I’ve been on TikTok for about three years now. I’m not particularly active but it’s supposed to be a good platform for authors, and I actually kind of enjoy it. For a words guy I like video. I’m not great at the production side of it, but I do like to talk, as those of you who know me know. I probably could have and should have done a lot more with it last summer when I was putting out my book, but whatever.

I made a video a few weeks ago that was basically just a riff off something from The Almightier, trying to frame the debate over capitalism and socialism as an archaic cultural remnant of another era, one that is actually preventing us from understanding our capabilities today.

Here it is:

@paulvigna30%. If we set aside just one-third of our global output, we could provide basic living standards for every person on Earth. The other 70% could go for all the fancy things we love here in the rich, developed world. That sounds like a pretty good deal, but we don’t take it, and the reason is because we have turned money into our god and the pursuit of wealth as our highest virtue. How that got to be in the subject of my book The Almightier, from @St. Martin’s Press. Want to know more? Check it out, it’s on sale now. (Yes, I’m asking you to buy it, I like money as much as the next capitalist.) #creatorsearchinsights #moneyedition #booktok #money

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

As of today, the video has about 15,200 views. That is not viral by real standards, but it is viral by mine. That’s more than twice as many as my next most-viewed video. And the video didn’t rack up the views overnight and then disappear. It was getting viewed steadily for weeks.

Subscribe now

The study I was talking about is “How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis,” written by two researchers in Spain. What they did was try to determine, from the ground up, what portion of our global resources would be required to ensure that every person on the planet, all 8 billion of us, would have access to a basic level of living standards, not just food and shelter but indoor plumbing, electricity, access to healthcare, even access to modern products, the internet and smartphones. And what they determined was that if we dedicated, in the aggregate, 30% of our global productivity to this, we could do it. We could eliminate homelessness and poverty and starvation. Leaving the other 70% for all the good, fun, luxurious, things we enjoy here in the western world.

That is a really illuminating way to look at the problem of resource distribution. We have a tendency to paint things in a either-or framework, probably because that works best for the kinds of engaging but not always illuminating debates we seem to like to have these days. The Barcelona study forces you to look at the issue from a different angle.

Leave a comment

I don’t know exactly how the TikTok algorithm makes it decisions, but it sent me video out to a lot of people who didn’t like it. Boy howdy did it ever. As of this writing, I am still getting comments. And most of them refused to look at the wider lens I was trying to bring to the table. It was kind of fascinating to me to see how many of them reflected the exact kind of attitudes I talk about in The Almightier, people who viscerally view capitalism as a religion but don’t seem at all aware of the fact that they are treating it like that.

Wait until they get a load of my idea to cancel the debt.

I only heard of Andrew Garfield’s new movie this week, after people were reacting to a reveal that it wasn’t just a historical drama about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, but a stealth Robin Hood origin story. “The Uprising” centers the story of the revolt around an unnamed ploughman, played by Garfield, who sparks the violent backlash. Apparently, the ploughman is supposed to be the inspiration for the Robin Hood story.

It’s always seemed a bit odd to me that I’ve never seen a Robin Hood story that played up the obvious economic undertones of the myth. Robin Hood is a bandit to the authorities, but a hero to the people, a man who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. It’s usually just presented as a fantasy adventure story, the Errol Flynn thing and all that, but there was always something more to it.

This new movie seems to center Robin Hood where he belongs, in the middle of an economic uprising of the people against the landed aristocracy and the king, a man (or in this case, a 14-year old Richard II) who purportedly was ordained by God himself to rule the land (how do you think you become king?) So, I think it’s actually pretty cool that Uprising would be a Robin Hood origin story.

But, really, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt is more than that. It’s a capitalism origin story. The revolt was part of a larger wave of unrest across Europe, which eventually grounded out in a new economic model, the one we use today. I came across all this history when I was doing my research for The Almightier; I’d certainly never learned it in school, and I doubt I would have found it using some Ai chatbot to do my research for me.

The Black Death started in a lakeside village in modern-day Kyrgyzstan in 1338. People died at an usually high rate; their tombstones all said they’d died of the same thing, a pestilence. That lakeside village was ground zero for what over the next decade or so would become the single-worst natural disaster in recorded human history: the Black Death. No earthquake, no tsunami, no war comes near its death toll. It spread from that village across Asia and Europe over the next 15 years, wiping out anywhere from a quarter to half of Europe’s population in the most painful way, and it left survivors psychologically scarred for life. Nothing else even remotely approaches its severity. Economic life collapsed. Fields went fallow. Famine crept across the Continent. Rich and poor alike were as liable to be killed. It was the end of the world, The Walking Dead but with a real virus instead of fake zombies.

Subscribe now

The Europeans were completely unprepared for the plague when it arrived in October 1347 aboard merchants ships that docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Most of the crews were dead, horrified townspeople discovered. It wasn’t the sailors so much that were the problem. The ships had rats on them, and the rats had fleas, and the fleas were carrying the pestilence - a strain of bubonic plague. It spread across the continent like wildfire. Nobody had any natural immunity. They didn’t know how it spread or how to stop it (incidentally, the bubonic plague still exists but today is easily treated with antibiotics.) It was wildly contagious. People got insanely sick, sometimes within hours of exposure, feverish, their bodies covered in horrid welts, and died within another few hours or just a few days. Few who came down with it survived. The only way to avoid infection was to avoid the infected, at any and all costs. Under the intense strains, the bonds of civil society frayed and shattered. Nobody wanted to be around other people. Mothers abandoned children. Priests abandoned their parishes. Anybody with the means fled to the countryside, as far from towns and people as they could get. The ones without the means were trapped in a living hell. So many people died there weren’t enough peasants to do all the work. The Feudal system around which European society was based shattered. It never came back.

That is the key point. The economic system that had ruled Europe fell apart, because there weren’t enough workers anymore to keep it going. And for the first time in their lives the workers find themselves with something they probably never thought about before and maybe didn’t even understand: leverage. Want the fields plowed? Pay us. Want the clothes made? Pay us. Want the boats built and the tapestries stitched and the music played? Pay us, pay us, pay us. In England in 1351, the government passed an exhaustive law called the Statute of Laborers, which set wage caps on a host of occupations. The goal was to keep worker pay at its pre-plague levels. There were similar attempts across Europe. But the people were not about to take being held down anymore.

One of the first and most successful worker protests, the Ciompi Revolt, occurred in 1378 in Florence. A ruling oligarchy of powerful families ran the city government, with representation of the workers coming from major and minor guilds. There were still other low-rung workers who weren’t represented by any guild at all. The “ciompi” were mainly wool workers from the lowest rung of society, the popolo minute, literally the “little people.” The wool industry was huge in Florence; it employed almost a third of city workers. The striking workers were so effective, they managed to take control of the city government and even hold it for a few years (they were helped by one influential elite: Salvestro de’ Medici; decades later, this connection to the little people would aid one of his descendants.) The city’s ruling families eventually connived their way back into control but it was clear the economic forces that had been in place for centuries were unraveling. The little people wanted something more, and they were finally in a position to demand it.

Share

The 1381 Peasants Revolt is the subject of The Uprising, and from the trailer it seems like it gets the history kind of right. People were in distress after the plague. And taxation was a crucial friction. You can see in the trailer, the whole thing starts when Garfield’s Ploughman finally screams “we’ve given you enough!” But the economic friction was festering even before the plague. The population across Europe was booming, putting pressure on an economic model that had been stagnant for centuries. The nobility were getting wealthier, opening a wider gap between themselves and the commoners. The lower classes had been agitating for better conditions before the plague, and there had been a few, isolated protests. After the plague, when conditions became even more dire and stratified, the popular revolts increased.

The Ciompi Revolt and the Peasants’ Revolt were not just vigilante mobs, they were serious attempts to change the system. In London, they ransacked the city and breached the Tower of London; the executed the archbishop of Canterbury and a few other people. Both ultimately however failed in their immediate goals but they set the expectations of the people. They wanted a better bargain, a new deal. They were not only demanding it, they were ready to go to war for one. Eventually, they were offered one, and they took it.

In the 1420s, a Florentine writer named Poggio Bracciolini wrote a dialogue, in Latin, called Da avaritia. On avarice. In the dialogue, Bracciolini makes a case that as far as I can see had never been made before: that greed, for lack of a better word, was good. Greed, he said, was the foundation of Florence’s wealth. That allowing the city’s merchant class to indulge their greed is what brought money into the city and made it as successful as it was. The greedy should not be condemned the way the Church condemns them, he said. The greedy should be supported, venerated, embraced.

If that argument sounds familiar, it should. It’s still being used today.

In medieval Europe, though, this was a radical, radical argument. The people were used to living under the oppression of the nobility’s greed; you can see in the Uprising trailer a scene where the king’s man sneers “The king is the law. He says pay taxes, you pay taxes. He says work harder, you work harder.” But they were unused to the idea that they could be greedy. The Church was very clear that greed was a cardinal sin, not to be indulged in. The hypocrisy was that the church could be, and was, greedy. The nobles and royals could be, and were, greedy. But the people were not supposed to be.

Bracciolini’s dialogue turned that thinking on its head, and the idea spread like wildfire. One of the first major proponents of it was Bracciolini’s close friend and patron Cosimo de Medici. Yeah, that Medici, whose distant cousin had once publicly championed the little people. Cosimo used this idea, what I called in my book an ethos of beneficial greed, to become the most powerful man in Europe. What the people saw was a man who’d become incredibly powerful, as powerful as any king or pope, who was a commoner. One of them. The Medici weren’t nobility, they weren’t royalty. They were prosperous merchants, sure, but not ordained by God for any particular role.

Cosimo became the role model for this new kind of commoner, and within a few decades you can see this idea completely transforms Europe. This is what pulled Europe out the dark ages. This is what changed Europe from a global backwater to a world power. It’s because this idea was embraced and implemented by the kinds of people who’d taken part in the Ciompi Revolt and the Peasants’ Revolt that the entire world changed.

So, really, the subtitle of The Uprising shouldn’t be “The Rise of Robin Hood.” It should be “The Rise of Capitalism.”

Leave a comment

The U.S. national debt crossed the $40 trillion mark this week. The miserable milestone came just four years after hitting $30 trillion. That came five years after hitting $20 trillion. That came nine years after the debt hit $10 trillion. That came 27 years after the debt hit $1 trillion.

It’s not just the federal debt. The states owe about $4 trillion. Corporations owe about $14 trillion. Individuals owe another $19 trillion. The U.S. economy generates about $32 trillion a year. We are woefully overleveraged, and beyond the point where we can tackle our debt problem with any normal tools. There are no levels of taxation or austerity that would be acceptable to the public. We are not going to grow our way out of it, not at this point. We could conceivably inflate our way out of it, but that would be a different kind of disaster. Or we can just wait for the inevitable economic collapse.

