David A. Jedeikin

Posts

  • Meritocracy is the New Aristocracy

    Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

    For those of you following my stories through the years, you have an idea where I come from.

    I’m WEIRD.

    By that I don’t just mean strange or peculiar (though I’ve been called that as well); I mean the phenomenon that’s been noticed among psychologists looking at who participates in their studies. An overwhelming number of them hail from the same background: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies.

    Basically, the most fertile breeding grounds for—and the biggest practitioners of—that thing known as meritocracy.

    Meritocracy: a good thing, right?

    The concept of rewarding people based on merit isn’t exactly new; it’s basically seen as a synonym for the modern era, at least in the West. Spurred on by the Enlightenment, and the idea that human life and human beings are improvable, leaders such as Napoleon put forward the notion of careers open to talent early in the 19th century. Nowadays, we take it so for granted that the idea of going back to a world of inherited privilege seems unfair and absurd.

    Plus, we need look no further than the enormous advances of the last two centuries as proof that meritocracy works, as the world moved from subsistence-level agriculture to jet planes and the internet. Obviously that’s because we adopted this new and better way of rewarding people, right?

    Turns out the answer’s not that simple.

    I’ve been following for some time the writing of one of meritocracy’s own whose become one of its harshest critics, Yale professor Daniel Markovits. I finally took the plunge and read his book on the subject—and it’s a sobering, all-too-accurate portrait of our crazy, fraught, competitive world.

    Markovits reminds us that the originator of the term, in the book that first described meritocracy’s rise, actually meant it satirically and critically. Only in later years did meritocracy’s proponents claim the term as a good thing.

    But how can something that seems on the surface to promote fairness and encourage people to excel…be bad? I’d break out Markovits’s argument into two parts: the unfairness meritocracy ultimately creates, and the not-really-better world of jobs meritocracy builds.

    Meritocracy creates a new kind of unfairness

    This one’s a both obvious and controversial claim for anyone who’s been alive over the past half-century. Basically, Markovits claims that meritocracy, and the rise in inequality in America over the past five decades, are one and the same phenomenon.

    On the surface, the probably seems ridiculous. If meritocracy is supposed to distribute opportunity more fairly than a society of oligarchs or aristocrats, then how can it possibly lead to more unfairness?

    The answer is proved by history. As meritocrats rose in status, they helped tilt the game more and more in favor of themselves. Sure, the daughter of a CEO is expected to work hard in school and in the jobs she lands afterward. But even with parents who try not to inundate her with advantages, the privilege is there: chances are, even if she goes to public school, it’ll be a better-run, better-funded public school than those of her poorer counterparts; even if her parents don’t openly cheat to get her into college, she’ll still benefit from better coaching, tutoring, and other preparatory steps to get her into the highest-status schools. Her better jobs will ensure better-quality, subsidized health care for her and her own descendants. Throughout her life, she’ll exist in a bubble with other people of superordinate status, and will imbibe and benefit from their elite standing and practices.

    Sounds a lot like aristocracy, right?

    For those who vehemently disagree, and claim that harder and more productive work should be better rewarded, I present Markovits’s second point.

    Meritocracy warps the very concept of “work” itself

    Proponents of meritocracy, and even of meritocracy’s excesses, always make this point: in meritocracies, people are rewarded for the value they create. We dare not go back to a Soviet Communist world, where doctors were paid the same as janitors, and nobody had the urge to work hard or innovate. Go that route, and we’ll end up collapsing the way the Soviet Union did in 1991.

    A further case for this was made when the mid-century American corporate world structure was dismantled in the “greed is good” 1980s. In fact, that speech, given by character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street is on that very subject: in it, he describes the sclerotic layers of middle management one of the companies he’s trying to wreck consists of. Dozens of vice presidents shuffling memos to each other. Overpaid, mid-skilled employees leaching profitability from shareholders. Just get rid of all that bureaucracy, and let true meritocrats reign.

    It’s an alluring, seductive notion, and it’s captivated us for decades: if we can replace 33 vice presidents each earning $200,000 a year (the figures Gekko cites in the film) with one high-achieving CEO who earns $2 million a year in salary—plus many tens of millions in stock appreciation earned by slashing company payrolls—well, on balance, that may seem like a good deal. At least, for the meritocrats, it does: a small number of their superordinates drives the company to profitability.

    But never mind the dozens of mid-level execs—and the thousands of mid-level workers—who are thrown out of work. For many of them, the only option will be to find new work in what Markovits calls “gloomy” jobs: low-skill, low-paid work in retail and services.

    Meritocracy’s tale of two suburbs

    To further exemplify his case, Markovits compares two American suburbs, Saint Clair Shores, Michigan, and Palo Alto, California. In the mid-twentieth century both were respectable middle-class towns, housing workers in automotive and electronics industries. Fast forward half a century to find one of these places—you can guess which—drastically weakened by the destruction of its middle class base, while another is super-concentrated by elite meritocrats in “glossy” jobs, who snap up its once-midrange homes for millions of dollars.

    But there’s more to the destruction of the middle class than jobs simply bifurcating into “gloomy” and “glossy.” What happens is the actual jobs themselves change in character. Mid-skilled bank loan officers become low-wage data-entry clerks; meanwhile, investment bankers, who securitize and sell the mortgage-backed securities that are what home loans ultimately become, require ever-greater skill, training, expertise—and compensation—to do what they do. Every year, the derby to get into elite colleges to land this elite training to land these elite jobs gets keener and keener; every year, fewer and fewer people make more and more money, while an ever-greater share of the population languishes in economic obscurity.

    The results of this are obvious on the bottom rungs of society: for the first time in generations, life expectancy is going down in America (even pre-Covid). Addiction to opioids rises as whole swaths of society find themselves increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, on the upper tier, things aren’t much better: as competition heats up to land in or stay in the elite, superordinate workers endure insane work hours, and growing pressure to be ever more productive, to add ever more value to the enterprise in order to retain their earnings, standing, and status.

    Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

    What is to be done?

    Markovits ends with only rough outlines of solutions, and I can see why: nobody’s really figured out a path forward out of this mess. His suggestion that jobs themselves get redistributed is a toughie, likely involving German-style vocational schooling, and possibly even moves toward universal basic income.

    Why aren’t moves like these already being made, or at least tried? Well, the history of inequality itself, paints a gloomy portrait: the only way societies have ever really pushed reset on inequality is through massive upheaval. To wit: world wars and bloody revolutions. It’s a bleak picture of humanity, yet one many meritocrats cling to. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” says one of the characters in The White Lotus, a recent HBO series about the well-to-do vacationing at an elite Hawaii resort. For the sake of humanity’s future, I hope we figure out a sane way to do so.

    One way to think more constructively is to recast some of what drives meritocracy. Where wealth of a different age prided itself on its idleness, today’s meritocrats cite their hard work as a defining virtue. I think a lot of this comes from the so-called Protestant work ethic, which holds labor and industry itself as virtues.

    Now, I do agree there’s some merit to that. If nobody did any work, we’d have long since died out as a species. And even fictional, egalitarian, post-scarcity societies such as those in Star Trek (a favorite go-to of mine) see folks laboring mightily to build starships, explore the galaxy, and excel in their achievements. I don’t think the spirit of accomplishment itself needs to die out. I don’t even think the notion of healthy reward for initiative and creativity is entirely misplaced.

    What is misplaced is the notion that we need to be always on, always all cylinders firing, all the time. “Only the paranoid survive” was the title of a book by one of Intel’s founders. But must we be so paranoid to invent iPhones? Once there was a notion that we as a species actually, on aggregate, would work a lot less, once we figured out how to meet all our basic needs—food, housing, economic security—through the technical advances we were making. With these taken care of, we’d be even freer to innovate, to use our merit to build things we wanted, and continue our processes of societal improvement.

    Even in such a world, there will always be those who labor mightier, whose talents are indeed greater, and will no doubt enjoy rewards and prestige for doing so. But I think they, and everyone else, would do even better work in a world where there wasn’t a proverbial gun to our head to do so—a gun that in this age is largely one of our own making.

  • How I got on board with political correctness

    Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

    You might say I came of age at the dawn of political correctness.

