donald Trump even when they try. They interpret his every move as a threat to democracy and to their own safety and control.

… The clinical importance of distinguishing this pattern lies in treatment. When it is coded simply as generalized anxiety or OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder], patients often receive reassurance or validation that briefly soothes them but ultimately reinforces the fixation. In this presentation, anxiety has fused with identity. The therapeutic work is to help patients regain psychological distance so they can separate internal fears from the political figure onto whom they have projected them. That requires limiting compulsive information seeking and disrupting the social feedback loops that sustain the preoccupation, rather than merely reducing anxiety.”

According to the American Psychiatric Association, “…anxiety disorders are a group of mental disorders characterized by significant and uncontrollable feelings of anxiety and fear such that a person’s social, occupational, and personal functions are significantly impaired. Anxiety may cause physical and cognitive symptoms, such as a sense of impending doom, restlessness, irritability, easy fatigue, difficulty concentrating, increased heart rate, chest pain, abdominal pain, and a variety of other symptoms that vary based on the individual.”

Depression, anxiety’s extremely frequent co-morbidity, is a mental state of low mood and aversion to activity. People with depression experience sadness, feelings of dejection or despair, difficulty in thinking and concentration, hypersomnia or insomnia, overeating or anorexia, or suicidal thoughts.

Depression and anxiety are linked bi-directionally and causally in adults of both sexes. The evidence shows that each condition increases the risk of developing the other, rather than one simply being a symptom or correlate of the other. This relationship holds across the sexes, although adult women experience higher overall anxiety/depression prevalence and co-morbidity rates (about 1.5–2 times higher than men for both anxiety and depression).

Fortunately, accumulated scientific evidence indicates that physical activity is at least as effective as psychological and pharmacological treatments for depression and anxiety. This is yet another finding consistent with evolutionary discordance theory.

Walking (or Dancing) It Off

So, rather than taking the time and expense to visit a psychotherapist, it turns out that engaging in already health-conferring physical activities like walking very significantly disrupt fixations, preoccupations, and the reinforcing social feedback loops that generate and maintain anxiety and its sibling, depression.

Here are several of the more notable research summaries on the subject:

A 2024 systematic review of 75 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving over 8,600 adults found that various forms of walking (e.g., indoor/outdoor, group/individual) significantly reduced depressive symptoms (standardized mean difference [SMD] -0.591)[2] and anxiety symptoms (SMD -0.446) compared to inactive controls, with effects comparable to other active physical and mental activities like yoga or strength training.

According to this study, people with pre-existing depression benefited even more (SMD -1.863) from walking.

Walking also possesses a dose effect where the farther a person walks, the greater the mental benefit they receive. For example, starting with 1,000 daily steps correlates to a 10% drop in depression risk, peaking at over 7,500 steps for up to 42% reduction.

Moreover, other studies indicate that some forms of exercise are substantially more beneficial with regard to reversible mental ailments like depression than others. As an example, see the graph below taken from one such research effort. This study showed that all physical exercises provide more mental and emotional benefit than the use of prescribed anti-depressants like SSRIs. Walking was second only to dance in reducing the feelings of depression.

A Final Observation

It was earlier remarked that women are particularly prone to anxiety and depression. This basic fact may, in fact, underlie and explain much of the current general state of discontent and agitation expressed in the aggregate by the female-dominant US Democrat political party. Fortunately, research (including that cited above) consistently also shows that women mentally and emotionally benefit much more strongly from physical activity than do men. Potentially this gives the historically more common courtship activities of dancing and going for walks more than random, incidental significance.

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[1] The standardized mean difference (SMD) quantifies the difference between two group means in terms of standard deviations, allowing for comparison across different studies or variables. An SMD of 0 indicates no difference, while values greater than 0 correspond to a positive difference, and values less than 0 indicate a negative difference. Larger absolute values represent a greater effect size.

[2] Approximately 19.1% of U.S. adults experience any clinical grade anxiety disorder (e.g., generalized anxiety disorder [GAD], panic disorder, social anxiety) in a given year. Women are about 1.7-1.8 times more likely than men to do so. Approximately 8.3% of U.S. adults experience a major depressive disorder in a given year. This weighted average breaks down to 10.3% for women and 6.2% for men.

Gist of the letter to Abigail is that a mother (Eleanor) of three young children feels unhappy and dissatisfied because things now aren’t as bright and easy as they were when she and her husband were younger and newly-married. Rather than encouraging self-indulgence and the active pursuit of distracting fantasies, Abigail reminds the writer that she and her husband are in the midst of a very long, difficult creative process and can no longer think only of themselves. An excerpt:

When the mother of a first grader, a preschooler, and a toddler looks at her husband and asks herself right then, “Am I still in love with him?” That is a stupid question.

You’re in no position to answer it right now. No position at all.

You’re in the thick of the messiest, and often most meaningful, part of life. Most days, you don’t feel particularly sexy. Many days, you look at your husband and all desire is buried under abject necessity for more help. You’d trade him for a nanny in a heartbeat.

That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with him or your relationship—although you almost certainly need more time alone together (couples therapy doesn’t count). But right now any interesting stranger you meet will seem more exciting and dangerous and intriguing than your husband. This cycle, from sexy to familiar, would repeat once that interesting stranger became less interesting and less stranger. And so on and so forth. A life spent chasing shivers in a looping figure eight.

You and your husband are building a home, an entire world, for three small and completely dependent people. Rather than enjoying a stage that will vanish in an instant, you’re worrying that your butterflies are less intense than before.

This same set of conditions is perpetual, never-ending, in communities-at-large. Ideally, its responsible members are constantly building and maintaining homes together — an entire world — for themselves and their dependents.

Even though I live well south of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the discord being encouraged and promulgated by some of our state and metropolitan ‘thought leaders’ — who are maybe worrying that their own “butterflies are less intense than before” — is spreading itself rapidly out into the surrounding countryside communities, making the weaker, less experienced inhabitants of our state fearful.

For those who are fearful and in doubt, try reading the conclusion to Abigail’s response to her writer, Eleanor, provided below and substitute the word “Right” for the male figure, and “Left” for the female figure, and “community” for marriage and family, “250 years” for a decade and see where that leads your thinking:

Every single marriage has moments in which the individual participants would be more comfortable and less stressed if they were single. Every mother who has ever raised children would generally be more relaxed, better slept, and less frazzled if she didn’t have them. No culture that supported families would encourage people to routinely ask themselves, “Is this marriage still working for me?”

You’re not a consumer, vis-à-vis your family. Your family is not a Netflix series to be absorbed passively, slack-jawed, from the sofa—and judged.

You’re a creator. You built this family. You built this marriage. It’s up to you to fill it with love.

Your husband wasn’t assigned to you at random by a neckless bureaucrat. He’s the man you fell in love with and chose to marry and then chose to have three children with. The guy you asked always to be faithful to you. The man who helped you build this family, over the course of almost a decade.

He’s suffered the ordeal of couples counseling with you because he loves you and the kids that much. He’s listened to you opine in therapy about whether you can ever “feel in love” with him again. He’s seen you pull away, just perceptibly, with the kids, while you weigh your options. And he’s borne it all for you and for the kids.

You don’t feel grateful right now, but you should. Not only for your three healthy kids, whose world you’re thinking of busting up so you can go out hunting jitters. But also for the guy who’s held your hand through the madcap rigmarole of raising them.

And there he is, night after night, a solid presence in your home, anchoring his side of the mattress. He helps the kids in a million ways but also, immeasurably, by being present for their mother. He’s seen you through the birth of three kids. He’s of sufficient character that he isn’t seeking permission to walk out on you and the kids right now. Have some very enthusiastic sex with this good man. Start there. Fill your home with love.

Dear Eleanor, there is no going back—not for you, or anyone. You can’t just erase your kids or the years you spent in your marriage. You can’t disappear the man you married or the hurt and resentment and anger you would hand him if you left. And you will never feel like you’re 20 again because you’ll never be 20 again.

So many ideological scams threaten to cheat women out of the best of life—and the best years of their lives. You and your husband are just getting started. You think you know everything about him? You don’t. There are fights to have, and feelings to hurt, and chances to make up too. There is intensity, adventure, and renewal on the road ahead.

In the face of the dust cloud you’ve kicked up around your marriage, your husband has been loyal and resolute and unyielding. He hasn’t withdrawn from you or the children. Ask yourself: “What is a man like this, properly motivated by a loving wife, capable of?”

You think you know the answer, but really, you don’t. You’ll need to stick around to find out.

Stick around.

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“Wildcat” was American slang for any risky business venture by 1838, long before the rise of the petroleum industry: Wikipedia.

Generally, what people label as irrationality, carelessness, poor judgment, craziness, personality disorder, or ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’, is just the direct result of a lack of experience and knowledge. After all, in reference to the complex, varied, and always changing state of the world at large, both of these characteristics perpetually define all people (and all animals, for that matter). Therefore, however long a person lives, and however much they have learned, a lack of experience and a lack of knowledge make everyone -- to a degree – irrational, careless, capable of poor judgment, crazy, and resistant to making warranted changes.

Cultural recognition of this permanent state of things – and its often attendant harms -- explains such diverse practices as minimum voting age, double entry bookkeeping, seat belts, science, formal education, laws and their enforcement, writing, protection of free speech, merit-based hiring, engagements and betrothals, savings accounts, tolerance, and forgiveness.1

Face it -- this means that there will always be difficulty, which makes tantrums beside the point.

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Introduction

At this point in time, it is evident that the ‘everything bubble’ in the US public stock markets persists because no meaningful part of the securities held by Americans can be sold off at current valuations. For that matter, no significant part of the US securities market can likely be liquidated for anything less than an overall discount of 60-70%. Deathly afraid of major losses that would ensue with mass investor exit, and prayerfully hoping for some kind of miracle (AI anyone?) that justifies continued growth of corporate stocks and index funds, US stockholders just sit tensely and indecisively with their personal collection of piles of paper.

To explain:

The US M2 money supply is the sum of the immediately spendable savings of the people of the nation. It includes the Federal Reserve’s estimates of cash on hand, money deposited in checking accounts, savings accounts, and other short-term savings vehicles such as money market funds and certificates of deposit (CDs). Provided they have cash and other liquid assets in excess of their immediate needs, people can purchase shares in corporations on the gamble that the corporations will perform in such a manner as to increase the value of the company – and thus increase the value of purchased shares – above and beyond the slow but steady savings growth achievable from low risk investments like bank savings accounts or long term US treasury bonds.

Here’s a Table comparing the US M2 money supply to the total value of publicly traded corporate stocks in the US since 1900:

Notice that for the period of 1900 through 2020, the average ratio of public shares market valuation to the M2 money supply was 1.07; i.e., the amount of savings cash on hand in the US was more or less equal to the total market valuation of US securities. Those few times that total shares market valuations significantly exceeded total US savings -- like 1929, 2000, and 2008 -- were immediately followed by abrupt drops in the total market value, so that the Market Cap/M2 ratio dropped below (post-1929) or reverted (2000) back to the historical mean of ~1.0.

