That said, I had a recent conversation about healthcare payments, where the other person’s view was simple: they did not like paying for healthcare at the point of service, and considered that the most relevant metric for “is this system working”, and therefore reacted negatively to a specific example of someone ostensibly receiving a large medical bill.1

Now, I don’t want to be dismissive - as we talked further, it was obvious she is not stupid or wrong, she just… values avoiding the complexity of “paying for healthcare” very highly. And beyond this, as she grew frustrated with my (longwinded!) attempts to discuss what other implications this might have for healthcare policy, it became apparent that simply having to debate those other complexities were also things she preferred to avoid, and - at an emotional level - did not appreciate me bringing up. I apologize to her, and anyone else who had to read through my comments, for being a longwinded, argumentative blowhard. It will definitely happen again.

Again, to repeat, this is not her being “wrong,” this is just her valuing a very specific part (the simplicity) of the “healthcare system” above the others. And I think many people share this preference, which is: the main thing they want from healthcare policy is simplicity. That when a health issue comes up, it will be handled (not even resolved positively, many patients surprisingly care little about this, particularly with chronic illnesses) and paid for (this is important, because for many people, acquiring the money to pay for things, and figuring out the best way to do so, is also a cost in time and effort) in the most simple, streamlined and with a minimum-of-their-involvement as possible. They just want it taken care of. It’s hard to blame them, especially once you’ve come face to face with what True Healthcare Complexity means. It can and will literally kill you!

I think this is an underrated issue. The US healthcare system, even just the face that people interact with - obviously the average joe doesn’t need to understand neurosurgery - is just too complex to understand and therefore people naturally and understandably turn to secondary methods of understanding explaining them: that is, conspiracy theories and assuming malevolent intent. The person I spoke to made this clear:

1. she had already spent the amount of thinking she wanted to do on the topic

2. she had come (using that secondary method) to the conclusion Americans were all slaving away in poverty to pay for insurance

3. she was emotionally committed to the simplicity of that conclusion to the extent that other people proposing more complex explanations felt hostile

4. she had no interest in discussing the complexities or implications of her personal healthcare payment strategy (moving to Canada)

To her, the Canadian healthcare system is vastly superior because it was simple enough - in the ways that she interacted with it - to understand:

1. it charged her nothing (easy to understand “no bill”), unlike in the US, which had ridiculously complex bills and payment processes (even if insurance ended up covering it)

2. it paid for it with taxes, taken quietly from her paychecks, unlike in the US, which has copays, fees and monthly premiums (and also taxes)

3. Any other opportunity costs, side effects, delays, tradeoffs, quality - or tax bills paid by other Canadians - were mostly invisible to her, so they didn’t register as relevant issues, and if someone brought them up, it felt like they were introducing that complexity as some kind of tricky justification for trying to undermine something she already felt positive about

Now, one (perhaps such as me) can disagree, and think we should consider those other factors, especially when trying to design or reform a healthcare system, but… she’s right, by her standards. If you don’t like complexity, a system that presents only simplicity (and hides all the complexity) is indeed better, for you - and, if the reasons it might not be better for others are complex, you might not care to consider them.

For a vastly more comprehensive look at the topic of “how do Canada and the US differ in coverage, and why?” - and much more - I highly encourage you to read this:

Wicked Hard

Your US insurer steadfastly refuses to cover a medical treatment? Don't look North.

On December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was gunned down on a New York City sidewalk. The trial of his accused killer, Luigi Mangione, is fast approaching and certain to trigger another wave of heated debate concerning insurance industry practices. Hand-waving about profits and calls to create a single-payer healthcare system a…

Read more

2 months ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · S. de Erney

This is one reason why you do not hear much about the McNaughtons of Canada. Patients with very severe ulcerative colitis surely live there. Perhaps they too would experience much better results with an expensive, ultra-high dose, biologic combination therapy. But the system ensures such a regimen could never be attempted. A doctor would never propose it. The patients would not be aware this was a possibility being denied.

That is simple. “Not being aware of an option” is a negative - optionality is real - but it is less complex. I think there is a case to be made that many people, via their revealed preferences and actions, prefer the lack of complexity that tells them “yes we are doing everything medically we can for you, and you won’t pay a dime” even if it results in medically worse outcomes! You may not believe me, but I ask you, have you ever spoken to a patient who was confronted with a choice between 1) a long list of medications, treatments, physical therapy or personal actions they would have to take and 2) a “simple” surgery (to them - obviously rather complex for the surgeon, but they’re unconscious), even when the latter option has worse outcomes and higher costs? Patients choose number 2 all the time. And this is at the individual level, where they realistically could expect to directly and transparently suffer the burden of worse outcome - how much worse would it be when they think it at the “national policy level?” What level of complexity would they choose to avoid, when the costs are hidden and distributed mostly to others? Congratulations, you’ve just invented the US healthcare system from first principles.

I think this is a generalizable rule: many people really dislike complexity, and consider “being forced to deal with complexity” to be a large cost. In any given case, if presented with two systems, one that gives you $1000 easily, but silently takes away $1500 later on, many people would prefer (not explicitly, but via the revealed preference of their actions) that to a system that made them fill out a complex form in order to receive $500. Again, this boils down to “higher value on the cost of cognition.” It is not actually irrational, but we do need to work around this fact.

So what to do about this, as we think about reforming the US healthcare system? Because a single payer system, as terrible as it is in real and complex ways, is indeed more simple to understand and imagine how we’d interact with it: I get care, I never pay for it - and the ways that it is bad would cost complex thinking to be aware of it, so I don’t. Feels like utopia! “Single payer” style systems are in fact the source of a great deal of the terrible complexity in modern healthcare, but one must admit they do an excellent job of making providers and insurers the face of that complexity, and thereby leaving patients unaware as to who to blame.

This means that any good solution - that isn’t single payer - will need to have simplicity written all over it. Thankfully, for you complexity haters out there, I have that simple solution - it’s called “the exact opposite of the single payer system.” What would this look like, to a patient like our Canadian friend above, in terms of the “complexity” they would encounter?

1. Your “health insurance,” which now only applies to catastrophic or large-scale costs, is now something you (well, your parents) sign up for at birth and promptly forget about for the rest of your life, like your birth certificate. No more shopping for plans when you leave the house, or every time you change a job. Much more simple!

2. When you do have to use that health insurance for those kind of events, you just pay for it like you would for any other thing you buy - no questions about “what is your insurance” at the hospital. If it’s covered, insurance reimburses you (directly) after. If you exceed your deductible, insurance covers it. No longer is billing some kind of weird coordination dance where your doctor has to keep resubmitting claims and your insurer keeps denying them because they used the wrong code. Insurers are much less likely to deny claims by patients, simply because you’re actually their customer, and now you can actually leave them if you want. Very simple.

3. For “regular health care” you just… go to your doctor like before. Whichever doctor you want, because “in/out of network” doesn’t exist any more. You either pay for the visit as you would any other service, or maybe you sign up for a monthly subscription like Netflix. Extremely simple.

4. And, if at any point you can’t afford to pay for those things, the government can step in with cash support like it does for many other things. Vastly simpler than the massive, complex paperwork challenge of dealing with Medicaid.

As a whole, the entire business of “paying for healthcare” is now just as simple as all the other transactions (either at point of sale or via insurance premiums) in your life. It’s not this weird abnormal complex thing that operates totally differently and has words that mean totally different things than they do in every other context. It’s just: you get thing, you pay for thing. The end.

Swipe your card for coffee, swipe your card for lunch and swipe your card for your meds at the pharmacy.

Pay a subscription fee for Netflix, pay a subscription for your doctor’s health maintenance plan, pay a subscription fee (premium) for your insurance.

Submit a claim to insurance when your car gets dinged, when your house has fire damage and when you break your leg.

The simplicity is not just that it is truly simple, but that it is handled simply using all the same incredibly effective tools (prices, insurance, markets, customer choice) that we’ve developed for handling exactly these kind of situations - but that the (mostly) government controlled payer system has completely screwed up. Incidentally, creating most of the complexity that Americans see in their daily provision of healthcare, even though it is presented by nominally private doctors, hospital billing specialists and insurers. It will be simple because it will be the same things we do for everything else, every day.

The Solution has to be simple, or people will reject it, because people hate complexity. If only someone had coined some kind of platitude, exhorting the listener to retain simplicity in all things, lest they be called stupid. I will leave that task to some more eloquent poet, and instead keep writing incredibly boring healthcare screeds.

As always, we will end on an AI-generated image note, to reward and outrage those who have read this far. This one’s particularly offensive, it put the bible verse in there without me asking at all. Not enough of a theologian to know if it’s warranted.

If none of the stuff at the link makes sense, that is entirely understandable, because it doesn’t make sense in reality. But here’s what’s happening: basically CMS (medicare, the federal government) is trying to cut costs by lowering reimbursements to doctors. Because everyone knows this needs to be done - “cutting healthcare costs” is practically a national mantra in the US nowadays. Silly quaint slogans like “in God we trust” or “the home of the free” are left back in the 20th century.

They are choosing to do this, in this specific case, (there are many others) by reducing reimbursements for when a doctor does any kind of other procedure or code (everything is a code that needs to be submitted to Medicare or insurance) at a regular visit. This means things like vaccines, “oh, I wanted to ask about this problem for my kid too,” petty little procedures like wart removals, etc… basically anything other than the generic Hello This Is Your Regularly Scheduled Well Visit, Please Only Tell Me About How Well You Are. Yes, there is literally a medicare code - and extensive rewards for doing enough of them - for Annual Medicare Wellness Visits. I’ve done the reports, it’s extremely boring exciting stuff.

The problem is, doing that is efficient - we want docs to take care of simple stuff like this at already existing appointments! This is how doctor appointments used to be, you just went in and they dealt with stuff. You don’t want to have to tell the patient “sorry, we can’t talk about that legally right now, you have to reschedule an appointment specifically for that issue, because it’s a different code.” Remember how difficult it was to get the appointment in the first place? Hopefully you can get the appointment before your next Annual Well Visit.

But, and this is the ENTIRE shell game of healthcare payments, making this change absolutely does reduce the official nominal costs of reimbursing for those well visits. Certainly reducing costs is a noble goal. Column A on the excel spreadsheet absolutely goes down, mission accomplished. We will pointedly NOT notice that Column B, marked “the costs of other types of appointments that are now necessary” went up, and also Column C, marked “the annoyance and time wasted for patients and doctors” is skyrocketing. Those are problems for different groups of people; people we (at CMS) don’t really know or care about.

Because the whole scheme now so complex, and the layers of responsibility so vague and convoluted, there are infinite ways to reduce costs in area A (let’s say the reimbursement rates for primary care visits) by increasing costs in area B (let’s say reimbursement rates for other types of procedures). Very often, the parties that pay for B are different than A, so the people in area A look like heroes and validate strategies like “use the federal government’s negotiating power to drive down prices” and indeed on paper they succeed - because we don’t talk about the other impacts to other people. But, the problem is, the people in area B want to reduce costs too - and theirs just went up - so now they have an incentive to game the system or lobby for a change that reduces their costs, and shifts them to area C (let’s say this is private insurers). And now the people in area C….. you can see where we’re going here, and it’s a place where we rapidly run out of letters.

This is why healthcare billing, and efforts to make it better, never make any sense to average citizens or patients. It’s just too complex, and like those shell games, the shells move too fast to know where the ball is. Now imagine if the magician had a few hundred shells instead of just three. The mark would never be able to figure it out. The problem is, at the carnival, the customer has the option to just walk away. Patients (and doctors) don’t. The only solution that works is to flip the table and start over, with something simpler that the patients and doctors (who have no choice but to negotiate the system) can understand.

Sadly this topic is incredibly boring, so I put this AI art here at the end. Maybe people who hate AI art will be so incensed by this that they will hate-read this and learn about healthcare billing. What other outrage inducing things can I add here, to drive readership? Puppies are bad. Taylor Swift is really just a hologram. Birds ARE real. Medicare For All is the stupidest idea of the century, and we have 74 more years to go.

There we go.

A slow decline over a century probably feels like the proverbial frog being boiled. But I think there is evidence of a sharp and noticeable downturn in the last 20 years or so. So why is there no revolution in the streets?

Part of the problem is mobility. Any New Zealander can cross the ditch to Australia with no visa required. It is pretty easy to get a work visa for the United Kingdom, and in general, the Kiwi passport is strong. If you don’t like your lot in life, you can vote with your feet: there are three times as many Kiwis living in Australia as there are in our own capital city.

Not really a “problem,” as it allows that individual to better their life, but it does point to a wider factor in the “mediocre” country debate. And that is: it is totally fine for 99% of countries to be mediocre - in fact, that’s probably an upgrade for many of them. So long as the mobility and trade exists such that talented people and valuable things can move to the most powerful places to exploit those traits, everything will be fine - the mediocre countries don’t actually need to have optimal policies.

But… that 1% of places, where the talented - not mediocre - people go, that place cannot be mediocre. It has to be better than that, in order to enable those talented people to create the surplus that, honestly, allows the mediocre countries to happily thrive in that status. No judgement from me on this - being mediocre, peaceful and productive is, historically speaking, a titanic objective achievement of which you, fine citizens of New Zealand, should be rightfully proud. But the world is not a uniform place - and this is good - and nearly every country is interconnected - it’s ok if your small country is just mediocre, if you individually can reap the benefits of some other country being better at a given task.

At a global level, New Zealand can have bad housing policies, and things will be okay. Europe can have bad tech policy, and that will be okay. Argentina can have too much inflation, and yet things will be okay. Canada can have bad healthcare policy, and… it will be okay. Because so long as there’s a place that people can go - or get a shipment from - for something better - the world will be okay.

But at least that one place has to actually do much better than mediocre. It has to be great - not great again - but greater always and forever. And for most of those things, that place is America. America cannot simply be that boiling frog. And it cannot even just have a revolution in the streets, like those hypothetical Kiwis, it has to even be better at implementing radical, greatness-inspiring reforms. Revolutions in the street are for mediocre countries. We have to do better at becoming greater.

Without offense - honestly, truly - to all those other countries, there is an international division of labor. For civilizational greatness, it is entirely fine if your specific country is merely mediocre, you can still excel at producing all the other important and wonderful things that we all need. But the United States, as the world’s reserve currency location for achieving greatness, does not have this luxury. We have to do better, because whether we - or the world - like it or not, America has built up within its borders a critical mass of The Right Stuff for civilizational survival. Some nebulous whorl of talented people, quality institutions and history, productive resources, accessible capital and good luck has settled onto this continent and there is no way to disentangle them. The greatness must be made here. It cannot be allowed to fail.

If New Zealand is mediocre - or even tragically fails, as bad as that would be - the world will go on. The same is not true for the United States. This is not some starry eyed spiritual American exceptionalism, this is hard-nosed, objective-assessment-of-the-facts American exceptionalism. At some point, whether one likes it or not, too many eggs have been placed in the basket.

America, and its bearing on the course of the world, is exceptional - because even the least inspirational bean-counting accountant can simply count up the factors that affect the world and discover that an extremely large percentage of them are located in America, for some peculiar reason. China, Europe, India, Russia, Africa - these are all places with massive influence on our human history, but there is simply one historic sequence that actually occurred over the past 250 years, and it is the one that resulted in the United States being, in the year 2026, the civilizational center of mass, where the critical pivot point of the future is located.

Specifically, we cannot allow America to just have mediocre - optimistically described - healthcare policy. It cannot afford to have terrible housing rules. It cannot have moronic, self-defeating trade policy. It cannot have stupidly designed tax and welfare policies. America’s cities cannot labor under sclerotic and ignorant governance. It cannot have incompetent and wasteful military strategies. Her citizens cannot tolerate leaders who are so spectacularly clueless about new technologies. Most importantly, it cannot be allowed to implode in a fiscal crisis - thereby dynamiting that well of greatness - created by the short-sighted vote-greed of its politicians.