    It was a generation ago. I was in college, back when Baby Boomer academics, those folks who opposed Vietnam and the draft, hit their career stride. They began questioning all that Dead White Male canon of Western thought. Back then, I was actually on board with conservative PC critics, the ones who called it illiberal and closed-minded. You can probably guess why.

    For one thing, I counted myself in their political camp. And even though I wasn’t really all that conservative, part of what I bought about conservatism, in the Reagan-Bush days, was that gains made in past ages—those battles fought for rights and justice—were over and done for. Won and assumed. In the post-civil rights era, went the thinking, there’s absolutely no need to make a big hoo-ha about linguistic trifles. Women can work and vote, so no need to spell womyn with a y or call it herstory. All that’s just performative b.s. In fact, sayeth the conservative, then as now, the real thing to be worried about is the latter-day leftist Thought Police, those Feminazis enforcing codes of speech, keenly attuned to trigger warnings. Plus, what are we supposed to call our heroes? Superperson? Wonder Individual? Puh-lease.

    But then, like Elpheba in Wicked, something changed within me. Actually, more like, I realized what was always there: my membership in LGBTQ nation. But, believe it or not, that didn’t change my stance on PC-ness just yet. I’d been so convinced of the illiberalism of the PC police that at first I thought they were the problem, the reason I didn’t figure myself out sooner.

    What’s behind all that PC bashing?

    These days, decades later, it’s not just conservatives who scoff at political correctness. This past summer a bunch of writers and artists, many on the progressive side of things, published a letter on Justice and Open Debate. In it, they warned against dogma and coercion, the inevitable by-products of PC thinking.

    One area that’s always been a PC target is humor. By its very nature, comedy is supposed to poke fun at the absurd—and what better way to do so than to veer hard into things that ought not be said? What, say they, we can’t make jokes about gay hairdressers or lesbian truck drivers anymore? We’re not being bigoted or homophobic, say the comics. We’re making fun of those dolts who don’t get that it’s wrong.

    That’s the big accusation from the anti-PC crowd: that there are no allowances for irony, parody, and satire, that PC thinking is too dense and dogmatic to comprehend motivation. Actually, here’s another place my past experience helps, as I think about my changing feelings on adult animated TV shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy.

    In my early, anti-PC days, I wasn’t a fan of these shows. They seemed like snarky liberal fare that simplistically pilloried complex ideas and institutions. The non-PC nature of them wasn’t an issue—in fact, it appeared like they were in fact defending the PC worldview by making parodies so obnoxious as to make political correctness seem, well, correct.

    But there’s another way of looking at these shows, as well as some earlier TV comedy—All in the Family for example. The show looked like it had a super-progressive outlook, with Meathead giving it to Archie Bunker and his wacky-doodle conservatism. I’d heard it said that was part of the boomerang effect that explained the show’s huge success: lots of conservatives tuned in as well, because they liked Archie and his way of thinking. This is not unlike wannabe criminals watching gangster movies, or wannabe workplace bullies watching The Devil Wears Prada or Swimming With Sharks. Parodies often attract the unintentional approbation of those who are its targets.

    The case for politically correct humor

    I think about these shows now, years later, and my prior feelings about them now seem to make the case for political correctness rather than against it. If a show initially intended to appeal to critics of something ends up attracting people in favor of that something, has the message really gotten through? Sure, the show got (or gets) good ratings, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a great thing if it emboldens the wrong people.

    There’s a way out of this. Decidedly non-PC comedians such as Sarah Silverman have acknowledged that their earlier work may have been insensitive, and have adapted and changed with the times. All culture operates within norms, and I think some of PC culture is simply nudging us to adjust our norms a little.

    That’s where conservatives lost me a long time ago: they don’t seem to get that. They also fail to understand the PC agenda, which is that the very subtlety of those cultural norms is what makes them so powerful. In my own life, it took me years to stop dismissing the existence of stuff like heteronormativity, and to realize how real and pernicious it can be.

    We tend to think of prejudice as something awful and overt, those scenes in somber Jim Crow-era period pieces where the white Southern sheriff liberally uses the n-word. Or reports of two straight guys from Laramie leaving a gay kid to die hanging on a fence. Sure, those things happened, and were indescribably awful. But it’s all too easy to be appalled by such events, and tut-tut that it’s nothing like who we are. By Star Wars-ifying reality, we feel good that we aren’t Darth Vader.

    Except even Star Wars isn’t that simple. Neither is bigotry. Over the years, I‘ve begun to see subtle patterns of behavior, in myself and others: the way we might be a bit more short with a customer service agent of a visible minority. The way we talk about sketchy parts of town. And—yes—the way so many movies of the last century ended with the guy getting the girl, but never, never two girls or two guys getting each other.

    Fragility and Cancel Culture

    Clearly, then, prejudice and intolerance exists on a spectrum. It’s rarely as straightforward as bigoted/not bigoted. Attitudes and assumptions sometimes need to be questioned and rethought, to understand where things came from, and why they are the way they are. At its most thoughtful, political correctness is an evaluation, a means of recognizing why so many assumed ideas and words were built on foundations of injustice.

    The pushback against this, as the book White Fragility suggests, primarily comes from privileged folks who previously never had to look this stuff squarely in the face. Most often, the defensive refrain goes: If I’m not offended, and I didn’t mean to offend, the offense doesn’t exist.

    Ultimately, that’s what I think political correctness boils down to: do we hold people accountable for unintended consequences of what they said or did? Where do we draw the line at “free speech?” Maybe it’s hailing from a land with stronger anti-hate speech laws, but I’ve always felt there’s a place for decorum, for nuance, for placing a few—albeit not many—limits on the right to offend. If the offense carries forward odious traditions with deep-rooted significance…well, maybe that joke about gay hairdressers needs to be dropped.

    That brings us to Cancel Culture, and the oft-stated notion that shunning or deplatforming someone violates our free speech principles. Actually, I’d rebut, it doesn’t. Even if somebody loses their Op-Ed column or Twitter account or TV show, they aren’t being silenced…they’re just being shown the door by a private corporation responding to market pressure. They’re still free to express their opinion elsewhere. This is where all the claims of illiberalism fall apart: I can’t think of anybody in the PC sphere who’s suggesting gulags or permanent exile for violators of norms. Everyone has the right to speak their mind—but if you perpetuate hate speech by belittling or mocking historically marginalized groups, your speech may find a more limited audience.

    By that token, political correctness is something we’ve always practiced. And it’s certainly been misused—comedian Bill Maher’s 1990s-era show, itself called Politically Incorrect, was canceled after he made one offhand (and I happen to think, accurate) comment about the 9/11 hijackers. Maybe that’s instructive as well: the goal of PC thinking isn’t to be a blunt axe. Instead, it’s to be more nuanced and thoughtful—not less. It’s to keep the conversation going—not shut it down—about what it means to be both a free and a considerate society.

  • The conscience of an ex-conservative

    Photo by Isai Ramos on Unsplash

    For you loyal readers, you may recognize the journey-based subheading: it’s almost the same one I used on a post four years back—a lifetime ago, seems like, in the lead up to the last Presidential election. There I told about my immigration path in America. But there’s a life journey that goes back even further.

    The way I was (and wasn’t)

    It’s hard to believe—least of all to me these days—that I once called myself conservative.

    OK, I wasn’t really, not by the standards in America today, or even those back then. I wasn’t even living in the U.S. at the time. In my case, I was really just copying (some) family and (some) community, folks who were more in the neoconservative mold like Marty Peretz or Paul Wolfowitz.

    I was also an obedient, closeted nerd, and in my life back then, the liberals/libertines seemed to be my biggest tormentors. I was just a kid, not some celebrity journalist, but my journey was a lot like David Brock’s, whose book I read many years later and could deeply relate. Between that and (yes) a high-school reading of The Fountainhead, the worldview seemed set: progressive ideas are nice in theory, but in practice are always co-opted by mean, selfish or lazy people, and therefore have no chance of working. Only competition and the free market can channel human ugliness to its highest and best use.

    I was never a social conservative per se, but as with a lot of fiscal and geopolitical neocons, some ideas seeped in. Since the party kids were such assholes, it made sense for me to live a life of abstinence. But that was as far as I went. I never disbelieved evolution, always believed recreational drugs should be legalized (going so far as to write a tenth-grade essay about it), and absolutely supported a woman’s right to choose.