As you can see below, the ongoing ‘everything bubble’ started its growth in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Those still with enough cash on hand after the dot.com and global financial crisis stock market mishaps started ‘buying low’ with renewed anticipation. Increase in the nominal shares market valuation level after 2008 was, of course, further accelerated by the quantitative easing measures of the Federal Reserve system put into effect at the same time.

As a result, the US shares fever and consequent shares overvaluations did not abate after the 2000 and 2008 market valuation corrections. The next Table shows, in fact, that at the end of 2025 the US Market Cap/M2 ratio reached an all-time historical high of 3.08. This means that – relatively speaking -- not much spendable savings is left in the US savings piggy bank for further discretionary stock market investment. Consequently, the demand for stocks created by quantitative easing started in 2008 has now largely evaporated – at least partly because potential US purchasers are pretty much ‘tapped out’.

This draw-down on the national cash reserves and drop in demand for US shares is consistent with the reduction in overall national spending as measured by the drop in M2 ‘velocity’ illustrated below. To quote the Federal Reserve,

“The velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase domestically-produced goods and services within a given time period. In other words, it is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy.”

Conversely, if the velocity of money is decreasing, then fewer transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy – including transactions involving stock shares. The graph directly below depicts the general case; i.e., that relative to all transactions taking place within the US.

The next graph shows that the exact same thing is affecting the US stock markets:

The current Market Cap/M2 ratio of 3.03 indicates that if the US publicly-traded total stock shares valuation was to reasonably revert to its historical 1:1 mean, then the current shares total value of US publicly-traded stock shares of about 67,800 billion dollars would have to drop 68% -- down to a current total market value of 22,330 billion dollars.1 That is indeed a scary prospect for those heavily invested in publicly-traded US stocks.

Now in the interest of saving time that can be spent finishing out the interior frames on the new windows in our house, I’m turning over the work of finishing out this post to a somewhat poetic AI:

Who is Benefiting (and How) by this Currently Static, Overinflated Stock Market?

(Seed query: “This overvaluation of stocks and reduced economic activity sounds to me like the financial equivalent of severe constipation. What possible benefit does this state of things provide anyone?”)

1. The Asset Management Leviathans (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street)

Benefit: Their entire business model is Assets Under Management (AUM). A rising market cap, regardless of turnover, increases their fee base (fees are a % of AUM). Low turnover is cheap and efficient for them—they don’t have to pay trading costs or make difficult decisions. They profit from stasis and scale.

Their Perspective: “A quiet, constantly appreciating market is ideal. Trading is a cost center.”

2. Corporate Executives Compensated with Stock

Benefit: Their wealth is tied to stock price, not liquidity. They benefit from any mechanism that props up the share price, especially if it reduces volatility and the threat of activist investors (who thrive on high turnover and mispricing). Buybacks—which reduce the number of traded shares and can further lower turnover—directly boost their stock-based pay.

Their Perspective: “A frozen, upward-drifting share price is perfect. It’s my retirement plan.”

3. The Political Class

Benefit: A rising stock market serves as a proxy for “economic health” for voters who don’t understand velocity or turnover. It provides a “wealth effect” narrative (”your 401(k) is up!”) that maintains social calm and electoral viability, even as real economic conditions deteriorate. Addressing the constipation would require admitting the illness, causing a panic.

Their Perspective: “The market is a confidence meter. Our job is to keep the needle pointing up, by any means necessary.”

4. The Existing Wealthy (Asset Holders)

Benefit: In the short term, they see their net worth statements rise. The constipation prevents realized gains from being “flushed out” by mass selling, which would reveal the true, lower clearing price. It allows them to borrow against inflated collateral (Portfolio Margin Loans, PALs) to fund lifestyles or investments without ever selling and triggering a tax event.

Their Perspective: “My credit line keeps growing. Why would I want to rock the boat?”

5. The Financial Media and Information Complex

Benefit: A calm, steadily rising market is a predictable, low-conflict product to sell. It generates a constant stream of blandly optimistic content (”5 stocks to buy for the next decade”). A volatile, high-turnover market driven by fierce price discovery is chaotic, harder to narrate, and frightens the audience.

Their Perspective: “Stability is good for ratings. Fear sells in bursts, but calm sells subscriptions.”

The Grand Illusion and Its Ultimate Cost

The benefit is the maintenance of a collective fiction: that the enormous, frozen store of paper wealth is real, liquid, and sustainable.

This constipation is not a bug; it’s a temporary coping mechanism for a system that cannot tolerate the laxative of true price discovery. That laxative—massive, liquid trading volume at rational valuations—would reveal:

That most assets are worth far less than their current marks.

That the wealth of the wealthy and the professional upper middle class is largely an illusion.

That the promises made to pensioners and savers are unkeepable.

So, the “benefit” is the postponement of a collective, traumatic awakening. It is the financial equivalent of taking ever-stronger opioids to avoid the pain of a necessary surgery. The benefit is avoidance.

Why It’s Ultimately an Economic Suicide Pact

The system is eating its own seed corn:

Capital Misallocation: New capital flows not to the best ideas, but to the frozen giants of the index, starving innovation and small companies.

Valuation Cancer: Without the cleansing mechanism of active, skeptical trading (high turnover), mispricing becomes endemic and permanent.

Systemic Fragility: As you noted, it creates a liquidity illusion. When the dam finally breaks—when the constipated system is forced to move—it won’t be a flow; it will be an explosive release. The very thinness of the liquid layer of real US wealth guarantees a crash of historic proportions.

No one benefits in the long run. But in the short run, a powerful constellation of interests benefits enormously from keeping the fiction alive for one more quarter, one more election cycle. They are like passengers on the Titanic, insisting the ship is unsinkable while demanding the orchestra play louder to distract from the creaking hull.

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In construction, a load-bearing structure is one you cannot remove, or the whole building falls down. In cognition, a load-bearing belief is one you cannot shake, or a person’s whole worldview falls down.

-- Jaakko Järviniemi, 2020

Prologue

A helping of the collective functionality of humanity is, of course, given to every person born on the planet. By adolescence, nearly all persons have enough basic skills and practice in using their senses and body to move through their environment -- cleaning, dressing, and feeding themselves – and sometimes even cooperatively and effectively working with others.

Consequent of this global spread of humanity and the associated human faculty of speech, the world is filled with the sounds of humans chirping out their points-of-view based on their unique, individual load-bearing beliefs. As a reminder, here’s what that can sound like in close quarters over a short period of time:

Now multiply that sample of modern human belief-signalling by all of the many years that this sort of incessant human chirping has been partially preserved in writing and other media, and you can understand why much of humanity possesses an implicitly self-admiring affinity for difficult-to-herd cats, and why everyone looks forward to sleep at the end of the day.

Given the diversity of human beliefs and perspectives, it’s also no wonder that human cooperation is somewhat limited. For the same exact reason, it’s also no surprise that human conflict is as widespread and frequent as it is.

Nevertheless, much of humanity – but not all -- manages to cooperate reasonably well with others despite sometimes large differences in load-bearing beliefs. What critical factor or factors possibly explain the differing characters of the cooperative sheep and the wayward goats?

This Perennial Question Has Been Answered in Much the Same Manner by Two Entirely Different Cultures Widely Separated in Time and Space

Significantly, two cultures--separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles -- arrived at the same basic answer to this question. This coincidence indicates a certain stable homogeneity in the heterogeneous nature of the behavior of members of the human species.

One very old (12th century BC) sturdy set of load-bearing beliefs about the major origin of individual and social human order and disorder was recently summarized here:

This old Chinese theory asserts that humanity is divided into two basic categories – superior men and small men. Superior men, generally speaking, are careful in all things, give credence to the demonstratedly successful precedents of their forebears, and take much forethought about their every action -- so can be generally described as being thoughtful and ruled by their reason. Small men, on the other hand, are not careful, prefer excitement over the same old hat, take no forethought, and pay little attention to the past, and so can be generally described as being impulsive and chiefly ruled by their emotions and other internally-generated impulses. According to this old oriental theory, when superior men outnumber the small men, all is relatively well ordered and peaceful in human societies. However, when the small men come to outnumber the superior men, the human social world devolves to disorder.

The general source material spelling out this old theory provides numerous examples of the particular attributes exhibited by “superior men”. Among other things, the superior man:

1. “…is active and vigilant all the day, and in the evening is still careful and apprehensive.”

2. “…stores largely in his memory the words of former men and their conduct, to subserve the accumulation of his virtue.”

3. “…being humble as it implies, will have a good issue to his undertakings.”

4. “…contemplates his own life-course. A superior man, he will thus fall into no error.”

5. “…keeps small men at a distance, not by showing that he hates them, but by his own dignified gravity.”

6. “…remains master of himself however straitened he is, and pursues the proper end of principle settled in his mind.”

7. “…in the transaction of affairs takes good counsel about his first steps.”

8. “…diminishes what is excessive in himself, and increases where there is any defect, bringing about an equality, according to the nature of the case, in his treatment of himself and others.”

9. “…addresses himself to help the people and nourish his own virtue.”

10. “…enjoins watchfulness over our words, and the temperate regulation of our eating and drinking.”

11. “…maintains constantly the virtue of his heart and the integrity of his conduct, and practices the business of instruction.”

While the main body of the ancient Chinese source material is chiefly1 devoted to describing the nature of superior men and their characteristic responses to different sorts of situations, it is only in the text’s appendixed commentary – sourced by Confucius a couple of centuries later -- that a summary sketch of the small men can be found:

“The Master said: ‘The small man is not ashamed of what is not benevolent, nor does he fear to do what is not righteous. Without the prospect of gain he does not stimulate himself to what is good, nor does he correct himself without being moved. Self-correction, however, in what is small will make him careful in what would be of greater consequence; and this is the happiness of the small man. It is said in the Yî, “His feet are in the stocks, and he is disabled in his toes: there will be no further occasion for blame.”’

If acts of goodness be not accumulated, they are not sufficient to give its finish to one’s name; if acts of evil be not accumulated, they are not sufficient to destroy one’s life. The small man thinks that small acts of goodness are of no benefit, and does not do them; and that small deeds of evil do no harm, and does not abstain from them. Hence his wickedness becomes great till it cannot be covered, and his guilt becomes great till it cannot be pardoned. This is what the Yî says, ‘He wears the cangue and his ears are destroyed:2 there will be evil.’”

Since then, Western psychology has constructed another model that views the human landscape in much the same way as the old Chinese did, but have added more details to the original picture. While the Chinese overall perspective was generally passive – suggesting that the trials and tribulations caused by the small men were naturally cyclical and must largely be just patiently and carefully suffered through -- the added details of the modern Western theory ultimately do help explain why the problem is perennial and cyclical.

According to modern Western psychology, the small men of ancient China exhibited what are now referred to as “personality disorders”. A personality disorder is, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s 4^th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

“An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture. The pattern is manifested in two or more of the following areas:

1. Ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people, and

events.

2. Range, intensity, lability, and appropriateness of emotional

response.