Just like the Kiwi who wrote the article above, it kills me to see my country be more mediocre than it should be. But, as he says, he can escape New Zealand’s mediocrity whenever he likes, and that is great. Unfortunately, in the case of America’s descent into sufficiently destructive mediocrity, there is no escape, not even for those of you with dreams of Mars bases. Anywhere I go in the world, that ruin will follow, because America’s fortunes and failures are too wrapped up in the fortunes of the world. This also means that there is no escape for him, either - or for you. In the war to run this planet with the barest acceptable minimum of competence and common sense, America is the last, best hope for victory1. There is nowhere else to run. For those of you who just want things to work, this is the last redoubt, and there are already holes in the walls. The line must be drawn here.

Mediocrity is intolerable. The danger of the next few years is real, and must be met with greatness.

If you are calling yourself a socialist but don’t advocate for that, then you should stop. Why call yourself a Nazi2 or a Communist if you don’t support doing the bad things they did? Just call yourself the term that describes what you actually want: Democrat, social democrat, liberal, progressive - whatever. All perfectly fine things to be.

To the extent that you do actually want true socialism: you are a bad person. This is not negotiable. Your views are fundamentally illegitimate, just like they would be if you publicly proclaimed membership in the American Nazi or Communist parties3. You should be excluded from any legitimate political party or project so long as you do not renounce the project of “massive government force to nationalize major sectors of the economy.” Because that path ends in death and destruction. While no political-economy axiom is 100% predictive, there is no principle more proven, via both theory and practice, than “socialism causes bad things.”

You may claim “I want to achieve those things via the democratic process, through peaceful, legal means” but even if you want that, it isn’t possible, because our country has good, fundamental rules that absolutely prevent it, as well as millions of people would be legally and morally justified in resisting you. And just saying “well, we’ll change those rules” is also disqualifying.

You can have whatever good end-goals you want - a paradise for workers, no one goes hungry, everyone gets high wages, all of that stuff is great and I share your desires to achieve it. But you may not choose socialism as the tool to achieve it, not in the least because it has categorically failed to ever provide those things. You must choose a different path.

If in the future you ever do enact some kind of democratic socialism, by definition there are things in our current free society that you will have to seize. I am, after all, a capitalist, and so they are things that are either currently mine, or that I (and many millions of others) need to be free in order for us to live and prosper, and therefore we will defend them - and indeed have the legal and moral right to do so. If your belief today, here in 2026, is that you would endorse sending men with guns to kill me (or anyone else) to accomplish these goals, then yes, you are morally wrong.

Now, I am not too worried this will actually come about, I think our system of “preventing idiot socialists from taking over” is pretty robust, and I don’t really think imagining vigilante fantasy scenarios is a productive way to spend one’s time. But, I am telling you this to explain why I am saying everything else. When I hear someone say they are a socialist, and truly mean it, I know this means: “my political beliefs would result in killing you” Most of the time I truly believe most of them would not actually pull that trigger, or even want someone else to, but you can perhaps see why it colors my opinion.

Because I am expert procrastinator, who understands why it is such a valuable and productive tool, taking this small detour clarified the most important part of the task I had been avoiding: why?

Thank You Space Ryan Gosling

Like so many other times that this question has been asked on the silver screen, Ryan Gosling answered the call. The movie begins with the discovery that, unless humanity acts, the sun will dim1 - a very Aztec crisis - which leads the world’s scientists to conclude that:

we will lose a quarter of the world’s population in the next 30 years.

I don’t think the risks of the fiscal cliff are that high but…. they’re pretty high, and 30 years is a reasonable timeframe for the crisis. The movie’s Chief Doom Scientist goes on:

And that assumes that the nations of the world work together to ration food.

Which they won’t. So I’d double the estimate.

Outside the movie theatre, we’re not worried about lack of food here - in some ways, quite the opposite - but the idea that it’s not just the physical effects that will cause harm, but natural, inevitable human mass reactions to them is a deep, unintuitive point. So many people think about potential crises and conclude “well, this bad effect only happens if we don’t take this basic action that would fix it, therefore it’s not a problem” without thinking about are we taking that action today? Yes, of course you can avoid getting a speeding ticket if you stop driving so fast, but you actually do need to take your foot off the accelerator, not just conclude that you could. The people in the movie, led by that chief scientist, realize that they have an obligation - to humanity, and not in a metaphoric, symbolic, “raising awareness” sort of way - to act. Ryan Gosling’s character prefers not to act; he must be forced to. Out here in reality, to be blunt: you will be forced to act as well.

This minor point is extremely important, because the most prominent people arguing that the fiscal cliff is not a problem we should worry about, do so because they claim that a nation that can print its own money cannot truly ever experience a fiscal cliff: they can always print more money to meet obligations. They are wrong - and others far more intelligent and informed than I have made this point - because the “cliff” is one of mass human choice: the rest of the country does not have to let them do that. To rephrase from the movie: “that assumes that voters will just accept higher inflation - which they won’t.”

The other part that makes the Hail Mary disaster relevant is that the harm comes from disrupting the productive systems of the world. The aliens aren’t coming to invade and kill us, they’re just slightly dimming the sun, which reduces crop yields and temperatures, which damages the incredibly productive cycles we have on earth for making food and happily remaining alive and well fed - and, taking into account human nature, incidentally results in massive amounts of death. Essentially, in economics, the effect is a mundane, simple reduction in productivity - which has massive, horrifying real world consequences.

Lastly, a personal note, I saw the movie with my daughter - and lots of the story revolves around the main character’s role as a teacher, and strongly emphasizes his overwhelming desire to teach and assist the next generation. Of any species! But for me, acting to solve this problem has an overriding personal element: my children will be young adults looking to make their way in the world at precisely the time when the fiscal cliff will begin to bite most harshly - via taxes or inflation - on precisely the kind of person they are going to be2. Even worse, whether it’s via desperate fighting over who has to pay, or some crisis that we can’t afford to fight, there will be high direct risk to their lives, happiness and the dream of the world I want them to grow up in. I do not want them to have to see a world where roaming mobs of unemployed 22 year olds are burning down nursing homes, or where those same kids are forced to work to pay for them. My parents’ generation somehow managed to preserve a world for my generation, despite two superpowers seemingly bent on nuclear annihilation. I want the same for their grandchildren. For my children.

What Do We Need To Preserve?

In times of peace, the most important thing for the national budget to produce is a minimal threshold of fiscal dry powder, unencumbered by taxpayer, bondholder or anti-inflationary revolt, to combat crises and make actually productive investments. Right now, we absolutely know that we do not have enough fiscal runway for a major crisis, because we had a minor crisis - COVID - and the spending on that provoked a pretty high level of revolt! Just imagine a war or emergency that required 5 times as much spending and provoked 5 times as negative a reaction.

Imagine how World War 2 would have played out, if we couldn’t have afforded to build all those ships, tanks and weapons - oh, we don’t have to, because that’s exactly what happened to Russia, Germany and Japan: they ran out of that capacity. That’s what happens to us, tomorrow - or twenty years from now - if we don’t fix this. This is not overdramatic sci fi scenario: societies die when they do not retain this reserve. This is cities on fire, blood in the streets, death for millions. That is what it meant for Russia, Germany and Japan. It did not mean this for 1945 America, because despite the ongoing Great Depression3, we still had that reserve. We are, today, in 2026, at “end of 1945” levels of “how much reserve do we have left?” Do you feel like we’ve just won the largest, worst, most destructive war of all time?

So, like Space Ryan Gosling - what do we have to do? How do we turn the sun back on? How can we preserve a world for my children and yours?

I have a few solutions. In order of financial impact, starting with the most powerful:

Cure Diabetes

The most important thing to know about the government of the United States is that it is a healthcare insurance plan that happens to have an army and a few other minor doodads - and significantly, some… large… debt obligations. The single largest spending item, across public and private, is medicine. The single largest item in medicine is the treatment of, and harms from, type 2 diabetes4 and diseases that that it causes or are heavily associated with it, including obesity, heart disease, alzheimer’s and many others - likely even more than you’re aware.

Therefore, the most powerful fiscal solution, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, is to cure or prevent that disease. This solution demands a more detailed set of steps:

1. subsidize cost of GLP-1 receptor agonists (ozempic, etc…) pharmaceuticals to zero for any patient with diabetes or sufficiently negative metabolic markers, for life.

2. end agricultural subsidies for any crop that contributes excessively to metabolic dysfunction/obesity: this means soybeans, corn. Accept this loses you some votes from certain districts.

3. enact steep Pigouvian sales taxes on food products in proportion to the amount of high fructose corn syrup and polyunsaturated fats they contain. There is no food that by necessity contains these things, meaning no one is going to starve because now all their food is too expensive, there are always equivalent products with other sweeteners or fats (and which can be subsidized if necessary). These are what makes “ultraprocessed” foods bad, not some magical dust sprinkled on them during the UltraProcess(TM) process.

4. actually enforce trans fat bans with random point of consumption FDA testing regimen. i.e. inspector walks into McDonalds and measure the trans fat contents in the fryer that they are using, not just assumes what it is from the reported nutrition labels on the barrels they roll in. If the tested material violates existing trans fat thresholds, they have to dump it, and pay a large fine.

5. Direct CMS to require (in order to get reimbursement) that all medicare-accepting doctors apply standard, proven obesity reduction/metabolic function programs using low-carb diets, intermittent fasting and exercise. Private companies and consultants do this all the time, it’s not magic.

6. Finally, the most controversial step. Increase health insurance or medicare/caid premiums (or however they “charge” the patient) in proportion to their lifestyle-controllable metabolic markers like A1c. If you are a more risky driver, you pay more in car insurance. If you are committing slow suicide with choices in defiance of your doctor’s accurate and effective recommendations (from step 5) and demanding that your fellow citizens bear the incredible costs of treating their predictable, inevitable consequences: this will no longer be tolerated. You may not like how this looks. That is too bad. Lives are on the line, including, in many cases, yours. Ask yourself: if you had diabetes, were morbidly obese and costing yourself thousands of dollars in treatment a year, and far more in discomfort, pain and humiliation, would you support others putting a little leverage on you in order to help you remove those afflictions? Sometimes you must act in your own self-interests. Sometimes a gentle, caring push is required.

Additionally, because the fiscal cliff is - by definition - a forward looking problem, curing and preventing diabetes not only saves billions now, but prevents the need for vast spending in the future - the time we really care about - as well. Heading off the diabetic progression of millions over the next 10 years means that 20 years later, in 2046, we will have cut a gigantic cohort of phantom spending that will never be seen. In the reverse, every person who successfully pursued some healthy strategy 20 years ago, preventing their having diabetes or obesity today, is saving us millions of dollars, particularly if they are now over 65. They are heroes for doing so; and we should create more heroes today.

This alone saves hundreds of billions of dollars a year (both public and private) - and, incidentally, will save millions of lives and drastically improve the quality of hundreds of millions more. This is something we must do, regardless of any thing else. This saves us not only from the fiscal cliff, but from the suffering, illness and death of millions.

A lot of American exceptionalism is fake, but in this it’s real: Americans simply will not tolerate the scale of any “debt crisis fix” that is necessary once the debt crisis arrives, and they will fight to prevent it. The only solution, other than finding some ongoing deep national well of calm and peaceful reflection, is to prevent it beforehand.

Which is why curing diabetes is so appealing and actually do-able without massive resistance: you aren’t taking money away from the victims, you’re curing their need for it. And they will be grateful, because it is an unpleasant and painful need to have.

Perhaps this will be enough. If not, and you need more savings? Well, I have more to choose from: some are better than others, some are easier to implement, some are mutually exclusive, some positively reinforce each other - many have other useful benefits.

The Buffet of Other Choices

Sell all unused federal land, requiring that some high percentage (set by nationwide referendum perhaps) be set aside for conservation or parks. This gains us a trillion in one time sales; some breathing room to work on other fixes.

Cut all federal research for anything that doesn’t result in curing diseases. Establish direct prize rewards for solutions, in proportion to how many Americans the disease is killing or injuring, and how much it costs us. Reduce FDA trials burden on new drugs and treatments, allowed tiered access based on initial safety under compassion use protocols. Additionally offer similar prizes for unknown new ideas for fiscal cliff solutions - if you save us a billion, you get a 10 million prize.

Elysium Hospice Care Option: use our extensive population health data to create an composite index for each American, using their own personal preferences, about what the costs, both financial and in personal pain, discomfort and suffering, that they can expect, given their current medical conditions, age and our available treatments. Present this information to them, as any respectful physician would do, when considering large scale often-associated-with-end-of-life care, like major surgeries or treatments, nursing home care or hospice. And ensure that hospice care that is offered is incredible and wonderful. So good that people fake having life threatening diseases to get into it becomes a serious problem.

What this looks like in practice: if you are 85 and get diagnosed with a terrible cancer for which the only treatment requires incredibly painful and complex therapy and medication and will only gain you a few more months of life, the doctors explain that to you those implications, trade-offs and also, as they do right now, offer hospice care that, incidentally, does not involve torture5. The only change here is to make that hospice care amazing.

If we are willing to spend millions to torture people for the last 4 months of life, I think we should be willing to spend a lot to instead give them an elysian existence of happiness and farewells for one month.

I support this on a moral level because we currently torture (in a way that would violate the Geneva conventions if applied to a POW) millions of elderly people (often with the patient not in a condition to approve or disapprove) each year to bless them with a few extra minutes, hours, weeks or months of often-also-extremely painful, humiliating and undignified life. We should stop doing this because torturing people for little gain is wrong. Yes, incidentally we would also save a lot of money on all the torture implements we won’t need any more.

Index social security benefits to a fixed % of GDP, to cap future obligations. Or abolish entirely and replace with mandatory savings accounts, removing “saving for retirement” from the federal budget entirely.

Index old age benefits recipient age (usually 65 for most things) to some % of average life expectancy, to cap future obligations, as life expectancy increases. Remove any rules or incentives that require you to retire to receive: if you can keep working, creating productive labor, then we don’t want to discourage that.

Abolish income tax, shift to a nationwide consumption tax (with progressive rebate), use this new platform to target sales taxes on products that cause large, costly negative externalities, like french fries or motorcycles or cocaine, as well as luxury goods like yachts, GPUs or fancy watches. Benefits: increased tax revenue, decreased cost of administration and tax preparation.

Abolish all welfare at federal and state levels, roll into the consumption tax rebate platform. If you previously received 500$ in value from four different federal welfare or assistance programs and 700$ from three different state programs, now you just receive 1200$ extra on your monthly progressive consumption tax rebate. Savings: all the administrative expenses from managing all those programs.

Cut military spending on anything that was designed only to fight the Soviet Union, and use new tech (drones, AI) to focus on winning the wars we’re likely to be in. What things you ask? Well, just look at the Ukraine example and take notes on which things got instantly shredded (on both sides) and then stop spending so much on them. Savings: lots, but impossible to measure. But one of the secondary benefits is that a functional, actually effective-for-the-next-war is itself a type of critical reserve that we must retain.

Abolish all density-limiting zoning in a 10 mile radius around top 10 urban geographic centers. Benefits: billions in tax revenue from agglomeration and economies of scale.

End healthcare insurance and government reimbursements for scheduled primary care or recurring medications, remove them from “insurance” claims system entirely. Obviously retain coverage for low probability or high cost events, as “insurance” is intended to. Fund that regular primary care via out of pocket patient choice, subsidized (with cash) if necessary for those who need it. Savings: billions, both from no longer needing to pay for this (you’d be surprised how costs drop when you stop promising to pay them no matter what) but also in getting rid of the expensive administration apparatus.

Remove all barriers (particularly environmental review) to any type of energy generation: coal, oil, nuclear, wind, geothermal or solar. Energy is productivity, productivity is tax revenue and revenue is fiscal crisis aversion. Export excess. Revenues directly into debt reduction. Be the world’s light source.

Enact revenue-positive guest worker immigration program, where to retain your status, you must remain employed and pay a higher rate of tax, use revenue to pay down debt. Also enact something similar to the “Golden Visa” idea, where you can simply purchase (directly into debt reduction) guest status for some high amount of cash. Ensure that every immigrant or guest is a (large) net financial benefit.

This can be done. We just need to pick enough of these to work, and then do them. We can make the sun rise tomorrow, and unlike the Aztecs, we won’t need sacrificial blood to do it. Disease, suffering and destructive policies will be the only things that need their hearts ripped out on the altar.