    As for the rest of those right-wing ideas, one part of my youth offered an escape.

    A sci-fi view of life

    Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

    I had my religion back then, and it was science-fiction. Even when others scoffed, I had my idols to guide me: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, even good old Albert Einstein. And in movie-land, Lucas and Spielberg, among others, were having their heyday. The authors I read put forward a vision of the world that could be better if only we were better. Actually, there’s another sci-fi franchise that borrowed from many earlier writers (such as H.G. Wells) and really perfected that paradigm: Star Trek. To this day, I’m still waiting for those Vulcans to land on Earth, and have us collectively grow the heck up.

    It’s always been hard to fit science (and science-fiction) into the political spectrum. In America, commercialization of scientific discoveries has practically been the nation’s founding mantra—and the reason so many of us, including me, ended up here. From drilling for oil to electric light to the airplane, the discovery of DNA, and the microprocessor, science and industry have gone together. The military has funded many scientific endeavors, from the Manhattan Project to the Internet. Looking at the suit-and-tie-wearing IBM professional from the nineteen-sixties and you might be more inclined to associate science and technology folks with the conservative crowd instead of the wacky-doodle notions of Trekdom.

    Harsh realities, new realizations

    Maybe that’s why I never really thought much about how my big-picture world view collided with my onetime conservatism. Even discovering I was gay didn’t move the needle much from my straitlaced self—at least not at first. It did force me to confront how much my disdain for the partying life was really hidden jealousy—which I think animates lots of conservatives today still. Cue all those jokes about Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham.

    But there was one book in particular that helped push me over the fence: Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Learning how Reagan-era conservatism basically left people to die because their disease at first disproportionately affected gays was a game-changer. Screw the virtues of the free market, or being tough on Soviet Communism. This facet of the Reagan Revolution was just plain wrong.

    I think, back then, you probably could have called me a libertarian—that crowd that proudly calls itself “socially liberal yet fiscally conservative.” To be fair, the social/fiscal dichotomy of today’s conservatism has always been a weird marriage. But it took me a few more years of career and life tribulations to realize that there’s a reason so many well-off, often white folks are fiscal conservatives: hailing from elite career and/or socio-economic backgrounds, they cling to a narrative about the virtue of hard work, a hatred of inefficiency and waste, and a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality that’s ingrained in the American psyche.

    A lot more years of wandering, reading and exploring led me to question this notion as well—to say nothing of working with actual die-hard conservatives in the American Midwest. Some takeaways: for one thing, it’s not like conservatives have a monopoly on hard work; early left-wing labor movements celebrated it too. Likewise, the notion that we all start from the same place in life—so-called equal opportunity—has long since been debunked. If there’s one thing this pandemic has made clear, it’s that plenty of disregarded, poorly-paid workers not only work hard, they’re in fact essential to our economy functioning. Although most of us don’t truly support everyone getting the exact same wage, can the difference between an Amazon delivery driver and Jeff Bezos really be justified in anyone’s view of the world?

    My conversion completes

    What finally clinched my ideological journey, however, came when I did those typical grown-up things a smidge later in life: marrying, co-owning a fixer-upper single-family home, and having a child. There were a couple of dimensions to this evolution: for one thing, same-sex marriage was a right we had to fight for, one that didn’t exist yet in this country when I met my spouse. In addition to the obvious side of the political spectrum that put me, there’s another wrinkle I seldom realized for many years: even though I’d been out and proud for decades, like so many LGBTs who’d come of age before it became so normalized, there was always a notion of existing on the margins, on the periphery. An apartment-dwelling single fellow treads with a lighter footprint than a family. Boy, did that become clear while embarking on a massive renovation in one of the most difficult housing markets on Earth. I started to see the side of human experience I sheltered from myself for so long: the bare-knuckled scramble for resources that sadly defines too much of our time in this world.

    I suppose for some that would make them double down on conservatism. It’s a movement that appeals broadly to the whole night is dark and full of terrors outlook on the world. But I couldn’t go back there, not having seen the very clear elements of randomness and inequality of opportunity all round me. There’s too much of a luck factor involved for me to ever take the conservative view of the world seriously, or believe it manages our dealing with the world’s chaos and unfairness most effectively. Consider the obvious advantages of upper-middle-class peers who work in elite financial or tech firms after having a fully-paid ride from Mom and Dad to attend an Ivy League college. Also consider the behavioral changes our unequal world elicits—which I believe explains the nasty, cruel streak that can accompany high performers in the workplace. If this is the best the free market can do, then no question we need to do better.

    The final nail in my conservative coffin, however, was the aftermath of the Occupy movement of almost a decade ago. It may have ended up a mess, but it was the first modern-day movement that actually kickstarted the conversation around inequality, drawing attention to its stunning rise over the past decades—years that almost exactly match the life trajectories of Gen Xers like myself.

    But what, then, of all those familiar critiques, those made on Fox News every night? I can summarize: the poor are (mostly) lazy; the rich earned what they have fair and square; government taxation and spending never works; socialism—indeed any social welfare programs—only lead to lazy people gaming the system. When the MAGA crowd yammers on about the radical left agenda, it’s usually these talking points that stand out.

    Thing is, these are mostly bullshit, oversimplifications or gross exaggerations. Nobody’s shilling for the hyper-statist lunacy of Cold War-era Communism; even Elizabeth Warren said of successful businessfolk: “keep a big hunk of it.” Meanwhile, Reagan’s welfare queens and crack babies barely existed at all, much less to the scary degree he represented. And, as mentioned, examples of the rich not deserving their lot are too numerous to mention—way, way more numerous, it seems to me, than there ever have been welfare queens or crack babies combined. While cheating and gaming the system are always a problem, that cuts both ways—the amount of tax evasion among wealthy individuals and corporations is off the charts these days.

    It’s in the question of taxes and government where I still think conservatives have a shred of a point—but just a shred, not the diseased extreme of Grover Norquist’s wacky-doodle tax pledge. The point is this: large, unaccountable entities are often lousy at getting stuff done efficiently. This is true of bureaucratic corporations and government agencies alike—plenty of large firms are shielded from market competition by the unassailable position they already hold. How to make organizations and institutions better, or reimagine them entirely, is a totally valid conversation to have—but in all the rage and hyperbole, I really don’t hear conservatives making it. “Fiscal conservatism” is often just code for allowing businesses to behave unaccountably—precisely the opposite of what it claims.

    The (hopeful) path forward

    In the end, though, I look back at my past and end up with my old scientists and sci-fi writers—and a line from the Broadway play-cum-HBO mini-series Angels in America: “You believe the world is perfectible and so you find it always unsatisfying.” It’s something the closeted Mormon character, who’s working for Roy Cohn in the story, says to the liberal Jewish gay guy he’s secretly dating.

    That’s where I realized I’d always been progressive even if I didn’t know it. People like me may be less happy with the world as it is than those who think it can’t be changed—or those who don’t give a fuck. But that what motivates us to want to make it better, and never shakes our belief that it’s possible to do so. It’s not so much a rebellious rejection of the status quo as it is an unceasing quest to make things better.

    Way I see it, the political side that’s moving in that direction will always get my vote.

  • It’s Time to Cancel Brilliant Jerks

    Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

    I still remember my first brilliant-jerk boss.

    It was decades ago, back when shooting video meant bulky cameras and VHS cassettes. Eli (not his real name) was a local boy wonder, a wunderkind of Spielberg proportions, in my mind at least: a twenty-six-year-old medical resident who also had a thriving side business as a high-end event videographer. Think Duddy Kravitz, only a lot more cunning. No doubt he was aware of career synergy even before it had a name: all those wealthy, influential community contacts he was making with his side business helped him build up his medical practice in later years.

    To me, he was a living nightmare. For two years, he berated me, belittled me, insulted me, yelled at me. And he’d say things like “You don’t have any stress, you know,” he once said. “I mean, I bark at you, and maybe that gets your blood pressure going.” After I finally quit, having slowly, painfully amassed some professional skills (and maybe a shade of backbone), I learned he’d been paying me a third of what he paid his other assistant. I’d been too cowed, too intimidated as a repressed, closeted eighteen-year-old to ask for more money or even a dash of respect.