There’s one other options. We can cancel the debt. All of it. There was a concept in the ancient world called an amargi, an edict from kings of blanket debt relief. I wrote about the amargi as a solution to our current problems in a guest essay today in the New York Times. The essay is based on ideas I developed in The Almightier, so if you’ve read that book this will be familiar ground for you. If you haven’t, this idea is probably going to sound like something from some sci-fi you’ve never heard of, but I’m telling you, it’s actually a really practical solution to an intractable problem. I’m really hopeful that this op-ed will open people’s eyes to it, because we need to do something. We can’t just sit around trying to stitch band-aids together and waiting for things to just fall apart.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Apparently we are at the part of the show where everybody has to state whether or not they use AI to write. Now that Substack is incorporating tools that purportedly let readers test a written work for its AI-edness, writers are sort of kind of being forced to state whether or not they are using AI.

For me, it is extremely simple: I don’t use AI. At all.

Look, I’m not going to grab a pitchfork and chase writers and other people who do use AI in writing (I also want to make one thing clear: I am only talking about AI and its use in writing. If people want to use AI to cure cancer or some other disease, I’m all for it.) I can understand why some people use AI for writing. Some people have disabilities for which AI compensates. Some people don’t like writing, don’t feel comfortable with it. Some people are just using writing to achieve some other goal and don’t really care about the writing. Some people are bad writers.

I’m not a great writer, but I am a competent writer. More importantly, I like writing. I started writing dumb stories when I was six or seven or something. I was 15 when I read The Sun Also Rises and realized that what I was doing was called a writer, and that I wanted to be one. And that’s what happened. I like words. I like thinking. I like thinking about things and then stringing some words together that express a thought. Why would I ever give that up to some computer program?

What counts as writing? Well, the writing, obviously. The editing. The revising. The research. Thinking about writing counts as writing. Every single part of producing a written work, from the very first random idea about to the finished manuscript, is part of the writing process. I do not and will not turn any of it over to an AI bot.

I’ll give you one very specific example of why I won’t use AI to write. When I was developing the ideas that would become The Almightier — wonderful book, by the way, can’t recommend it enough (oh, no, he’s using emdashes, test him for AI-edness) — I didn’t really know where I was going. I had one initial idea, that virtue and money had somewhere along the line gotten mixed up, and I wanted to try and find out where. A lot of people point to Reagan and Thatcher and supply-side economics and leave it at that. I’d done a bit of research about debt jubilees back in Mesopotamia for a story I ended up never writing, and I suspected the relationship went way back. So I started doing research, a lot of research. I went down a lot of rabbit holes. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I couldn’t, of course. Almost everything in my book was something that I’d just discovered while doing the research. Things that became core and integral to the whole book I had no idea existed until after I started working on the book.

At one point, I came across a reference to an old dialogue called Da avaritia (On Avarice), by a Florentine writer named Poggio Bracciolini. I had never heard of the dialogue or the writer. As far as I can tell, nobody in economics really ever talks about this dialogue, but they should, because it is ground zero for our modern attitudes about money and capitalism. In the dialogue, Bracciolini makes the full-throated argument that greed is good, that the wealthy are the ones who makes societies wealthy, and that we should embrace both. Sound familiar? Of course it does. This is everything we think today, and it was written in the 1420s. When Zohran Mamdani said billionaires shouldn’t exist, and his critics jumped all over him, they were aping almost word for word things Bracciolini said in Da avaritia. They just didn’t know it.

But, I couldn’t find the dialogue online anywhere. I started wondering whether it actually ever existed. It took me weeks to finally stumble across a podcast that mentioned it, and the podcast’s website had a bibliography that pointed to the one and only English language translation of Da avaritia. Bracciolini and this dialogue form the backbone of a three-chapter arc in the book that centers around Florence and Cosimo de Medici and the birth of capitalism. And if I’d been relying on AI I’d never have found it.

Subscribe now

Just for fun I asked ChatGPT — yes I downloaded the app, but just out of curiosity; I’ve used it maybe three times including this time (there’s those emdashes again, red flag for sure) — to find me an English language translation of Da avaritia. “As far as I can determine there is no complete published English translation of Poggio Bracciolini’s Da avaritia,” it told me. “If your goal is to read the entire work in English, translating it chapter by chapter from the original Latin is probably the best approach, and I’d be happy to help with that.” And then it served me ad from an outfit called Christian Faith Publishing telling me how I can become a published author.

That is research using ChatGPT.

Da avaritia was translated into English in 1978 by Benjamin Kohl and Elizabeth Welles for a collection of Humanist writings called The Earthly Republic. I have it sitting on my bookshelf. If I had relied on AI to do my research for me, I would not have ever come across this work. I would not have ever read it. It would not ever have become part of The Almightier. Obviously the problem here is that while all these AI programs are trained on mountains of material, and I’m a member of the class-action suit that just settled with Anthropic, they are not trained on everything. They know only what they are fed. Obviously nobody fed The Earthly Republic into ChatGPT. The Almightier would have been materially different if I’d relied upon AI. It would have been materially worse.

I can’t trust AI to be comprehensive because I don’t know what it was trained on. But more than the lack of trust, I enjoyed doing all that research. It was a genuine thrill to stumble across Poggio’s work, and Harriet Martineau and Jacob Coxey and Eric Williams and Raymond De Roover all the other people I’d never heard of who tumbled into my work. I know that kind of thing isn’t for everybody. But it should be a thing for writers. Why else are you writing, if not to explore ideas and express new ones?

So, no, I will not use AI for writing, at all, ever. I hope that answers the question.

Leave a comment

We grow enough food to feed every person on the planet. And we could grow more. There are vast swaths of fertile land that we’re not even using. The Democratic Republic of Congo could be Africa’s breadbasket. They could grow enough food in just that one resource-rich country to feed 2 billion people. India is another country with abundant natural resources that are underdeveloped.

We grow enough food to feed every person on the planet. In fact, we have the resources to ensure that every person on the planet could have all of their basic needs met, not just food and shelter, but even things internet access and cellphones, the things that make modern life modern. In fact, we have such an abundance of resources that it would take only 30% of them to ensure every person’s basic needs were met. All 8.5 billion of us.

That is what a study from two professors in Barcelona concluded. It’s a fascinating study and only eight pages; I highly recommend reading it. If we could somehow dedicate and direct 30% of our global resources to ensuring that the basic needs of every person on the planet were met — all 8.5 billion of us — we would still have 70% of our capacity to dedicate to all the frivolous, fun, fantastic things we love here in the developed, western world. In other words, we could all be greedy little capitalists (and I’m not bad-mouthing greedy little capitalists; I am one myself) and eradicate starvation, homelessness and poverty.

Please sit with that thought for a few minutes. Mull it over. Digest it. Sit with it for an hour, a day, however long it takes.

Share

There is no need for anybody to be starving. There is no need for anybody to be homeless. There is no need for anybody to live in poverty. So why do half the people in the world live in poverty? Why are people starving? Why are people homeless?

I was going to go into a long exposition of what I think, but I think now it’s actually better to just sit with that thought. I’m not going to answer the question, and you don’t need to, either. You don’t need to offer the knee-jerk reaction. You don’t need to have any answer at all. Just think about it. Think about what we can do for each other as a species, what we are doing, and why.

Leave a comment

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by the creator with unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The image above is from the satirical magazine Puck, and it was published in 1910. It shows the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A man, labeled “the spirit of 1908” comes running in screaming “Don’t sign that declaration, gentlemen! You’ll hurt business!” You see, not everybody was on board with the whole all-men-are-created-equal idea. Not in 1776. Not in 1910. And not today.

The Declaration of Independence is probably one of the most important written things in the history of the world. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true, because Jefferson’s document changed everything. Looking at it as a writer, I see two things. One, it’s an incredibly well written document. Jefferson’s prose is rightly lauded. It’s just great. Buuuttt…there are problems, and those problems matter because they are the source of a lot of the friction in this country today. (I wrote basically this same essay last year, thought about just reposting that, but then decided to take a new stab at it.)

One. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” Look, if you need to state that something is self-evident, it self-evidently is not self-evident. I don’t need to state that the sun will rise in the east. It has risen in the east for every single day of human history, it rose in the east for five billion years before we were around, and it will almost certainly rise in the east for another five billion years. “The sun rises in the east,” is a self-evident statement. If I were to say, “tomorrow the sun will rise in the west,” well, that is not a self-evident statement. I’d really have to marshal some serious evidence to make that case. And I’d have less than 24 hours to do it.

The fact of the matter is, all men were not equal in 1776. That was the entire point of the revolution. The King was manifestly placed above everybody else. People were rebelling against that situation, there was a lot of angst about that situation, but it did exist. So, there was a civil war in England. We had a revolution in the colonies. There was a revolution in France. People don’t fight bloody, violent wars over things that are self-evident.

Subscribe now

Two. “All men are created equal.” This is an incredibly powerful statement, honestly one of the most influential single sentences ever written. But the entire phrase hinges on what is meant by the word “men.” Does “men” here mean all mankind? It almost certainly did not to Jefferson, who himself held human beings as property. Not one African held in slavery in the colonies was considered equal. Women? Nope. They were property too, with limited rights. The native Americans? Not even close. Hell, even poor, landless whites were not afforded the same rights as the people in Jefferson’s social circle. In fact, roughly 75% of all the people living in the colonies in 1776 did not have the same rights as the white, European, wealthy, land-holding men. When Jefferson wrote the word “men,” he meant only those men.

The full implications of the Declaration of Independence were beyond what the founders had in mind, and the entire history of our country can be read as people on both sides of the divide trying to contend with the full implications of the declaration. We are still, to this very day, arguing over the animating principle of the nation, and the plain fact of the matter is that if you do believe that all mankind is created equal, if that is self-evident to you, you have to also realize that it is not self-evident to other people. So it’s great that we’re celebrating 250 years of this country. It’s an achievement. But what was started 250 years ago continues to this very day. We are not fighting kings, but we are still fighting.

Leave a comment

Okay, I’m on TikTok. Yeah, it’s sort of ridiculous, but I’m a writer trying to sell books and if you want to sell books these days you need to be on social media, as much as you can or as much as you can stomach. Thus, I’m on TikTok.