3. Interpersonal functioning.

4. Impulse control.”

Bernstein, a now retired clinical psychologist who has written extensively about the effects of personality disorders in the home and workplace, echoes Confucius’s remarks on the nature of small men, and explains the above psychological definition (2013, Chapter 1):

Lability -- which means rapidly moving from one emotional state to another, poor impulse control, and distortions of perception, like seeing yourself as the center of the universe, are characteristic not only of people with personality disorders but also of normal infants. Here then is the first thing we need to understand: emotional vampires [i.e., people with personality disorders], these children of the night, are indeed children. They have not matured enough to feel empathy. Like infants, they believe other people are not people like them, but instead are objects created to fill their needs.

Infants are pretty good at getting their needs met, but infantile adults are even better. One minute, they can be as charming and ingratiating as children; the next, they can be just as heedless of other people’s feelings and just as intolerant of anything that stands between them and what they want.

People with personality disorders can be successful in all sorts of endeavors because they are willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want. Compared to normal people, they are less hampered by shame, embarrassment, or worry about the effects that their actions may have on others. Their main, and often only, concern is their own bottom line.

Echoing Confucius’s words about the nature of small men, Bernstein (ibid.) further remarks:

The most useful way to understand people with personality disorders is to recognize the hunger that motivates them. Each of the types we will discuss is driven by a particular immature and impossible need that, to them, is the most important thing in the world. Their singular drive is the secret of their success — and of their failure. There may be some consolation in knowing that though emotional vampires may be successful in some areas, they are generally not very happy. There is never enough of what they need to satisfy them. In the end, they often self-destruct, but the process can cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage.

Emotional vampires [again, people with personality disorders] themselves are not necessarily aware of the irrational needs that animate them. Like young children, they don’t do much self-examination; they just go after what they want.

A Modern Mechanistic Accounting for the Presence or (Relative) Absence of Personality Disorders in People

The neuroscientist, Paul MacLean (1913-2007), originated and promulgated the triune or tripartite brain model of the interrelationships between human brain structure and human behavior. The first iteration of ongoing academic and medical research involving these subjects, MacLean’s simple model posits that there are basically three interdependent cognitive systems simultaneously operating in people that roughly correspond to general regions of the brain. Here’s an illustration summarizing MacLean’s thinking as far as the various major ‘regional’ neurological structures of humans (and other mammals) are concerned.

The next graphic summarizes MacLean’s findings as far as how the three major vectors of thinking leading to resultant human behavior. In the main, MacLean’s experimental and observational findings, and his resulting triune brain model, are consistent with the added detail since provided by more recent neuroscience researchers.

The Small Man Perches on a Two-Legged Stool

Bernstein (ibid., Chapter 2) later uses dual-process theory and MacLean’s underlying triune model of the brain to empirically sketch out the cognitive and behavioral differences between those small men with personality disorders and those superior men who are not (as strongly) affected by the problem.

Modern psychological dual-process theory, popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, is based on neurophysiological evidence that humans possess two different mental toolkits for thinking. The evolutionarily oldest tool, type 1 fast-thinking, functions instantaneously, instinctively, and intuitively in order to deal with immediate events like physical threat, dominance, mating, and hunger. Automatically-secreted factors like hormones, and the actions of pre-programmed, hard-wired neural circuits deep in the brain’s basal ganglia (‘lizard brain’) and the limbic system (‘paleomammalian brain’) push humans into immediate action in response to specific stimuli without any pause to consider the possible pros and cons of the action.3

Through much of the natural evolution of man and other mammals, this fast approach was necessary and sufficient and – as it turns out – significantly energy-sparing.

Type 2 slow-thinking, on the other hand, makes more use of the cerebral cortex -- that part of the human brain believed by MacLean to have been developed most recently in overall mammalian evolution -- and the limbic system (middleman mediator between that neocortex and the basal ganglia/lizard brain). The Wikipedia entry on the neocortex, making up 90% of the cerebral cortex, states:

The neocortex, also called the neopallium, isocortex, or six-layered cortex, is a set of layers of the mammalian cerebral cortex involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language.

For a species to develop a larger neocortex, the brain must evolve in size so that it is large enough to support the region. Body size, basal metabolic rate and life history are factors affecting brain evolution and the coevolution of neocortex size and [human] group size. The neocortex increased in size in response to pressures for greater cooperation and competition in early ancestors. With the size increase, there was greater voluntary inhibitory control of social behaviors resulting in increased social harmony. [Emphasis added.]

According to Bernstein, then, reliance on type 1, uninhibited and reactive fast-thinking originating in the basal ganglia (“lizard brain”) and in the limbic system, is usually more salient and dominant in small men afflicted with personality disorders than it is in superior men whose, among other things, fast-thinking capabilities are salutarily integrated with inputs from their more active and more developed type 2 slow-thinking abilities. Rather than employ type 2 thinking to check their homework completed with type 1 fast-thinking, small men habitually – for reasons not hypothesized or theorized by Bernstein -- just “…hear what they want to hear [can hear], and disregard the rest”;4 i.e., they behave as if they are only immersed in -- and thinking in -- the very short-term, and only of themselves.

Unfortunately, even in the best of circumstances there are many reasons why getting into, and maintaining, the habit of using type 2 thinking, and integrating its effects with those of the rest of the human brain to help balance the function of the whole system is difficult.

An Important Caveat regarding One of the Three Legs of the Triune Brain: The Energy-Saving and Progress-Conserving Ratchet Effect of Accurate Memories (Crystallized Intelligence)

Recall that the source document for Chinese small man/superior man theory observes that the superior man “…stores largely in his memory the words of former men and their conduct, to subserve the accumulation of his virtue.” According to the triune model of the brain and associated human behavior, this behavior of the superior man is derived from the memory consolidation and memory storage functions of the limbic system. The frequent speed and aptness of much type 1 fast-thinking is often derived from the human ability to recall and then apply effective solutions to identical or similar situations from the past of the individual concerned – or from the past experience of “former men” – without having to (again) conduct cumbersome and time- and energy-consuming type 2 slow-thinking all over again.

Interestingly and counter-intuitively, research indicates that, on average, members of the apparently impulsive Left invoke type 2 slow-thinking much more frequently than do those who are politically more conservative and behaviorally less impulsive. This suggests, then, that the Left’s characteristically greater forward-looking ‘openness to experience’ reflects the tendency of its members to pay relatively little backward-looking heed and respect to lessons already learned personally or by others, and instead to try to substitute those ‘lessons learned in the past’ with more intense and more frequent de novo type 2 slow-thinking in the present. As will soon be discussed, such forced type 2 slow-thinking activity materially exhausts and depletes the energy supplies of the neocortex. This mechanism may ultimately explain why type 2 slow-thinking of the political Left is often paradoxically associated with their relatively unconstrained behavior towards others; i.e., after all the sturm und drang of being in an intense state of high arousal and racing around trying to reinvent the wheel and figure things out for itself, there is relatively little metabolic ‘oomph’ left behind unused in their neocortices for the very critical brain business of voluntarily inhibiting social behaviors to help maintain social harmony.5

From this insight, it can be hypothesized that the stodgy old Right is – paradoxically -- more likely to successfully effect and then maintain more cultural improvements and corrective actions than the purportedly “progressive” Left. The Left seems to take at least one culture-improving and culture-maintaining step back for every step forward, evidently because precedent and established tradition make relatively little neurological impression on their collective triune brains. The graphic below shows the postulated case for more conservative humans who take full advantage of the findings (the Bayesian priors) of their forebears – the cultural wheel with its ratchet teeth of precedents and past lessons can only stop or go forward in one direction, and never loses rotational progress. Without those teeth of memory – the postulated condition of those who are “open to new experiences” and who accordingly neglect of the results of the cultural experimentation of our forebears – the wheel unfortunately goes as easily backward as it goes forward.

Original gif by ZabMilenko at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49717967 converted to mp4. Video metaphorically illustrated how memory and the written word help ensure human cultural and material progress. The only alternative to using memory and reading the words of our forebears (and living others) is to repeatedly attempt to reinvent and reconstruct the wheel.

More Modern Accounting for the Presence and Absence of Small Men: The Type 2 Slow-thinking System of the Neocortex Is Extremely Metabolically Expensive to Run

For any human (of whatever load-bearing belief system) or other mammal, the background, the ultimate limiting factor for balanced and effective brain function is the high metabolic energy requirements of that brain. At rest, about 20% of the human body’s energy6 supply is used to run the brain — though it represents only about 2% of the body’s total weight. What is more, the type 2 slow-thinking neocortex is especially metabolically active, consuming about 50% of the mammalian brain’s gross energy budget. This being the case, evidence indicates that the human body has evolved to minimize its energy-intensive, self-corrective type 2 slow-thinking operations in the interest of maximizing the probability of individual and group physiological survival through times of want. Unfortunately, the brain’s chronic high energy demands set an ultimate upper limit to the level of voluntary inhibitory control of social behaviors evidenced by man. This being the case, anything that can be done culturally or biologically (like evolving larger memory capacity and learning to write and read) to maintain adequate brain energy reserves directly works towards the mutual task of establishing and maintaining the general peace.

As you might guess from the above comments about the high energy needs of brain tissue, research shows that voluntary self-control by type 2 slow-thinking operations of the neocortex strongly deplete blood glucose levels, but restoring blood sugar levels will restore an otherwise temporarily weakened level of self-control.7 From “Paying the brain’s energy bill”:

For example, in rats performing a spontaneous alternation task, which requires spatial working memory, glucose levels are selectively decreased within the hippocampus. The level of decrease scales with task difficulty: glucose is reduced by 11% during a three-arm maze and by 32% during a more challenging four-arm maze. Task performance is also limited by glucose levels, and is therefore improved with prior glucose supplementation. Recently, hippocampal sharp wave ripples, which are important for memory and working memory functions, have been shown to trigger decreases in systemic glucose levels via a pathway involving the lateral septum, a critical node of communication between the hippocampus and the hypothalamus. These findings suggest that peripheral metabolic state and cognitive functions are intimately coupled.

It is not so surprising, then, that it has been shown that the average obese human in fact expends far less metabolic energy in their neocortex than the average non-obese person. Not only does this finding suggest a major caloric cause for that obesity, but, at the same time, it provides an explanation for the eating-related lack of voluntary neocortex impulse control displayed by at least some of the obese.8

Given the triune brain’s evolved preference for avoiding type 2 energy intensive slow-thinking if possible, motivating the brain to carry out type 2 slow-thinking is necessarily difficult. Moreover, several classes of common, relatively static, everyday non-metabolic obstacles – habits, imperfect memories, and cognitive blind spots -- can further hinder the type 2 thinking actions of the neocortex. These operate below the level of consciousness and include:

1. Cognitive biases like those related to framing, anchoring, or to the race, religion, politics, or personal appearance of others.

2. Expertise. Experienced and confident experts sometimes jump to unwarranted conclusions and actions because those conclusions intuitively ‘feel’ correct. This self-confident type 1 fast-thinking goes entirely unexamined and checked by the expert’s type 2 slow-thinking and sometimes causes experts to make errors. Recall that the superior man, “…being humble as it implies, will have a good issue to his undertakings.” This means that the expert can oftentimes be a small man.

3. Variations in trait mindfulness; i.e., a person’s inherent or learned ability to maintain active awareness of their thoughts, internal feelings, and information coming in from their externally directed senses in the present moment. People who characteristically pay more attention to what is taking place around and in them more frequently and aptly employ type 2 slow-thinking than those are natively more oblivious.