    I know this feels like the least important thing in the world right now, some Gen Xer’s random, haunting memory of a horrible boss from eons ago. How irrelevant it must seem in our dystopian present, with lingering racial injustice, a troubled American presidency (to say the least), economic turmoil…and, oh yeah, that microscopic little bug that’s made 2020 feel like the end is nigh.

    But what if I told you all these are in some way connected?

    Definitions

    I can’t speak to everyone’s definition of what a brilliant jerk is, but here’s mine:

    A person of exceptional achievement, stature, reputation, or authority — real or perceived — with a pattern of being gratuitously cruel or unpleasant, most often to subordinates.

    They’re not just in the workplace, I know, but it’s often in that arena that we find the brilliant jerk. Makes sense, since workplaces are some of the most hierarchical places of our age. Since a huge part of brilliant jerk brilliance is just how incredibly well they exploit hierarchies, they’re just as insidious today, in our late-capitalist age, as they were in earlier times. Where, in the past, a brilliant jerk could be a tyrant king or a conniving courtier, in the modern world they’re “rock star” professionals or executives who “add value to the enterprise”—and, in so doing, establish a position of dominance within it. This is the source of brilliant jerk power: perceived indispensability.

    But what makes them jerks in the first place?

    I think some of it comes from the romantic notion of the tortured artist, mixed with the robber baron mystique of the 19th century. People often point to Steve Jobs as justification for (and maybe a model of) the brilliant jerk’s M.O.: after all, without him, there would be no iPhone. Ergo, you have to have that sort of person around to unlock innovation at that level.

    I doubt this is universally true, and plenty of amazing, accomplished people (a few of whom I’ve had the good fortune to work with) aren’t jerks. I think the more common reality with brilliant jerk types is more pernicious. Let’s look at this bit from Swimming With Sharks, the 1994 movie where Kevin Spacey’s (ironic, I know) a brilliant jerk Hollywood studio executive lecturing his naive assistant:

    What, you think someone just handed me this job? I’ve handled the phones. I’ve juggled the bimbos. I’ve — I’ve put up with the tyrants, the yellers, the screamers. I’ve done more than you can even imagine in that small mind of yours. I’ve paid my dues — Dammit, it’s my turn to be selfish. It’s my turn.

    Chilling, right? Such great insight into the mindset, and how it serves as perpetuator of both power and bad behavior. Brilliant jerks, without exception in my experience, have this super-aggressive social-Darwinian mindset (itself a construct of Herbert Spencer, not that other guy and his Galápagos finches). They don’t just view hierarchy, and the forceful exercise of it, as some unfortunate thing to overcome; instead, they view it as an inescapable condition of life itself. The universe is uncaring and tough, so we ought to be even more uncaring and tougher. I imagine brilliant jerks have movie-cliché drill sergeants running on continuous loop in their brains (which for my money Full Metal Jacket probably renders best).

    The personal is political

    To understand this mindset further, I think we need to look to politics. Ideology, more exactly, the ever-present left-right divide. To grossly oversimplify, we have the left/liberal worldview believing in the potential of humans to do amazing things together—and so it stresses the importance of bold, egalitarian, usually not-profited-oriented collective action such as done by governments granted with ample taxation; the right/conservative worldview, meanwhile, is more cynical: emphasis is on the unfixable crooked timber of human nature, the inefficiency of government, and the inherent laziness of individuals absent the good swift kick in the pants of incentive capitalism. The state’s job is to protect law and order and property rights—and leave the rest to sort itself out.

    It’s tempting to look at these worldviews, and lump brilliant jerks into just one of them. Some of that, I think, is valid: it’s a lot easier to look at the conservative world picture and deduce the thought process: “well, if everybody’s a jerk, might as well be one too.” Except, I don’t think it breaks out that evenly, or that cleanly. Plenty of political liberals have been brilliant jerks, too—including some horrifically extreme examples, like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Heck, Harvey even fundraised for Hillary.

    Why is that? I think it’s because no side of the political spectrum has ever been able to do away with the concept of hierarchy. Even egalitarian societies have chieftains who call the shots. The most radical Communist regimes ended up as police-state, inner-party hierarchies. Regardless of whether our pecking order’s based on hardworking merit, inborn ability, or unfair privilege, we humans tend to go along with it, in so doing granting certain people greater agency in our society. And whenever you have an asymmetry of power, you allow for poor treatment of the less-powerful.

    Brilliant jerks we know and (don’t) love

    Shutterstock via deadline.com

    It’s no great leap, given my back-of-the-envelope politics, to guess who I think is the most visible brilliant jerk of all these days—and an analysis of the current U.S. President’s mentors and influences substantiates my claim. To those who may scoff at the brilliant part, well, I’d argue that running his business the way he ran it (not well, but with the appearance of great success), cultivating the image he cultivated, then successfully engineering it all to win an American Presidency… it may strike many of us as horrific and dystopian, sure, but there’s no underestimating the brilliance of pulling it off. That his “brilliance” had a lot of help from luck and timing—and lots of family money—doesn’t diminish it. It’s part of it. That’s the thing about brilliant jerks: fairly earned or not, their projection of legitimacy sticks.

    So how does it relate to other big world events? Let’s start with the Epstein-Weinstein duo. Now, I know tantrum-y bosses are not in the same league as sexual harassers and assaulters. But it’s probably safe to claim these behaviors are often branches of the same tree—and are not infrequently committed by the same people (as another bit of fiction, the show Entourage, so well depicted). No surprise: in both, power gives sanction to the powerful to mistreat others.

    This brings us to more extreme behavior in the news these days. I know nobody’s calling murderous, racist cops brilliant either. They’re practically the definition of bad cops. But there’s a common thread here: entitlement, which derives from power and hierarchy. These are entitled jerks—literally protected from consequence, in the cops’ case, by qualified immunity. Same deal with the Kens and Karens we’ve been hearing about lately, mostly better-off white folks operating with relative impunity.

    In these cases, it’s apparent to me now where that flavor of hierarchy came from, something I’ve been reading up on lately with mounting horror as a lifelong science geek: the legacy of 19th-century scientific racism. It shows that, even though science is supposed to be an impartial beacon on our understanding of the universe, it too can be perverted by human bias, and used to justify the most awful forms of inequality. Sure, I know most brilliant jerks today would decry this bit of two hundred year-old pseudoscience…except when they don’t, and it creeps into the conversation.

    St. Louis Public Radio

    Can we overcome them?

    Still, I know that, for those who haven’t been around them, brilliant jerks probably feels like how some circles view climate change: a bad thing we need to deal with at some point, sure, but otherwise abstract, diffuse…and perhaps not all that critical. I mean, if a few Amazon.com warehouse workers are being mistreated, but the company still manages to send out packages reliably and efficiently…are we going to call for Jeff Bezos’ head or boycott Amazon and bring it to ruin? Unlikely.

    I think that’s the call to action here, tough. No, a horrible boss isn’t the same thing as a rapist, or a killing cop…but some motivating elements behind all of them share common ancestry. While it’s inevitable for things in some workplace circumstances to get exercised or heated (sometimes over the dumbest things), the one-way extreme behavior that characterizes brilliant jerks really should have no place in our world.

    To answer the Steve Jobs question about innovation sans jerkiness, I offer up this thought experiment: imagine society without this behavior. Some brilliant jerk supporters, reading this, might counter that, without these hardasses cracking the whip, society would collapse into mediocrity, “socialism”, blandness, and, ultimately, impoverishment—heck, just ask Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand. To that I say: just imagine how many other people would feel, newly empowered, without brilliant jerks to hold them back. Think of what their new sense of agency might accomplish. We’ve been told to believe we need the bad cop, in our lives and careers, someone to keep the rest of us in line. But do we? And, if so, is the brilliant jerk model really the right bad cop for us to have?

    Because, ultimately, society is a series of choices about what behavior we will and will not accept. Now more than ever, with the world on lockdown and our future uncertain, is the time to start pushing for some better angels of our nature to rise up.