I don’t get a lot of traction, to be sure, don’t have a lot of followers and I never go viral. But sometimes I do get some good comments and back and forth, like on this one I posted earlier this week:

@paulvignaPoverty is not inevitable. The problem isn’t people. It’s not lack of resources. It’s the system. It’s the system we created. And the thing at the center of that system is money. I wrote The Almightier to explain how our attitudes about money got to be the way they are. It’s for sale now, available at libraries, who knows maybe you could borrow a copy from a buddy. I will say humbly that I think it explains our beliefs and myths around money better than any other book has. #fyp #booktok #money #inequality

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

“Poverty is a choice,” I say. But not a choice of the impoverished. Poverty is the result of the choice we as a collective society have made, about how to distribute resources. It’s basically just me riffing on one of the ideas in The Almightier. That we could feed, house, clothe, educate, and provide healthcare for every person on the planet, but we have an economic system that doesn’t care about that. And, of course, explaining why that is — which I admittedly don’t really do in the post — is the entire point of The Almightier. Somehow the video ended up getting into the feeds of some people who disagreed with it.

“I don’t grow food for free,” a person named fluffy farmer wrote.

“It is the result of personal choice,” another said, talking about poverty.

One argued that the U.S. has been giving out aid for decades and it hasn’t made any difference. Another told me to write a check to the government and tell them what I want it used for.

“Nobody became homeless because they didn’t do drugs,” yet another said.

“Man must work for his food,” another wrote.

This, I thought, was actually is great. That’s exactly what I want. There isn’t much use in me talking to people who already agree with me. What I want is to try and change people’s minds who don’t agree with me. My greatest hope for The Almightier, to be honest, was that it would get picked up on the political right, that I’d have a chance to reach people, some people, on both sides of the divide. Because the thing I’m talking about really does exist beyond political divides. We have made money our religion, and both sides worship it.

Leave a comment

And that money worship is what keeps us from seeing the reality of our circumstances. We already grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and could grow even more. There are vast, fertile swaths of the Democratic Republic of Congo and India that aren’t being tapped. We have ways to grow food with hydroponics and some really sci-fi looking methods. Food scarcity is not an issue. We could clothe everybody. There are mountains of unworn clothes polluting poor nations, where the fast-clothing companies just dump them. We could easily build enough housing; the housing shortage has nothing to do with the resources but is a result of policies. We already in theory provide education to every child; I think we could do it a lot better, and a lot better for kids who don’t live in rich towns, but we do already do it. We ostensibly offer healthcare to everybody. The services exist, we just price too many people out of accessing them. We could generate enough electricity. We could generate enough electricity with fossil fuels or renewables.

Scarcity is not an issue. It just isn’t. And yet, every day I walk by people on my way to work who are indigent, who are homeless, who are begging for money. And it takes some real mental gymnastics to just ignore those people. Like, you really have to compartmentalize your brain to just walk past them, to ignore them. I’m not saying this to call out others; I’m talking about myself. I live in this world, and I work for a salary, and I have access to credit, and I live a fairly comfortable life. It’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong, and I have plenty of stresses and anxieties. But I’m not begging on a street. And you have to really, really wall yourself off from those people to not think about them, to not feel for them, to not want to do anything but walk by and maybe toss a quarter in the battered paper cup they’re holding out. You have to believe in the power of money. And we do. I do, too. I’m not holding myself out.

Well, all that back and forth on my post must have triggered something within the algorithm, because it served me up this post, of Tupac Shakur in 1992 making exactly the same point, only much more passionately and eloquently:

@3.37aem“Even if you earned it, you still owe.” #tupac #billionaires #capitalism #fyp #tupacshakur

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

That is a young man who has come into what was probably a fortune, saw himself elevated above most of the rest of humanity, and didn’t understand why. And you can see how much he’s struggling with it, on a very visceral gut level. You can see that he just does not understand the system that allows the inequality to exist. I don’t mean that to disparage Tupac. Most of us don’t get it. I didn’t get it for most of my life. All of us can see it, it’s impossible not to see it, and some of us are bothered by it, some try to do something about it. But very few understand it. And that’s what makes it so hard to fix.

Part of the problem as I see it, a big part of it, is our circumstances don’t match our economics. Maybe 5,000 years ago, or even six hundred years ago, you needed a system that distributed scarce resources as best you could. And the mechanism people came up with to decide who gets those is money. But then pursuing money became the end in itself and the real goal, of distributing resources among a large group of people, became forgotten. And now we are in a situation where there are more than enough resources for everybody but we don’t talk about that because we have turned the pursuit of wealth into our highest virtue. The bigger part of the problem is making people understand that nobody’s success, nobody’s failure, is a result of only their own efforts. You, me, Elon Musk, all of us owe people who’ve directly helped us along the way, and people who have indirectly helped us by crafting this world we live in. None of us would last long without the safety net that is society itself. Even Albert Einstein would’ve just been a slightly cleverer monkey without the whole of society educating and nurturing him. None of us make it on our own. None of us.

“Even if you earned it, you still owe,” Tupac says in the video. And that is the real heart of the matter. The problem is we’ve stopped teaching people that.

Subscribe now

(Editor’s note (well, me’s note)): This newsletter is totally separate from my work at American Banker. Everything here is my own opinion. If you want to check out my Bank Notes column, it’s here (subscription required). Also, I am not the Paul Vigna who writes about wine. That’s the other Paul Vigna. His newsletter is here.)

In the early 1700s there was this Scotsman named John Law who went to France and convinced the French that he had this super-awesome plan to turn the Mississippi valley into this incredible economic engine. Law had spent time in Amsterdam, which at the time was a leading economic power and which seemed to have mastered the art of turning money into power. Law convinced the French he had learned this one incredible trick, and could apply it to the land they held in the new world. The incredible trick is to raise money by issuing securities against whatever enterprise you’re trying to build. It is essentially the model for all businesses today, whether they are profitable, cash-generating operations or failures or frauds. Everybody from Henry Ford to Charles Ponzi to Elon Musk has followed this blueprint. That’s why it’s funny when we treat businessmen as visionaries. All of them are just following plans laid down by others centuries before they were born. They all owe John Law.

Anyhow, the French, and especially King Louie (the VX) and his extremely greedy court, were all about this new plan and gave Law everything he needed. He formed a company, called Compagnie des Indes, in 1716 and was granted the exclusive rights to developed the lands around the Mississippi claimed by France. I wrote about Law and his scheme in chapter nine of The Almightier.

For a few years, it all seemed to be working great. Law’s Compagnie des Indes had a monopoly on the French lands in the new world. The company saw the price of its shares rise 3,500% in just a few years. He formed other companies on the success of that one. He formed a bank that would take in gold, issue currency based on it, and then lend out the gold. This private bank essentially became France’s national bank. Law hatched plans to issue more debt and securities in the company’s name that would be used to pay off the national debt, which had soared under the bloated mismanagement of the previous King Louie (the XIV). He was named the controller general of finances, sort of the equivalent of Treasury secretary, or Fed chair. Or both, combined. He had an extreme amount of power and wealth. He was the richest man in Europe. On paper.

Share

Everybody wanted a piece of this thing. Demand for French debt went stratospheric. The French issued more currency, used to buy more shares of Compagnie des Indes. The demand spilled into markets outside France as well. People everywhere were getting fantastically, impossibly rich. There were so many people with so much paper wealth, more wealth spread more widely than anybody in Europe had ever seen. They actually had to coin a new word to describe this new class of wealthy: millionaire.

I was thinking about John Law after all the breathless coverage of another new class of wealthy, a class that comprises exactly one person. Yeah, Elon Musk floated shares of his gee-whiz, kitbashed, AI-social-media-internet-service-space-rocket company SpaceX at such an insane valuation that he now exists at a level of wealth that nobody has ever seen before. We’ve gone from millionaires to billionaires, and now we have a trillionaire. On paper.

I could spend a day going through all of SpaceX’s financials and showing what a house of cards it is, but many others have already done that, and it doesn’t really matter. Nobody who’s buying SpaceX shares is looking at it rationally. They can’t be, or they wouldn’t be buying it. What I want to do is draw a parallel between Musk and Law, because there seems to be a connection there.

Leave a comment

Law’s Compagnie des Indes wasn’t a bad idea. The Mississippi valley is of course loaded with natural resources and opportunities to build profitable businesses and get into trading all kinds of things. It’s not like Law went to the French with some idea completely divorced from reality. And like Law, Musk’s SpaceX and Musk’s other businesses have some grounding in a good idea. Electric cars are a good idea. Reusable rockets are a good idea. Providing internet services is a good idea. I don’t know that social media is a good idea anymore, but whatever.

But none of those things are what make Musk’s companies so valuable. Tesla does not trade on its fundamentals, and SpaceX is closer to Mars, figuratively and literally, really, than it is to its fundamentals. No, both those companies’ valuations are tied directly to the cult of personality that surrounds Elon Musk, and I suspect Elon Musk knows that. His real talent, like some other people these days, is selling himself. He’s been incredibly good at it. I mean, you should not be able to go to Wall Street, say something as half-cocked insane as “I’m going to build an Austin on Mars” and raise dollar one. But, here we are.

And, of course, the AI fever dreams. Like everybody else in Silicon Valley, Musk is trying to capitalize off the AI building craze. The industry is spending roughly $1 trillion a year to buy chips and train AI bots and build data centers and even nuclear reactors if they need to. It is an absolute feeding frenzy. Forget questions about whether super-intelligent AI will take all our jobs or wipe out the human race or whatever. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you’re spending trillions you’re going to have to generate an insane amount of revenue to make good on the capital expenditures. Spoiler alert: they’re not. I wrote about this a bit over at American Banker last week (spoiler alert: sub required).

Musk and Sam Altman and all the rest aren’t selling business realities, they are selling fantasies. And they are really good at it. John Law was really good at this, too. For a while. If you can convince enough people to buy into your hyperbole, you can float an entire nation’s economy. But the reality always, always become unavoidable, eventually. By 1720, the business fundamentals of the Compagnie des Indes and Law’s other businesses were in such shoddy condition that the entire scheme collapsed. The French boom became a bust, the economy collapsed, and Law fled the country. He died a few years later, in 1729, impoverished. The world’s first famous millionaire became a nothingaire.

Subscribe now

The blowback and acrimony lasted for decades. In his Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued forcefully that modern man was the barbarian, the idea that some were by rights entitled to what should belong to all was an abhorrent philosophy that resulted in most of the world’s ills. “As the most powerful or the most miserable considered their might or misery as a kind of right to the possessions of others, equivalent, in their opinion, to that of property, the destruction of equality was attended by the most terrible disorders,” he wrote.