What’s more, impulsive type 1 fast-thinking also has a built-in response time advantage over more careful and painstaking type 2 slow-thinking. The emotionally- and habitually-acting reptilian brain and paleomammalian limbic systems responsible for informing type 1 fast-thinking processes respond to environmental stimuli within 80 to 120 milliseconds, while the neocortex – if it responds at all – only begins its slow-thinking information processing work after 200 to 500 milliseconds have passed by.

Stress, fear, time pressure, and addictive substances provide even further advantage to the type 1 fast-thinking process and its areas of influence in the triune brain, as the effects of any of these factors automatically and simultaneously biochemically increase the activity of the reactive reptilian brain and disengage the neocortex that would otherwise head off suboptimal type 1 fast-thinking. Using the same hormonal and neurotransmitter mechanisms, insomnia, excessive physical activity, and fatigue can lead to inattentiveness, distractibility, poor executive function, and long-term destruction of neurons and synapses in the neocortex, further enabling the more peremptory, sometimes less optimal behavioral responses caused by the older and lower parts of the triune brain.

Other effects of these same mechanisms are further discussed here:

Non-Passive Responses to the Small Men at the Family and Work Group Scales

Personality disorders are usually very refractory to change, and improve, if at all, very slowly and very incrementally. This characteristic of the general problem may explain the dominant ‘just wait it out’ or ‘retreat’ approaches taken by the ancient Chinese towards the advances of their own small men when and where enough of them came to outnumber the superior men.

At the person-to-person level, Bernstein (ibid.) counsels that non-therapists that have no choice but to deal with personality disorders in the home or in larger group settings (e.g., the workplaces or communities), realize first and foremost that because of the fundamentally and chronically irrational nature of these people, seeking the cooperation of the disordered person and reduction of their troublesome behavior through type 2 reasoning, discussion, or argument with them is as ineffectual as trying to reason with a misbehaving 2 year old (or an extremely demented old person).

Instead, Bernstein (ibid.) recommends using type 2 slow-thinking to, as already mentioned, recognize “the hunger that motivates” the troublesome person, and then seek ways to set up static, consistently-applied contingencies in the household or the workplace that, appropriate to the particular unmet “hunger”, encourage performance of mutually-beneficial behavior. The idea is to simply bypass and ignore the small man’s relatively weakly operative neocortex, and its disused or weak capacity for type 2 thought and consequently related learning and memory, and instead nonverbally and impersonally reinforce or condition9 the person to unconsciously follow and become habituated to, new, less troublesome behaviors. As it turns out, this same approach is that taken in consistent, organized fashion, by some cultural institutions like the armed forces, prisons, Alcoholics Anonymous, and certain religions.

According to Bernstein (ibid.), this class of fix can be carried out through either positive reinforcement (provision of the ‘food’ desired by the small man) and/or negative reinforcement (removal of an unpleasant stimulus; e.g., nagging). These tactics are, of course, those taken by parents when raising young children before they’ve learned to reason and competently, reliably, and voluntarily curb their own impulses.

In this last regard, recall again Bernstein’s remark:

Here then is the first thing we need to understand: emotional vampires [i.e., people with personality disorders], these children of the night, are indeed children. They have not matured enough to feel empathy. Like infants, they believe other people are not people like them, but instead are objects created to fill their needs.

In general, then, Bernstein’s advice is oriented to minimizing the impact of personality disorders on people in regular proximity to someone exhibiting such disorder, and is not optimally designed to materially help reduce the dysfunctions of the brain operations and the behaviors of the person with the personality disorder. The main ideas Bernstein promotes are just minimizing the internal and external damage caused by personality disorders by not arguing with (and further stressing) the offending person, but instead by providing them non-verbal reinforcement that will tend to help ‘reboot’ and ratchet that brain, and help it continue its otherwise halted development. Bernstein in fact advises that in cases of full-blown clinical personality disorder controlling the behavior of a person or group that the innocent beat a complete and permanent retreat from the scene.

Natural and Evolved Cultural Mechanisms of Corrective Personality Development

Like Bernstein observes, personality disorders10 are primarily characterized by much the same sort of immature behavior that parents and grandparents observe in their own children and grandchildren as they grow up. In modern psychology, the dominant working hypothesis is that non-organic personality disorders originate when a vulnerable, still-forming personality and its supporting biological systems are unable to absorb the stresses, shocks, and other influences coming at it from the outside (and later from the inside). Maladaptive distortions induced on the still-maturing, and not yet very resilient personality become self-perpetuating and embed themselves into the functional and structural architecture of the brain – and the biochemistry of the body. The nonmedical pathway out of this pit, according to modern psychology, is to painstakingly rewrite those patterns by further experience, and thus rewire the triune brain.

Not surprisingly, most personality disorders occur in young adults and lessen or disappear with physical maturation, increasing age, and further experience. Indeed, ‘in the wild’ natural social and biological worlds outside of the office of a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, some quite common life events and experiences frequently help complete the triune brain’s stalled maturation process and materially diminish early distortions of the human personality.

The following kinds of events often taking place ‘in the wild’ typically create an inescapable reality check that can shatter a core pathological load-bearing belief or defense mechanism, and trigger dramatic improvement and restore stymied personality maturation:

1. Profound, non-voluntary loss of:

   · a lifelong caregiver

   · a spouse

   · a prestigious job

2. Major consequence events (hitting ‘rock bottom’):

   · Serving out a lengthy sentence in a rigidly controlled prison environment

   · a near-fatal suicide attempt or catastrophic loss of a relationship due to personal behavior

3. Unexpected personal encounter and long-term exposure to unconditional positive regard:

   · entering and sustaining a long-term, stable, and deeply validating

   relationship (romantic or therapeutic) can act to reduce and de-escalate

   negative biochemical and neurological effects of anxiety and threat

   imposed by the limbic system on the triune brain

In contrast, the following category of events also taking place ‘in the wild’ change the environmental contingencies so persistently that old patterns are no longer reinforced, and new healthier ones gradually take their place:

1. Immersion in a high-structure, and/or high-mastery environment:

   Joining the military, a demanding religious order, a rigorous apprenticeship, or a close-knit emergency services team. These environments provide: 1) unambiguous identity, 2) clear rules and hierarchies (reducing uncertainty and conflict), 3) tangible skill mastery, and 4) built-in, non-optional social support. This external structure functions as an artificial prefrontal cortex which regulates emotion and provides a coherent self-narrative until the individual internalizes it.

2. Chronic, debilitating physical illness or severe addiction recovery:

   A chronic illness that cannot be charmed or dominated (re: narcissistic personality disorder) can humiliate the grandiose self into extinction, forcing a more realistic confrontation with vulnerability, dependency, and the kindness of others. Similarly, the 12-step program in Alcoholics Anonymous directly and systematically attacks the narcissistic defense structure, and imposes a new (non-grandiose) load-bearing belief; i.e., “I am an alcoholic in recovery”.

3. Becoming a caregiver (e.g., parenthood or caring for a sick relative):

4. For some, the inescapable responsibility and emotional attunement required to care for a vulnerable child or parent can force the development of empathy, patience, and emotional regulation. It re-centers the individual’s focus outside of their own internal chaos or fears.

Finally: Personality Disorders and that Pesky Rural-Urban Divide

Bernstein remarks that although people with the most common personality disorders can and do cause a lot of collateral damage, they also tend to act as part of a system that has, over the last few centuries, catalyzed and originated many favorable changes in the human way of life. Unfortunately, the very psychological immature phenotype that prefers dynamic, complex, and liberated systems ultimately fosters an environment that further dysregulates its own members and annihilates the niches of other phenotypes.

The general behavioral phenotype of those evidencing the most common personality disorders is just that of the collective Left: “high in openness to experience, low in conscientiousness (structure and order), high in neuroticism (sensitivity), with fluid identity and weak group boundaries.” People with these traits particularly welcome change and novelty, but this change and novelty, like any other addictive drug, further disorders the personalities chasing the shiny new epiphenomena.

Now consider that since the mid-1800s in a western country like the USA, young adults – those statistically most apt to display personality disorders – have mostly migrated from the country to the cities for education and/or employment. Leaving a rural environment of relative social stability and support, and taking their still disordered and immature brains with them, these young humans enter an environment that offers much less in the way of conditions conducive to continued, uninterrupted maturation.Consequent of those two reinforcing factors in the US – geographic concentrations of immature minds evidencing personality disorders and a paucity there of social and cultural support systems ameliorating these disorders -- the frequency of personality disorders in US (and UK) urban centers is much higher than that found in rural environments.11

The net result of this rural-urban behavioral disorder gradient is that in and around cities, individuals demonstrating personality disorders aggregate to generate collective personality disorders. Given that nationally and world-wide more people now live in and around cities than outside them, this confirms that — pending the lagged effects of their generally choosing to not reproduce themselves biologically — the small men temporarily slightly outnumber the superior men.

Evidently, like the old Chinese justifiably believed before us, only more careful patience is needed and things will, in fact, improve on their own.

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I enjoy reading Ruy Teixeira’s Substack writing about the state and concerns of the American Democrat Party primarily because he is able to be relatively objective and therefore insightful about that Party’s current problems and confusion. See, for example, his piece published today:

The Liberal Patriot

The Big Tent is Overrated

Democrats are famously in very poor shape these days. Despite the unpopularity of many of Donald Trump’s specific moves, Democrats’ popularity has not been rising. Indeed, in many polls it is mired at historic lows. Democrats’ lead in the generic congressional ballot for 2026 is…

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10 months ago · 40 likes · 5 comments · Ruy Teixeira

Reading this, I am reminded of the song from “My Fair Lady” — “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

If the [female-dominant] Democrat Party was to rectify its core views and beliefs to the extent necessary to gain a significant number of adherents from the (non-Fascist, non-radical, non-violent) American majority it would have to, among other things, become much more like the [male-dominant] MAGA-version of the Republican Party. This would mean stopping and thinking deeply and long about things — which is not something that is apt to happen with a feminized Party that defaults to impulsive tantrum-throwing when things don’t fit its characteristically emotional responses to everyday difficulties.

For further context, see:

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The clear, ‘easy to dance to’, common sense simplicity of this model of the working of human affairs at the large and small scales contrasts strongly with the complex, detailed, and fruitlessly blame-casting modern psychological model of such things, an example of the usage of which has been topically demonstrated by El Gato Malo here.

To start off, according to this simple Zhou Dynasty cultural working hypothesis, all order or disorder in the human world ultimately and atomistically derives from the order or disorder embodied and displayed by the male and female parental authorities of each human family. From Hexagram 37, Appendix I:

“In the household, the wife has her correct place in the inner and the man has his correct place in the outer. That man and woman occupy their correct places is the great righteousness shown in the relation and positions of heaven and earth.

In the household we have the idea of an authoritative ruler; that, namely, represented by the parental authority.

Let the father be indeed father, and the son son; let the elder brother be indeed elder brother, and the younger brother younger brother; let the husband be indeed husband, and the wife wife: then will be the family in its normal state. Bring the family to that state, and all under heaven will be established.”