The Last Answer

Unfortunately, good ideas are not enough. At the end of the day nearly all these suggestions are, under the current political climate: impossible. And, even if you convinced a bunch of congressmen, it would still not be enough because this isn’t just a physical problem - like the movie, it is also a human one - the other side has senators too, and their desires can’t, and shouldn’t, be just swept away. They have to be persuaded, peacefully. Whatever set of solutions you pick has to be at least acceptable to whoever was otherwise going to get all that money.

Even worse, any sufficiently effective subset of the above requires executive branch action or at least using a presidential candidacy as the Schelling point around which to coordinate. So, I regret to inform you, there is one last (first?) step you must take: you must find a presidential candidate who believes these truths to be self evident, and get them elected on a mandate to preserve our future.

Time is running out.

[Insanity Quotient: still too high]

No, really, I’m not joking. We can have:

a cure for type 2 diabetes

cures for most infectious diseases

cures for most cancer

end and reverse global warming (except where the effects have been positive)

reduce crime to near zero

reduce car injuries and fatalities to near zero

beautiful clean futuristic cities and verdant prosperous rural utopias, your pick

extensively improve the quality and length of our lives

zero percent unemployment

have a great nationwide schooling program - tracked, tailored and perhaps even cut short for those who would benefit - that produces what kids, parents and society actually want, and if you say “test scores” I will slap you

prevent large scale wars (like a hypothetical US-China one)

win whatever other little wars that come up so decisively they seem boring

vast, endless supplies of green (glowing) electricity

massive increases in the affordability, quantity and quality of the goods you consume every day

AI that ends up safe and benefiting people, because we put in place systems that prevent it from working any other way

exterminate the parasites, worms and insect disease vectors that kill millions

an insane secular military order with weird uniforms for people who need a transcendental purpose in life, wait hold on this was from a different list

a strong, comprehensive, contingent-on-objective-material-conditions social safety net that is relatively cheap, effective and rarely utilized, because cost of living has gone down and productivity has gone up

a future where we look back on the majority of problems we have today as quaint and backwards things, like smallpox or not having indoor plumbing, or Michigan, and your grandchildren don’t believe your stories about them

a future where your children - and mine - are free, happy, healthy and rich

hope

Not just for the rich or powerful, but for everyone; for you. Not in centuries - soon.

I can hear you pathetic objections now: whining about how naive and impractical this is, how expensive, how many roadblocks and hurdles there are, how many devils are hiding in the details. Shut up. Tell the part of your brain that generates anxiety and worry and depression and self-doubt, in the nicest possible way: shut up.

You are not wrong; you should always think up potential problems - but only to solve them, or more accurately, to demand that they be solved by the people you’ve hired to solve problems. And that’s where you’re failing. If you are constantly thinking about the problems, that means you don’t think they’re solved. Your job as a voter and a citizen is to not tolerate leaders who obstruct instead of enable utopia. Because while…

"Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together."

… is a stupid quote, because it was deployed in the context of an actual existing government that is very much not “of choice” and also, frankly, astoundingly incompetent, there is a kernel of truth to it. Like everything else, we can improve it - admittedly with a loss in lyrical quality:

“Good government is simply the name we give to the things that we have determined require a stronger form of coordination.”

Because if it was just “doing things together” then that could just be teams or organizations or corporations, and if they could do all those things above, they would have already, so something’s stopping them - something more is required. But someone - again, this is YOU - decided to put many things into that “we REQUIRE government to coordinate” bucket and then forgot to monitor if your leaders were actually obstructing or hindering them, that now these tools we created are obstacles. Or, more charitably: not exactly doing their “coordinate this important thing” jobs very well. Maybe it was right to say “it must be government that does this,” but surely is wrong to then say “but we aren’t actually going to make sure they do a good job of it.”

I am not saying all this because I’m some brilliant genius who has come up with amazing plans to do all this, because I’m not. I have not identified all the problems and stumbling blocks. What I am is someone who knows - just like you all do - the method how humans overcome those problems. I don’t have the answer, I just know the process for finding all of the answers, and I can see how that process is being sabotaged and held back by exactly the people you all elected to make that process work!

All you have to do is get rid of the things that are hamstringing our ability to coordinate, and we even have a method for doing that: it is called voting. Vote against people who screw this stuff up. Say loudly, that you are doing so because they have no plan for the future and that’s disqualifying, when pollsters or someone asks. Find someone to vote for who knows - not the solutions - but the way to find the solutions, based on 6000 years of human civilization… finding solutions.

This is going to sound trite, but it’s true: we are on a precipice. Things - technology, culture and political, and most importantly: human reactions to them - are actually changing and accelerating faster than most of us are used to seeing. Some of your despair, worry and loss of hope is actually justified - if you conditioned it on having a legible, clear, predictable vision of the next 20 years, then it is easy to see how the extremely unknowable circumstances of the near future might be cause for alarm. That life, right now, is objectively pretty good, makes the worry worse: if you honestly don’t know what tomorrow will bring, it could be good or bad. If things are terrible - like perhaps you just left a long Depression and World War - then that uncertainty might be hopeful: surely it will revert to a more pleasant baseline. But if things are pretty decent, and you have a lot nice people or things in your life that you’re afraid to lose, then the chances of uncertain future outcomes taking those things away is (as far as you know) truly more likely.

On some deep, instinctual level, the hope for the future that everyone nostalgically thinks back to in the post-war period is precisely this effect: things were bad for a long time, and then something happened (winning World War 2!) that credibly signaled that our government was doing a good job protecting us from bad things like Nazis or Imperial Japan. But critically, like today, there was a new technology that could cause incredibly destruction: so why were people optimistic, despite the rapid proliferation of literal nuclear missiles pointed at their homes? How could anyone be optimistic with that hanging over your heads? Because despite their fears, they credibly believed that the systems and tools that the government had put into place to mitigate that disaster would work: our nuclear arsenal’s deterrence, arms reduction pacts, red phones, promulgation of the costs of the MAD doctrine - maybe even just the fallout shelters - and everything else. You can scoff, but those people had kids - I am one - even though everyone said they thought that the Cold War would obviously end in nuclear fire. Creation betrays fear.

Government, for all its faults and credible critiques, is how we shape the future. If you fear the future will be bad - or even merely less good that it could be - that is implicitly a vote against the current government, because that’s their job. Not just the current administration and president, but recent ones as well - the whole “status quo.” There’s a reason “the deep state endures” conspiracy theories resonate so much, because despite large turnover in presidents, congressmen and cabinet members, the actual day to day laws, rules and bureaucrats that average citizens are exposed to are pretty similar - and not in a “well hopefully it will be better tomorrow…” way. If government were constantly doing a great job, the “deep state” would be a compliment, an ideal to preserve!

The typical pollster question of “do you feel like the country is headed in the right direction” is honestly a pretty good summation of this. If you feel that it is not headed the right direction - and you can look up that survey question’s nationwide response if you want to be even more depressed - then why are you accepting the normal crop of candidates who aren’t even bothering to lie about having a plan for tomorrow’s right direction?

Sure, at the ballot box in November, you don’t have that choice. You do have to pick the lesser of two evils. But for every other day, you can demand better options for that election, and also for everything else in life. Because the future Golden Age requires us to believe in it today, and while we may not be able to precisely determine its position in the future, we can absolutely increase our velocity towards it.

Rational Optimist Society

Has the singularity begun?

In today’s Diary…

Read more

3 months ago · 488 likes · 53 comments · Stephen McBride

Ever hear of the Singularity?

In the early 1990s futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted superhuman intelligence would trigger a point where technological progress goes exponential, rapidly and irreversibly transforming human life.

It appears he was right.

What are the chances we’re going to see an upwards-to-the-right chart about now? Pretty high, and increasing:

To end, he states:

I think the Singularity will be among the greatest wealth creation events in history. The barriers between ordinary people and extraordinary outcomes have never been lower.

I’ll admit I’m optimistic about… half of this.

If “the singularity” or “the great acceleration” is here - or even close1 - then it becomes even more important to make governance much better than it is. Because this is power, power lets humans do more, and if the rules and systems we have in place around “what can humans do” and “who gets to wield the power” are terrible and inaccurate, then they will prevent our ability to do (or enjoy the benefit of) good things, and inappropriately allow humans to do bad things that hurt us, or fail to protect us from whatever unexpected bad side effects that arise.

Every problem with a technology is a human problem first, and you can radically affect whether the effects of the technology are good or bad with human choice and human rules, and how we curtail bad effects from human choice and how we set up good rules to foster the good effects essentially pans out to “government.” So… I wonder how this “government” has been handling this job so far? Maybe that’s a clue as to how they’ll handle it in the future:

This specific case - “what will be the political reaction to driverless cars?” - is just one easy to understand example. The range of reactions from the political system could be, could have been: “mandate driverless cars” or “ban driverless cars to save human driver jobs” or “do nothing, ensuring liability uncertainty and slower adopts” or “enthusiastically support with public road infrastructure that makes visual and LIDAR systems more accurate” or even “have supported a simpler automated infrastructure-based driving and safety system 30 years ago.” These choices have ridiculously different consequences, on the scale of thousands of deaths and billions in damages or costs. You can easily extrapolate this to every other aspect of AI or new technologies in general. Another possible tack a politician could take on this topic is “oh nice, autonomous vehicles, who cares about traffic safety, let’s put guns on them and invade China!” Seems bad, but predictable.

Yet everyone understands, intuitively, that for all the other technologies we’re actually incredibly uncertain about which path the politicians will pick. Everyone knows that the government’s track record on this stuff is abysmal, and what’s worse, we know that their methods for making these decisions are also abysmal, and are driven almost not at all by the actual important questions, but by perceived optics, pandering to special interests or just good old fashioned stupidity, incompetence and lack of imagination. When they DO get things right, it’s often by accident or benign neglect, or aligning (corruptly) with a special interest that happens to have big positive externalities.

We are not afraid of the singularity itself, we are rightfully worried that the politicians in charge at the time it arrives will screw it up and prevent us from reaping the benefits and also impose the costs on us. The Manhattan Project scientists did not fear that their creation would directly destroy the world (well, at least not after that first test…) they were (rightfully, accurately, presciently) terrified that human governments would use this new tool to do terrible, potentially world-destroying things. And they immediately also concluded that they had to very loudly coordinate, communicate and create organizations and laws to help prevent that from happening. They managed to succeed - on the front of “preventing nuclear war” - but they did not do as great job on the topic of “enabling the benefits of civilian nuclear power generation,” and indeed it remains underutilized to this day. Still, I can’t complain too much, the former was more important than the latter. But it means that “nuclear power” as a technology, for most Americans, was just a thing that just threatened to kill everyone and also, by the way, maybe created a little bit of electricity.

If all those “incipient singularity” technologies listed in the article above: AI, solar, fusion, autonomous vehicles, drones, genetic data and rockets - all end up just seeming to average Americans to be open ended commitments to “bad things happen to you” and all the opportunities for “good things happen” are throttled, captured or restricted - this would be a titanic failure as a society.

This is why we have to fix government - the tool we use to mediate those good and bad effects - before it arrives.

has a massive post called “Do Young People Suck?”, where the question is asked to answer why marriage and fertility rates are falling. There are many words and many of them are very correct, but sums up his conclusion with:

It’s that the in-person socializing which allows people to find good mates and which draws the sexes together to compromise has collapsed. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Relationships are declining because nobody is partying.

Tyler Cowen writes “My Simple Model of Fertility Decline”, and his model is also simple:

Fertility rates have declined around the world because birth control technologies became much better and easier to use. And people — women in particular — just do not want that many kids.

I think these are both likely relatively accurate analysis, but I want more. This is not enough. Birth rates are not the problem1, they’re a symptom of the problem. Humans will not want to have children if they don’t perceive conditions are advantageous, but critically, they will also not want to do many other long-term, positive sum things that are critical for making the future a good place, either for yourself, your kids - or mine! I like my kids. I want the world they grow up in to be as good a place as it can be. If you don’t want to have kids yourself, that’s fine. But if you have lost hope; if you are not trying to make tomorrow a better place; if you are selling tomorrow to buy today - then in a meaningful way, I consider your… lack of hope… to be my enemy.

Sometimes people call pro-natalists2 creepy because they’re so obsessed with fertility rates and getting (forcing?) other people to have kids. No. That’s not me. I’m actually obsessed with something bigger: the flourishing, freedom and happiness of the entire human race, including me, you and all of the us who haven’t been born yet. If you don’t want to have kids, I am entirely fine with that. But you aren’t allowed to not flourish. That is strictly forbidden. There will be a brutal, unceasing, all-encompassing dictatorship of prosperity, freedom, flourishing, happiness and fulfilment.

I intended to write this before, but due to rampant procrastination did not, and then found myself writing most of it in this comment thread: (with thanks to Ellie - in quotes -for the conversation)

Birthrate is one of those things where by itself, all else held equal, for humanity’s survival, I don’t think it matters if it is declining, because if all else is held equal, there are compensatory forces that will bring it back up at some point.

But, it is a symptom of a far worse problem - the belief that 25 years from now is not worth planning for - that is incredibly threatening to humanity.

Ellie:

I’m not into the idea of kids because I can’t afford them while maintaining my lifestyle (which is modest) and saving for retirement.

Paris is extremely expensive and we pay high taxes and social charges to pay for the daycare and medical care for other people’s kids.

Point of clarification: my husband and his entire family are from Paris. My elderly mother lives here. So living in Paris is not a luxury good per se. We…just live here. 🤷‍♀️

I will never financially escape this loop so why not keep the money I have and enjoy my freedom?

Plus, I see the photos of the people advocating for more children, and let’s just say I’m not persuaded to be like them…

I think you’re describing exactly the wider issue (of which low birthrate is just a symptom) what I’m worried about: we have created a situation where people (you, in this case) believe that they have to spend so many resources now (those taxes, cost of living) and therefore have less to invest for the future (whether it is kids, or retirement, or to donate to charity, or...). I don’t have any moral judgement of that - I am mostly ambivalent between “working to produce great stuff in the future” and “having kids”, but my worry is that if too many people do that, the future will be less good that it otherwise could be. And perhaps “less good” enough below some important thresholds that I’m very personally concerned about, both for myself and for my own kids.

“I will never financially escape this loop so why not keep the money I have and enjoy my freedom? “

Regardless of the question of kids, this is depressing to me and indicative of a certain despair (in the non-emotional or judgmental sense) about the future. I have no problem with whatever choices you are personally making, but again at a high level, a world where [today requires consumption of 1000 dollars, 50 is invested in the future, and results in 100$ of value then] is worse than one where [today requires consumption of 500, 250 is invested and results in 750 value in future], if billions of people act according to the former.

My target is those numbers, and it applies equally to you (without kids) and people with them (like me). I want the cost of today to go down, and the value of tomorrow (or 25 years from now) to go up. I think the birthrate (and many others) is downstream of that. Having kids is just an extremely salient expression of that calculation.

“Plus, I see the photos of the people advocating for more children, and let’s just say I’m not persuaded to be like them…”

Seems illogical? If you had kids, you wouldn’t be like them, you’d be like you, and your kids would be like you and whoever you chose to have them with.

That’s interesting. And I don’t take any of it personally.

A point of clarification… The government takes about 40 to 50% all in from everything my husband and I take home. It is not a choice.

So my line of thinking is,” I’m already paying for everybody else’s free daycare and free healthcare. Why don’t I keep what little is left and enjoy it?”

In terms of future thinking, which I think is what you are alluding to, it seems logical to spend whatever income is left on retirement and investments because I want my future to be better than today.

And to be clear, I don’t think that my actions today will have a real impact on the future. Like what am I gonna do? Build a new Notre Dame? Discover a cure for Alzheimer’s?

Like you, I don’t judge anyone who has chosen a different path. I’m just sharing my line of thinking.

“The government takes about 40 to 50% all in from everything my husband and I take home. It is not a choice.”

Right, not your choice, (other than choosing to move to a different, lower tax country) but I meant more as a choice society made. French society (democracy, government, whatever you wanna call it) chose those tax rates (costs today for you) and also set policies that heavily influence the ROI you might expect to see in the future (and not in a good way, in my humble opinion). Definitely you have to act within those constraints, but my goal is political, to change those constraints. I think we (American society in my case) should make a new choice: reduce today costs and enable higher future returns. I also think a lot of people are mistaken about the costs of kids today, and the benefits of kids tomorrow, in a way that leads them to undervalue kids, but obviously that depends a ton on the individual and I’m not going to argue someone’s own priorities.