  • Escape From Bougiestan

    Photo by Bernadette Gatsby on Unsplash

    Almost five years ago, my then-domestic partner/now-husband, our two pets, and I, packed our things and moved away from San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The little condo had been my home for over five years, and as is often the case with homes freighted with emotional memory, I wandered the empty space we were about to leave forever, and teared up a bit.

    I was lamenting for more than just reasons of nostalgia, though.

    My tears were because we were leaving Bougiestan.

    That’s my name for it, portmanteau of bourgeois and -stan, the Persian suffix for land or place (hence Pakistan, Turkmenistan, etc).

    Every city’s got these places, well-manicured, upscale neighborhoods of charming older homes, or sparkling new McMansions. I’m not talking just about areas of huge affluence, the Billionaire’s Rows sprouting in a few global cities. No, Bougiestan’s bigger than that: it includes places like Shaker Heights, Ohio; Overland Park, Kansas; The Woodlands, outside of Houston; Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs; Chicago’s North Side and North Shore suburbs; Palo Alto, California. Pretty much every economically-significant metro area’s got a Bougiestan, the primary nesting grounds of the upper-middle class.

    How My Family Got There

    Nobody alive today knows exactly how my forebears gained admittance to this realm. Sometime in the early 20th Century, one of my grandfather’s brothers moved to South Africa from Eastern Europe, and hit it big there. His wealth spread to other members of that extended family as they leveraged those connections to establish themselves all over the globe. After the Second World War, my grandparents moved to Canada. Although they lost most of their prior wealth in the decade that followed, they nonetheless held on to just enough to remain in Bougiestan. My father, availing himself of the rising postwar economy, kept the party going as a corporate attorney right through my childhood. Only in the stagflation 1970s did my family’s socio-economic situation come under threat, an anxiety that hung over our household for all my teens and beyond.

    For me, however, the die had been cast: the notion of not living in Bougiestan seemed unthinkable. Even in my early years as a wannabe screenwriter and office temp, I always lived in or near upscale neighborhoods—even if only in a studio apartment. While I was fiscally careful about it, for others in my sphere it often meant repeating my parents’ mistakes, overextending themselves to live the lifestyle of their well-to-do cohorts. As offspring came into the picture, the urgency of Bougiestan becomes doubly significant: after all, good neighborhoods have good schools and good amenities…so not living in those places must be tantamount to child neglect and abuse.

    Trouble in Paradise

    But is it? My own memories of bullying and social ostracism—driven partly by the fact that my parents struggled to get by in our little Bougiestan—suggests that life in there isn’t always better. When Tom Hanks’ character in the 1993 film Philadelphia, brings his Latino boyfriend, played by Antonio Banderas, to the Bougiestan he grew up in, Banderas scoffs. He can’t imagine the place being anything less than idyllic. Hanks replies: “those can be some pretty mean streets. Don’t let appearances fool you.”

    While there’s obviously nothing wrong per se with aspiring to live in such places, Bougiestan carries with it much of our current conversation about inequality and the vanishing middle class. It’s also a physical manifestation, in America at least, of the country’s tortured racist past, something I myself wasn’t cognizant of when I first came here two decades ago.

    A History of Nice Neighborhoods

    San Francisco redlining map

    Even the most illiberal of people now agree Southern-style segregation was wrong. Jim Crow is practically shorthand for racial injustice, to say nothing of South African Apartheid or Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws.

    But the reality in America is more nuanced than that: from the 1930s right through the 1960s, banks in America engaged in the practice of redlining, of literally drawing red lines around economically disadvantaged, mostly minority districts, and refusing to lend there. Conversely, many interwar suburbs, Bougiestans both back then and continuing to today, enacted racial covenants prohibiting people of color from residing there.

    While this obviously doesn’t mean that every resident of Bougiestan today is racist, it does mean their lives and lifestyles are built upon that legacy. It means that the property appreciation those people enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, was not shared by all. If there’s one thing our move to a onetime non-Bougiestan neighborhood—rapidly becoming part of Bougiestan thanks to San Francisco’s real-estate market—taught me, it’s that turning a place into a Bougiestan costs money. Big money. All those lovely landscaped yards and gut-rehabbed interiors involve huge expenditures of skilled labor and cash—something that’s in short supply to nearly all of the population.

    My own crocodile tears upon leaving Bougiestan, though, pale compared to how many others see it. It’s perhaps best expressed by a character in an episode of the HBO TV series Big Little Lies, itself set in a Northern California Bougiestan community near Monterey. Laura Dern’s character, wife of a financier, learns her husband’s been convicted of Bernie Madoff-like financial crimes. Her family’s economic standing in jeopardy, she freaks out, and shouts at him:

    “I will not not be rich!”

    If Not Bougiestan, Then Where?

    Dramatics aside, Bougiestan is really just a manifestation of our era of rising inequality, of hyperinflation in critical domains such as education, health care, housing, and retirement. Bougiestan’s residents, in a way, only exacerbate the problem, hoarding the opportunities available to them. In many ways, this isn’t their fault, at least not entirely: while the upper-middle class have undoubtedly benefited from the last four decades of “greed is good” capitalism, its biggest winners and instigators are the truly rich, the rentiers, the financially independent whose income is passive and not primarily earned through wages.

    While there are many standouts among this class who’ve rejected the status quo and look to fix it—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Marc Benioff stand out—too many follow the path of Roger Ailes, Richard Mellon Scaife, and the Koch brothers, for whom inequality is not a problem to be remedied but an inescapable, unchanging reality of the human condition. There will always be poor people, said one young conservative to me at a job at a Midwestern bank years back, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

    I reject this notion, and believe that more than just social policy can fix it (though I support that as well). For all our technological innovations over the past few decades, we in fact live in an era of declining productivity and growth. Most innovation these days is focused on small-ball communications technology (do we really need another social sharing app?) or finance of the type that nearly wrecked the world economy a decade ago.

    Fixing the Real Problems

    This has been good in Bougiestan, for those talented, lucky, and assertive enough to remain in it, but it’s likewise left many millions behind. Compare these last fifty years with the century before it—between 1870 and 1970—when the world catapulted itself from a largely impoverished rural or early-industrial existence to a cornucopia of airplanes, moon rockets, labor-saving, affordable appliances, mass transit and automobiles—and even the foundation of our more incremental-improving times, the microprocessor.

    Technology isn’t the absolute savior, but as rapper Macklemore put it about another social cause, it’s a damn good place to start. Bougiestan and the housing crisis are in fact the same issue, for as long as housing is rare and expensive, even the most basic, Levittown-style living will be unattainable to most.

    But what if we could leverage technology and automation to build housing at one-tenth the cost it is now? Construction is an industry that’s hardly changed at all in centuries. Look around at your home: every cut piece of timber, every brick laid, every drywall panel in every building ever built was applied by hand, with human toil and sweat—just as was done in the time of the Romans. Sure, we have power tools instead of slaves, but little else has evolved. There have been moves in prefabrication here and there, but nothing that’s moved the needle in any big way.

    To that end, the biggest thing that’ll make Bougiestan, or at least more of its trappings, available to everyone, will be the will to make it happen. As World Wars, moonshots, and disease-eradication projects of the past have proved, humankind possesses immense potential to reshape the world. But it’ll take earnest commitment, concerted initiatives—and maybe a little sacrifice—from everyone, in Bougiestan and beyond, to make it happen.

  • My Year-End Facebook Cleanse

    It’s been more than a decade since I gave up soda. Coca-Cola in particular.

    I kept hearing about its harmful health effects. I’d been a committed one-Coke-a-day guy for almost a decade, then a Diet-Coke-a-day guy for most of another. I was sure I was hooked, had less chance of quitting than I would have much stronger stuff. Heck, there’s even evidence that some Cola ingredients are as addictive as any—and let’s not forget, once upon a time, the product contained a certain particularly habit-forming substance that made up part of its name.

    But nope. One day I just stopped and…that was that. Oh, I still drink some from time to time, particularly the Mexican-sourced variety, the one that uses cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. But once I quit, I never went back to daily or even weekly use. I’m at fewer than one a month these days. And I really don’t miss it.

    I wonder if the same will be true about Facebook.