According to the main text, however, the chief limiting or controlling factor over the health of the household and therefore “all under heaven” is this:

“For the realization of what is taught in the household (or for the regulation of the family), what is most advantageous is that the wife be firm and correct.”2

Appendix II summarizes the simple mechanics behind the entire matter:

“As wind comes first from fire, so does the transforming influence emanate from the family. The superior man, in accordance with this, orders his words according to the truth of things, and his conduct so that it is uniformly consistent.”

Note the apparently illiberal, apparently inegalitarian Zhou usage of the phrase, “the superior man”. According to the Zhou dynasty’s common sense point-of-view described in the I Ching, society is inhabited by two sorts of people: the afore-mentioned “superior men” who strive to order their words and actions with the truth of things, and the “small men” who do not – or at least do not so much, and not as well. The characteristic behavior of people choosing to act in a small man way is the exact opposite of that of those people behaving in a superior manner. So, if the superior man works to order his words according to the truth of things and acts consistently, then the small man thinks and acts under the influence of words that are false and not in accord with reality, and therefore behaves impulsively and haphazardly. Nevertheless, these differences notwithstanding, the small can become superior merely by working at it.3

In the I Ching empirical model of the human social world, moreover, overall social order and disorder are determined by the relative dominance of the competing influences of the superior and small men. When the presence of superior men (and well-functioning families) is predominant, then the human world is peaceful and orderly. On the other hand, when the influence of small men swamps that of the superior, the human world enters disorder and nears ruin (Hexagram 12, Appendix I):

“The want of good understanding between the different classes of men in obstruction, and its indication as unfavorable to the firm and correct course of the superior man; with the intimation that the great are gone and the little come; all this springs from the fact that in it heaven and earth are not in communication with one another, and there are no well-regulated states under the sky. The inner is made up of the weak divided lines, and the outer of the strong and undivided: the inner is the symbol of weakness and the outer of strength; the inner represents the small man, and the outer the superior man. Thus the way of the small man appears increasing, and that of the superior man decreasing.”

Apropos a very recent salient event in the US and these general circumstances, Appendix II (Hexagram 12), states and cautions:

“Heaven and earth, not in communication, form obstruction. The superior man, in accordance with this, restrains the manifestation of his virtue, and avoids the calamities that threaten him. There is no opportunity of conferring on him the glory of emolument.”

In the Zhou Dynasty’s cultural view of things, when worse comes to worst the superior men initially have to sit tight. From Appendix I (Hexagram 23):

“Splitting apart denotes overthrowing or being overthrown. We see in the figure the weak threatening to change the last of the strong into one of themselves.

That it will not be advantageous to make a movement in any direction whatever appears from the fact that the small men are now growing and increasing. The superior man acts according to the exigency of the time, and stops all forward movement. [In doing this] he values the processes of decrease and increase, of fullness and decadence as seen in the movement of the heavenly bodies.”

However, Appendix II with regard to the same situation, more prescriptively and specifically comments:

“Superiors, in accordance with this, seek to strengthen those below them, to secure the peace and stability of their own position.”

Eventually, however, according the Zhou Dynasty’s cyclic view of nature, the unfortunate circumstances reverse themselves quietly and gradually, and the superior men and their influence on the world at large returns. Appendix II (Hexagram 24):

“The earth and thunder in the midst of it form coming back. The ancient kings, in accordance with this, on the day of the winter solstice, shut the gates of the passes from one state to another, so that the travelling merchants could not then pursue their journeys, nor the princes go on with the inspection of their states.”

Appendix I (Hexagram 24) further explains:

“Coming back indicates the free course and progress of what it denotes: it is the coming back of what is intended by the undivided [strong] line.

Its subject’s actions show movement directed by accordance with natural order.4 Hence he finds no one to distress him in his exits and entrances; and friends come to him and no error is committed.

He will return and repeat his proper course; in seven days comes his return: such is the movement of the heavenly revolution.

There will be advantage in whatever direction movement is made: the strong lines are growing and increasing.

Do we not see in coming back the mind of heaven and earth?”5

Whatever, then, according to the Zhou Dynasty model of the human world, could possibly catalyze reconciliation and communication between the small men and the superior men and thereby prepare for the restoration of order, cooperation, and peace? Counter-intuitively, the small have to be courted by the superior, who must subordinate themselves to the small in order to start things off moving once again in the right direction.6

Appendix I (Hexagram 31):

“Sensitivity is here used in the sense of mutually influencing.

The weak above and the strong one below; their two influences moving and responding to each other, and thereby forming a union; the repression of the [strong] one and the satisfaction of the other; with their relative positions where the male is placed below the female: all of these things convey the notion of a free and successful course on the fulfilment of the conditions, while the advantage will depend on being firm and correct, as in marrying a young lady, and there will be good fortune.

Heaven and earth exert their influences, and there ensue the transformation and production of all things. The sages influence [i.e., ‘court’] the minds of men, and the result is harmony and peace all under the sky. If we look at the method and issues of those influences, the true character of heaven and earth and all things can be seen.”

In sum, the following is the basic approach that needs to be taken in times of social disunity and conflict -- according to the Zhou way of thinking, that is (Appendix II, Hexagram 31):

“The superior man, in accordance with mutual influencing, keeps his mind free from pre-occupation, and open to receive influences of others.”

The thinkers of the Zhou Dynasty would view the ‘we won’t back down’ chest-beating currently being indulged in by some members of both the Left and the Right not at all favorably as far as the task of achieving mutually acceptable positive results is concerned.

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https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/08/06/308-the-coming-deconstruction-of-global-money

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Grant Tinsley, an associate professor at Texas Tech, and Director of its Energy Balance & Body Composition Laboratory, provides a very useful summary of a 2023 laboratory study, Assessing the reliability and cross-sectional and longitudinal validity of fifteen bioelectrical impedance analysis devices, that examined the utility of 15 portable body composition scales for keeping track of body changes caused by diet, exercise, illness, and age.

What I believe is the most important general finding of the Siedler et al., 2023, laboratory study referenced above is this one:

“Six (40 %) of the fifteen devices in our sample demonstrated statistically significant negative proportional bias as demonstrated in the Bland – Altman analysis. In other words, many of these devices demonstrate a lack of sensitivity required to accurately estimate BFP [body fat percentage] in individuals on either end of a population’s distribution while generally exhibiting greater accuracy in estimating BFP in those with intermediate values. This may point to an artificially restricted range of output values programmed in these devices based on a manufacturer’s desire to provide a relatively ‘normal’ BFP estimate to a consumer. It may also indicate the use of an exceedingly homogenous reference population by the manufacturer when developing algorithms. Therefore, those with levels of body fat further from the population norm should generally be more skeptical of outputs received by a given consumer-grade BIA [bioelectrical impedance analysis] device.” [Emphases and acronym definitions added.]

What this means is that these researchers found convincing evidence that a significant number of the commercially available home use body composition scales provide inaccurate and unreliable % body fat estimates for those who are more fat, or less fat, than the modern “normal” to (normally) “overweight” majority.

As an example, Siedler et al., 2023, provide the following scatter plot for the Withings Body Cardio BIA device we’ve been using at our house for a little more than a year.1 Note that at scale-estimated % body fat below 20%, the Withings BF determinations become noticeably and progressively much less precise and accurate; i.e., much more “noisy”. (The Y-axis measurements represent clinical quality ‘ground truth’ measurements of the % body fat of the study’s test subjects.)

My digitization and re-graphing of the point data from the graph above indicate that -- for Withings % body fat estimates of around 20% or less -- there is little or no measurement value whatsoever to the Withings Body Cardio % body fat readings. The R-squared for the line-of-best-fit for the data scatter plot beneath indicates that the Withings Body Cardio BIA device scale at the 20% reading level and below is only about 2% accurate.

In contrast, Withings Body Cardio readings above 20% body fat are much more strongly correlated with, and are therefore much more predictive of a person’s true percentage of body fat. See the graph and Table below.

These effects of the loss of accuracy and precision of the calibration curve of the Withings Body Cardio at % body fat values around or less than 20% showed up not only in both of our most recent % body fat determinations, but seem to have somehow exponentially distorted our most recent muscle mass and bone mass estimations as well. See the example graph below to see the probable distortions I am referring to. Presumably, the bioimpedance ‘algorithms’ used to estimate the mass of each body component in the Withings output (bone mass, water mass, muscle mass, and fat mass) are computationally dependent on each other and are therefore only reasonably valid when % body fat determinations are reasonably accurate.

Fortunately, the Siedler et al., 2023, study produced data indicating the relative ability of each of the 15 tested units to “…adequately detect changes in body composition over time as compared with the reference 4C model.”

Again, this is an important concern because, as they say,

“Overall, the relatively poor longitudinal validity demonstrated in approximately half of our sample of devices indicates that consumers should be wary of the ability of such devices to accurately track changes in [their] body composition over time, at least on the population level.”

The top seven yellow-highlighted devices on the Table below demonstrated to Siedler et al. that they were sufficiently reliable and accurate in estimating the % body fat in people of all body types, however. Surprisingly, the Japanese-designed $80 Omron HBF-516/HBF-514C provided better overall body fat estimation performance than the six other top instruments costing significantly more, including the $1100 lab-quality Seca mBCA 515/514. Although demonstrating less accuracy and precision at % body fat levels below 10% than the Omron, the even cheaper $49 Tanita UM-081 turned out to be no performance slouch, either.

The measurement validity scatter plot for the Omron HBF-516/514C from Siedler et al., 2023, is shown below. Note that – unlike in the case of the Withings Body Cardio BIA device discussed above – the Omron provides a rather tight, focused linear response to changing % body fat across the entire % BF range exhibited by the Siedler et al. study’s rather extensive and physically heterogeneous test sample of people.

So, now that my wife and I have both worked our way down to around the 20% body fat detection limit of the Withings Body Cardio, we’ll be continuing our n=2 experiment -- with regard to determining the possible salutary effects of minor dietary polyamine supplementation -- using an Omron scale to keep more accurate track of further possible muscle mass and fat mass changes associated with this slight dietary change.

A couple of final comments:

First, among other things, the scatter plots below continue to suggest minor dietary polyamine supplementation does, at least in my 73 year-old male case, significantly serve to reduce body fat while building/restoring muscle mass.

Second, readers may recall from this post and this one that the average US diet is – in an international context – relatively deficient in polyamines, and that this deficiency could be behind both the diminished state of US male fertility and the retarded improvement of US life expectancy compared to that of other industrialized nations.

Perhaps tellingly, the authors of the paper containing the graph above briefly remark near the end of their report that:

“We found that [low] appendicular skeletal muscle mass was an independent risk factor for mortality in the general population, and this was more pronounced among younger Americans. This is striking given that the risks of low muscle mass have been a major focus in the geriatric literature and in cohorts with various chronic diseases, but not otherwise in the [younger] general population.” [Emphasis and explanatory adjectives added].

More cheese for all! Herbert Hoover’s chicken-containing pots got it a bit wrong.

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Here's a graphed summary of these positive changes in my case:

And here’s a graph depicting much the same favorable changes occurring in my wife over the same time period:

As you can see, compared to last year’s data, in both of our cases muscle and bone masses have significantly increased, and fat masses have simultaneously decreased, during the ongoing polyamine ‘treatment’ period. No change at all in the seasonally characteristic levels of our physical activity or sun exposure has taken place over the one plus year period shown.