1720 as a terrible disorder. 1929 was a terrible disorder. 2008 was a terrible disorder. Are we headed for another one? I mean, if I could answer that question I’d be running a hedge fund in Greenwich (well, if I could answer that question, and had a ton of capital, and the time to wait it out). But history sure makes a strong case that we are, and that the people we are currently venerating for their fantastic wealth are leading us there.

Money isn’t real.

I mean, it isn’t real in the way a tree is real. Or a stone, or a blade of grass. A lake or a mountain. Those things all have an existence independent of our awareness of them, and they all adhere to the laws of physics. You can cut a tree down, but you can’t make a tree not exist. Even things that don’t exist in nature, a house or a car, say, are comprised of things that do exist in nature. A car isn’t really a thing on its own so much as it’s a very clever amalgamation of various natural resources.

Money isn’t like that. Money doesn’t grow in a field. It doesn’t float in a tidal pool. It doesn’t cling to the side of a mountain. Money doesn’t grow on trees because money doesn’t grow anywhere. It doesn’t exist. It is a system, a thing people made up thousands of years ago to help them keep track of and distribute resources as the first large-scale city states were emerging.

Okay, great, who cares? Does that effect you at all today? Well, yeah, I think it does. I think a big problem in our world today is that nobody understands what money actually is, what it isn’t, and why it was created in the first place and how it’s come to be misused. That was the point of the book I published last summer, The Almightier, and all that is what I’ll be talking about tomorrow at 11:45 a.m. ET with Al Lewis on a livestream on his Business Blunders Substack. Al is a long-time business columnist who’s seen everything (including me; we worked together for several years at The Wall Street Journal.) So I’ll be interested to see what in the book struck a nerve with him and why.

It should be a lot of fun and hopefully enlightening, so grab you lunch and join us.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I have a theory about why capitalism works. Not how it works — there are scores of books and essays and college courses that will explain that — but why. What thing about capitalism was different that made it such a success. I talked about this in The Almightier, but I didn’t really present it as a working theory. Most explanations about why capitalism work focus broadly around two things, efficiency and freedom. While capitalism is a system that prizes efficiency, I don’t think that’s it. Freedom gets closer to it, but freedom as an idea really white-washes the thing I’m going to talk about.

If I had to guess, I’d guess that most people think capitalism started with Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations. But you have to go back centuries further, to the decades after the Black Death, to really understand how capitalism started and why it worked.

The economics of Europe, the system of feudalism, were broken by the Black Death, the plague that swept across Europe beginning in 1347. The plague killed so many, fields lay fallow. Famine followed. Businesses disappeared. A city like Florence, with thriving commercial sector, was under intense strain. The surviving workers realized they had leverage, and they used it. The demanded better conditions. They demanded better pay. They demanded representation. And they stopped working when they didn’t get it.

One of the first and most successful worker protests, the Ciompi Revolt, occurred in 1378 in Florence. A ruling oligarchy of powerful families ran the city government, with representation of the workers coming from major and minor guilds. There were still other low-rung workers who weren’t represented by any guild at all. The “ciompi” were mainly wool workers from the lowest rung of society, the popolo minute, literally the “little people.” The wool industry was huge in Florence; it employed almost a third of city workers. The striking workers were so effective, they managed to take control of the city government and even hold it for a few years (they were helped by one influential elite: Salvestro de’ Medici; decades later, this connection to the little people would aid one of his descendants.) The city’s ruling families eventually connived their way back into control but it was clear the economic forces that had been in place for centuries were unraveling. People were tired of a system that preached greed and wealth for the nobility and the church but turned hypocritical when it came to the commoners. They wanted something new, and when it came it transform Europe and eventually the entire world.

The economic friction was festering even before the plague. The population was booming, putting pressure on an economic model that had been stagnant for centuries. The nobility was getting wealthier, opening a wider gap between themselves and the commoners. The lower classes had been agitating for better conditions before the plague, and there had been a few, isolated protests. After the plague, when conditions became even more dire and stratified, the popular revolts increased. There were attempts to stem this tide, of course. In England in 1351, the government passed an exhaustive law called the Statute of Laborers, which set wage caps on a host of occupations. The goal was to keep worker pay at its pre-plague levels. There were similar attempts across Europe. But they were swimming way against the tide.

There was an idea floating around Florence in the early 1400s. Maybe it was in some other places, too, but definitely Florence, which at the time was a major industrial center on the Italian peninsula. And one of the ruling families there were the de’ Medici. Anyhow, my theory centers around Cosimo de’ Medici (if you’ve already read The Almightier, you know where this is going), who really is one of the most fascinating people in 15th century Europe. Cosimo took his family bank, which was already successful, and leveraged it to become Florence’s absolute and undeclared ruler and one of the most powerful men in Europe, “a king in all but name.” The Medici were so successful and so powerful — they did eventually achieve nobility, they did eventually land two of the family in the papacy — that it seems like they invented banking. But they didn’t. To be sure, they were very good bankers, especially Cosimo. But the tools they leveraged — letters of credit, the branch banking system, double-entry bookkeeping — all existed before them. And there was one other tool Cosimo leveraged, to a degree nobody else before him had. But it’s the only one that doesn’t get talked about it.

In the 1420s, a close friend of Cosimo’s named Poggio Bracciolini wrote a dialogue called On Avarice (Da avaritia in the original Latin). It was done in the old style, a conversation between four people debating avarice. Three of them are adamant that avarice is the worst of the worst, the most venal of sins, the root of all sins, in fact. But one of them, a guy named Antonio, takes the opposite side of the debate. He argues that avarice is not actually a sin, that in fact it is the avaricious man who brings prosperity (if you’ve listened to any of the debates around Zohran Mamdani’s “we don’t need billionaires” line, you know exactly where this is going). I’m just going to quote from the book:

Then, Antonio speaks, and this is where we can see the strand of thought that would over the centuries become an overpowering force in our world. “Avarice, sometimes, is beneficial,” Antonio says. He says that every single thing people do for work, every professional undertaking, is done for money. He rattles off a long list of occupations, even priests. In fact, not only do priests work for money, he says, they work as priests because they expect to have the least amount of work to do in order to get the most money. They are the worst hypocrites, he says. If all those people were to stop working for money, Antonio says, society itself would come to a grinding halt. “Everything is done for money, that is, because of avarice.”

In fact, he says, avarice itself is what gives rise to civilization in the first place. What is avarice except the desire for more than just the bare necessities? If nobody wanted any more than the bare necessities, everybody would be a subsistence farmer living on their own. There’d be no brotherhood of man, there’d be no reason for anybody to work with or help anybody else or form any kinds of societal bonds. Charity would disappear. For one thing, nobody would have anything to spare for anybody else; they wouldn’t be able to help each other. There’d also be no way to prepare for the future, and to build up any kind of storage or defense against calamity.

Forget about the great cities or the small towns. They wouldn’t exist. There’d be no churches, or art, or commerce. We need avarice, he says. We need it to build our world. “If you think that the avaricious ought to be censured, then the whole world should be censured, and all mankind should change its ways and adopt other rules for living.” The rich should not be condemned for their wealth, he says, but celebrated for it. For it is they, he says, who actually have something to give to the needy, the indigent. It’s they who are in a position to help cities build their great works, the big halls and churches. “It is a custom established by common use and practiced from the very beginning of the world that we strive more for our own good than that of the community,” Antonio says.

Poggio and Cosimo were very good friends. They would take trips together, and Cosimo financially supported Poggio on his myriad trips around Europe looking for old Greek and Roman manuscripts (this is actually what Poggio is today primarily remembered for; he was instrumental in reintroducing the classic world to Medieval Europe.) But even if they weren’t, the ethos Poggio is describing here is exactly the one that Cosimo used in his business and life, it is the one that made him such a success.

Leave a comment

Cosimo was a major financial benefactor to a ton of people inside and outside Florence; artists, architects, merchants, clergy, intellectuals like Poggio. Cosimo used his fortune to finance a ton of projects, churches, libraries, monasteries. He was essentially a one-man public-works program. And he built up a base of support that kept him running Florence for 30 years. And even this isn’t what was so radical. This ethos basically boils down to “greed is good,” that you can indulge your greed, get rich, and give back some portion to the wider community. In the book I call it the ethos of beneficial greed. And yes, the entire debate today around taxing billionaires is an echo of this ethos.

No, what made this ethos truly radical, what makes it the foundation of capitalism, is this: Cosimo wasn’t a noble. He was a commoner. When I was writing The Almightier one hypocrisy kept cropping up: philosophers would condemn greed, clergy would condemn greed, lawmakers would outlaw usury, but all of it still existed. The rich and powerful indulged their greed liberally throughout history. The Romans banned usury, and all the senators just found people to use as fronts while their engaged in usury. The church banned usury, and the church said greed was a sin, and it seemed like nobody was listening. Or rather, nobody with power was listening. Kings, princes, dukes, royals, clergymen — the people who held power in Europe — were all greedy, were all avaricious. It was only the commoners who were supposed to listen to church teaching. It was only the commoners who were supposed to accept being poor and impoverished, who weren’t supposed to want or expect anything for themselves. God would provide, or so they were told.

Cosimo changed that. Cosimo was a commoner who lived in a castle. Cosimo was a commoner who rose to power and wealth. Cosimo was a commoner who indulged his greed and got rich. And his elder relative who’d been so instrumental in the Ciompi Revolt gave Cosimo street cred. He was popular with the people. And he was doing this as attitudes were changing, as this ethos that Poggio had written about was becoming acceptable. Even the archbishop of Florence was talking about it in his sermons. The ethos of beneficial greed was becoming a thing, not among the nobles, but among the regular folk, and Cosimo was its face.

For the first time in maybe a thousand years what the commoners of Europe saw, the impoverished who were told never to expect more than scraps, never to want more than to be a vassal, was that they could indulge their desires, it was acceptable to want more, it was acceptable to work and accrue wealth in this world rather than just praying for it in the next. What Cosimo showed the people of Europe was that greed, for lack of a better word, was good. And everything changed after that.

And that, my friends, is the foundation of modern capitalism. Greed isn’t some weird byproduct of capitalism. Greed isn’t some unfortunate outcome. Greed is capitalism. The entire point of the model of capitalism is that anybody can be greedy; indeed, that everybody should be greedy. Yes, this was all dryly put into a quasi-scientific framework by Adam Smith, but trying to fit economics into some scientific framing hides what it really is that makes it work. The real problem is that we have built up an entire belief system around capitalism that not only buries this reality but doesn’t ever acknowledge it. And if you can’t see the foundation of the system you’re using, you can’t ever really understand that system, or why it works, or how you can make it better. Our biggest problem today is that the people in charge of this system fundamentally do not understand what makes it work.