    I was a (somewhat) early adopter of social media: Friendster in 2003, MySpace in 2004, LinkedIn around 2005, Facebook in 2007, Twitter in 2008. I probably would’ve been on Facebook even sooner if I was of the generation still in school when the platform was using college as a combined exclusivity ticket and way to scale up incrementally. It was a master strategy to build a global online brand that now attracts a surprisingly large fragment of all humanity.

    At first, it made sense, the whole social network thing. Once we had telephone books, newsstands, our own address books, home phones, mobile phones, email. Now we had it all in one place, everywhere, all the time, mated with the capabilities of old-school BBSes and the power of video-capable computing. Social networks went from wonder to utility in a very short time.

    Thing is, this killer app of the Internet age didn’t come free. Lots of them started or scaled as venture-backed enterprises…and VCs don’t run charities. It also had become clear, after the age of Napster and Limewire, that people had a thing against paying for content online. The mindset was: it’s not on physical media; it shouldn’t cost anything!

    Except most of the cost of putting out media isn’t the medium it’s on: it’s paying talented, experienced people to create the content. And paying talented, experienced people to curate it. And paying talented, experienced people to write the code and maintain the systems that keep something like this up and running. For years, people talked about nothing making money online except porn (remember those days?) and nobody having figured out the economics of online advertising. Well, turns out, the economics are alarmingly similar to advertising anywhere else: if there are a lot of people spending a lot of time in one place, that place can sell that value, the value of those eyeballs, to the highest bidder. Best of all, unlike the random spray of TV or print ads, Facebook had all this data on who a person was. Which meant they could sell advertising that was targeted. Micro-targeted. Perfectly targeted.

    That was the devil’s bargain we collectively struck, when we said we didn’t want to pay for something that we knew not to be free. The system found a way to monetize us, effectively turning consumers into the product.

    Now, all that would be fine and dandy in the naïve old world of thinking shitty, bad, fake advertising never works, and that if it did, regulatory mechanisms and/or media gatekeepers would keep it out of the system. Except, that means admitting you’re actually a media company, which Facebook had repeatedly refused to do. I’m only more convinced of this as one of a relatively few people who’s worked in both the creative side of media and the technical side of tech, witnessing over two decades as the latter industry transformed itself from a fringe curiosity to one of America’s economic powerhouses. Because, to steal from Spider-Man for a minute, with great media-company power comes great media-company responsibility.

    I’m not a complete Luddite, of course. I recognize that popular products and innovations have their place, their legitimate reason for being popular to begin with. I also know a number of perfectly fine individuals who work, or have worked, for today’s flavor of Big Blue. And I know the company I’m shunning also owns Instagram, which I still actively use, meaning at least some of the espionage harvested from us all is at least in some tiny way still gleaned from me.

    But Facebook as Facebook? It’s long since stopped being useful for me at connecting with people, given so many other options out there in the wild. I’m already in touch with everybody once long-lost. And so weary had I grown of those endless “feeling happy/sad/grateful” posts that I’d unfollowed pretty much everybody, save a dozen or two close family and friends whose lives and opinions really matter to me. Well, that and a few legitimate news sites, the ones close to the top of that pyramid of responsibly-fact-checked, sober journalism.

    But why do I need Facebook for that if I can just download the Atlantic app? And the New York Times app? And (platform plug) Medium? And, for photos, Instagram, where pictures are worth a thousand far less nasty and discordant words than what’s found on their literal big brother.

    We’ll see how long this lasts. Maybe it’ll take a bunch of us on a Facebook vacation for the social media behemoth to tinker with its core product, re-evaluate its role in the world, and lure us back with an improved, sounder offering. Or maybe I’ll find it harder than I think, quitting a two-billion person entity cold turkey. For now, I’m logged out on all devices. I’ll post articles like this one to my Facebook feed from outside. Need to reach me? Try me in one of these other spots.

    We all moved to Facebook once. We can move again.

  • Decade

    Exactly ten years ago today, I boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston, bound for a relatively new destination on their roster: SFO.

    I wasn’t exactly Mary-Ann Singleton, at least not anymore. For one thing, I was a good bit older. For another, I’d lived in San Francisco before, in the heat of the dot-com era. Back then, almost as quickly as I’d been granted admission to Baghdad-By-The-Bay in 1999, I was ejected in 2001. I was in the middle of a Green Card application that could only stay alive, in those post-9/11-economic times, care of a new job deep in the Midwest (more on that saga here).

    But even without that, I’d soured on San Francisco. The intolerable cost of housing. The angry backlash it engendered. The can’t-seem-to-get-it-right public transit. And, for me, some personal stuff, too: a friend who fell prey to drug addiction. A messy breakup for one of my earliest relationships. I thought it all spelled the end of a lifelong dream to live in California.

    So why come back?

    Turns out some other bits of America were even less of a fit for me. Oh, sure, I found cities that seemed better run, that had friendlier people, and more affordable real estate. But something about SF called to me in those years, across the miles and time zones. For one thing, as a software developer and progressive-minded science nerd, I found Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being flat to be a bit of optimistic overreach. Heck, Tom, America isn’t even flat. And, for me, there was no better way to experience that than by working at a San Francisco startup one year… and then working in Middle America with ex-military software guys at an investment bank in the heart of the Dubya Bush years. You can guess how those lunchtime conversations went.

    And so, after years of cobbling together contracting gigs in America’s Number Two tech center, I decided, for the first time in my life, that an earlier decision I’d made about a place I’d left wasn’t the right one, and that, yes, it was the right place, after all.

    Oh, it was no small change of heart: it led to the end of a four-year relationship, the fortuitous sale of a Chicago condo right before the big housing crash, and the niggling suspicion that, for all its attraction, SF would still present many of the same issues in 2007 that it did in 2001.

    I wasn’t wrong: MUNI still sucked, leading me to get a motorcycle license and a scooter (I still own one a decade hence). There was more melodrama with friends and more-than-friends as I found the city less welcoming, at least socially, than those Middle America spots I’d previously called home.

    And I watched the tech industry transform. Ten years ago it had recovered from its dot-bomb hangover, and had reached a sort of equilibrium where work was widely available, the Bay Area was still an international software center…but enough of the old guard was around to make an offbeat fellow like me feel right at home. One of the senior guys I worked with at two of my first jobs was a gay hippie type who was as great to work with as he was brilliant.

    But then, along came Facebook. And Twitter. And an ever-expanding Google. And the iPhone, released within days of my return here. On the one hand, it was reason for techies like me to cheer: more work opportunities and new technologies. But it felt a bit different this time, as I found myself contending with new challenges in the business (once they assailed me for being too young; now it’s the opposite); and an even greater conflict between the burgeoning business (now populated by more than a few of those types I thought I’d left behind in the Midwest) and a metro area that wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this major world industry exploding on its doorstep.

    And yet, I somehow managed to make it all work, and can now count San Francisco as the second-longest place I’ve lived in after the city of my birth. I became a U.S. citizen here. I springboarded into a trip around the world from here, which led me to write a book about those experiences. It sucked me into the vortex of an ever-buoyant real-estate market, where I bought and sold one home and am now in the midst of fixing up another. With all its foibles, faults, and transformations, San Francisco’s still got an ineffable uniqueness, a heart-stopping beauty and force among the great metropolises of our age.

    But the biggest thing San Francisco granted me was a long-delayed adulthood: I met the man I’d eventually marry here. I dealt with the loss of a parent here. I adopted two pets and am planning an even bigger adoption with my husband here in the years to come. For better or worse, this lifelong nomad can finally say he put down roots in this most rootless of cities.

    Here’s to the next San Francisco decade.

  • Ending Inequality As We Know It

    The biggest progressive goal ever for a time gone insane.

    c/o Wikimedia Commons

    “My Daddy makes four thousand dollars a week!”

    There it was. My earliest introduction to income inequality, sitting on the dock of a bay at summer camp with a group of fellow ten-year-old boys, back in the heart of the Reagan era.

    Never mind the appropriateness of a kid that age being privy to that knowledge (yet another wrinkle of that crazy time). While we can all imagine — resent? admire? — the lifestyle of that kid’s family on that income in that era, this was, perhaps, the first time Young Me began to innocently ask the $107 trillion question (the total GDP of the world, by one reckoning):

    Why does economic inequality exist?