“In terms of future thinking, which I think is what you are alluding to, it seems logical to spend whatever income is left on retirement and investments because I want my future to be better than today. “

Yes, with the addition that the exact numbers you assign to “benefit to today” vs “benefit tomorrow” are really important in determining what you do, because obviously you trade off between them. For example, your statements (”I’m not into the idea of kids because I can’t afford them while maintaining my lifestyle (which is modest) and saving”) show that if, for whatever reason, your today costs went down a bunch (France lowers tax rates - suspend your disbelief, I know) and made a bunch of credible policies that increased future ROI (deregulated finance/industry or reduce capital gains taxes, or made some great infrastructure investments) you might consider a different kind of investment: kids. Because now you’d have enough disposable income today to afford kid costs today, and also now be motivated (like I am) to prioritize (more than before) ensuring that the world your kids grow up in is as good a place as it can be - which is conceptually equivalent to “higher ROI investments being available today.

To take a personal example, my sister is 3 years younger than me, but at birth had a heart condition that required a very recently developed surgery to correct. She’s now completely healthy, but if I had been born with it, I likely would have died. Whatever investment in time and money that brought about the technological innovation in time (consumption forgone by the researchers, surgeons or investors - many of whom literally have no idea they helped) resulted in a much better world, both personally for me and my family, and also for society, which now has a productive mom with a happy family and 2 kids, instead of a world without her, and broken hearts for my parents and I.

Which leads me to:

“And to be clear, I don’t think that my actions today will have a real impact on the future. “

Sure they will! Productive labor/investments/saving are precisely the actions that, for most of who cannot build Notre Dame or cure Alzheimer’s, are how we have an impact on the future. When adults produce stuff and then forgo their own consumption (invest/saving), that leaves more stuff for the rest of us to either consume at lower prices (thanks!) or use to invest in things that will produce even more value in the future. When you buy 100 bucks of Tesla stock, you are impacting the future (in the amount of [100 dollars x TSLA appreciation]), because you’ve given the company (or someone else) the money and said “use this to impact the future more than I could myself” because that’s the entire reason you invested: because you want to, in the future, have [100 dollars x TSLA appreciation] instead of [100 dollars x your bank accounts interest rate].

Somewhere out there is an investor (or taxpayer) in the 70/80s who produced the marginal dollar of value that pushed the heart-surgery-R&D industry over the critical line and let it save my sister’s life, and even though I will never know who they are, I am eternally grateful to them and that process. And because I saw how directly it helped, I am extremely motivated to see it work efficiently enough to give a good life to not only some newborn 20 years from now, who will be saved by some investment today, but for everyone.

Kids are just a unique form of this, in that they are (on average) both an excellent investment in the future for society as a whole, and (according to most “investors”) also provide a lifetime of non-financial rewards. Obviously the costs (and opportunity costs) of starting on this path will influence how many people want to do it, and therefore my goal is we should changes those [today cost] and [future ROI] numbers so that people (after doing the math) want to have more kids AND want to make more productive investments in the future. Either way, future lives (and their quality) are hanging in the balance.

I agree. I think what we are both saying is that if the costs were lower today, people would be more interested in tomorrow.

For whatever it is worth, my husband and I are solidly in the upper middle class and live in a nice area. Nothing super grand. (I joke with my East Coast friends that we live in the Arlington, Virginia of Paris!)But pretty nice.

If people like me feel strangled, how does everyone else feel? Yeesh!

In an important way, I think Ellie has lost a critical measure of hope. This is not a criticism of her, or anyone else, but it is a criticism of the society that has set up the costs and conditions of the world such that she and millions of other people who might want to have kids, or make other important forward looking investments, will choose not to do so because they don’t feel like it’s worthwhile. Now, you could say “oh she could move to a lower cost-of-living place” and that’s true, but dense cities are (were?) another of humanity’s methods for forward-looking, positive-sum investments, due to the economies of scale from bringing people together. That we have set things up so that one method of productive investment is damaging another is exactly the failure I’m criticizing. Cities should be where people go to flourish and prosper, AND where they go to take advantage of the density of human capability, both for work now, and future projects/having kids. If they aren’t? Then we have screwed up, and we need to fix that.

The trad-est of traditionalist house wives with 7 kids living on a farm and the most child-free-est guy of all time both want, at a high level, precisely the same thing: for tomorrow to be better. Because they can’t want anything else; humans are machines to produce better tomorrows. Their precise motivations that they rationalize as their reasons for wanting that vary quite a bit - and honestly, I’m fine with whatever you choose - but so do their beliefs about how likely it is for tomorrow to actually end up being better. It is the latter that we must target, for the sake of the future.

I want the future, deeply. I want more babies, more cures for diseases, more Notre Dames, more skyscrapers, more life-saving heart surgeries, more clean and prosperous cities, more rocket ships to the moon, more stained glass windows, more life, more everything, more humanity.

I want more hope for all those things, and I want that for all of you as well.

I am not a good writer and never will be, because I’m too impatient. Good writing forces the reader to feel something, but I don’t have that talent - I just have the feelings and a minimal threshold of skill at flailing at a keyboard in a way that hopefully produces words that gesture vaguely in their direction. So I am reduced to just stating, plainly: this is what I want.

It seems to be a feature of human nature that as good things happen we have a desire to. . . piss some parts of those gains away. Entrepreneurs will step into those slots and create new, exotic, and appealing ways for us to do so. Sports gambling can be destructive and addictive, but for a lot of people it is mostly harmless fun. Yes, you’re more likely to end up losing, but a bet on how many points LeBron James will score might make the game more exciting.

I think this is correct: wealthier people consume more luxury goods, and are willing to spend more on them. People are buying entertainment just like they would for paying for a movie ticket.

But while I think that’s a good insight, and I love Tyler Cowen, I think this next line is a rare mistake:

The intertwining of successive ups and downs reminds me of how many people use GLP-1 drugs. They help you lose weight, and if they work for you, they ensure your weight will not rise above a certain level. So why not eat more chocolate ice cream?

This isn’t how GLP-1s work - they don’t set some weight limit and then prevent your body from breaching it, so you can eat more ice cream (at lower “cost”). They are also not (directly) appetite suppressants, like some previous drugs. In trials, they tested this: people on GLP-1's lost more weight, even if they kept eating the same amount as before, or compared to the control wing.

This isn’t just to criticize - he was just using it as an analogy, after all - but because I think it’s wrong in an interesting way, especially given the economic model he just outlined.

What they do - at an economic level, not a medical1 one - is essentially change your utility function. Both in what amount of benefit you think you will get from an action, AND also how your body reacts to those actions - because obviously, your body needs a system to interpret and balance those things, with certain chemical/biological parameters. We’re just… tinkering… with those parameters.

The person on GLP-1s is, in reality, less likely to want to more ice cream, AND less likely to want to bet on LeBron. Or to want to drink alcohol, and so many other things: because it is directly affecting the factors in the internal formula affecting how much you want to do a thing, based on how much of it you’ve already done. In fact, researchers are already exploring using it to treat other kinds of addiction, which is the clue that tells us something other than “lose more weight” or “eat less food” is at play. It’s directly affecting the parts of our body that determines what “more” weight is, and what “less” food is, and how it reports that information to our brains, during the biological price discovery phase. At some level, we use the same process in our bodies to determine “should I eat this ice cream?2”, “should I bet on LeBron?”, “do I really need a drink right now?” and “do I need to store these 9 calories as fat or can I expend them?” and these drugs are affecting it directly.

You could even say that GLP-1s are the first drug class developed in the economics department.

HR sent out an email telling everyone that the company’s health insurance plan costs have gone up, so they have to pass on some of the costs to us. Turns out that Bob in accounting got some exotic form of cancer that costs a million a year to treat!

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and also because HIPAA is no joke. But this really happens, and it’s incredibly stupid, and if you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s even more incredibly stupid than you realized at first.

What other “insurance” system works this way? None of them. If your CEO’s house burns down, your fire insurance premiums don’t go up, because why? Why would the risk pool for any insurable thing only include the people who work at a specific company? Especially when many companies have very few employees - it’s just a terrible way to assemble insurable groups!

Even more weirdly, isn’t the entire point of insurance… to insure against the chance of a rare, expensive event occurring, with the premiums having been calculated ahead of time to take that into account? Specifically, if your health plan provider says “oh Bob got space cancer, that costs a ton, we have to charge your company more” then… what were they providing before? If the damn insurance policy says “we cover space cancer” then why didn’t the premiums take that into account? The entire point of insurance is, if space cancer strikes 1 in a million people each year, and costs 1 million dollars to treat, then you get a million people in your risk pool and charge them each 1 dollar in premium (plus a little for operating expenses) and that’s… what insurance is!

But there, we see the issue: “then you get a million people in your risk pool.” That’s the problem: your pool (the company employees only) is too small, so when someone gets space cancer, some company’s payroll gets hit hard. Because our government has essentially mandated (and heavily subsidizes and protects) employer-based health insurance, we’ve reduced the pool of people down drastically - and far beyond the number you need to actually spread out the risk. So instead of 2000 people in a pool, you have 20 pools of 100 people at 20 different companies.

Now, there’s a huge amount of complexities here - there always are - particularly around whether the company is completely self-insured (again, just an insane concept that you would never apply to any other industry) or not, but the facts remains: this is not insurance. No one is assessing risk. There is no market. Customers are not purchasing a product nor are producers offering one, it’s all just wedged uncomfortably into other systems and we hope it doesn’t destroy them.

There isn’t even a bad guy who’s getting rich off of this. It just sucks, and costs billions, to every party. The people responsible - the (often long absent) designers of healthcare regulatory policy over the past 50 years - aren’t getting rich off this, or even amassing power: they just tried their best and failed, because (in a socialist calculation way) the healthcare market is too complex and infinitely flexible to regulate successfully. They’re just random retired government bureaucrats somewhere - no one even knows their names.

This has to be destroyed. Razed to the ground, and the fields where it grew salted. It cannot go on. No system can function like this. This is not what these words mean. Any attempt to fix America’s healthcare system has to, as a first and necessary item, obliterate this with every legal or regulatory weapon in our arsenal.

Health care insurance must return to what the words actually mean:

• Insurance plans must be between the patient and the insurer: remove all subsidies, tax preferences and regulatory encouragement for employer-based plans.

• Make employer-based health insurance plans illegal.

• Transfer every existing plan to the individual.

• Health insurance plans cannot cover predictable events. If you can put it on your calendar ahead of time, health insurance companies cannot pay for it. They can offer premium reductions for taking health-enhancing, preventative (and therefore reducing the risk of future cost) measures, but cannot require you (or your provider) to comply with the insurance/claim framework to receive that care, nor charge premiums that take “paying for predictable, low-cost care” into account.

• Changing your job should not change your health insurance, because jesus christ, you aren’t changing the thing being insured.

• Allow the “direct primary care” market for predictable primary care to exist, using the payment model that works best for it - subscription fees - and therefore NOT use the payment model that is radically, shocking, stupidly unaligned with it: insurance, premiums and risk pools.

This must happen. This can be done. You are all cowards and helpless weaklings for tolerating this state of affairs. Your regulatory overlords have beaten you into such a state of abject compliance that you think that your employer offering you a health plan, where they get a tax benefit for providing - but you don’t - that charges you a biweekly premium for the privilege of charging you more, and making you (and the doc) fill out a ton of claims/admin paperwork to “insure” against the risk that… you’ll go to your doctor’s visit… that this is a “perk” that you should be grateful for receiving, and should think twice about quitting your job, for fear of losing. And half of you are begging for rules1 requiring insurance to cover more predictable, low-cost events! That’s not a favor to you, that’s them cutting your arm off and beating you with it, and you wondering if it might be nice if they cut of your other arm too, so as to beat you more efficiently.

That is pathetic. Demand more.

How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?

It is a good question, because right now our national problem solving capacity is extremely bad. Most things run pretty well anyway, because in the past, Americans with better problem-solving capacity solved those problems and we inherited their (mostly) still-operational solutions. Which tells us that we used to have better problem solving capabilities, or else we couldn’t have built those systems in the first place.

In order to figure out how to improve that capacity today, we probably need to figure out how it got broken in the first place. And then we also run into another question: how did it ever work in the first place? How do you solve a problem like this?

The Problem With Problems

If you are a country, to solve a problem1, you have to do the following:

1. identify problem

2. figure out solution

3. determine if the solution to the problem passes cost-benefit test (Maybe it would be better to fix some other, more pressing, problem with those resources)

4. decide who is the best person to execute solution (Voting)

5. those people execute the solution (Policy)

6. make sure it was executed correctly and reward those who did it (Vote for them again - or not)

This is boring obvious stuff, it feels stupid typing it out. Let’s do something far more exciting: time travel. How did people in the past used to do it?

Old Timey Problems

Cave-man days: easy. Everyone (all 30 of us) could see the problem. The tribe’s chief was obviously the one who had to fix it. The solutions were obvious and simple: yes, we should all throw our spears at the tiger trying to eat us.

Kings and Things, feudal ages: basically the same, just with kings ruling over far larger societies, and the only people who mattered to consult on problems or solutions were the nobles/warriors. Again, problems and solutions were usually simple - and any problems that weren’t immediately apparent (such as the Black Death) just basically went unsolved, and wreaked their havoc unimpeded by human plans.

Modern states, republics, democracies: now things get interesting! Once countries became so large, and having granted the vote to enough people, that it was not always entirely clear what the problem was, or what the solution might be. Before the development of advanced communications technology and institutions for transmitting info about problems and solutions, countries that got too large (and problems too invisible, and solutions too opaque) basically collapsed into smaller, more easily managed states. The communication limits on problem solving was one of the major restraints on state size and reach.

Eventually, we did invent those advanced communications technologies And those things are the tools that we, the people, use to observe the world and decide how to act. The general technology resulted in faster, wider and more detailed communications, consisting of everything from the printing press to the internet, cameras or radio. The institutions of communications we called: the news, intelligence services and social media.

Old Timey Solutions

Now, anyone familiar with America’s past, and who remembers the Maine, is well aware that they did not work perfectly, or even close to perfectly. But they worked well enough that America basically outperformed every other country in the problem solving department for a quarter millennia.

But the effectiveness of the communications revolution has been unevenly distributed. Most Americans have lost their faith in their government’s ability to solve problems, and while sharing that lack of faith, American politicians have lost faith in the idea that they would be rewarded for solving problems, even if they could somehow manage it.2 While at the same time, it is possible to learn - from that informational firehose - about a wide range of problems3 that we do indeed face, and what solutions might be available. Now, instead of just comparing our performance to Britain or China, we have the tools to compare to an even more impressive society: the one we imagined we’d have. The American Dream. The obvious counter-factual world where we didn’t have all the stupid policies that hamstring our ability to achieve that hope. Flying cars and 280 characters.

So now, we’ve caught up to modern America - and our shameful lack of problem-solving capacity. Nearly everything in our society that works (from actual physical infrastructure, to the culture at our major institutions) was built generations ago. Or is just an entirely private institution (e.g. tech companies) that can innovate and operate because they work in a space that regulators were too slow to choke out of existence. Some of it still works very well, where uncreative maintenance can keep them humming along. You can complain about the roads or bridges, but mostly they work pretty well, even the really old ones! These kind of things don’t need creative new solutions.

Modern Problems

Other parts have degraded heavily, or become radically more expensive. No one really agrees on which parts are the worst problem, how to fix them, or who would be best placed to do it. But everyone can feel the general sense of “things are not heading in the right direction” - which is exactly why pollsters ask that question. Even though objectively, things might be doing all right for a given individual, we are adept at detecting (even if only subconsciously) which way the winds are blowing at a tribal level. Why exactly is our feelings only this so vague and unquantifiable? Why don’t we, as the critical mass of voters, actually know the specifics of what’s wrong, and how to fix it?