Subscribe now

Magatte Wade is somebody I follow on Substack. Her newsletter is Africa’s Bright Future newsletter and she evangelizes capitalism as a solution for African economies, and in case that sounds pejorative, I don’t mean it to be. I really like what she writes and the lens she brings to the subject of African economies (and in case that sounds condescending, coming from a white male in the U.S., I don’t mean it to be; I am genuinely fascinated by the growth potential of a continent with 1.5 billion people, a very young population, and vast natural resources.)

But she wrote something the other day about capitalism I thought worth replying to, and I figure it’s also worth reprinting here. This is what she wrote:

This was my reply:

I have a lot of respect for you and what you’re trying to do, Magatte, which is why I follow you. But I think you’re brushing away capitalism flaws here, and that is dangerous. For all the good capitalism has done, it is not perfect and we all should be honest about that. Don’t just wave a hand and call it envy.

I agree that greed is part of human nature, though I acknowledge also the point is debatable. But, people don’t confuse greed with capitalism. Greed is quite literally the cornerstone of capitalism. What we call capitalism today emerged in 15th century Florence and its animating idea was flat-out the argument that greed is good. (I wrote a book about this called The Almightier if anybody wants to explore that.)

Making greed, the idea that people should be out for themselves, the foundation of an economic system has resulted in some profound, real damage. American slavery was an outgrowth of this. Colonialism was an outgrowth of this. I could go on, but you get the idea.

The other problem is this system is built around the pursuit of an imaginary thing. Money doesn’t exist objectively, it’s something we created. It’s really just an accounting system, a way to keep track of and distribute resources. But we’ve turned it into a totem, and we’ve made possessing it our highest virtue. That results in a profoundly warped economic system. And it’s unnecessary. A core tenant of capitalism is resource scarcity, that we need to compete for limited resources. But there is no resource scarcity. As a human society, we have all the resources to provide the basic necessities of life to every person on the planet. That should be the prime goal of our economics, but it’s not. It’s the pursuit of wealth.

Leave a comment

I think a better economics would focus on people helping people rather people helping themselves. That idea exists across cultures — harambe in Swahili, which means “pull together.” Sisi kwa sisi, “us for us.” It’s in Greek word sunergos, which means work together. Sunergos is the root of the word synergy.

I’m not saying we should have an economic system that doesn’t reward hard work and innovation. We should! But the centerpiece of our economics, the animating principle, should be about people helping people. Our brains are big enough to hold both concepts, and balancing both will give us the best of capitalism without the painful consequences of a system that pits people against each other.

Thanks for letting me hijack your post, Magatte. Like I said, I respect what you do and are trying to build. Just wanted to give you something else to think about.

Peace.

If you’ve already read The Almightier, some of that will sound familiar. But I think it might be worth writing an essay explaining exactly how capitalism got started, its animating principle, and how a return to that principle could save capitalism. Maybe save isn’t the right word. Improve it. Turn it away from its own worst impulses. Make it not such a damaging thing to so many people.

Yeah, maybe that’s what I’ll do next.

Subscribe now

If you read the business press you’ve seen people extoll the virtues of the resilient consumer. Sure, consumer sentiment is literally the worst on record, but consumer spending is..say it with me now…resilient. The resilient consumer has that can-do spirit that keeps the economy humming, that pushes corporate profits to fresh records. God bless the resilient consumer.

Just last week Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s economic council, was on Fox Business crowing about record credit-card spending (skip ahead to about the 5:10 mark if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.) “The consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders,” he said. “Credit-card spending is through the roof. They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else, too.”

Consumer credit-card spending is indeed through the roof. Consumer credit-card debt at the large banks was at just about $1 trillion at the end of last year, according to the St. Louis Fed’s Fred database (absolutely one of the best free sources of data out there.) That’s up from about $600 billion in 2021. That is a sharp increase. Hell, consumer debt overall is rising sharply. It hit nearly $19 trillion last year, up by about half since 2013 (most of it is mortgage debt, but still). Those are all record highs.

In other words, U.S. consumers have never been deeper in debt.

The fancy, market word for debt is liquidity. It’s spending power sloshing around. People use it to buy houses — and everything else apparently — companies use it to fuel expansions, Wall Street uses it to fund exotic trading strategies. Everybody loves liquidity.

But let me be clear: consumers going into record debt levels to cover spending is not a good thing, no matter who tries to pass it off as such. We have created a world where most people cannot live without debt. Yes, you get paid a salary in cash, but you survive on credit. Credit-card loans and auto loans and tuition loans and home loans and second loans on your loaned homes. You don’t have a choice. The consumer is not resilient. The consumer is like a foie gras duck, liquidity being poured down his beak until his stomach is set to explode. I wouldn’t crow about that.

Leave a comment

But that unhealthy trend is absolutely what drives the economy. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet, but I am the managing editor over at American Banker. Started in December. One of the things I’m doing over there has become a daily column we call Bank Notes. Earlier this week I wrote about this myth of the resilient consumer. “The degree to which consumers are taking on more credit is the real driver of the economy, not some ballyhooed resiliency and determination to spend,” I wrote (yes, I’m quoting myself.)

That’s half of it. The other half that keeps consumer spending is advertising. An endless, endless torrent of propaganda and marketing. If you watch TV or streaming services, you get three minutes of ads every eight minutes. If you’re on TikTok, every third or fourth swipe brings up an ad; hell, half the the time the people you’re watching are selling something. Facebook lately feels like it feeds me more ads than posts from people I follow. Read a newspaper (anybody do this anymore?), and you get fed ads. Ads, ads, ads, constantly. It’s as if the foie gras duck was strapped into a chair like the guy in Clockwork Orange, his eyes propped open, and forced to watch ad after ad after ad.

All that advertising conditions people to spend. The liquidity that comes with debt gives us the means. And the cycle just goes on and on, whether or not it’s good for people, whether or not they can really afford it. If you want to know why people are in such lousy moods these days, well, sure it’s (waves hands) all that stuff, but it’s also because we’ve been turned into spending machines against our better judgement.

@paulvignaWelcome to Times Square Talks! I may do more of these, I like the idea of it. Today I am explaining the myth of the “resilient consumer,” what really drives the economy, and why it’s not healthy. It’s a big topic and I’ll have more to say, but just wanted to get this initial idea out there. And if you want to learn more, check out my book “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin” from @St. Martin’s Press. #money #finance #newyork

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

This is not a healthy situation, and it is not a healthy economy. I was talking about this on TikTok while I was walking through Times Square, a canyon of advertising that symbolizes the kind of constant ad pressure people live with. There is a way out from all this, but it would take a major cultural shift. I’ll write about that later. For now, I just want you to see the tortured duck that is the “resilient” American consumer.

Subscribe now

Did you read the long essay in the New York Times by the Substack writer Jasmine Sun? The gist of it is summed up in the opening line: “Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it.” The shorter summary is people in Silicon Valley understand that AI is going to undermine the economy to the point where the economy will cave in, but they don’t know how to stop it. The doom is like a little demon on their shoulders, whispering famine.

They could all, of course, quit their jobs and projects but the prospect of fantastic wealth is another little demon on their other shoulder, whispering fortune. You know, of course, which demon they are listening to.

There are two main schools of thought on this. One is that the AI threat is real, the other is that AI will be like every other technology, causing some disruption and chaos but ultimately leading to a better economy and society. I think there is some truth to both schools of thought. I think the threat is AI is very real, for two reasons: the technology itself and our sclerotic political leadership. AI is already replacing jobs, across a number of industries. It doesn’t have to replace 100% of the jobs for the economy to crater. At the height of the financial crisis — when half a million people a month were getting laid off — unemployment hit 10%. At the nadir of the early ‘80s recession it was 11%. Unemployment at the height of the pandemic hit 15% (very briefly). At the height of the Great Depression, it is estimated that 25% of the work force was unemployed.

In March, Jack Dorsey fired 40% of the workers at his company Block. AI had simply made them redundant, he said, and he warned that within a year or so every other CEO would realize the same thing. I wasn’t a math major, but I know that 40% is higher than 25%, or 10%. So yes I think there is a very real chance that AI could spark an economic crisis, soon. And that’s a big problem for our politicians. Neither party in the U.S. is even remotely prepared to handle a crisis of AI taking away so many jobs that an economy built around an old economic model craters. The Democrat’s ideas are all from the 1930s; the Republican’s ideas are all from the 1890s. Neither party is prepared for today. But today is coming.

And it’s not just the problems of AI. The economic model has been slowly cratering for at least half a century. In Sun’s essay she noted that some people are worried about AI resulting in a permanent underclass, to which one of the commenters to the piece scoffed. “We have had a permanent underclass for a very long time.” We have been propping it up with debt, an ever growing piles of IOUs that have covered up the fact that our economic model is broken. The federal government owes $39 trillion. States owe almost $4 trillion. Corporations have $14 trillion in debt. Households owe another $19 trillion. Those numbers are well north of 100% of our total GDP (about $31 trillion). There is no way to circle that square. The only thing that is keeping this economy afloat is not the extreme amounts being spent on new data centers. It is our own blind faith in the economic model.

That faith will be pulverized once AI starts really taking a hatchet to the jobs market. Imagine a reality where 25-30% of the work force gets jettisoned from their jobs in a very short amount of time, a year or so. And our politicians are, well, who we have now. Remember the response to Covid? To the financial crisis? Yeah, it’d be that again. Politicians who have no capability of handling a crisis, basically handing it off to the Fed, which creates trillions worth of new credit to paper over the fact that the economic model is broken. It worked in 2008, it worked in 2020. Will it work again? I dunno. Maybe. Maybe not.

But at some point that game will end. The economic crises in the early 18th century in France and England forced them to adopt economic policies that slowly stagnated their economies and led decades later to both the American and French revolutions. You can put off paying the bill, but it eventually comes due. It will come due again. AI might end up just being the thing that brings the whole rickety thing crashing down.

Leave a comment

Or, you can acknowledge that the “bill” is part of a model that is hopelessly broken, and make something better. That is what we need to do now. We need an entirely new economic model based on the reality of our lives in the 21st century. If AI and humanoid robots and other forms of automation lead to a situation where most people do not need to work, we need an economy built around that reality. The problem with all the AI handwringing is that we’re taking a new technology and trying to force it into an outdated economic model. That is going to cause nothing but pain and chaos and anguish, and probably violence and riots and murders and revolution.