    Such a childlike question, huh? I think, whenever I asked it, the more conservative dads of the time fulminated about the perils of Communism — this was the Cold War era, after all — and economic redistribution and such (if you’re wondering why this offended them so much, this might be the answer). Which got me thinking about the basic societal notion we’ve all bought into: you know, the one that says certain people are entitled to greater rewards in exchange for greater contributions to society.

    Trouble is, the degree of “greater rewards” and “greater contribution” remains contested…and has been, on and off, throughout human history. These days, talk of inequality has fueled many movements, from the Tea Party to Occupy to would-be populists the world over. Meanwhile, all that economic talk about consensual market activities and willing participants and rational choice has begun to feel wrong to many of us.

    It wasn’t always that way. I think, for a time, many of us held out hope — heck, I did, naively, in the early dot-com era, where, in America, inequality was briefly shrinking in the 1990s even as tech companies were handing out stock options like candy. Hope that this would all work itself out, you know, like the way the Great Compression did for the white middle class in the 1950s and 1960s, except maybe for everybody this time.

    Only it didn’t happen.

    Where it all went wrong

    “Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012).” Peter Turchin, University of Connecticut

    The nineties and beyond instead continued the trend of the decade or two prior, leading us, in America and the West, to the most unequal age in over a century.

    But let’s look deeper than just the last fifty or a hundred years. Let’s go back to where inequality started. And I mean way back, to before history itself.

    We have, in our minds, this notion of basically egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies… then flash-forward a few millennia and humans are building pyramids to the dead bodies of the Pharaohs. But where do we get that idea?

    Turns out we’re largely beholden to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who back in the 1700s literally wrote the book on the idea of an egalitarian prehistory. Closer to our time, UCLA professor Jared Diamond went so far as to call the development of agriculture the worst mistake humans have ever made — and by that, channelling Rousseau, he meant it spelled the end of equality — and fairness — for humankind.

    Some evolutionary biologists take a different view: you know, all that stuff about survival of the fittest and warring tribes of chimps. But guess what? Lots of that was actually pseudo-science. Darwin himself never said the words “survival of the fittest.” Capitalists of the time popularized it. Science is great, but it’s easy to misrepresent or oversimplify; just ask any climate-change-denier on a cold day.

    Breaking the wheel

    So where does this leave us, those who aren’t happy with the way things are? Most neoclassical economic consensus concludes that capitalism, the free market, and any inequalities therein are logical manifestations of the productive capacity of some humans over others. Going back to a slightly Younger Me again, one fellow at a Chicago finance company I worked at a decade or so back laid it out this way: you’re paid based on how much value you add to a company’s bottom line. Period.

    I’m going to take the position of many of my fellow progressives and call bullshit on this whole scheme. Fiat money, indeed the entire financial system, consensual or otherwise, are ideas we humans made up. Most of us went along with these with little understanding of how they worked, or how they greatly privilege some over others. And sure, reforms and revolutions past didn’t always work out as intended (though often not for reasons we think— see Western intervention in the Russian Civil War as one example). But if there’s anything the crazy events of the past year have taught us, it’s that now’s not the time to give up or stop trying.

    So what all do we do? For a start, keep on exposing elites. I give early credit to filmmaker Jamie Johnson, whose HBO documentaries in the mid-2000s were among the first to shine a light on the doings of the One Percent. We also need to continue to foreground the real will of the people: most Americans, particularly younger Americans, are actually unhappy with the socio-economic status quo. Comedian Chris Rock, himself no slouch in the success department, put it best: “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots.”

    Conservatives usually point to socialism’s failures as a stern warning of what happens when you try to fix things. But let’s face it: socialism was something of a 1.0 product, a 19th century solution filled with pitfalls and bugs. Yes, Bernie did a killer job rehabilitating the brand, and some northern European countries get many things right. But the time has passed for mealy-mouthed third-way triangulation. It’s time for progressives to swing for the fences again. To think big, in 21st century fashion, about where we want our world to go so, and start working to get it there.

    How big a change are we talking? I’ve seen this articulated more and less in various spots, so let me lay it on the line:

    To feed, clothe and medically care for every human being on the planet to at least a present-day Western middle-income standard of living, and do so in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

    Crazy, right? How the heck are we going to do that?

    A utopian shopping list

    Believe it or not, there’s a growing consensus that we’re getting to the point where this is now feasible — if only we allocated the efforts and resources of our civilization more wisely. As author William Gibson put it, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

    Some proposals to get there are bold — like transitioning our entire financial system to post-scarcity economics; in this scenario, nobody gives anything up, but the old rules of money and demand are, over time, engineered away (you’ve actually seen this before on TV, and it’s awesome).

    Less radical, but still pretty ambitious, is the call to replace the various forms of social welfare with a flat basic minimum income paid to everyone. Thomas Piketty’s notion of a global wealth tax has also been called out as a means to diminish yawning chasms of inequality, and help with things like infrastructure and basic services. Overall, tidying up our consumer culture of throwaway obsolescence and fixing climate change with carbon-neutral forms of energy production would also need to come about.

    Awesome! Where do I sign up?

    Unfortunately, there’s one critical, final step that needs to happen before any of this can start. In olden times they called it noblesse oblige, the whole Spider-Man great-power/great-responsibility idea, that the rich and the powerful owe a certain degree of generosity and nobility to the rest of us. I think we’ll take that in the form of a few score more Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts, thank you very much. More than just money, I think visionary leaders need to stand up, and get enough of us to get onboard.

    I know conservatives and establishmentarians of all stripes will try and fight this. Their worldview of tax cuts and government-can’t-do-anything-right and efficient markets and wealth creation leads many of them to believe inequality is part of a just-world hypothesis — even though there’s plenty of evidence that many at the top haven’t necessarily earned the right to be there.

    By Eugène Delacroix — Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives via artsy.net, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27539198

    There’s also the dark shadow of history, which reminds us how past ages of inequality got settled: wars, plagues, revolutions. It’s scary. By that reckoning, Brexit, Trump and Le Pen could be heralds of what’s to come, as people’s rage is diverted into reactionary politics and xenophobia. If for no other reason, this is the best one of all to do something big. Because while we all recognize that some extra reward for extra initiative is fair, the world’s economic system as constituted isn’t. And it’s only a matter of time before enough of us get fed up and flip over the chessboard altogether. So why not make the game fair again instead?

    That’s something that makes sense to everyone, from the innumerable people suffering greatly the world over…all the way to future incarnations of Young Me, wondering why the petty unequal-ness they see all around them is the way it is.

  • A Liberal’s letter to President-Elect Trump

    Dear Mister President-Elect,

    Congratulations!

    As you can probably guess, I didn’t vote for you. And yeah, many of my crowd supported your opponent and, as you’ve put it, said some things about you that were not so nice. But let’s put that behind us and remember that once shared some common ground: in a long-ago world where Bill and Hillary attended your wedding, we actually kind-of dug your brand.

    It’s true. I used to live in Chicago and thought that the skyscraper you put up along the river complemented the city nicely. When I was a kid on my first trip to New York City with my parents in the 1980s, we went to Trump Tower, which had just opened on Fifth Avenue. I get it: I’m a big-city northeastern boy too, raised on subways and tall buildings. And all of us want to see this Republic succeed. So how do we do that?

    I know, you scored a lot of points by making friends with those Breitbart folks, and it sure won you a lot of popularity in some parts of the country. Although most of us in blue America hated a lot of what you said, you did hit on some stuff we liked: while we have a military filled with honorable women and men (something we were all reminded of this Veterans Day), we waste that talent policing problems around the globe that we often make worse by sticking our nose in them.

    You touched a nerve with that — and you’ll find many Bernie Sanders lefties flocking to your side on that point. So put your money where your mouth is, and shut down wasteful, stupid military spending. Focus our troops on targeted, important things, but keep things lean and mean. I bet our armed forces could be just as effective and cost half as much — and imagine how much money that’ll save our people. And that’s just good business sense, right?

    Focus our troops on targeted, important things, but keep things lean and mean. I bet our armed forces could be just as effective and cost half as much.