For me, dietary changes during the 2025 period of muscle and bone growth, and fat loss, however, were the addition of 50 grams cooked wheat germ 3-5 days/week (spermidine source), ~2 ounces sharp cheddar cheese 5-7 days/week (putrescine and spermidine source), and a daily orange (another putrescine source). My spouse, on the other hand, is slightly allergic to modern wheat varieties so won’t consider eating wheat germ, and has been increasing her polyamine intake instead by eating tangerines and small amounts of sharp cheddar cheese almost daily – and less frequently by eating button mushrooms. Neither of us have made any effort to restrict total food intake each day. Nevertheless, I can report a greater mealtime appreciation of food during the experimental period of eating. That being said, I seem to achieve satiety with less food intake than previously. As will be mentioned again later, perhaps that’s the result of mammals like us being much better able to put fat stores to energy-producing use when body stores of polyamines are not depleted.

For more context, see this thread of posts on the whole subject of polyamines and the health (and longevity) of humans and other organisms:

1) Some Very Interesting Small Cellular Molecules: the Polyamines

2) Where Have All the Little Wigglers Gone, Long Time Passing?

3) Polyamine Addendum

4) A Systems Hypothesis Nicely Explaining Both the American Hispanic Paradox and the Relatively Low (and Decreasing) Average American Lifespan

5) The U-Shaped Curve, Polyamines, and Those Apparently Quite Demanding Gastrointestinal Bacteria

The last (#5) post on this list presents the results of a simple epidemiological/econometric study of international nutritional data showing that about 90% of the nation-to-nation variation in average life expectancy at birth can be predicted just by possessing knowledge of the average national daily intake of the three major dietary polyamines – spermidine, spermine, and putrescine. The experimental augmentation of our local American diet with spermidine-containing wheat germ and button mushrooms, and with putrescine- and spermidine-rich sharp (aged 1+ year) cheddar cheese and putrescine-rich citrus fruits, is supported quite strongly and promisingly by the results of this epidemiological/econometric study.

Again, keep in mind while thinking about the implications of this particular post, that an increase in body fat, and decreases in muscle and bone mass, are ‘normal’, increasingly negative physical changes observed in aging humans eventually leading to the development of physical frailty and consequent inability to carry out the normal physical activities of daily living, including self-care.

It so far appears, then, from our short-term experience reported here, that minor dietary increases in ingestion of polyamines can favorably attenuate the normal age-related and unhealthy trend eventually leading to incapacitating physical frailty. These favorable effects on bone, muscle mass, and fat accumulation are consistent with more academic findings, in particular those of Kiechl et al., 2018, demonstrating that significantly better health and greater longevity are conferred upon those with just slightly higher than average dietary intakes of spermidine.

As to the polyamine-related biochemical mechanisms possibly behind the reported muscle and bone mass gains, and losses of body fat, it has been firmly established that protein synthesis and cell replacement,2 and fat transformation into useable energy are both restricted in mammals,3 if not halted, when polyamines are depleted without replacement as organisms age.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the masses of our major tissue types over the longer term as the small dietary modifications reported here are continued. When, for example, will the relatively large muscle gains we’ve been experiencing without increasing our physical exercise or protein intake levels in the first four months slow down and plateau? And will seasonal reduction in physical activity and sun exposure next winter again result in the fat gain and muscle and bone loss we both experienced during winter 2024?

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Michael Ruse noted Charles Darwin's work as a hallmark of the consilience approach. Darwin brought together evidence from entirely different fields of inquiry: animal and plant breeding, geology, natural history, biogeography, sociology, and many others. He had a remarkable ability to answer questions in one field by examining data in another field entirely. The ability to bring together observations that seem disconnected from each other, explain all of them with one unifying explanation is a powerful mode of scientific thinking.

Consilience of evidence also helps to answer criticism that scientists are closing off debate by excluding ideas that do not fit within their disciplinary boundaries. Where “convergence of evidence” may seem inward-facing, confined to a single research tradition, consilience is explicitly outward-reaching. It requires translation and integration across disciplinary boundaries and sometimes even across different ways of knowing.

The public asks more of science than scientists often ask of their own fields. That may seem unreasonable. But I think scientists can answer the call to expect more in their work, to communicate more effectively to more people, and to be transparent about what they know and don't know. It's not the process of “vetting and validating” that accomplishes these goals; it's the transparency, replicability, and openness that makes it possible for anyone to evaluate the work.

By the way, for those unfamiliar with the term, “puffery”, see this wikipedia entry for explanation.

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According to the data, a total cholesterol value of about 220mg/dL is optimal for avoiding death by any means – no matter your age or your sex. Too low a cholesterol value can increase your chances for premature death, and too high a cholesterol value will also foster the same end.

Similarly, there’s also such a thing as being too skinny or being too fat.1

It turns out that the same u-shaped curve relationship probably also applies to polyamine consumption; i.e., not only may too low a consumption of certain polyamines be deleterious to your health, but too much of this otherwise good thing could also be dangerous. After all, recall Kiechl et al.’s important cautionary comment with regard to dietary spermidine at the end of this passage:

“To our knowledge, our study is the first to show an inverse relation between the amount of dietary spermidine intake and all-cause mortality in the general community. The association emerged as independent of other determinants of longevity and lifestyle. The survival advantage was driven by a reduced risk of death from all major causes. The key association was highly consistent in subgroups and successfully replicated in an independent cohort from the same geographical region. It exhibited a linear dose-response type and particular strength. Spermidine showed the strongest inverse relation with mortality among 146 nutrients studied. The reduction in mortality risk related to a diet rich in spermidine (top compared with bottom third of spermidine intake) was comparable to that associated with a 5.7-y younger age. All of the findings apply to spermidine from dietary sources and to amounts characteristically found in the Western diet and cannot readily be extrapolated to high-dose spermidine supplementation or extreme diets.” [Emphases added.]

There are isolated reports in the biological and medical literature suggesting that spermidine can, in fact, be slightly to seriously toxic at especially high rates of consumption. See, for example,

1) Serum spermidine in relation to risk of stroke: a multilevel study;

2) Acute and subacute toxicity of tyramine, spermidine, spermine, putrescine and cadaverine in rats; and,

3) Changes in whole blood polyamine levels and their background in age-related diseases and healthy longevity.

The collective academic polyamine literature provides the following average daily polyamine consumption data for the countries shown in Table I, data that permit epidemiological examination of national polyamine consumption habits for evidence that too much – not to mention too little -- of one or other polyamine in the diet can be deleterious to human health and longevity.

Using the published estimated national average daily dietary polyamine intakes for each of the countries shown in Table I, and regressing2 those against national average life expectancies produces a multivariable linear equation predicting average national life expectancy with about 90.3% accuracy3 as shown in the following Table II ordinary least squares regression analysis output.

Putting the Table variable coefficients into equation form yields: log(life expectancy in years) = 1.738343-0.251801*log(mg putrescine/day) + 0.866728*log(mg spermidine/day) - 0.405104*log(mg spermine/day) + 0.5*0.645324*log(mg putrescine)^2 -0.5*0.592945*log(mg spermidine/day)^2 - 0.437871*log(mg putrescine/day)*log(mg spermidine/day) + 0.362375*log(mg spermidine/day)*log(mg spermine/day).

The adjusted R-squared value (Table II) for the linear regression of average national life expectancy against average national polyamine consumption rates indicates that the average national life expectancy at birth can be predicted with about 90.3% accuracy, just by knowing the average daily dietary consumption of the polyamines putrescine, spermidine, and spermine of a given nation’s human inhabitants.

So, it appears possible that the effects of these dietary polyamine consumption data on average national life expectancy are externally “telegraphing” what is going on internally in the human body with regard to ingested polyamines. For example, note that the negative sign of the squared spermidine factor (LSPD*LSPD) indicates that as the amount of spermidine goes up in a diet, the effect of that spermidine on life expectancy becomes more and more negative – just as seen on the right hand sides of the U-shaped curves shown in Figures 1 and 2 above. Conversely, the positive sign of the squared putrescine factor (LPUT*LPUT) indicates that as the amount of putrescine goes up in human daily food consumption, the effect of that putrescine on human life expectancy becomes increasingly positive – just as seen on the left hand sides of those same two Figures.

Judging from the characteristics and predictive strength of the equation, then, striking some kind of an approximate balance among putrescine, spermidine, and spermine in the human diet is important to the matters of health and longevity.

These predicted contrasting effects on life expectancy of increasing the amounts of spermidine and putrescine on people eating the average American diet can be more tangibly illustrated by numerically titrating the average American with servings of foods that are especially rich in spermidine (e.g., wheat germ) or foods that are particularly rich in putrescine (e.g., citrus fruits or sharp cheddar cheese) utilizing the basic, internationally-based equation provided above. Table III shows the results of some of this ‘table top’ mathematical experimentation.

As indicated in Table III, after the first 25 grams of the stuff, only gradual and slight progress in equation-predicted life expectancy is achieved by simply stepping up the amounts of spermidine and spermine-rich (0.16 mg/g and 0.15 mg/g, respectively) wheat germ in, say, the average American diet – and this predicted average longevity very, very gradually decreases as this hypothetical dietary component is further increased. On the other hand, adding in only small amounts of putrescine-rich sharp cheddar cheese (0.65 mg/g) or orange (0.12 mg/g) to the average American diet (or the average Japanese, Italian, or strict Paleo diet) is predicted to lead to quite large increases in average human life expectancy.4

All in all, these Table III results suggest that modern human diets (especially that of Americans) may be more starved for putrescine than they are for spermidine and/or spermine.

In this last regard, it is known that gastrointestinal bacteria that dwell in the colon utilize putrescine to locally produce the spermidine and spermine required to maintain and grow the tissues of the lowermost, most removed reaches of the human digestive system. This bacterial autonomy is important because little or no food-sourced spermidine or spermine makes it past the duodenum and small intestine, so the gut bacteria living within the colon must make their own — for themselves and our lower gut tissues. It is further recognized that during fasting, when no bacteria-nourishing, spermine and spermidine-poor semi-digested foodstuffs are descending down the mammalian digestive tract, these same bacteria are forced to directly extract putrescine from the mammalian circulatory system to obtain the basic energy supply necessary for their continued survival.

Perhaps, then, as humans age and gradually lose much of their cellular capacity for producing their own supplies of polyamines, their gut microbiota shift from beneficially acting mutualistically with us to acting as amensal parasites instead, strongly competing with us, their host, for dietary polyamines and thus foreshortening our lifespans. If this is so, human diets particularly rich in bacteria-feeding putrescine might serve to relieve some of the competitive pressure for systemic and dietary polyamine supply otherwise developing over time between humans and their gut micro-residents.

Finally (almost), for those who would like to mess around with the polyamine-dependent life expectancy prediction equation described here for the sake of personal curiosity, here’s the Excel file that was used to generate Table III.

Life Expectancy Equation And Sensitivity

14.4KB ∙ XLSX file

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For those same messing around purposes, here is also a sample of polyamine-rich foodstuff portions and their corresponding putrescine, spermidine, and spermine contents in milligrams. Different quantities of these polyamine-rich foods can be input into any of the national base cases provided in Table I in order to see what sort of effect such dietary polyamine additions would likely have on that nation’s average national life expectancy and average national health level.