Our old economic model revolved around money and the pursuit of wealth. The new economic must have people’s welfare as the pole around which it revolves. The new economic model should revolve around a couple of core truths: we live in a world where scarcity is not an issue. There is enough food, housing, clothing, healthcare, and education to go around. Every human being has a right to those things. The only question of our economics is how to efficiently distribute them. We used to rely on money to do that. We probably will still have to rely on money, but as a representation of people’s rights, not their ability to work. That is itself is a massive cultural shift, and I’m not even sure how you get people to start seeing it that way. My solution was to write a book, but it will take way more than just one book.

Of course, one way to get people to start seeing it that way is to have a crisis hit. People say “Oh, the AI bots are going to take all our jobs,” and I say, when? Let the bots and humanoid robots take all the jobs! That would be fantastic. People could be released from the drudgery of day labor to pursue lives of true meaning. How fantastic does that sound? (To be clear, I get that for many people, their jobs do give their lives meaning; I’m one of them. Even if AI took my job, I’d still be writing.) Automation can be a great thing, if we can build a new economic model that reflects our new realities.

This has to be the goal. Not the crisis, the shift in how we see economics, how we see the entire point of society. Do not listen to anybody who does not understand this or at least.

Subscribe now

I remember back when I was a kid one time, I was with a bunch of my cousins and we were just talking and chittering the way kids do, and I guess we were saying “like” a lot. As in, “I was like…” whatever. “He was like…” whatever. I don’t remember what we were saying. I just know we were saying “like” a lot, because my father came over and starting giving us a hard time about how much we were saying “like.”

My dad was one of the mellowest men you’d ever meet in your life, when I say a hard time, it was the most chill hard time you can imagine. (Also, it’s entirely bizarre-world to me to realize now that everything my father said and did when I was a kid he did when he was younger than I am now.) I think he was genuinely puzzled why were using the word like the way were; it clearly wasn’t something he’d been raised with.

If we were repeating something we’d heard somebody say, he said, we shouldn’t say “he was like,” we should say “he said.” It was really just basic grammar he was trying to teach us, but it underscored something that was much bigger.

Why do we say “like” so much? I blame television, but not for the reason you think.

In the early ‘80s using “like” was pretty much a short-hand for dumb people (one of the reasons my father was trying to get us away from using it.) Using like and a handful of other words — gnarly, tubular, radical, I don’t know there’s a few others — that largely didn’t survive the ‘80s were enough to mark you as a bubble-headed idiot. But unlike gnarly and tubular, “like” has become such a part of the lexicon it’s not even derided anymore. You can hear people who are absolutely viewed as experts and authorities use it as a completely normal expression.

What’s, like, the deal?

Leave a comment

The deal, I think, is television. My father’s generation, the baby boomers, were the first generation to be raised with televisions in the house, but they weren’t universal and they weren’t ubiquitous until maybe the late ‘50s or ‘60s. Which means most people my parent’s age weren’t raised around televisions. I was. My earliest memory, the very first thing I can remember, is an image in my head of my father, sitting in a chair in our living room, watching television. In my head, the POV is from the floor, I’m looking up at him in the chair. I may have still been in a crib for all I know.

My point is that I was raised with television as ubiquitous. So was everybody I know. I’d bet that I’ve watched at least some television most every day of my life, except for a couple years in my 30s when I gave up TV. And if there was something I really wanted to watch I went over to my mom’s house, or my aunt’s, or a friend’s. And even when I “gave up” TV, I did actually still have a TV. It was an old 1960s GE portable that was my father’s; for all I know, it’s the TV he was watching in that image in my head. You couldn’t watch TV on it normally; it took about five minutes to warm up, and it only got over-the-air reception (on Sept. 11, for instance, after the towers fell, it didn’t work. Because the TV antenna for the entire area was the one on top of the World Trade Center.) But it worked up until 2005; the last thing I watched on it was Pope John Paul II’s funeral.

And I know my parent’s generation was raised with a visual communications medium, as well, movies. But even that was different. You went to a movie theater, you sat there for a couple hours, and you went home. TV is on in the house constantly. We have our TV on pretty much all day, and most of the time we’re not even watching anything. I’ll have it on when I’m working. It’s on because I’ve become so used to it being on that it’s being off feels weird.

TV of course is primarily a visual communication medium. Oh, sure, there are scripts for all the shows, but you don’t see words, you see images. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. Decade after decade. And, eventually, after watching decades of moving images, you start to express yourself in moving images. So if you are having a conversation with somebody, and later you’re talking about that conversation with another person, you are not going to say, “So Sally said…” You are going to say “So Sally was like…,” exactly the thing my father tried to get us not to do. And not only are you are going to not only relate what Sally said, you are going to imitate how Sally said it. Television has changed how we talk to each other. We express ourselves visually now.

Subscribe now

To be sure, this is a half-baked theory for which I have done absolutely no research. It’s just something I’ve thought from time to time. But I think it is directionally true, and I think the trend is only going to increase. We express ourselves visually. Social media has gone from primarily a text-based medium, the early days of Twitter and Facebook, to one that is primarily visual, Instagram and TikTok. And while that is mainly a result of the falling prices of hardware that make it affordable to host and store video, it’s also a result of what I’m talking about.

Substack is to a degree a response to this trend, but it’s spitting in the wind. Substack has something like 50 million users, and that’s fine. TikTok has somewhere near 2 billion. And that isn’t going to change, no matter how much people like me, people who think and express themselves primarily through words, try (for the record, I’m also on TikTok and enjoy it; I did, after all, growing up in the visual age). Visual mediums are dominant now. I’m not saying print is dead. I’m saying print is in the minority. And the common usage of like is an example of that change. And that’s, like, okay.

In 33 AD in Jerusalem a man the world knows as Jesus was executed by the local Romans. The story we’ve been told for 2,000 years is that the whole thing was part of a divine plan. That God himself was the father of Jesus, and God ordained that his only son would be murdered on behalf of humanity. And on Easter, the Christian world celebrates the story of his death and resurrection.

But — and I understand this will be insulting to some of you — that story isn’t true. It can’t be. Gods aren’t real. They are the products of ancient myths. If you want to argue that there is some kind of energy source to the universe, some glue that holds it all together, some sort of figurative godhead, I’m on board with that. I get it, and I actually agree with it. But that’s very different from arguing there is a supernatural deity that controls the universe.

The problem with the story of Jesus is that we usually get hung up on this debate, “Is Jesus God?” or some such. It’s the wrong question. The question is, how’d people come to see Jesus as a god in the first place? I started answering that in Friday’s post. Today I want to look at this related question: did Jesus do something that led people to see him as a god? The answer to that question is yes, you may be surprised to hear me say. But it isn’t what you think, and what it is has something very direct and important to say to us today.

I was raised with the Gospel stories of Jesus, and for a long time I believed them. There is one huge problem with them, though, that didn’t become evident to me until my adulthood: God doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe that you’re probably not going to like the rest of this essay, but its truth doesn’t rely upon your belief. God doesn’t exist. No gods exist. God is a myth, a story people told each other back when they didn’t understand what the world was and how it operated. The idea of gods is deeply, deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. They could 100,000 years old. But that doesn’t change the fact the Hebrew god, as well as every other culture’s gods, were myths, not reality. The man that history knows as Jesus, therefore, could not have been a god. He was a mortal man, just like all the rest of us.

But, that doesn’t mean his story doesn’t have any significance. Indeed, part of those old cultures was that god-cults grew up around important people. Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, kings and emperors going back to Mesopotamia were all assumed to be gods, or the offspring of gods. And the man, not the god, the world knows as Jesus did in fact do something so radical, so incendiary, that people started to believe he was a king, and a god.

This is the story I told in my book The Almightier. It’s the story of a mortal man named Yeshua (his actual name; Jesus is a translation). This man was on a crusade to restore a very important part of Hebrew law, of his god’s law (just because I don’t believe in god doesn’t mean Yeshua didn’t; he did, passionately.) He led a crusade to restore this lost law, clashed directly with Jewish and Roman officials, took over the temple in Jerusalem, was arrested, and executed. There is really more to this than I can fully explain here; I highly recommending seeking out the book if you’re interested. You could even borrow it at the library if you don’t want to buy it.

Leave a comment

The story I tell in The Almightier does exist in the Gospels; it has to. The Gospels are the only record we have of the life of Yeshua. The problem is, they’re not objectively trustworthy. The people who wrote them didn’t know Yeshua; they lived decades after his death. And they weren’t trying to create an objective record; they were trying to seal the argument that he was a god. But if you strip out all the miraculous stories they told about Yeshua, stories of the sick cured and the dead brought back to life and visits from angels and gods, there is still a story there worth telling today.

One day in Nazareth a young man was invited to speak at his local synagogue. He had been going about the countryside preaching and saying some incendiary things, and the locals wanted to hear it for themselves. And what he did was to declare a “year of the Lord’s favor,” an obscure edict in the Mosaic code. This was so enraging that the locals dragged him out of the synagogue and were going to throw him off a cliff. What was so controversial about what he said?

The year of the lord’s favor (it’s in the Book of Leviticus) was a year when all debts were erased, and it was supposed to occur every 50 years. This was a Hebrew version of an ancient Mesopotamian practice called an amargi, which was a blanket declaration of debt relief from a king or emperor — and importantly, only a king. This was a power wielded only by rulers. Through the power of a god-king, all debts were magically erased. People sold into bondage were released to freedom. People who’d lost their farms had their farms restored. The amargis were a tool to offset a pernicious problem of compound interest: that debts had a habit of growing and growing until they crushed people and society. The nature of compound interest is that creditors pay interest on their interest, and loans end up actually getting bigger even as the debtors try to pay them off. The people who invented money — the Mesopotamians — first discovered this unintended consequence of loans, and developed a relief valve, an offset. The amargi. But the amargis were bitterly opposed by the creditor class, who fought for thousands of years to kill the practice. By the time of Yeshua, they were only a faint memory.

And that is what made his crusade so audacious and controversial. He was demanding something the wealthy hated, and he was demanding the use of a power that had historically been reserved for kings. And, eventually, he went beyond words. On Passover in 33 AD, Yeshua and his followers went to Jerusalem and took over the temple. Now, temples in the ancient world were not just religious buildings like they are today. There was no separation of church and state back then; the church was the state. And the temple was where all economic activity took place. Goods were bought and sold, contracts were entered into and mediated by temple officials, loans were made, money was exchanged. Temples were the economic center of the city state.

You all probably know the story of Yeshua throwing the money-changers out of the temple, but if you don’t know this background you don’t really understand the significance of what he did. When he and his followers ransacked the temple, they were upending the economic life of Jerusalem. Yeshua was actually executing an ad-hoc amargi, because once his followers swarmed in and took over the temple, you can imagine what happened to the money and the records.