The specific broken part in this machine is step 6 from above: the informational connection between the problems/solutions and the rewards for executing them. Simply put: government problem solving is done by politicians who get elected, and those politicians do not get elected (or re-elected) for solving problems, because voters do not punish them for failing to do so4. In most cases, the problems (and accurate solutions) are not actually that hard to identify - that’s not the stumbling block! It’s a principal - agent problem: how to get the politicians to do what we want. We, and the founders, assumed this problem would be handled by the free press, acting as the grease between the principal (the voters) and the agent (the politicians). But like so many other solutions, this requires maintenance - and we have let that institution decay, in purpose and in culture, because we have let it stray from its intended course. They too, simply respond to incentives. We have to set them.

The model political actor for this “complete detachment of problem solving incentives from getting elected” issue is of course Donald Trump. To many people it seems like he has proven politicians can actually do and say whatever they want - that the old rules no longer apply. George Bush took lots of heat for breaking his “no new taxes” pledge - it seems comedic that such a standard would apply today. And yet, the frequency of “Trump Always Chickens Out” points to an important question: what exactly makes him chicken out?

Modern Solutions

The answer is always: “objective, un-gameable, not easily spun facts that tens of millions of voters actually care about.” If tariffs sent markets plunging, he became vastly more likely to dial them back. If a novel disease was going to kill 2 million Americans - well, no amount of shrieking “fake news” would make that go away - so better green light a vaccine crash development program. For Operation Warp Speed, Trump made the right decision because for once he was forced to accept that there was a number that was going to go down - morbidly, the number of Americans who were alive - and it would actually matter to him and his re-election chances. The information channel of “this a problem > it will cause serious harm > this is a good solution > we should do it > and totally claim credit for it so we get votes” was so simple and self-apparent that we didn’t need the news or the CIA to figure it out.5 In this case, America’s problem-solving capacity was incredible!6

How can we make more things like that? How can we make accurate signals7 that even the king of post-modern politics can’t ignore?

America’s Heartbeat

First: a publicly accessible, heavily advertised, nationwide dashboard of metrics that everyone agrees represent vital information about the country. GDP, inflation, labor force participation, military deployments, budget, anything from the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and obviously a wide range of private indicators or polls. Rates of disease, markets… anything. Something that is so widely accepted and undeniably vital to American’s interests that it can’t be handwaved away - something… like the stock markets that rendered such a negative opinion of tariffs. This is the information part of the solution.

Second: a carefully curated set of prediction markets8 about those metrics - not silly pointless sports or political horserace betting - but estimations about whether those numbers will go up or down. And, naturally, how they will respond to political events. If a politician who presents an excellent solution to a major problem (thereby making some number go up!), then the prediction market should reflect that - and the politician should be able to use that in their campaign ads! “Vote for me, I advocated for this brilliant policy, and look, it made (future, expected) unemployment go down!” This is the part that filters the information and improves how effectively we can use it.

Third: publicity. This is the hardest part. Someone needs to be the “news” agency that brings all this together in the public consciousness. Someone who provides the conceptual glue that ties “this problem will kill a million Americans,” “here is a potential solution for that problem,” “president Bob is suggesting a policy to fix it,” “look, the estimates for casualties are trending downward” with “therefore Bob’s poll numbers are going up because traders voters are recognizing it was a good plan.” Some celebrity endorsements couldn’t hurt! We live in a democracy - there is no way to get politicians to do good things without making it searingly clear that failure to do good things will be punished democratically. This is an informational problem - and as part of the solution, someone has to scream those pieces of information from the rooftops9.

The ideal end point is that instead of endless 24 hours news programs that pander to the lowest common denominator of viewer, and also the lowest common denominator of politician willing to spin it, you’d have something an authoritative source (like a stock market) that could be used to settle (in the loosest possible sense of the word) the issue. If the president sends a stooge on CNN to say “our new policy will have wonderful economic effects,” you want the reporter to say “but then why are all these markets on GDP, unemployment and the budget plunging in response to your announcement?” - and for it to obvious and generally accepted that those numbers were from a source other than CNN just making them up.

Even more ideally, just like we learned about disastrous economic policies (price controls, subsidizing demand, high inflation) from the negative shocks they created - and mostly learned not to repeat them - you’d want the administration to not even propose the terrible policy idea in the first place, because they’ll have learned that it will send those markets into a tailspin. And - just spit-balling here - maybe at some beautiful future nirvana state, they might actually go out and figure out (from past market performance, and checking with traders) what the best policy might be ahead of time - and just do it in order to reap the electoral benefits. You can, after all, just do things. But if you want politicians to do things, you need to accurately convey to them that doing those things well - and only that - is in their best interests.

So - do that.

You live in a democracy. You’re a voter. Demand better style.

Transparency

There should be a full time TV crew following the president around and broadcasting anything that isn’t classified. You all voted for him, he works for you, you should be able to see what he’s doing, and how.

What candidate could possibly be opposed to this? What do they not want you to see?

Morality

The president doesn’t have to be a paragon of moral virtue. But it helps, and relatively speaking, one who is, is better than one who is…. less so? There are 300 million people in this country. Surely you can find someone who is actually an upright person? At least, perhaps, one who can more accurately conceal their lack of moral standing? “Successfully concealing flaws” is at least is a trait that any national leader requires.

To be blunt, and specific, no one actually cared about the details of what Bill Clinton did, what mattered in reality was:

1. People who can’t control their urges are obviously bad people to have run nations, because every single minute of their lives they are presented with opportunities to indulge those urges at our - the citizens - expense. Is it morally wrong to take one marshmallow when you could have two later? Of course not. But we should definitely not vote for you if you consistently do that.

2. People who can’t conceal that they lack that self control also can’t conceal a lot of other things that we want them to conceal.

3. Doing something that makes such an obvious, likely target for media/popular outrage or scandal, means that you’ve created a situation where you’re undermining support for your (theoretically) actually good policy agenda. “But voters should focus on real policy goals instead of sex scandals!” Of course they should, but “realizing that is an unrealistic goal for millions of voters in the world we live in, and therefore avoiding doing things that let them indulge in that desire for scandal over objective things” is a skill leaders should have.

What candidate would disagree with this? What does it say if a candidate won’t agree to “the most moral candidate is better?” Isn’t it obvious?

Certainly, a candidate could have really good ideas and policies that outweigh those flaws, but they are absolutely signals to take into account, particularly at a stage in the selection process where you are not restricted to “the lesser of two evils” of the general election.

Sleaziness

The president - and anyone associated with them - should not hang out with sleazy money managers/fixers, they should not exchange sleazy emails with them, they should not give or receive money from them, they should not travel to their sleazy islands/clubs/parties, and they definitely not have sex there with people who have been brought for that purpose. Apply these rules to all applicable situations that even remotely resemble this one, not just the one you’re all thinking of, that I’m not naming because I reject clickbait on ideological grounds.

“But… that’s how modern politics is done! Nothing criminal happened! How else can I raise money for my campaign!”

Yeah, maybe that’s even true, but sorry, this is just going to have to be a loss the political community has to take. Life will go on. Yes, I really believe that regularly doing stuff that average people find to be disgustingly decadent by public servants - even if the true deep down reason is those proles are jealous, or envious of the dominance you’re asserting, even if it’s perfectly fine if other private individuals do it - is reflective of you, the candidate, being Not A Good Candidate.

I do not care how completely legal and totally not immoral snorting cocaine off hookers and eating lots of caviar and traveling to exotic islands in your monopoly man top hat and having lots of rich people sex is, you are gonna have to not do it. And a big part of the reason that you should not do it, is because Norma from Ohio thinks it’s really sleazy. And maybe if you did a lot of it in the past, that may indeed exclude you (in the eyes of the voters) from public office. These are the sacrifices one must make. My deepest apologies for your loss.

“You’re just jealous, because you’re not rich/powerful/influential/sexy/awesome enough to be able to do that stuff!”

No, unfortunately for your strangely defensive comment, I am. I actually do have enough money and power (mostly because it doesn’t actually take that much any more!) to physically do all that stuff, I just… choose not to.

Because, frankly, I am better than you, sleazy candidate defender. I am morally superior to you, and those candidates, for this explicit reason. I am also better than all the candidates out there who have done these - or similarly decadent - things in the past, because that is what being morally superior means: it means not doing those things. Why do I keep having to repeat this? This is Baby’s First Book Of Morality level stuff.

This is not me bragging, this is just me noting that I can put my pants on all by myself in the morning. It does not mean that I am some moral paragon at the far end of purity and light, it means that I am slightly above some ridiculously low threshold of dignified behavior. A threshold that is so shockingly low that defending people who don’t meet it is itself extremely suspicious behavior! Yes, this is the witch hunt I endorse, the stake at which you shall be burnt is labeled “you don’t get to be elected to public office.” Unleash this Inquisition.

Now, on one point, you’re absolutely right. I’m not … something… enough to get invited to do those things alongside other rich/powerful/influential people by an influential someone named Jeff. Definitely, I lack that something trait, you’ve got me there. Though, I wonder how many people think that is a bug or a feature.

Physical Prowess

Yes, I think this matters. Yes, if you are going to lead a country, you should have at least a little - the more the better - personal, physical toughness. Yes, I am running for president. Yes, I think I could take every single person in the Democratic primary in hand to hand combat. Yes, I would particularly love to fight Gavin Newsom. Yes, I think it would get great ratings too.

No, I don’t think anyone who can beat me up should get the nomination instead. But if they can, then I happily admit you should count it as at least one or two points in their favor.

Does this automatically disqualify geriatric 80 year olds? Yes! Of course it does! Are you not paying attention?

Non-partisanship

No matter his party affiliation before being elected, the president should not act like a Republican or a Democrat party member. The president should not know what Democrats or Republicans are. If asked by a reporter, they should pretend to have never heard of them. Every time someone says the words “the Republican party THIS” or “the Democratic party THAT” about national politics, the country loses 17 collective brain cells.

Political parties absolutely have a good role to play, in ensuring that members adhere to the good political policies that the party believes in. Now that you’re all done laughing at that joke, we can recognize that they aren’t actually doing that role at all, so let’s establish a principle of separation of party and (federal) state.

Even if you believe your party (and perhaps the one the president currently is a member) is the best and the other is nothing but horrible people, they still get to vote, and unless you have a veto proof majority, then actually enacting your party’s brilliant ideas will require some of them to cooperate. In today’s hyperpartisan world, how can you do that if the presidency is just a weapon to wield against the other party? You can get more of the real things you actually want, with real actual benefits for you, by ensuring that the accomplishments of “your” party aren’t seen as PR failures for the other side, and that your failures aren’t seen as their wins.

Accountability

Every single statistic about the country should be broadcast every day on a publicly accessible website from the White House, and every single national news outlet. Employment, labor force participation, inflation rate, GDP, soldiers deployed abroad, quantities of trade, rates of death, births, new companies formed, bankruptcies - everything.

What kind of candidate wouldn’t want you to know this? People who vote for a president believe that he will make the country better. What does it mean when, once they are president, they don’t loudly proclaim all the things that are better, but also explanations why the things that aren’t getting better, will as a result of his great policies? Isn’t it obvious? If you go to buy a used car and notice that the salesman has removed the odometer, what information do you now know?

Competence

Every month the president should complete a (variable, randomly selected by voters and the nation’s doctors on an unpredictable schedule) cognitive fitness test, with the results being publicly accessible. Hell, wake him up in the middle of the night and make him take the test, because I’m pretty sure if there’s a nuclear emergency I don’t want his judgement to waver just 'cause he’s a little sleepy.

What possible motive would any candidate have for opposing this, unless they couldn’t pass the test? If your current president is not doing this, isn’t it obvious why?

Why would you ever tolerate candidates who don’t live up to this standard?

To repeat: You live in a democracy. You’re a voter. Demand better style.

Demand…. more. Demand… okay, sorry, I can’t do it, because another thing a candidate should have is the personal dignity to not make politically convenient puns.

First, I must caution him, there are a lot of Brian Moores out there, you gotta make sure you’ve got the right one. Thankfully, he’s on target here. (I would include as a target, as I was defending the honor of his valiant and correct criticism of wealth taxes)

Second, the background of this debate:

It grew out of a side exchange¹ we had over the canard that “you can’t tax unrealized capital gains”. TL;DR: average Americans are already taxed annually on the unrealized gains on their main asset, their homes.

I cited my post to him as my argument for why I thought the “realized vs unrealized” distinction matters so much to people, both in the context of “taxing assets” AND “what does it mean to be rich.” Specifically: that the way people use the concept “rich” (both today and historically) implicitly reveals that they really do morally differentiate between the treatment of realized and unrealized wealth. Yes, on an academic level, re-assessment of property taxes is a form of unrealized gains taxation.

My point is, instead, that the massive number of caveats/limitations on property taxes (infrequency of reassessment - often only at point of realization, deliberate undervaluing, exceptions for people with static incomes, relatively limited extent of property taxes on total net worth for most) indicate a strong dislike of that form of taxation. Similarly, yes, obviously you can physically pass a law to tax unrealized capital gains, just like you can physically set income taxes to 99%. In normal political conversation we use the phrase “can’t” to imply “if you do this, voters will revolt and undo what you did.”

Third, and this will be the theme of everything else, I think the question of “Is Mr. Saunders right that I am wrong?” is essentially immaterial, because I think he misses my point (right or wrong) entirely. I am not going to try to argue that he is wrong, I will argue that we share the same goals, and that we can both achieve them simply by reconciling certain concepts.

Some examples:

Brian’s main thesis seems to be about the moral valences/judgments applied to the Super Haves. That some are good (what he calls the “producers”) and some are bad (the “consumers“). Warren Buffett as archetype of the former, given his famously frugal lifestyle, even as the 10th richest person in the world.

This seems like a bizarre starting point for someone who’s entire idea system is based on Liberty. What difference does it make how someone disposes of their wealth??

Because I’m not talking about liberty? Liberty is a different debate, in a different context. In the context of efficient economic policy, it absolutely does matter: if someone saves/invests 10 bucks (resulting in there being more stuff next year) then it is very different than if someone consumes 10 bucks worth of stuff this year, resulting in there being less stuff for the rest of us, all else equal. They’ve even got different letters for them in first year economics equations. If you treat them as having no difference you will not have a good economy, or much in your retirement fund.

The economy is powered by consumption. It needs savings. It needs investment. All three.

And no one is saying we should abolish either. I say “either” instead of “any of the three” because savings and investment are the same thing in this context. The question always is on the margin, which should we incentivize more, for optimal outcomes? And every econ textbook knows that if you want to have more stuff next year, you want to incentivize investment over consumption, because consumption involves consuming stuff and investment involves making more stuff. This isn’t even economics, this is… reality. Obviously, no one would recommend consuming nothing, or reducing consumption to levels where one suffered harms from it. This is like someone saying “I think I should go on a diet and eat less food” and you replying “that’s a ridiculous plan, you need food to live!” Think on the margin.

There’s no compelling data supporting the idea that ever stretched skew of the distribution curve is necessary for overall growth of the economy and shared progress and prosperity.

Again, this is not what I am saying. I am saying that savings/investment are necessary for increased future growth and prosperity, on the margin. Therefore, as “possession of unrealized assets” are the mechanism by which investment occurs, we should endeavor to have more of it. “Unrealized” is the key idea, not only to “taxes” or “rich” or whatever, but at a deep level of the literal concept of what it means to have something. “Unrealized” means that I actually do not have the wealth, it has been shared with someone else, I have deferred the consumption of real goods. This is the core understanding of so much more than economics.

This is extremely vital to understand: when I buy 10 shares of Apple stock I have nothing - I possess only a unrealized concept of subjective value. The person who sold me the stock, and then bought a yacht worth [10 x AAPL] - he has the wealth. The wealth is the yacht. Unrealized assets cannot be material wealth because without that distinction, there would be no reason for the word “unrealized” to exist. This is the conceptual fabric of human language. Don’t mess with it.

Yes, obviously I am well aware that in colloquial usage, we do refer to people who hold lots of unrealized assets as “rich” or “wealthy,” but it is always and everywhere predicated on the implicit assumption (and the extent to which) that paper wealth can be realized into real goods. If I own ten million shares of Apple, today I am rich. If tomorrow Apple stock goes to zero, I am no longer rich. That this is exactly how people use the word reveals to us that the obvious semantic payload of “rich” or “wealthy” implies realization, or at least the capability thereof.