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From Wikipedia: “Liebig's law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1840) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients.

This was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was the growth of a plant or crop improved. This principle can be summed up in the aphorism, "The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil." Or the rough analog, "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link."

Read now a short summary review (Bardocz 1995) of the nature and functions of polyamines in the bodies of people and other animals [emphases added]:

“Like other growth factors, putrescine, spermidine and spermine are involved in every step of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis, and are thus essential for cell proliferation and growth. In contrast with metal ions, which have localized charges, polyamines can form bridges between, and therefore connect with, distant negatively charged structures because of the positive charges distributed along their hydrocarbon chain…

Polyamines are very stable compounds that are able to resist heat and survive acidic or alkaline conditions. They can interact non-specifically with negatively charged structures and, in these non-specific roles, they can be replaced by metal ions, most often Mg²⁺ or Ca²⁺. Because of their structures, they can fulfill a wide range of uniquely specific functions in cells, such as the control and initiation of the translation of mRNA to form proteins and also regulation of the fidelity of the translation. Polyamines can stimulate ribosome subunit association, stabilize the tRNA structure and reduce the rate of RNA degradation, enhance both RNA and DNA syntheses, help to condense DNA, covalently modify proteins as well as regulate the rigidity and stability of cellular membranes.

However, the most important function of polyamines, one in which they cannot be replaced by any other positively charged molecules, is to act as secondary messengers, thereby mediating the action of all known hormones and growth factors. Thus, the polyamines fulfill indispensable roles in human metabolism.”

Next, recall that as people and other animals age, they become more and more dependent on food sources for those limiting factors, spermidine and spermine, because their bodies gradually become less and less efficient at manufacturing these small molecules internally. Over the span of a human life, therefore, endogenously-generated polyamines become a limiting factor hindering the growth and repair of the human body.

It is not surprising, then, that Kiechl et al. found that average human healthspan/longevity increased by almost 6 years in America for people eating a diet with only a marginally higher than average dietary content of spermidine:

“To our knowledge, our study is the first to show an inverse relation between the amount of dietary spermidine intake and all-cause mortality in the general community (Table 2). The association emerged as independent of other determinants of longevity and lifestyle. The survival advantage was driven by a reduced risk of death from all major causes. The key association was highly consistent in subgroups (Figure 2) and successfully replicated in an independent cohort from the same geographical region. It exhibited a linear dose-response type and particular strength. Spermidine showed the strongest inverse relation with mortality among 146 nutrients studied (Supplemental Figure 4). The reduction in mortality risk related to a diet rich in spermidine (top compared with bottom third of spermidine intake) was comparable to that associated with a 5.7-y younger age. All of the findings apply to spermidine from dietary sources and to amounts characteristically found in the Western diet and cannot readily be extrapolated to high-dose spermidine supplementation or extreme diets.” [Emphases added.]

The less healthy, and biochemically faster-aging group in the bottom third of daily dietary spermidine consumption in the Kiechl study over the long run ate a diet containing 9.0 mg/day or less of the substance. On the other hand, the healthier and 5.7 years biologically younger group, that in the top third of daily spermidine consumption, took in 11.6 mg/day or more of the substance – a minimum of just two or three milligrams more each day. Not much of a dietary difference for such a very large epidemiologically-evident health-increasing advantage.

This within-the-US limiting factor behavior of spermidine also shows up internationally when comparing the average life expectancies of different countries, and appears to explain up to about 60% of the US life expectancy deficit compared to the life expectancy levels of the average person in most of the other industrialized countries. See Figures 1 and 2.

What is it about the dietary proclivities of the average person in the US that could be causing this polyamine and life expectancy deficit in America? There’s evidence to suggest the problem in the US has come about because of adoption of an ersatz, ineffective form of the country’s traditional Northern European dietary pattern.

In those countries following the Northern European dietary pattern, the central staple foods are meats, fish, and/or dairy products -- accompanied by complements and accessories of vegetables, starchy foods, and condiments. On the other hand, in those Asian, Mediterranean, Latin American, and African countries following the other major manner of human eating, grains, legumes, and/or tubers fulfill the role of the staple part of the diet, and meats, fish, and non-starchy vegetables function only as minor complementary and accessory foods.

You can see in Figure 4 that in the Northern European dietary pattern, limiting factor polyamines like spermidine are obtained chiefly by eating large (main course) amounts of staple meat and dairy products. In the alternative (Mediterranean-Asian-Latin American-African) dietary pattern,1 however, polyamines are instead chiefly taken in by consuming staple legumes, nuts, and seeds, and only complementary or accessory amounts of meat and dairy.

Consideration of the Hispanic Paradox in the US provides one key (of two) for decoding why the average American lives 4 to 6 less years than the average citizen in most of the other industrialized nations. Hispanic Americans, largely following Latin American eating habits that are not so reliant on meat had an average life expectancy of 82.2 years in 2019, while White non-Hispanic Americans at the same time had an average life expectancy of 78.9 years. This very substantial difference exists despite the greater general economic advantage of the average non-Hispanic White American over the average Hispanic American. Figure 5 further details the deep nature of the Hispanic American health advantage.

So, what gives here? To obtain the second key to answering this question, take a look at the inflation-corrected average price of commercially-processed meat from 1949 to the present in Figure 6. It is clear in this graph that meat prices in the US have been climbing since the first depletion-caused oil shocks of the 1970s. For most people in the US, this continuing price pressure has been sufficient to force grocery substitutions, gradually but materially moving Americans away from their traditional Northern European meat-centric dietary pattern to something entirely different – not a Northern European diet or the Mediterranean-Asian-Latin American-African alternative – but a pale, puffy ersatz imitation of the traditional Northern European pattern of eating.

With the rise of meat prices, the average diet in the US began substituting polyamine-poor refined flour products for staple meat-dominant main dishes. Witness in Figure 7 the timing of the consequent rise, for example, of the term, “hamburger helper”, in the American food lexicon.

As you can see below in Figure 8, meat substitutions or ‘helpers’ made out of refined flours are much poorer sources of the limiting factor polyamines than is meat. So, in the US while average Americans were inadvertently shortening their lives by reducing the amount of meat (and dairy foods like sharp cheddar cheese) in their diet, the average American Hispanic instead steadily steamed on healthwise, continuing unchecked to get the ample polyamines implicit in their less expensive Latin American cuisine.2

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Here’s a diagram illustrating the approximate national distribution of the two dietary patterns.

As fossil fuels continue to be used (depleted), the “easy pickings” energy sources become more and more rare, which causes the amount of energy needed to obtain net surplus energy for human use to increase. This depletion process, and the attendant increasing energy expense caused by depletion, is tracked by the EROI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) ratio:

EROI [or EROEI] = (energy obtained)/(energy spent to obtain that energy)

The branch of economics called biophysical economics predicts that, as fossil fuels depletion continues, the various fossil energy dependent systems that support post-World War II industrialized societies will eventually falter and degrade in their operational effectiveness. Socio-economic systems like healthcare and education are among the most expensive, in terms of the amounts of energy required to maintain them and make them function. Accordingly, biophysical economic theory predicts that if fossil fuels depletion is advanced enough to cause harm to human systems, this harm would first show up in these two particularly energy-hungry, often inefficient human fields of activity. Think canary in a coal mine.

EROIs can be calculated for all levels and all types of human activity. The most general, most all-encompassing EROI ratio, however, is the Societal EROI. This particular EROI measures all human activity products and divides them by the total amount of energy used to produce all those human outputs. As human activity and the energy sources employed by humans change from time to time, Societal EROIs also change.

The estimated Societal EROI history of the US is illustrated in Figure 2 below. Before the onset of the use of coal and petroleum products, pre-industrial Societal EROIs were relatively low, indicating much upfront energy (“energy invested”) – human and otherwise-- was required to produce sufficient surplus energy to run human systems. In the US, it appears that Societal EROIs in agriculture-dominant, early rural America varied within the low range of 5:1 to 9:1. Among other things, this low range of Societal EROIs initially prevented much urbanization to develop in the country.

Recent biophysical economic analysis indicates that Societal EROIs greater than 11:1 are necessary to grow and maintain modern, urban-dominant societies. As Figure 2 indicates, however, Societal EROIs greater than 11:1 mostly occurred in the US only during the immediate post-World War II period, and then largely ended with the two oil price shocks of the 1970s. Currently, the Societal EROI levels being experienced in America are much like those present in the country just before World War I and just before World War II. This being the case, it is expected that there should be some concrete evidence that the healthcare and educational systems of countries like the US should, in fact, be exhibiting some perceptible negative changes due to underlying fossil fuels depletion and increased energy cost of energy.

Healthcare Systems

Average life expectancy at birth seems a reasonable summary measure of the efficacy of the health-maintaining practices of both the individuals and the institutions of any given country. Figure 3 below illustrates the changes over time in average life expectancy in a sample of the industrialized countries of the world. Of all the countries shown, Japan (red line) has managed to build the highest life expectancy, while the US (black line) has performed the worst at this task.

Figure 4 maps out changes in US life expectancy during its transformation from an agricultural rural nation fueled dominantly by biomass energy sources to an urban industrialized country run on fossil fuels.

Pre-1900 values of the annual changes in life expectancy are relatively smooth-looking because data were available only at 5 year intervals and because annual life expectancy growth was needfully extrapolated over those 5 year periods. The very spikey graph of annual life expectancy growth from 1900-1947, on the other hand, illustrates the effect of communicable diseases (and post-disease rebounds) on the US population in this era without antibiotics. Note the gradual permanent disappearance[1] of this “spikeyness” after the penetration of sulfa drugs and penicillin into medical practice over the 1937-1947 period. The thick colored lines are lines-of- best-fit for annual changes in US life expectancy. From 1860 through 1947, the US manage to increase the life expectancy of its population at about an average of +0.31 years/year, going from 1860’s life expectancy of 39.4 years to the 66.8 years of 1947. Over the post-World War II 1947-1973 industrial expansion built on abundant domestic oil production, annual life expectancy growth slowed down to an average of approximately +0.18 years/year, and achieved an average life expectancy of 71.4 years in 1973.

Surprisingly, Figure 4 shows an appreciable multi-year jump in the growth of US life expectancy during the 1970s oil shocks, just after average life expectancy reached 71.4 years. Figure 5, demonstrating a pronounced global jump in bicycle sales focused on the same period of time, indicates a general increase in physical activity on the part of fairly sedentary, car-dependent Americans probably explains the unusual and relatively large incremental improvement in American life expectancy when gasoline was in particularly short supply and had become much more costly (along with everything else).

Unfortunately, as Figure 4 shows, annual growth in American life expectancy has slowly dropped to zero since the US entered a post-industrial state of Societal EROI less than 11:1, and fell to zero to negative annual growth in 2015-2016, well before the later and further COVID19 negative effects on US life expectancy. Average life expectancy in the US was 77.4 years in 2022, 1.5 years less than its peak value of 78.9 reached in 2014.