The other context you probably never learned is this: At the time, 33 AD, the Roman Empire was embroiled in a financial crisis every bit as debilitating as our 2008 crisis. A banking firm named Maximus and Vibo was rendered insolvent when two of its customers, an importer in Alexandria and an inking concern in Tyre, went bankrupt. Maximus and Vibo’s insolvency sparked a chain reaction across the Roman financial system. Banks from the capital out to the hinterlands closed their doors in the face of bank runs. The entire credit system froze. And in one corner of the empire, at the exact same time, an itinerant preacher was demanding the restoration of a long-forgotten law that wiped out debt.

Kind of puts the story in a different light doesn’t it? Debt forgiveness was once a real thing, the creditor class killed it off, Yeshua tried to revive it, and got crucified for it. The Romans mockingly called him the king of the Jews — he did after all try to seize a power reserved for kings — his followers earnestly believed he was their king, and as was the custom back then a god. And through the centuries and millennia the god story was reinforced generation after generation and the debt story was buried and forgotten, to the point where you have to squint through the Gospels to see it.

But I think the story I’ve just told is closer to the truth. And sheds an important light on a long-forgotten but important tool for solving the problem of overwhelming, unpayable debts. Yeshua tried to revive that tool and failed. And for the next two thousand years we have been denied the most common-sense solution there is for solving the problem of overwhelming debt. Now, with the U.S. national debt growing exponentially, about to cross the $40 trillion mark, with global debt topping $300 trillion, we seem to be helplessly watching as overwhelming debt once again threatens to collapse society. There is a method for dealing with this, if we can wrap our heads around it. Bringing back debt forgiveness is the resurrection story we really need right now.

Subscribe now

When I was a little kid there was a British series about ancient Rome based on a novel by Robert Graves called I, Claudius that aired on PBS here in the states. Given that my family came from Italy, this was a big show in my house. We watched all of it. I was a kid and didn’t know much about the Roman Empire and didn’t really care, but back then you had one TV with 13 channels and no remote control — if you wanted to change the channel you walked over to the TV and turned a knob — so we invariably watched whatever our parents watched.

Most of it went right over my head to the point that I don’t remember anything about the series — except for one line. At one point, the young Claudius is talking to his mother, Livia (just to show how over my head this was, in the prior scene Livia was having sex with her grandson; I did not know that until I looked up the episode while writing this (in retrospect, I wonder if my parents actually let me watch all of this)). Livia is apparently dying, again right over my head, and she says to him “I want to be a goddess, Claudius.” I have no idea why that line resonated with me, but it did. But not in a serious way. For some reason, I thought it was funny. I’d say it my mother all the time; it became a running gag. “I want to be a goddess, Claudius.”

Subscribe now

Here it is:

I finally did come to know the context, not just about Livia and Claudius and his history, but why Livia would’ve said a thing like that in the first place. And it casts a light on how people thought back then, how they venerated leaders, and how one particular leader may have become subject to the biggest deification cult the world has ever seen.

(I know some of you will really disagree with this piece, might even find it offensive, especially as I’m putting it out on Good Friday; I respect that. I’m not going for outrage here, I’m just trying to explain the world as I see it, to myself as much as anybody else.)

Leave a comment

In Roman culture it was common to deify emperors and other nobles. Julius Caesar was deified. Claudius was deified. Livia wanted him to deify her because, once he became emperor, he had that power. An emperor, himself a god, could just go ahead and declare that other people were gods. This was a culture of pantheism and the Romans had tons of gods. Every house in fact had its own little household gods.

And this wasn’t just a Roman thing; they were actually late to the deification game. Deification was something that existed across the ancient world. It existed in Greece, it existed in Egypt, it existed in Mesopotamia, it occurred in Buddhism. It was really, really widespread. Kings and emperors were routinely assumed to be gods themselves, or the children of gods, or the handpicked gods’ representative on Earth. All of the power of the ruler came from this assumption (and it seems to me there is still a faint echo of this notion in how we look at and look to leaders today, though that’s a completely different essay). And some Christian scholars recognize this in their own religion, though they see the deification as revelation rather than mere cult worship.

Chapter two of The Almightier tells the story of a carpenter from Nazareth named Yeshua, who declares that a year of the Lord’s favor is at hand, takes over the temple in Jerusalem during Passover in 33 AD, and is executed by the Romans. Yeah, of course you know the story. The story I tell in The Almightier is broadly the same story I learned in CCD class when I was a kid (and I swear to you, I never knew what CCD stood for until I just looked it up; Confraternity of Christian Doctrine).

The key difference is I assume that Yeshua was not a god born man, but a man born man. That he was a mortal, and that something he did must have made him some kind of hero to some group of people, who started to deify him the way people did other rulers and leaders. And eventually, that deification overshadowed everything else he did in his life, and we’ve had 2,000 years of CCD classes that have reinforced that deification.

But he could not have been a god. For the simple reason that gods don’t exist. The whole idea of gods was something dreamed up by people tens of thousands of years ago when we didn’t understand how the world worked or what it even was or why we’re here (I suppose we’re still kind of stuck on that last one.) And it was seized upon by people who took power and used the myth to justify their power. And the whole idea has been around for so long, and has become so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness, that we continue to believe it even though it is patently obvious that gods are myths.

So if Jesus wasn’t a god, what did he do that got people to thinking he was a god? That got people to start deifying him? That, my friends, will be the topic of my Easter Sunday sermon.

Share

You may know me from the book I published last year, The Almightier. You may know me from my books about bitcoin and blockchain. Maybe you know me from my years at The Wall Street Journal. It’s possible you know me because you just, like, actually know me (lots of friends and family on this subscriber list).

Or maybe you know me from my award-winning wine coverage. In which case, you don’t know me. At least, not this me. Because there is a Paul Vigna who covers wine, and covers it well. It’s just not me. And while I think about this from time to time, I noticed recently a couple of people subscribing to PofV who I think expect that I’m this other Paul Vigna, so I figure now’s a good time to set things straight. If you’re here for award-winning wine coverage, you’re going to be disappointed.

For the first 30 some-odd years of my life, I’d never in my life met or even heard of somebody named Vigna who wasn’t related to me. And there weren’t any other Pauls in my family. For years and years, I’d assumed I was a name unicorn. The only Paul Vigna on the planet. Certainly the only Paul Vigna in America. But in the ‘90s, working at Dow Jones Newswires, I met some guys from Philadelphia (at least one of whom is probably reading this as he’s a subscriber), who were a bit confused when they learned my name. Did I know, they asked, that there was a Paul Vigna who wrote about sports in Philadelphia? Was that me? I had no idea what they were talking about. I’d never heard of him; I’d never heard of any other Paul Vigna. This was still the early days of the web so it wasn’t like I was doing Google searches of my name and things like that. Hell, Google didn’t exist at this point. But I went to the Philly sports pages, and there was my byline, me writing things I’d never written. It was weird to discover that not only wasn’t I the only me, I wasn’t even the only me who was a journalist.

Leave a comment

Eventually, I got in touch with this other Paul Vigna, this other me. He’d never heard of me, either. I think it was even stranger for him; at least I’d been told about him. Me contacting him out of the blue had to be really bizarre. And we had a lot of things in common. We’re not related, I don’t think, but we’re from the same general area, the U.S. east coast, have the same name, and we’re both writers. I mean, what are the chances? In the bizarreness of it all, we hit it off. We kept in touch. We’d email each other every now and again. We were like friendly doppelgangers to each other. And once Google became a thing and you could look up your name, I discovered that there were a bunch of other Paul Vignas. One was a doctor. One was a tile salesman. One was a musician whose stage name is Paul James. I found an obituary for a Paul Vigna, which was really disturbing. So as it turned out, there were lots of me’s out there. Hell, I found out that there’s a bean called vigna. A bean!

Share

Paul and I kind of lost touch, but through all the years I’d regularly get pitched wine stories. Every time I’d respond and explain there were two of us, I was the other one, and I’d give them Paul’s email. I figured it was doing a good thing for Paul, and I was happy enough to help out the flak also. When I got to American Banker, for some reason the volume of wine pitches increased exponentially. Now I was getting a few a week. Eventually, one of the flaks apologized and explained that their database had my email under the other Paul’s name. And it turned out that was the case. Muck Rack, a website that tracks journalists, had inadvertently merged my profile into Paul’s. His picture, his profile, my email. After a lot of back and forth with the Muck Rack people, I straightened it out, more or less.

A couple weeks ago I emailed Paul and told him this whole thing. He had no idea. Not one flak that I ever sent over to him ever mentioned that they’d contacted the wrong Paul Vigna and that I’d redirected them. Not one! I mean, at the very least it’s a kind of entertaining story you’d think a flak would use as an entry point. But nope. And he’d never gotten one misdirected pitch for me. Muck Rack screwed up his profile, but not mine.

So if you’re here because you think I’m the Paul Vigna who covers wine, and covers it well, I’m sorry to say I’m not. I won’t be offended it you leave. But if you’re interested in some unique takes on money and culture and history and the occasional rant about something Star Wars-related, well then I hope you’ll stick around. Hey, it’s not like I’m charging anything, right?

Subscribe now

What we are celebrating in the U.S. this year isn’t just the 250 anniversary of the revolution of 1776, it is the 250 anniversary since a group of people forcefully rejected the idea of kingship, the idea that some people are born to rule and everybody else to serve.

The problem is, though, that that idea — the divine right of kings — is very old and very embedded in our culture and in the two and half centuries since “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” we have thrown off the idea of a capital-K King, but we have struggled to throw off the wider idea that some people are superior and by virtue of their position deserve to rule. I mean, we have an entire group of people trying to revive the divine right of kings by renaming them a unitary executive, kind of like how some people have tried to revive the idea of God by renaming it intelligent design.

Jared Sexton Yates wrote a valentine to the Enlightenment today that gets at this. The gist of his essay is that basically we are caught between Enlightenment-style democracy and autocracy:

When humanity fought its way out of theocratic control, it was one of the greatest achievements in history. We were largely illiterate, had to fight tirelessly to establish even the most basic rights. Almost all power, political and economic and culture, was monopolized by the elite. By large, we didn’t understand why almost anything happened. In the event of a pandemic or a natural disaster, we turned to superstition or prejudice. Regarding the elite, we were left to gossip as we wondered what happened in the halls of power from which we were banned.

I know it’s easy to paint the elites are the evil ones pushing down on the rest of us, and for sure they do press their advantage. But there’s, what, a few thousand of them and like 8 billion of us? Are they that magically powerful? Or are they leveraging a belief system that is still deeply burrowed within our brains that we instinctively respond to? I think our problems are more about us than the elites.