So in regular day to day usage, where we normally expect that most paper wealth will indeed be realized in the course of action, we can use the terms interchangeably, safe in our assumption that there will be a lot of overlap between the people who are paper-rich and who are goods-rich. But the problem is that in this conversation, the phrase “we should tax unrealized gains” violates that gentleman’s understanding of the term, because “tax” is heavily contingent on “realized or not.”

And, to bring it all back around to the top, it means that no, you actually cannot tax people’s unrealized assets, that is conceptually invalid. If congress passed a law saying “10% unrealized assets tax” what actually would (ignoring the protests and revolts and guillotines) happen is that I would need to pay US dollars in taxes in relation to 10% of what it says on my Vanguard dashboard on April 15th - let’s say that’s $1,000. In order to do this, I have to sell $100 worth of my portfolio (using on-hand cash is equivalent, remember fungibility), which means giving other people (let’s say Bob) those stocks in exchange for money.

Now, this is the important part, where I truly channel : the true change, the true meaning of “who is taxed” is “who consumes less of what was produced this year?” Before the wealth tax law, Bob was going to consume that hundred bucks to buy a yacht. He would therefore have had a yacht, he’d be yacht-rich. But now, with the tax, instead he defers that consumption, and holds $100 (actually probably less than $100, because the price drops from everyone selling it to pay their taxes) in stocks. Now he’s yacht-poor. Instead, the government takes the money and buys a yacht (the only thing this toy economy produces is yachts) for Kash Patel to go to hockey games. The true accounting of the tax is thus:

Bob: minus one yacht

Kash Patel: plus one yacht

Guess who’s not on this list? Me! I wasn’t actually taxed because not one single real thing was taken away from me. Because the person who bears the cost of a tax is the person who has less of the thing after, and since the thing being taxed (unrealized assets) was a thing I had given to Bob, he is the one who bears the objective reality burden. I’m against unrealized gains taxes on me, because they take from Bob! The mechanical process of “unrealized gains taxes” is exactly “taking out of the national investment column” and putting it into the “consumption” column1. That’s not my insane libertarian interpretation, that is simple reality.

In terms of real resources - the context that matters - this tax is a redistribution from Bob to whoever receives whatever the government buys with the tax revenue. The “unrealized” context is…. well… it’s not real. It’s right there in the name!

You may have heard a variant of this tax incidence question in the tariffs debate, and it works the same way. Importers pay tariffs nominally, but if they can pass on equivalent price increases to their customers, in a real, meaningful way the customers have “paid” the tax (i.e. they now can consume less) even though they didn’t interact with the government at all. These are just facts: American consumers pay tariffs, and taxes on unrealized assets are paid by Bob, or whoever consumes less as a result of it.

Mr. Saunders claims I am “defending the rich” from taxation, let the above stand as evidence that I am actually defending Bob, whether or not he is rich.

Okay, back to the rebuttal:

Brian starts off with a historical howler, arguing that in antiquity, being rich was only about consumption. I guess he’s never heard about Julius Caesar’s will, gifting three months wages’ equivalent to all 320,000 male citizens of Rome … in coin.

Again, missing the point. I challenge you, the reader, to re-read the claims I made and ask themselves if the point I was making was one that would be refuted by “one time a guy gave some other people currency”? Obviously the claim was not “no one ever used currency,” it was that people’s perception of what they meant when they said “rich” always meant “realized material wealth.” Caesar is one of the worst examples for this case! Notoriously in debt - what is debt but the realization of other people’s money? - and who “earned” lots of that money by plunder, and who is known throughout history for purchasing the loyalty and votes of his countrymen with lavish displays of material wealth. Caesar was all about realizing assets, that is what he was known for, he bought the Roman Empire with strategic realization of assets and demonstration of wealth in precisely the manner his countrymen expected, as an embodiment of a rich and powerful citizen!

This is my case: if, throughout his career, Caesar had only acquired promissory notes to Gallic estates (freely given, surely), and never spent them, or cashed them out for gifts for his soldiers, or rewards for followers, or bribes, he would not be famous, he would not have been powerful and no contemporary would have called him rich or powerful. In fact, to the current debate, whatever Roman taxes existed that rich people would have to pay, he would have (if he only owned notes) been exempt from them, because they were all levied on real material assets.

Onward, in rebuttal to my idea that Ancient Roman Warren Buffett would not have been considered “rich”2 back then, because all he had were greenbacks:

Buffett’s wealth is not in green papyrus. It’s in bits in a vast array of digital ledgers, all secured ultimately by the power of the US Department of Defense which backs up the power of the US-dominated global financial system

This seems pedantic? It’s obviously just contingent promises? If the value of his stock goes to zero, the DoD will not be securing anything, because it’s gone. And no one - Romans or today - would call him rich. Again, maybe I’m just being unclear - my apologies.

Buffett could trivially fly in on a private airplane (rented NetJets is his preference these days) that would dazzle those ancients to the point of thinking he’s a deity from the sky.

Renting a jet is consumption, a realization! The entire point is that if you buzzed Roman-era Capitoline Hill in your jet, a realized material asset, the Romans would indeed think you (unimaginably) rich, but if you just walked by and said “I have one million TSLA shares” (in Latin?) they would not.

“Tax = disincentive” is one of the tropes that laissez-faire zealots love to drag out. First and most obviously, that depends on many factors, especially price elasticity of demand and substitution effects (e.g. take more vacation time in lieu of a big cash bonus).

Why are we just saying directly false things? That taxes disincentivize what is taxed is a bedrock principle of reality, if you take away 10 apples, there will be less apples in the bushel. It does NOT “depend on other factors”, taxing something will always result in less of it - those other factors may change the extent to which that occurs. Nothing about “Tax = disincentive” is a concession to insane laissez-faire zealots, it’s normal neutral fact that everyone agrees on.

Second, of the three categories of tax almost all of us pay, on (1) income, (2) consumption (= sales tax), and (3) wealth (= (a) real estate assessment based annual taxes, and (b) capital gains), which activity would we pick to disincentivize?

If you said “none of the above”, which is why the tax code tries to maintain them in equilibrium, give yourself a cookie.

No! The tax code does not try to maintain them in equilibrium, there is absolutely no economic principle that states that you need to. Economists on the contrary are always producing lists of “which tax is the least bad”? And regarding “which activity would we pick to disincentivize?” isn’t the answer obvious?

1. Income = the act of producing value → results in more things for everyone

2. Consumption = the act of consuming value → results in less things for everyone

3. Property tax = the acting of owning property (partially consumption) and, if based on regularly reassessed value, then also appreciation.3

4. Unrealized gains or capital gains tax = the act of giving other people money to invest in productivity → results in more productivity, which is more things for everyone

Surely it is obvious? #2 is the only action that is, all else held equal, a net negative to the amount of stuff we have. This is not to say that it is bad morally, it obviously is not! Consuming food to stay alive is obviously very good, but the reason it is good is that it is a trade for something incredibly valuable: not being hungry! But it is a trade - in exchange we lose the ability for anyone else to eat that food. If we could somehow reduce the need to eat, or perhaps increase the benefit from less food, that would obviously be good, and part of why it would be good would be because it reduces consumption. This is exactly why everyone treats “consumption taxes are usually the least distortionary” as a solved problem.

The two most important KPIs of the economy — which most libtarians seldom talk about — are Productivity and Personal Consumption.

I love that you think that libertarians are guilty of ignoring productivity as an economic indicator, because everyone else thinks they talk about it way too much.

But the real killer is the consumption line. Consumption is a cost. It is not a KPI, we do not want to maximize it. We want to maximize the benefit we get from consumption, but that is a very separate thing. One, in fact, that we achieve precisely by deferring (reducing today) consumption: if you don’t eat one marshmallow today, you may be able to invest in productivity enhancing stuff and get two marshmallows tomorrow.

Does anyone really think modest income tax rises reduce the level of effort and productivity at work?

Yes, everyone agrees that it does this, in proportion to how modest it is. If you reduce the amount of benefit people get from a thing, they will do less of it, on the margin.

That Elon Musk as the archetype Richie Rich will work less hard and be less innovative and productive if his compensation goes down from a $Trillion to a $Billion???

Yes, of course, on average many many rich people will do precisely this? Are you saying that rich people don’t make different decisions based on how much money they get from it? Now, in reality, rich people are different, because they tend to have enough resources (or relative incentives) to change jurisdictions in response to tax code changes. “A rich dude moves his company, wasting real resources, to avoid taxes” is precisely the distortion we want to avoid. Is this perhaps a less than hypothetical scenario in Musk’s case?

By the same token, that demand for home ownership is reduced in High Tax states like Texas because Houston’s 2.5% bite is greater than San Jose, CA’s 1.5%???

Yes, all else held equal - which, in 2026, between CA and TX, it is not - a place with 1% higher cost of home ownership will see lower demand for it, because that is the most simplistic implication of the supply and demand concepts.

Brian’s idea that we should focus taxation on consumption is even nuttier when personal consumption represents 70% of GDP. Talk about something we want to incentivize, not the opposite.

You are killing me. What does the P in GDP stand for? Again, you must define terms clearly. We do not want to incentivize consumption as a line item, that is simply the mathematical value denoting the loss of resources. We DO want to maximize the benefit we get from the act of consumption. There are scenarios you can construct where demand drops so low that we have problems. We are not near that state, and tax policy can’t possibly have enough effect to push us there.

Deflation is worse than inflation, as the world learned in the 1930s, and, thankfully implemented emergency measures to prevent both in 2008 and 2020.

This is insane. Please, do not say crazy things like this. I said we should maximize productivity so that the prices of goods we all value will go down: literally the food we eat. And you respond “deflation is worse than inflation.” Please, repeat yourself, into the microphone if you will: you are saying “the prices of the things you Americans need to live going down is bad - worse, in fact, than if they all went up.” I can try to argue against this idea, but in this case I think the public condemnation it would evoke is enough.

“Our tax system should follow our moral intuitions” is not a good idea in a society as large, complex and diverse as ours. There are no shared moral intuitions.

At a high level I generally agree. We should not, for example tax people because we have the intuition that they are morally bad. But our tax system should follow the economic principles (intuitive or not!) that have we have discovered. And, most importantly, we do all share the most relevant moral intuition: that more stuff is good, and better than less stuff. That more food, more cars, more life saving medicines, more homes, more trees, more gentle quiet moments of peace spent with family, more children, more joy and beauty - that having more of these things is good. I reject the idea that anyone does not share this moral intuition.4

The Rich and the non-Rich exist in natural political adversarial opposition, their interests as diametrically opposed as the zero-sum closing price of transactions between any buyer and seller … between farmers and eaters, borrowers and creditors, oil drillers and car drivers, etc... They may have a shared interest in a vibrant market … high Velocity … where both sides are incented to transact, but not on prices.

This simply isn’t true; this is a zero-sum mindset, but we can have positive-sum trades. The rich and the non-rich, and in fact all of the parties in all of those comparison, all share an interest in having an economic system that results in the most stuff being available for everyone. We don’t have to fight, we can work together, and I really think we should - specifically, work together to defeat wealth taxes that will would heavily harm us both. I’m not particularly rich, but I have enough unrealized assets in my retirement account that I will absolutely fight like hell (and ally with any other faction in society in order) to not have it go down by 10%.

Yes, Tax The Rich

I fear we have lost the purpose of political discussions: everyone fights over symbolic partisan word association and not “what should be done?” When Mr. Saunders, a staunch Democrat, says “Tax The Rich” he thinks my reaction, as a libertarian, is “No, I Like The Rich, Don’t Tax Them!” but this is wrong. I wholeheartedly support taxing the rich5 - my point is that in this context of “tax incidence policy” and “distribution of real(-ized) resources” the “rich” are the people who have lots of real material resources, and therefore we should tax them along that metric, when they convert unrealized things into those real resources - i.e. at the point of sale, via consumption/sales taxes. And that almost people intuitively understand this - they see a trust fund baby blowing everything on drugs and a frugal old man saving (and giving his money to others in charity or investment) and agree that they’d rather tax the former more and the latter less.

This is not an argument, I am not trying to win, for my evil libertarian vision to triumph - I am trying to say that if we use the definitions and concepts as I’ve laid out, that not only will it result in outcomes that liberal democratic proponents (a group of which I am also a member) want, but because they hew closer to the way regular people use the terms, they will also enjoy better support. The ideas “taxes don’t have disincentive effects”, “we should incentivize consumption”, “productivity isn’t worth it”, “wealth taxes”, “price drops from productivity enhancements are bad” and “the definition of ‘rich’” are not ideological pillars of the liberal project! There’s no reason to fight for them. It is not needed to sustain liberal democracy - in fact, you can serve it better by jettisoning them, as indeed most adherents have. You aren’t giving ground to us evil libertarians by agreeing to work on a common ground of understanding. Like all the mutually beneficial market exchanges that occur in the millions every day between buyers and sellers, farmers and eaters: there is a price point at which we both win.

So, to Mr. Saunders, and to everyone else, I say: join me in the promised land of conceptual clarity and abundance. You have nothing to lose but your chains, high tax incidence and frequency of inconclusive partisan online debates.

“Elites” just doesn’t map properly any more - it works best in a historic, observational sense of, “we can see that in these burial sites, because they had rich gold hoards or ceremonial weapons, that they were of the city’s elite.” The tension between “elites who have power” and “elites without power, but people want to emulate them” and “do elites have to be rich?” means people are constantly arguing past enough other.

We constantly have these stupid circular definition debates:

Person 1: The elites are doing this bad thing, we must stop them!

Person 2: I totally agree, I can’t believe that obviously elite asshole Bob is promoting that stuff.

1: What? No, Bob isn’t an elite, he’s just a rich businessman?

2: Right, but since people listen to him and emulate him, that makes him an elite.

1: No way, the real elites are like Tim, who’s the president, they’re the ones doing the bad stuff. They have actual power!

2: Tim’s not elite, he ran on an explicitly populist platform of attacking the elites, like those ivory tower professors like Steve that are brainwashing everyone!

1: How can some boring pudgy professor with patches on his elbows be “elite”? No one listens to them! He can’t possibly enforce this bad thing!

2: His paper Interplays of Elite Signaling In Victorian Oklahoma had an impact score of 6.9! That’s even more influence than Sally, who writes for the Times!

1: Wait, now you think random reporters are “elites?” I know for a fact she can only afford to eat ramen 7 days a week!

Me: I hate you both so much, why are you doing this instead of talking about the actual bad thing, or maybe how we’d fix it?

1/2: Cause it gets more clicks to talk about “who” instead of “what,” remember to like and subscribe!!!

Me: [gunshots]

How many times have you read something like that? How many times do they ever get around to actually debating something of merit, on some objective grounds?

Historically, we had a much more accurate, detailed system with the Three Estates:

The best known system is the French Ancien Régime (Old Regime), a three-estate system which was made up of a First Estate of clergy, a Second Estate of titled nobles, and a Third Estate of all other subjects (both peasants and bourgeoisie).

Maybe we could just update the names/categories slightly, emphasizing the most important feature of any category of society: the ability/method of making others do what they want.

The Powerful

Nobility and their servants (obviously not necessarily hereditary, but essentially people who wield actual legal power - they make you do something with legal authority) - modern additions of soldiers, police, bureaucrats and lawyers.

The Persuasive

Clergy/media/priesthood/academics - the world of ideas, influence - they convince you to do something with words. “Wait, come on, are you saying that Anderson Cooper is a essentially a bishop?” Yes, keep up.

The Prosperous

Burghers/artisans/guilds - they can only convince you of something in exchange for money, sufficiently rare labor skills or value. Modern additions of skilled/credentialed labor, engineers, doctors or small business owners.

The People

Which leaves the “average Citizens/Everyone else”: while the “Fourth Estate” as a term is already taken (Carlyle, come on, seriously, obviously reporters are part of the clergy estate, how could you not see this?), this is essentially all the other people who can’t (or choose not to) persuade with words, legal power or money to particularly influence anyone to their point of view. Maybe we can label them the Zeroth Estate. They don’t get an AI image for relevant symbolic reasons.

See? This is so much better! Now we can talk more accurately about the actual topic at hand. Let’s try our argument again:

Person 1: The powerful [government First estate] are doing this bad thing!