In sum, the cessation of annual life expectancy growth and the drop in average life expectancy following the re-imposition of pre-WWI and pre-WWII Societal EROIs because of fossil fuels depletion indicate the American healthcare systems were and are suffering significant stress and fragility during this new energy milieu.

There is evidence for hope and adjustment to the new energy circumstances, however. The population and healthcare institutions of Japan instead are and have been exhibiting what Nassim Taleb has defined as “antifragility” under somewhat worse surplus energy privation:

“Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers. As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency (i.e. the ability to recover from failure) and robustness (that is, the ability to resist failure). The concept has been applied in risk analysis, physics, molecular biology, transportation planning, engineering, aerospace (NASA), and computer science.”

See Figure 6 below and note that the line-of-best-fit trend lines for annual growth in life expectancy in Japan, unlike those of the US, have remained consistently well above the zero growth state all through the 1860-2022 period, despite the 1970s onset of surplus energy privation because of fossil fuels depletion.

The Japanese example with regard to continually increasing life expectancy and its supporting healthcare systems – individual and institutional – indicate this country and its people have somehow managed to continue to improve the national average state of health despite fossil fuels depletion, and despite spending much less on institutional, formal healthcare than the US. These significant differences between countries like the US and Japan with regard to health merit close study, analysis, and appreciation. A general, very introductory description of the healthcare system of Japan can be found here. It seems altogether possible that any principles gleaned that explain the antifragile success of Japan with regard to increasing and maintaining health under economic (and other) stresses might also find useful application to the other socioeconomic systems of the post-World War II industrialized nations.

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[1] Except for the evidently somewhat self-inflicted imposition on the populace in 2019-2020 of a novel disease agent immune to both antibiotics and (multiple rounds of) artificial viral vaccines.

Fizaine and Court (2016), for example, have used the detailed economic data available for the US to more rigorously statistically estimate the minimum societal energy return on energy invested (EROI) necessary to maintain and grow the kind of industrialized societies and institutions that arose during the post-World War II global economic expansion. In the case of the US, these authors have determined that it is impossible for the country to maintain its post-World War II industrial way of life if it spends more than 11% of its annual gross domestic product on energy costs. This cost corresponds to a societal EROI of 11:1 – a value slightly different than the older, qualitatively-determined values of 10:1 and 15:1.

Note here that a societal EROI differs from the EROIs for a particular fuel like petroleum or fire wood in that the societal EROI indicates the ratio of all societal consumption and growth (numerator) divided by all the energy consumed in producing the materials and services for that consumption and growth.In the case of a fuel EROI, on the other hand, its EROI more locally represents only the energy initially consumed in producing the surplus fuel of a certain type and use for a society.As will be shown later, the societal EROI can be approximated very easily by using the national accounts GDP data freely available for many countries, and by employing the EROI formula, societal EROI = (100-%GDP energy expenditures)/%GDP energy expenditures.1

In 2017 the same authors graphically published their laboriously established estimates of the global well-head and mine mouth EROIs for petroleum, natural gas, and coal for the 1800-2012 time period.

Digitization of the global petroleum EROI data from this graph and use of a logarithmic scale make it clear in Figure 3 that Morgan’s (2024) data are correct, and the global EROI value for oil is now about only 10:1. According to Table 3 of Fizaine and Court above, this oil EROI is now too far below the minimum necessary 19:1 EROI value to provide sufficient support – on its own – to the continued maintenance and growth of modern societies.

Next, Dupont et al. (2021) estimated the global societal EROI for the year 2018. Their published societal data point is employed below as a check of an application of the simpler GDP-based societal EROI estimation technique mentioned earlier.

According to the Figure 4 data array, the OECD nations have – in the aggregate -- been left high and dry with regard to energy since about 1973, while the US enjoyed two brief respites from the effects of fossil fuels depletion: ~1985-1989 (“Reagan era boom”), and 1996-2002 (“United States boom”). Both of these minor US economic respites are marked above by dips of the US societal EROIs below the minimum 11:1 societal EROI threshold. Without the US military spending then being directly applied to the benefit of the energy industry, it appears that the period between 1989 and the present would (blue line) have been a period of continued economic maintenance and growth. On the other hand, without that military spending, things might have been even worse for both the US and the other developed countries.

Post-1988 US GDP percentages spent on military spending were obtained from https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget. They are extremely significant (3-5% of annual US GDP) in view of the total now-normal 6-8% GDP scale of US %GDP energy expenditures per se.

Fizaine and Court (2016) provide the following reconstruction of the US energy source mix through time. Biomass includes fire wood, animal fodder, and human food. Among other things, this diagram illustrates the reasons for the generally waning degree of social and economic influence of skilled and unskilled workers, and the small-scale farmer and rancher as the US got older.

Converting the above US historical %GDP energy expenditure data into societal EROIs yields a long run historical perspective of the US with regard to energy use and surplus energy availability.

Societal EROI in the US began increasing from its early subsistence biomass-dependent level of 5-7 up to about 12 as coal use spread throughout the economy from the 1850s through the start of the 20^th century.2 The then historically high level of societal EROI of 11-13 from 1890 to 1910 was matched by economic growth rates of greater than 7%/year. Immediately thereafter, however, the US economy evidently overshot the mark by too rapidly investing in initially inefficient industrial electrification, and thereby displacing much labor and creating economically-crippling chronic unemployment – a high level of unemployment that did not slacken except briefly during World War I, and then during and after World War II.

Following that long period of economic stagnation (and its included Great Depression), the US economy was buoyed upward by a deep, energy-rich pool of oil and gas capable of generating high societal EROI values much greater than the minimum 11:1 required for economic systems maintenance and growth.

This pool was sufficiently depleted, however, by the mid-1970s to drop the US societal EROI below this minimum required societal EROI for significant periods of time, consequently damaging the upkeep and growth of systems established during the post-World War II economic expansion.

Recall this earlier presented Figure 7 “harbor model” of the societal effects of fossil fuels depletion on Western style industrialized polities. It qualitatively highlights the proposition that as fossil fuels depletion occurs, formerly functional systems in industrialized countries sequentially suffer degradation and decreasing effectiveness. The detailed record for the US shown in Figure 6 of this post shows that it is more complicated than Figure 7 above suggests. Each of the systems listed below have taken repeated damaging hits since the oil crises of the 1970s, damage that sequentially occurs over and over again as societal EROI levels repeatedly drop below the minimum required 11:1 societal EROI for the US. See Figure 6 and note the major societal EROI drops that occurred within the current energy era marked there with light red shading. The periods of societal EROI perigee there correspond very closely, if not exactly, with the timing of academic achievement score failures and decreases in US and other country life expectancy documented in my last post.

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The minimum EROEIs of fossil fuel representative conventional sweet (sulfur-poor, easily refined) crude oil required to conduct the Western-style economic human activities are listed in the above Table, but note that these become increasingly less certain the higher the activity category is in the Table. Cited values up through transportation’s 3:1 EROEI are reliable, while those above that value are more speculative.

Recorded data illustrated below show that the health care systems of most of the westernized countries started to break down and become uncoupled from increased expenditures and consequent life expectancy increases in 2019 — just before the COVID19 event. The US, however, reached a comparable point of health care systems disruption in 2014, 5-6 years before most of the rest of the industrialized nations did.1 The prediction in the Table above that global westernized health care systems would begin degrading in about 2017 is therefore reasonably accurate.

Education systems time series data for the world were (so far) unobtainable by the writer, but the two graphs below show a distinct and major break down in the US education systems took place in 2005 — 18 years earlier than the Table in this post predicts. Again, this is a finding that indicates that US socio-economic systems are more fragile2 than globally expected towards the effects of fossil fuels depletion.

The next graph shows that increased per pupil expenditure in the US after 2005 was unable to stop and reverse the steep downward trend in US student academic achievement, indicating thatthe US education system is indeed broken and is no longer positively responsive to previously helpful outside inputs like increased funding.

The fact that the US education system lost its effectiveness 18 years earlier than the topmost Table predicted, suggests that the US public education system is more fragile and far less resilient than is the American health care system. Given the great contrast in the degree of training and education of the personnel involved in the two different systems, this is not surprising.

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Fronted by Kuniyasu Soda (MD/Ph.D.) of Jichi Medical University and Saitama Ken-O Hospital, his group has been studying polyamines for more than 30 years. He and his colleagues were the first to observe, for example, that a diet high in polyamines prevents age-related diseases and extends the life of mice:

Rather than represent that improvements in mammalian health by polyamine supplementation occurred because of an increase in cellular autophagy, the Soda group found instead that (Soda 2023):

1. The ‘test tube’ in vitro experiments providing evidence that human cellular autophagy increases in the presence of heightened concentrations of polyamines unknowingly erred in the use of fetal bovine serum in the cellular growth medium. This serum contains a copper-based enzyme not present in human cells which catalyzes the breakdown of spermine and spermidine, artificially creating cell-toxic compounds from those polyamines that then kill human cells and thus induce the autophagy more recent researchers became prematurely enthused about. This process does not actually occur in the bodies of real living humans, according to Soda 2023.

2. Rather than being caused by spermine and spermidine-induced autophagy, improvements in mouse (and human) health and lifespan are caused by the strong antioxidant character of the polyamines, and – more importantly – by the ability of spermine in particular to significantly inhibit the development and progression of age-related diseases through gene methylation.

Another important observation made by the Soda research team is that because the enzymes that create and transform the various members of the polyamine chemical series slow down and become less effective with the increasing age of the organism concerned, variation in the polyamine content of the personal diets of older people automatically introduces some significant and telling individual variation in the concentrations of blood and cellular spermine and spermidine levels as they age.

In connection with that last observation, the Soda research group has demonstrated that in cases of age-related diseases of the brain, cardiovascular system, kidney, and muscles, for example, the whole blood ratios of spermine to spermidine are lower in people afflicted with these diseases -- and become lower with the progress of these diseases.

Furthermore, from Soda 2022:

“The properties of spermidine synthase and spermine synthase have not been fully clarified, however, they seem to lack a regulatory or rate-limiting role in polyamine synthesis. The administration of arginine or ornithine stimulates putrescine levels; however, the subsequent synthesis of polyamines [spermidine and then spermine] is not necessarily [subsequently] stimulated in elderly people or aged animals. These findings indicate that the activities of spermine and spermidine synthases decrease gradually with aging.”

Among other things, this set of observations suggests that dietary putrescine (from fruit primarily) and spermidine (from peas and fresh corn, for example) are much more apt to benefit the health (and fertility) of younger people with intact polyamine synthase enzyme systems than they are older people with weak polyamine synthase enzyme systems. In older people, the polyamines putrescine and spermidine obtained from food are far less likely to be transformed into the health- and longevity-promoting spermine.

An obvious work-around for older people seeking to avoid or improve chronic diseases that often develop with the passage of time would appear to be to focus dietary polyamine supplementation using foods especially rich in spermine, spermine that would not need to be first biochemically transformed within the body’s cells in order to become of cellular use and benefit. The following series of graphs from Munoz-Esparza et al., 2021, identify the human foods with higher concentrations of spermine. Wheat germ with its ~9 mg spermine/100 g wheat germ is king, but most meats are generally very significant sources of spermine, too.

Note while decoding the graphs that scaling on each graph is different.

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