Subscribe now

The revolt of the American colonies, and soon after the French, was so radical, so world-changing, because people weren’t just overthrowing a king, they were overthrowing the whole idea of kings. The whole concept of there being a certain person who was somehow, for some reason, deigned to be a ruler by birth, by blood. That some people were inherently superior. It may not have been the first time in history that a group of people did it, but those were the ones that were the most far-reaching. In the 250 years since the colonials rejected the rule of King George, kings have become an endangered species. Very few of the ones left have any real power.

So why does autocracy seem to be making a comeback?

Part of the problem, I think is that we’ve lived with the idea that all people are equal for only about 250 years, but we lived for probably 10,000 years with the idea that a small group of people are not only better than the rest of us, not only are justifiably supposed to rule us, but are in the fact the key to our fates and fortunes.

Share

By the time humans invented writing a bit more than 5,000 years ago, you could already see that society had arranged itself around a twofold power structure: the king and the god (I’m not citing sources here, but I explored all this in The Almightier). The early city states like Uruk were literally built around the temple, which was seen as the home of the gods on Earth. And then the king was viewed as the gods’ chosen representative on Earth, often worshipped as a god himself and very often believed to be a descendent of the gods.

Who knows how long this belief system was in place. The first large city states emerged more than 5,000 years ago but today archeology has uncovered a lot of older sites that look like even earlier “cities,” in terms of being large, permanent settlements. Catalhoyuk in modern Turkey was occupied almost 10,000 years ago. Gobekli Tepe, also in Turkey, is even older, maybe 12,000 years ago. Did they worship gods? Did they have kings?

We’ve lived with the divine right of kings for thousands of years. We rejected it only 250 years ago, and I’d argue the remnants of that older belief system are still deeply, deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. You can see it quite clearly in everything happening today. We still believe that some people are better, are our salvation, are our only hope. We have not yet fully come around to the reality that we do not need them, that we have all the resources we need to take care of ourselves and each other. We’ve come partly around to it, we are not ruled by kings and popes anymore. But we haven’t come fully around to it.

Most if not all of our problems are because we haven’t washed these archaic beliefs out of our modern culture. We are still shaped by ideas about money, gods and leaders that are older than any of us will ever know. We think we’ve shaken off the ancient world. I’m telling you, we haven’t.

Leave a comment

A couple of years ago I started keeping a file of all the words I looked up while reading. These would be words I came across, didn’t know, and couldn’t figure out the meaning of from the context. Or even words that I thought I knew but realized that I’d never actually learned the definition.

I liked keeping the list. Looking back at it I can glean what I was reading at the time. For instance, in July 2023 I looked up atelic, littoral, autochthonous, taurine, plagiary, volte-face, ex ante, and vae victis. Learning new words is fun! (if you’re a book nerd, I guess.) I was doing a lot of the research for The Almightier and was coming across a lot of words I didn’t know. Or knew only tangentially. Ex ante, for instance, is a Latin phrase I’d heard plenty of times but realized I didn’t actually know the meaning of. So I looked it up, and put it in the file.

I thought about writing a post about the practice from time to time but never did; it felt just a little bit self-indulgent. But the other day I came across a post from Kahil Green on Substack talking about Kai Cenat. The popular social-media star apparently has started reading during his live streams. Literally just sitting there and reading, and looking up the meaning of words he doesn’t know.

Some people were laughing at him. The act of reading — actually reading, trying to understand what you’re reading just for the sake of the reading, not so you can rack up pelts on your TBR list on Goodreads, caring about the words enough to look them up — has become such an alien act that even when one of the most influential people on social media does it he gets mocked. But what Kai is doing is a good thing. It’s a good thing for Kai, and it’s a good thing for book lovers, and it’s great thing for writers.

So, as a writer, I have to applaud what Kai’s doing. I think it’s Goddamn fantastic. This is my Kai Cenat appreciation post.

Leave a comment

I’ll be honest, the book industry feels like pretty rudderless these days. For all the books that are getting sold, it seems like books matter less and less. People have so many options and finite time. Writers are in competition not just with each other, but with anybody and anything that vies for people’s attention. The Rams-Seahawks game. The Olympics. Fallout. Pluribus. Seinfeld reruns. CNN. TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, Spotify, taking walks, sleeping. AI-generated books for Christ sake! (Somebody published on Amazon an AI-generated “reading guide” for The Almightier the day after it came out; seriously.) Hell, we’re competing with Kai Cenat for that matter.

And nobody really knows what works in terms of getting people to buy books anymore. I met with a PR firm that wanted to take me on as a client. They had a whole launch plan for The Almightier, and it was all the stuff you’d expect. Pitching reviews, essays I’d write, interviews, etc., etc. I asked them what their plan was for social media. “Well, we’ll book you on podcasts,” they said. And that was it. Now, podcasts are fine, podcasts are good. I love doing podcasts. But podcasts aren’t Twitch or TikTok or Twitter or Instagram or wherever. I don’t think of podcasts as social media. They just had no plan for the hundreds of millions of potential readers on those sites and more. And this wasn’t some fly-by-night outfit. These guys were pretty well known; I knew about them from when I was back at the Journal. But they had no clue about social media or how to approach it.

(I didn’t go with them; I didn’t go with anybody for that matter. I don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars sitting that it would cost to around to hire a PR firm (seriously, I think they quoted me somewhere around $40,000.))

Subscribe now

But then you get BookTok, people just randomly talking about books on TikTok. And now I see Kai reading, just literally and actually sitting and reading, and doing it in front of 20 million some-odd people. And I mean, I never would have thought that Kai Cenat and I would have anything in common. But we do. And it’s reading and looking up words. And you realize that not only is reading not dead, but the basic function it serves — communicating a thought from one human being to another — will never die. The form may change, indeed it has changed myriad times over the past 10,000 or so years, but the act itself will never die. And this act, gathering information and sharing it, is the thing that is at the heart of all human progress. All of it.

Readers of the world unite!

Two hundred years ago, nobody knew that the dinosaurs had ever existed. It’s kind of wild when you sit back and think about it.

I read a good book about this last year, “Dinosaurs at The Dinner Party,” about the Victorians that finally pieced the evidence together. Dinosaur bones had been discovered from time to time throughout history, but nobody had ever understood what they were really looking at. All those myths and fantastic tales of giants and beasts were basically the result of people finding the bones and not understanding them. But in the 19th century, a disparate group of people started figuring it out, and everything we thought we knew about the planet Earth had to be rewritten.

Two hundred years is not that long ago in the context of the millions of years of human evolution and when you think about that, you realize our modern understanding of the world is extremely nascent. Every human explanation of the world, from whenever the first myths emerged in prehistoric times right up to the early 1800s, did not account for the fact that entirely different species roamed this planet for hundreds of millions of years before we even came around. We still have not fully absorbed that reality; hell, there are some people who don’t even believe it.

I think we discount anything that happened before recorded history, we assume it doesn’t affect us today, but I believe it does. How old is the concept of god? Of money? Of kings and privilege and the idea that some people are better, are chosen? I believe our most deeply held convictions are so deeply held because they are tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of years old, and all our newly found, modern knowledge can’t shake those old beliefs from our collective consciousness.

Here’s another one to consider. In the 1870s, researchers published their translation of an ancient Mesopotamian tale, a myth about a heroic king called Gilgamesh. The epic had been written at least 2,000 years before Christ, and probably existed even longer than that. What most shocked people about the tale was that it included a story about a massive, globe-destroying flood…just like the story in the Bible. Only, Gilgamesh predated the Bible’s flood story by more than a thousand years. Was the Bible the very word of God handed down to man, or was it just some regurgitated myths? The evidence seems pretty clear, and yet there are millions who believe in the Bible’s inerrancy.

And think about this. A hundred years ago, nobody had ever flown above the clouds. People had been telling stories about what was beyond the clouds for millennia. Olympus. Asgard. Heaven. Svarga. People from cultures all over the world assumed that there were mythical, magical beings living in fantastic cities above the clouds. Hell, they thought the stars and the sun and the moon were those mythical, magical beings. What do think a “sun god” is? And then the Wright brothers built the airplane, a little more than a hundred years ago, and soon after people could go up above the clouds and for the first time see for themselves what was up there. And of course, they saw that there was nothing up there. Nothing at all.

Leave a comment

Our understanding of the world has changed drastically — drastically — in the last two hundreds years and it has challenged all the myths and all the assumptions we’ve had. And of course, what we know today is correct and what people thought a thousand or two thousand or three thousand years ago was wrong. The problem with this, though, is that those old ways of explaining the world are older than we realize. They are in fact older than we can ever know. The flood story, for instance, probably predates the written word, it was probably an oral story maybe based on a real event. All those gods and myths are also almost certainly older than the written word. How much older? It’s impossible to know, but it’s probably tens of thousands of years.

Here’s something to consider. The star cluster we call the Pleiades, or the seven sisters, is a constellation of six visible stars, but in every culture’s myth about them the number is seven. How? Why? Were ancient humans just bad at counting? Well, it turns out that at one point there were seven visible stars. What point was that? About 100,000 years ago.

So the stories we have been telling ourselves about the world, the stories that are buried deeply in our collective consciousness, indeed the stories that are the foundation of our culture, are thousands upon thousands of years old. And the things we’ve come to understand about how the world really operates are only a couple hundred years old. And this is the friction at the heart of the world today. All of us have been brought up in cultures that predate modern knowledge. And it’s hard to rectify the deeply ingrained beliefs we were brought up with and the reality that dinosaurs were here before us, there is nothing above the clouds, and there are no gods, anywhere. I just googled “dinosaurs and the Bible” and came across this, somebody trying to retcon dinosaurs into the Bible. Think about that. My man Dan’s cultural background runs so deep in his psyche that rather than accept the plain truth of scientific discovery, he wrote an entire book that subsumes reality into his mythological beliefs. And he has a PhD.

I’m not mocking Dan. I’ll be honest, it gets me, too. I consider myself a pretty modern guy. I don’t believe in gods, I don’t believe in magical, mythical beings. But I was raised Roman Catholic, and I will still from time to time pray to the Virgin Mary. I have a St. Christopher medal, the patron saint of travelers, and I bring it with my when I travel. I have a St. Francis medal, the patron saint of writers, that I wear. Do I believe in these saints? No. Then why the reverence? Why the genuflection? I don’t really know. It’s just stuff I brought up with. It’s part of my culture. I can’t really shake it.

This stuff runs really, really deep. I think the best thing I can do is just write about it and try to help clarify the friction of old beliefs and new realities.