Person 2: That’s right, they passed this law that causes that bad stuff to happen, we should try to stop it.

1: Let us tell everyone about the harms of this bad thing, so that they may use their democratic vote to influence those powerful people, who need our votes (and a critical mass of the people not in the other 3 estates) to remain in power.

2: Good idea, fellow citizen - we will contact the persuasive [media/clergy Second estate] press, or perhaps attempt to persuade people ourselves, to that end.

1: Maybe we can find some relatively wealthy people [the burgher Third estate] who can use their money to help us persuade people, or to directly donate to politicians who will oppose that bad thing.

2: Yes, as we live in a democratic society, this is the best way to go about things. Now that we’ve resolved this issue, have I mentioned that your jawline is looking very chiseled today?

1: Yes, indeed, I have been working out. I also recommend these supplements from…

Me: CUT! END SCENE! Get out, both of you.

Using the power of Socratic dialogue, I pronounce this issue solved. Anyone found using the now-outmoded terms “elites” to discuss modern political issues will be fined a fixed percentage of their substack earnings.

What’s a filter? Well, one example is the criminal justice system: the police and judges that run around and arrest certain individuals who have committed crimes (causing harm to the society), and impose some kind of outcome that reduces their harm going forward. And, hopefully, pre-emptively deters other criminals, with the ideal end result of “everything gets better for everyone, on average.”

That is a filter. Filters have 3 parts:

1. The filtering criteria: used to identify which actions or people are considered (by a critical mass of society) to be, on net, harmful to the society. In the case of police, it is the set of criminal laws.

2. The resolution: whatever “fix” the system imposes on those identified by the filter. In this case: varying levels of fines, imprisonment, or in rare cases, the death penalty.

3. The benefit: (which can be negative if you design the system badly) whatever subjective measurement method society uses to determine what the cost of the harmful action is, weighed against the cost of setting up and running that system. Again, in this example, we’d have to weigh the benefit of prevented crimes against the cost of those police, jails and so on. Or perhaps, if our filtering criteria is badly formed, the cost of false positives: arresting and imprisoning people who are not net harms to society.

Read more

I did not use the term “lost pursuits of happiness” lightly - this core founding principle of the country is exactly why overly expensive housing is so destructive. And also, hopefully, how we can fix it. On paper, it is a simple problem: one number is too much higher than another number, and the difference between them is causing lots of bad things.

As an analogy, if you wish to buy baby formula because you want your newborn child - who, hypothetically speaking, was born five and a half weeks early and was terrible at breastfeeding - to not starve, that seems to be a straightforward exercise of “pursuit of happiness,” liberty, freedom and every other good and true American impulse.

If the government made baby formula illegal, that would obviously be bad and obviously also a violation of your civil rights, the constitution and whatever range of laws that we have put in place. We would consider that law unjust and hopefully get rid of it, and one of the key motivations in doing so would be that “babies starving is bad.”

If the government merely taxed formula at high rates - remember that the power to tax is, established by precedent, also the power to destroy - then this would also be (less) bad. Good thing our noble, wise government would never do something like this! But whether it was truly illegal (in a way that we could overturn the tax) would depend on how strongly they impacted people’s right to buy stuff to feed their kids. This is something - the relative numbers - that a court would decide. If the tax were small or you could easily purchase substitutes, the courts would certainly let the tax stand, and this would make sense, as the tax would not likely be harming anyone’s adorable children. However, if it could be proven that - using the admittedly subjective “reasonable” precedents from hundreds of years of decisions - it was excessively impacting those customers, then the tax could be struck down. Obviously at some extreme, if the tax meant that families that made $1000 a month now had to pay $500 a month for formula for their child, it would seem obvious that would impose an undue burden.

Housing taxes, restrictions and regulations are similar. They impose cost increases in the housing market, and the amount of that cost increase can be unreasonably burdensome. The problem is that these harms are harder to calculate and far more distributed - and even more harmful on net.

Regulations on how many housing units you can build is essentially a tax, and it is also “taking” (from the landowner) under the 5th Amendment, in that by definition it reduces the value of the land that someone owns. This was all established in Euclid v. Ambler in 1926, which was opened the way for restrictive zoning laws. In that case, the court concluded that even though it was a “taking,” the need for government to be able to pass laws for the general welfare overrode that right.

Importantly though, the determination was based on numbers: the relative value of the benefit to public welfare (for the village of Euclid, only a few miles from where I live!) compared to the relative harm to the realty company. The court, even in deciding to allow Euclid to pass restrictive zoning laws, accepted that it only applied to the numbers of this case, and that a future case with different numbers might result in a different outcome. And indeed, in future cases in which it was determined that the law did negatively impact the property-owners value too dramatically, the zoning rules were overturned. But, crucially, it did not particularly consider the harm to future residents, or any of the other parties who would be harmed by the zoning “tax.” And, due to technology and other increasing returns from density, the amount of harm that occurs from not being able to leverage those factors has also increased in the past 99 years.

This is the key: it depends on the numbers. Fortunately, we’ve already established that the numbers are the problem, and that - in many other cases - if the numbers become too high, they impose an undue burden, and require a fix. All we have to do is properly calculate them.

So, to sum up, we - just like the Supreme Court in 1926 - need a formula that tells us “what is the impact of these restrictions?” One on side, the benefits to the city (or whatever jurisdiction considering the law), which the Court did certainly take into account:

• safety and welfare

• “maintaining the character of the neighborhood”

• achieving necessary and important government goals

On the other, the harms to the range of citizens:

• Per Ambler, the harm done to the value of the property owner’s asset - but in order to craft correct policy, we need to also consider:

• the citizen (who may currently be outside the city limits and therefore would not have standing) who can’t afford to take a higher paying job

• the employer who can’t afford to hire workers who can afford to live there

• businesses in high cost area who lose out on customers

And finally, the scope of the calculation: obviously it needs to be limited to some range of reasonable commute distance from where the potential job-seeker is trying to work.

There is obviously no way to precisely calculate these values, this just establishes that they exist and can roughly estimated, and that in many other aspects of life we examine these costs to determine the level of harm suffered by individuals.

Now, to give that formula teeth, we need a law at the national level that declares that:

All Americans have the right to pursue their happiness and well-being without being unduly impeded by governmental regulations. Having a job and a home are necessary parts of that pursuit, and cannot be overly constrained. To that end, excessive costs placed on Americans by regulations that make it unreasonably difficult to achieve these goals, without those regulations achieving commensurate benefits, will be considered impositions on that right and therefore subject to legal challenge. In addressing those challenges, the courts are required to consider the harms to all Americans, not just the property owners.

For one specific (example) threshold, if there is a urban area that has an average salary for the bottom 20% of jobs’ wages of 1000$ a month, within 30 miles of the city center, but the average housing costs of the bottom 20% of rents in that same area is 1200$ a month, then that will now be considered, by definition, to be an undue burden on the rights and interests of not only of the property owner who would like to build new housing to meet that hole in the market, but also the potential employee and employer who cannot afford to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Adjust the exact numbers of the threshold as necessary!

None of this is to imply that cheap housing is some kind of right. What is a right, and the right that is being violated, is the general freedom to just do things that help us … pursue happiness… that don’t harm others (very much). Therefore, if that’s the criteria for what we can and cannot do, we have to be able to measure that and make legal decisions based on it.

The estimates of the cost of overly expensive housing runs into entire percentage points of national GDP, which is not surprising when you consider that it directly cuts into one of the most productive inventions of mankind: the agglomeration of talent and economies of scale in cities. We are a civilization founded by cities and the housing crisis is eating away at that foundation.

This will give locals the ability to challenge rules that have outsized negative impacts in places where the harms multiply due to already-existing density, but it also prevents this rule from being used in situations where the benefits don’t justify it. Bluntly: suburbia, the places where people are most worried about density - the justification to use this rule in places that are primarily bedroom communities is much lower, because the math of the harms and benefits is very different. There are fewer jobs (people are often commuting to the city), there’s more room to just build new housing, there are usually accessible highways - and on the other side of the ledger, there’s more “non-dense-urban” living that you’d want to preserve. This limitation is a feature: the math on “is this housing restriction truly causing great harm?” has to work out, and simply due to the way the United States is constructed, most places the answer is: no. Only already-relatively-dense urban areas and their surroundings have the level of agglomeration that increases the “harms done by housing restriction” to a sufficient level.

Once this law is passed, ideally what you’d like to see is individuals who understand the local real estate market suing to repeal whichever zoning, regulation or law they feel is causing the most additional costs (and the least benefit). The courts would then explicitly have to measure (imperfectly, certainly) the full extent of those harms (the majority of which were ignored in the original ruling) when comparing to the benefits. That data, captured particularly in charts that show “average cost of housing” as a multiple of “average salary” in a given region, will naturally lead to a loosening of housing restrictions (via successful challenges) in exactly - and only - the places that need it the most.

At the end of the day, the housing crisis is bad because it causes harm to Americans. We can easily measure the immense scale of those harms. A major cause of that harm is excessive regulations against building more homes, ostensibly (and legally justified) for safety and welfare reasons. Therefore, the solution to this must require the courts (who judge the quality of those legal justifications) to take into account the full spectrum of harm and benefit when considering the legality of these rules, and incentivize them to undo the most harmful/least beneficial of those rules, using existing and well-established legal principles. The stakes are so high that we have an obligation to do something that will accomplish this, and I think a law in this mold would be that something.

Not one or three or four, but two! Two stones!

Always two, there are

there is no Dana, only… dualism

In the beginning there was only darkness. Then the lord said, let there be light.

And before that, there must have been a time with a Lord and a not-Lord. A God/Not-God of the Differences, perhaps. And then, before (before what? after what? concurrent with what?) that, a time and not-time. What does “then” mean to us, in relation to “now,” except as… not-now?

How are we to understand any of this? From the beginning or the end?

[Insanity quotient: 1 on a scale of 0 to 1, of course]

Differences, Mirrors, Recursion

(defun make-sense (words)

(if (= words bullshit)

1

(* words (make-sense (- words 1)))))

We can play these logic games all day, and they’re interesting, because logic and math only matter in that they reflect reality, and they really do reflect reality, and also imply non-reality.

But I’m getting distracted - I was trying to go one way, and accidentally went another, but now I go back to the top: there is actually just dualism. That’s all there is, things that are one way and other things that are another way. And recursive masses of those differences stacked infinitely inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, and what we call concepts or definitions or words are arbitrarily and non-arbitrarily chosen levels of nesting. Normal people, people who don’t go on insane metaphysical crusades over words, say “dualism” to focus on mind vs matter, or theological Good vs Evil, but no, I literally mean: dualism is the only thing that exists.

Read more

On the front end, this is a good analysis and actually gets to the heart of the fiscal matter: social security and medicare. And correctly ascertains that it is their elderly/retiree targeting that makes them so resilient - people really do believe it is not an entitlement, but a system that they have paid into, and are only getting their just rewards from their investment. People react to cutting SS and medicare like they do to a wealth tax on their 401ks because that’s what they think it is. And even people who are 251, who won’t get it for 40 years, recognize that those (necessary) benefit cuts aren’t going to reduce the amount they pay into this totally-not-a-401k solution on their payroll taxes.

But that’s why the solution - demagogue the old - isn’t the right call, for the same reason that the Judis/Texeira “Emerging Democratic Majority (from immigrants/youth)” didn’t happen: because time passes and people know it. Recent immigrants give birth to natives. Youth become old and more conservative. Republican governments can restrict immigration of Democratic-leaning voters.

The old are powerful because they not only are growing more numerous, but because everyone knows they will be old one day. People happily demagogue immigrants, or men/women, or some race (and critically, if they can be convinced the demagoguing will creep into their demographic, to stop supporting that!) because they know they won’t ever wake up one day and find that they’ve become that group.

Do not demagogue the old, they’re just too powerful, too many people believe their cause (that they earned it!) is just, and what’s worse, their ranks increase (proportionately) every day.

So start over and target a different leverage point: there’s a reason that I said that people think of SS/medicare NOT as entitlements. As everyone knows, particularly for social security, this was the original explicit intent to cast it that way in ORDER to make it permanent via universal support - but as essentially retirement accounts that they have paid into, and are only receiving their just, earned, rewards. Remember the “get your government hands off my medicare!” crowd? It’s funny to laugh at them, but their view is more in line with the actual consensus opinion in reality: it’s mine, I paid into it, and the risk from debating the topic is that you might take it away from me.

First Pillar

But that tells us the leverage point: because people have far more support for “I earned it” than “this is an entitlement you charitably give me”, they will be far less resistant to reducing benefits above and beyond that “paid in” threshold. Randomly grabbed chart (doesn’t matter if the numbers are right, it’s the general concept):

That “difference” is what to target. People will fight tooth and nail to protect the green bar, but far less for that difference. That is a LOT of cost savings! Being able to frame your benefits cuts as “not touching what you put in” is a major point in your favor. Don’t believe me? Go ask the average 70 year old who’s getting social security. Tell him you’re gonna cut SS benefits. He’ll probably stab you. Now, come back later and tell him you’re gonna ensure long term SS solvency (and continued ability to pay out EARNED benefits) by reducing the unearned payouts to relatively high-income mooches who are sneakily getting more than they “paid in.” The response will be… different. But they’ll have the same impact on the budget.

Second Pillar

Secondly, as the caption notes, there’s another “difference,” and this one also lets us further fracture the pro-elderly-entitlement coalition: because social security actually has a relatively bad return on investment (compared to a private retirement account), you can simultaneously improve the future budget outlook AND cause young workers to have more money in their retirement accounts.

So, instead of demagoguing the old, demagogue unearned handouts (to the old) and their logical inverse: government imposed reductions in what you (the not-yet-retired) could have invested yourself, and gotten a higher ROI.

Hanania shows this chart:

Now, imagine redoing that poll with a new 4th option: “reduce UNearned benefits AND lower taxes by allowing younger workers to invest their retirement themselves, resulting in a higher rate of return and therefore more money when they retire.” I don’t need to be a polling expert to tell you it would win in both demographics, and indeed with millennials and Gen X too. And it has the added benefit of actually being able to work. So do that instead!

Remember, the fiscal time bomb of social security is not the current state - it is the future long term threat (in 5, 10, 15 years) of it spiraling out of control and eating up more of the budget. If you change those long term projections by capping unearned payouts (future) and also removing the burden of those incoming retirees (in 5, 10, 15 years) by letting them fund private retirement, the fiscal picture becomes vastly more rosy.

Third Pillar

And here’s where we have to think outside the box2 and ask ourselves: what do the old people want this money for, anyway? We ignored medicare above, but now let’s talk. Because really, the answer is, primarily: [Wilford Brimley voice] diabetes. Yes, sure, it’s actually the wide range of lifestyle diseases of civilization, but that is a whole ‘nother argument, and I’m asking you to just take my word for it3 that “diabetes” sums it up.

The fact remains though, that the single largest thing that those old people are spending their medicare money on is diabetes and diabetes-adjacent4 stuff. Really, on the order of trillions of dollars over the past few years, and at an increasing rate. This is something we young (shut up) people don’t understand, because we are still young and full of youthful vigor (and insulin): millions of old people have been kidnapped into a system where their income (and therefore ability to pay for healthcare or anything else) was reduced (via taxes), and forced into payer-based healthcare systems that make it impossible to imagine paying for treatment any other way. And now they’re really, really sick and dependent on the system they were forced into: medicare.

And unlike social security, which essentially has limiters built in - i.e., we won’t give you more social security just because you say you need it for something - medicare (and medicaid, a not-insignificant budgetary item itself, also not necessarily old-linked) will absolutely funnel you many thousands more dollars if you start racking up diabetes-related diagnostic codes. In fact, it’s totally unlimited: if every person over 65 acquired type 2 diabetes or related conditions, medicare would be legally obliged to pay it out. And honestly, that’s not exaggeration: that’s where we’re headed, that’s not an outlandish scenario, that’s the asymptote the graph is leaning towards. There is not even a fig leaf of “sorry, you didn’t pay enough in to cover this.”

You literally do not get it: the healthcare system is the largest industry in the country and diabetes “treatment”5 is the single largest item in it. More than any other single thing our nation is a dialysis center, with trillions of tax dollars going in one end and slushing around with the country’s ruined kidneys, and waste products out the other.

When old people hear you “demagogue” them or contemplate cutting their medicare, this is what they imagine: Paul Ryan Richard Hanania running in with scissors and cutting these lines:

And then blood spatters everywhere and they die. Because the world they live in, they are literally dependent on this. Not metaphorically. Literally they need it to keep the blood pumping into their organs. You cannot fight this. You are not strong enough; there is no strength that can overcome sufficient weakness. They will see you burn first.

You cannot defeat an army that has been convinced there is no other option for their own lives but to defeat you. You have to change the world they live in so they have Sun Tzu’s outlet. You have to stop seeing them as the enemy army. You must see them for what they truly are: unwilling hostages. Hostages that have been placed, by the real enemy, in harm’s way, as insurance - haha- against pesky cost-cutting people coming in and fixing the budget.

You have to defeat diabetes so they don’t need the money as badly. You can laugh, and I can go on for hours about just how to do it, and I have, but it can be done, for less money than we spend failing to defeating it. So much less money, in fact, that it is the non-hyperbolic difference between diabetes destroying this country in fire and triglyceride-heavy blood. I am not joking. I am uttering prophecy. Go back and look at that poll chart, the difference between Gen Z and boomers on how to fund old age entitlements. Right now haha funny, “okay boomer”, but in 20 years that is civil war. What happens when SS and medicare need that funding? And gen alpha has even more skewed opinions than that, and instead of boomers, the Gen X’rs and millenials of 2045, even more skewed towards what the (now dead) boomers felt in that Cato survey?

When “higher taxes or inflation (from that borrowing)” will mean Gen alpha (and older "Gen Beta” or whatever we call ‘em) workers have even less purchasing power than the Zoomers are complaining about now? When those old Gen X’rs and millennials are sitting there, dependent on dialysis et. al. at even higher rates6? Both sides really will believe that losing the fight between “higher taxes/inflation” and “benefit cuts” means their literal, not-metaphorical death. How much more bloody would our first Civil War have been if instead of just their slave labor, the southern plantation owners thought Lincoln was going to take away their literal medical life-support? I do not want to live to see my kids clamoring to burn down nursing homes.

Okay, that got a little apocalyptic, but not without reason. I have Seen the data. It is not good. We actually have to fix this, and demagoguing the old is not the solution, because they aren’t the enemy, and collectively they are too strong and will kick our asses. Instead, we need to enlist them into our side, the side of Not Having the Country Burn Down, against the evil zombie forces of Mathematically Selling Out The Future (Which Is Now) For Short Term Political Gain Now (Which Is The Past).

Are you not motivated to fight against faceless forces of history and mathematics? Do you need your enemy to have a face? Okay, then let’s at least use an accurate one:

That’s the face of your enemy. Yeah, he’s dead, but that’s the whole point: it’s a zombie army, and it really is coming to eat your brains to prolong its unnatural and unholy life.

Don’t demagogue the old. Get the old to help us fight zombie LBJ, lord knows they hated him when they were young.

• hundreds of billions of dollars saved in healthcare spending yearly, both by govt and private. Fixes the federal budget crisis long term: the impact of this cannot be understated. The US fiscal crisis is almost exclusively one of spiking healthcare costs. Now we avoid 22 year olds burning down nursing homes in 2045, which seems good.

• drastic health increases from curing worst lifestyle diseases

• more responsive primary care, faster appointments, longer time spent addressing issues for patients

• radical simplification of “insurance” market, no more complex bureaucratic claims or approvals

• no more debates about govt healthcare covering illegal immigrants: they get healthcare or insurance if they pay for it, like anyone

The details:

- break employer-healthcare link: abolish the tax incentive for employer based healthcare insurance that gives them a 30% discount to providing it (but not you), and locks in employees. Probably just make it illegal for employers to offer health insurance: instead, immediately reassign current insurance policies to the individual, and convert all costs that the employer or employee pays (usually something like 5:1, so everyone will essentially get a big raise on day 1) to direct salary.

- make providing insurance for non-risk events illegal, like laws exist in other insurance industries (this means your insurance can’t cover your regular yearly visits, etc... just like GEICO can’t cover your gas). This returns healthcare to the two different markets it used to be: regular predictable low-cost care, paid out of pocket (cheaper due to not involving the overhead of insurance) and insurance for rare, high cost catastrophic events. To repeat: if your “insurance” is “covering” events that you choose, or are predictable, you are being ripped off, because they have to charge you more than the cost of providing it because there’s no risk premium, and they have all this overhead because they’re an insurance company. Think about it: if you know you have a yearly primary care appointment that costs 90$ (ask your doc!) why would you pay an insurance company 100$ a year to “insure” you against the “risk” of having to pay for it? Apply this concept to every other part of healthcare that is predictable or low cost: you’d much rather keep your insurance premium and use it to pay out of pocket.

- so now you have 2 markets: regular low cost primary care - mandate that all care of this kind now be provided on the existing Direct Primary Care model, where the patient pays a small monthly fee (or one-time self pay if they want) for concierge access to the DPC doctor (usually you see something like $90 per month for middle age people). This market exists solely as a transaction between doctors and patients. Insurers are not allowed, no claims are filed, nothing. No medicare or medicaid either - no 3rd party payers at all. If people can’t afford this, and society wants them to, then it can direct govt can just send them direct cash payments for it - which will be much lower than the spending already dedicated to it, because there is no payer overhead. Plus it’s much faster, currently tons of people are waiting 6-9 months for basic appointsment, this would allow the supply of physicians to meet the demand

-and then the actual insurance market, which now consists solely of what we normally call “catastrophic care” - i.e. low chance, high cost events where the insurance framework of risk, coverage, deductibles make sense. Copy the private “community care share” model of Sedera, basically you pay a monthly fee and they cover all healthcare costs above a (negotiable) maximum out of pocket. No complex claims, prior auth, not paying docs. Just sending the insurer your receipts, they send you check.

- make healthcare expense/insurance fully tax deductible for individuals

- abolish medicare, medicaid and the VA: wholly convert to a system of direct cash payments to cover whatever minimum level of 1) Regular primary care fees and 2) catastrophic insurance premiums that the voters feel is appropriate for citizens to have, more similar to other subsidy programs

-retain a vastly smaller department at HHS (maybe even just in the CDC or FDA) for promulgating best practices

-get the govt out of physician training: no more medicare paying for residency slots, no more limits on # of doctors. Accept more accredited, capable foreign medical grads into programs.

-mandate full ahead-of-time price transparency (lots of good things have been done here already)

-this results in large cost decreases across the entire industry (similar to the cost decreases you see in already existing self pay direct primary care providers or the self pay surgery centers like the OK surgery center) because you’ve cut out (most of) the entire insurance/payer system which is pure transaction costs. No need for complex EMR payment mechanisms, no paying thousands of CMS or insurance co employees to provide “insurance” services to a system that isn’t “insurance”, docs’ certainty of being paid goes up, no having to comply with massive ICD10/CPT coding systems which costs providers tons, patients get to choose which services they want, while actually understanding the costs. Rather than “oh insurance covers it, I’ve met my deductible, go for it.”

-mandate education program about end of life care that emphasizes the personal physical costs vs benefits of drastic interventions after the age of say, 75, with the primary benefit of preventing late life medical torture. Hospice care is a really good, wonderful thing, make sure everyone knows it.

-the final and most powerful solution: cure T2 diabetes, which is the single largest driver of healthcare costs (300-400B or so). This is absolutely doable, private healthcare consulting companies do it all the time merely with lifestyle and nutrition changes. (GLP1s and other meds can help, deploy as necessary). Publicize those methods and, retaining 1 single medicare quality metric, require that primary care providers practice those methods, and incentivize patient compliance (always the stumbling block) by allowing the catastrophic insurance providers to increase rates based on your metabolic markers (that indeed do correspond to large later costs) so if you don’t adhere to the program, you are going to pay a lot more in premiums (just like you would/should for smoking)

Edit: I forgot to add what the day to day of the healthcare system would look like, for average patients or employees.

-day one you get a raise for your employee health contribution + your employer’s (which is usually 5-10x as much), and whatever was going into your HSA plus their contribution. For most people this will be a large amount of money.

-your employer’s health insurance policy is transferred to you personally, and can’t be revoked if you quit (you start paying the premium directly yourself)

-the insurance company can’t offer coverage for regular, un-insurable events any more, only catastrophic stuff, so your premium goes way down, you call them to negotiate what your new deductible is - basically whatever your family couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket in a year. Or maybe you decided to change insurers. [This is the first part of New Healthcare: the actual insurance market for catastrophic stuff]

-you now have some money left over to buy Direct Primary Care visits, or one of their yearly subscription plans (if you’re say 40, it might cost 90$ a month) [This is the second part of New Health care: the regular, predictable stuff that cannot be “insured” against.]

-you can see any doctor you want for regular, predictable care because “networks” don’t exist anymore. You can get appointments a lot faster, and spend longer talking to your doc, because now doctors want your business instead of being forced to churn through it by billing departments

-no more claims or paperwork like that, just go pay for whatever regular care you want, and if you have an actual catastrophic claim, just send the receipts (like Sedera does today)

-when something catastrophic happens (major cancer diagnosis, car accident) your catastrophic insurance covers it (after deductible) just like every other normal insurance policy (car, house) that you have in life. This means you actually almost never really deal with your health insurer at all, until late in life.

-if you can’t afford Part 1 or Part 2 - or, as you get older, your rates go up - (i.e. people who in the previous regime would be on medicaid/medicare) then the govt should, via democratic vote, establish some baseline level of cash support for you to buy those things - just like it has for other things that it wishes to support via welfare. The actual amount needed will be less than what we were spending on medicaid/care before, because much of what had driven the prices up is now gone.

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

[This is the number 1 entry in the recurring series of “Does This Thing Even Exist?”]

When the word “rich” (or “wealthy”) was invented, “hoarding currency from productive labor or investment” was not a part of life. “Rich” always referred to consumption of stuff - read the contemporary accounts of Greek or Roman elites, or references to rich/wealthy. They are never referring to some artisan/worker (economically equivalent to most of us today) who amassed tons of coins from his work, or even some sea captain who was investing (similar to modern investors, in the only form of that in ancient times) in trading expeditions or colonies. If those people had lots of money, but didn’t spend it on lavish homes, wine, public feasts, triremes, slaves and servants - they would have been invisible.

And, to those Roman or Greeks, not just invisible, but tautologically inconceivable: all those things were the only reason to acquire wealth; they were the wealth to which they were referring! If that person were hoarding currency in a box somewhere and living life as a relatively ascetic hermit, that would… make no sense to them. Like sci fi robots repeating “DOES NOT COMPUTE.” Furthermore, they would certainly not be referring to that person as “rich” or “wealthy” because it is obvious that only the people “spending that currency for stuff” were counted as rich or wealthy, by literal definition. And as a counter-example, back then there were obviously tons of people (without any currency at all) who were counted as rich, so long as they had lots of stuff, acquired via plunder or conquest.

Even beyond that, the aspect of consuming the wealth was the relevant part for the moral condemnation, either by random non-rich people of the time, or in the explicit religious frame of early Christians. This makes total sense, because this is a human tendency that long predates Christianity, Rome, Greece or even language: at some prehistoric level, in your little caveman tribe, if Thag has more meat or furs, it very likely means that you have less, because the amount of that stuff the tribe has is mostly fixed. And probably that he cheated somehow to get it,1 and should be condemned by tribe elder shaman. This behavior probably pre-dates even humanity, and is observed amongst chimps, many mammals and even birds.

It is very clear: “rich” originally meant “rich in stuff”, and the moral implications of it depends on contextual scarcity of stuff, and that is the meaning that even today, most people instinctually use, simply because it is much easier to observe that someone has consumed2 Ferraris, yachts or cocaine.

So why do we explicitly use it today in such a different way - specifically, to refer to the amount of currency that a person has? Worse, why do we use it in that different way, and then expect that morals, laws and norms around wealth that were invented when rich meant “in stuff?”

Everyone today agrees that Warren Buffett is rich, but prehistoric cavemen, ancient Greeks and early Christians, who assembled a mass of cultural, social and religious norms around “wealth,” would not. They would see a man whose home, clothes and food reflect the lifestyle of a non-rich, non-elite person3. This is not a man who would hold lavish feasts, live in the largest marble home or field vast armies of servants. He doesn’t even seem to hold a rank in the Senate! The only thing he seems to have in abundance are these worthless slips of green papyrus. Warren could get into heaven. He’d fit through that needle. Because he’s not ancient-rich4; bad-rich; he is not consumption-rich. He has not consumed anywhere near enough of our collective stuff to qualify as rich in way that would trigger our natural human instincts of self-preserving egalitarianism. He is not gobbling up all of the olive crop, he is not snatching more than his share of mammoth steak.

He is only rich in the modern usage of the world, that strangely equates those green scraps to wealth. The problem is that using “rich” to also mean that, in addition to “consumption-rich,” is stupid and really confusing! Changing the usage of the word, and then expecting all the past ideas and principles around “rich” to remain the same is insane. Having a bunch of unspent currency is in fact the precise, literal, diametric opposite to (consumption) rich - it represents the exact scale to which one has not consumed. Consumption-rich is bad-rich, currency-rich is good-rich, because consuming a thing means that no one else can consume it, while getting more currency means either producing something of value via labor (for most of us) or deferring consumption for investment or saving. Otherwise known as: giving money to other people for them to consume or hopefully increase productivity with - also known as “having more total stuff next year.”

Just like the autism diagnosis, we need to split the word up into two different things. Because the guy who works his ass off, provides tons of value to other people and earns 1 million slips of green paper - and consumes very little of it - is a hero. He has dumped a ton of value into the big pot of stuff we as a species made today, and took out very little. Good job, Warren.

Even better if instead of …. counting his money in the park with his weird money-sack-pet-creature… he gave the money to other people who could invest it in new productive businesses, and result in even more good stuff next year [investment]. Or maybe somehow magically created new productive people and spent money on them.

But his goodness would be reduced if he spent his money on things - and in proportion to which those things reduce the benefit of consumption for others. Obviously, buying the necessities of food, shelter and clothes doesn’t mean we should think less of him. But as he starts spend more and deferring less consumption, yes, I think we progressively get closer to humanity’s intent of “bad rich” from antiquity. Particularly if he spends on things that are not great, like cocaine and hookers, or buying up an excess of things that other people need, like cocaine or hookers, thereby driving up their prices [increased demand]. Even worse would be if he spent and consumed in excess of the value of the labor he produced that year [taking out excess loans]. We might forgive this if he credibly promised to repay us in the future with deferred consumption, but it would be even more reprehensible to not do so. Not cool, Prescott.

So what two terms should we use? I think we should keep the term “rich” to mean those “consuming-rich” people, who are wealthy in (perhaps excess!) consumption. It fits with the long standing history of use, and means that every biblical verse or egalitarian norm still works with the same term.

But we need a new word for the “good-rich”, the “production rich”, those who have produced so many real things for others, but have contented themselves with little green slips of paper, and the promise that one day the rest of us will be kind enough to take them back in exchange for some nice stuff. I think “producer” works, if a bit bland and un-heroic, for a description of…. literally the act that creates the food we eat and every material thing of value. It also doesn’t really capture that hopeful optimism that is inherent to the act of deferring consumption. Because the act says that you believe the future - when you end up spending the money - will arrive and will be sufficiently great that you’ll be able to enjoy that consumption5. And perhaps, that your labors today contribute just a little bit to making that greater future. To the hopeful producers.

But more importantly than proper nomenclature, we also need to refactor society, particularly our tax code, to treat the two categories differently. Every tax on a thing disincentivizes that thing. Therefore, our current tax system, heavily skewed to income tax, reduces the incentives for those good-rich, the hopeful producers, to do their thing, which is “making stuff for everyone.” We should therefore shift, as much as possible, to a system that taxes consumption6, so as to proportionately disincentivize consumption - which, again, is “reducing the amount of stuff that everyone has.” Our tax system should follow our moral intuitions.

Excess-consumption-rich: bad.

Hopeful-producers: good.

This post, especially the Buffett analogy, was inspired by .