    I read your book when I was in high school and liked it. Oh, forget about your co-author bitching about it, and you. My favorite takeaway from the book was how you had a rep in New York for building stuff on time and on budget. That’s awesome! America’s in desperate, desperate need of new stuff built, and it’s just the kind of thing a President with a background in construction can kickstart: highways, bridges, airports, trains.

    You’ve probably been to Europe or China and seen how they’re beating us with trains. We need to win with trains. Tell those whiny Republicans to shut up about them being a socialist idea. You’re from New York, you know how a great city works. Build America some fast trains to ease the horrible crowding we have at our nation’s airports, Mister President-elect, and we’ll love you for it.

    Back to those Breitbart people for a second (like you, I have a tendency to go off on tangents). I know they helped you win, but let’s face it, most of them aren’t helping the conversation and you know it. So do a Night of the Long Knives (not literally, of course), and lose them. Go back to being the New York libertarian you always were. You hate the Republican establishment and they hate you right back. Heck, you don’t even agree with them on much… so why toe the party line? You want to renegotiate trade deals? You want to fix immigration? Actually not a bad idea! And both are more connected than you think.

    You hate the Republican establishment and they hate you right back… so why toe the party line?

    I came here from Canada thanks to a NAFTA work visa — which is part of what’s good about NAFTA. Most trade deals right now aren’t great because they benefit countries with cheap labor but screw over our people who have no freedom to either move or retrain. Well, how about we set up something in this country so workers can train for new and better jobs if they want them — kind of like how the GI Bill helped the World War II generation. We bake into our trade deals the ability for our workers and workers from other countries to easily and legally work where they want. I don’t think anybody, liberal or conservative, is against good, honest people coming to this country to work (or vice versa). If you make that process easier — something so many Presidents have promised but couldn’t make happen — then all that extreme vetting you talked about during the election won’t be much of an issue.

    Then there’s some other big stuff: tax cuts, climate change, the LGBTQ. For the first one, there’s such an easy solution Republican types keep overlooking: if you don’t want to raise taxes and don’t want to make it all government’s job, then do what your ancestors did, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons, and all those guys who came to New York before you. They built libraries, schools, and Rockefeller Center. Make it easier for this generation of America’s wealthy to do the same. Get them together and make them do it.

    Don’t believe all this right-wing think tank hooey about climate change being a Chinese hoax — come on, you know it’s real. Remember Hurricane Sandy nearly taking down your city? Plus there’s lots of money to be made in new energy tech, just as there was in oil circa 1885. Fighting climate change could be good business.

    Next, please, listen to Ivanka and Melania, who no doubt have tons of colleagues and friends in LGBTQ-land. Blow off Mike Pence and his calls for bathroom laws and conversion therapy. Those guys don’t get it. You’ve lived in New York your whole life. You’ve traveled across America for this campaign. You know we’re bigger than that.

    Blow off Mike Pence’s bathroom laws and conversion therapy. You’ve lived in New York your whole life. You’ve traveled across America for this campaign. You know we’re bigger than that.

    And finally, if you really want to unite the country the way you said in your acceptance speech, then go rogue and fill your cabinet with people nobody expects. Put Bernie Sanders in the Treasury Department. Make nice with Elizabeth Warren and put her on Indian Affairs. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about you, Mister President-Elect, it’s that you know how to entertain, and you’ve got a sense of humor. Use those to bring us together, put this ugly, awful campaign behind us and begin the process of becoming One Nation, Indivisible once more.

    Yours,

    David Jedeikin

  • Twencennial American

    What my two-decade journey as a Canadian living in the United States says about this year’s election

    via Flickr @mrjoro

    Twenty years ago this month, I stepped up to a U.S. Immigration podium at Montreal airport, Canadian passport and plane ticket in hand, bound for Los Angeles.

    My trip lasted exactly an hour.

    American Immigration officials had me all figured out. I triggered what’s known as a pattern of preconceived intent: all that luggage, a desktop Mac from those pre-smartphone days, plus some correspondence I’d packed with me from movie producers, short-term apartment rentals, and family relations—noob mistake. Oh, I wasn’t actually trying to settle in L.A., at least not yet. Unlike many would-be immigrants, I could reasonably go home, albeit tail between my legs, Joe Gillis-in-Sunset-Boulevard style. I was giving myself four months to see how things would work out, much like any other Hollywood-bound dreamer from podunks near and far. Only difference was, my not-so-podunk happened to be north of an important imaginary line.

    “You can’t just go and move to the United States,” growled one of those officials as he made some entries into his computer, handing me back my passport after a seeming eternity of police-style intimidation questions. I didn’t realize what was going on at first: I was being refused entry to America. I was in the INS’s system, the Mark of Cain upon me for all time, for all I knew.

    Americans have this weird relationship with their neighbor to the north. Too many of them don’t even realize Canada actually is a separate country (to our constant exasperation, and no doubt to Ted Cruz’s benefit.) For the most part, Canadians are subject to the same immigration laws as our European, and Asian, and Latino counterparts—though our proximity to the U.S. and our near-identical culture and speech patterns obviously gives us a leg up.

    Unlike our southern neighbors, however, for whom el norte can be an enigmatic, tantalizing prize (or so politicians want you to think), for Canucks, America’s mostly just a convenient place to visit for cheap gas and factory outlet shops, and—for the better-heeled—sun-dappled vacations with the kids at Disney resorts in the wintertime. When those well-off children grow up, their parents do the same thing their American counterparts do: send them to elite colleges with the aim of getting them hired by top-flight U.S. legal or consulting or investment banking firms. Those lucky Canadians then often have their immigration paperwork handled as part of their employment package. Heck, if they’re high up enough on the totem pole, a Green Card usually follows not too long after. And don’t even get me started on Justin Bieber.

    For those not quite so well placed, things can get dicier. Canadian-ness mitigates some, but not all, of the obstacles we face as would-be migrants. In my case, a bit more initiative was all it took: a week after my initial refusal, with rearranged plane tickets and a few letters of explanation, Immigration officials did let me in. On arrival in L.A. I enrolled in a night school screenwriting class at UCLA, went to some LGBTQ coming out groups, and worked to kindle a life in a new land.

    In case you’re wondering why they did they let me in: Well, you’re technically allowed to decide to try setting up shop in America once you’re in the country, as long as you go home once your legal time as a visitor in the country is up if things don’t work out (a very loosely enforced six months for Canadians pre-9/11). You’re just not allowed to intend to do that at the instant you cross the border. Capiche? Me neither.

    Lost in all the rhetoric about immigrants and open borders these days is the big question: why come here? Why uproot ourselves—or, sometimes, flee in fear and desperation—from homelands, crossing deserts hidden in false bottoms of trucks, or boarding planes to California with three month’s savings and only the vaguest of invitations to pitch stories to off-Hollywood kids’ TV shows… all to live in a land it’s now claimed needs to be made Great Again?

    I can only begin to imagine the urgent and heart-rending needs of migrants and refugees both political and economic, and the concomitant will and desire migrants share to better their lot, and in so doing, their new homelands. The overwhelming number of us don’t come to the Land of the Free to lead a life of depravity and crime. We live in a peculiar time, an era of declining illegal immigration amid hot-button election-year immigration stances. But then, this stuff was big news when I first arrived as well, and has been so many times in the past when politicians wanted to fear-monger. But others are better qualified to report on all that. What I have to offer is my own perspective: twenty years as an immigrant in this country.

    Let’s start with the “why leave” question, and my answer to it.

    I was no refugee or victim of global poverty. I was, rather, a closeted gay nerd of moderate means growing up in a quasi-traditional, cosmopolitan, eastern-Canadian community in an age before Canada surged ahead of its southern neighbor on same-sex legislation. America, particularly California with its movies and technology and LBGT meccas, beckoned from an early age. “Go West,” sang the Village People, and I heeded the call, the strains of that seventies disco tune playing as I packed up my life of temp jobs and spec scripts and nascent gay identity. The fact that many of my cohorts viewed America with disdain, even suspicion, only whetted my appetite further.

    “The asshole of America in Gucci loafers,” sneered one colleague as he characterized Los Angeles. Hollow rhetoric, I thought, as I beheld the grandeur of the city at night from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook off Mulholland Drive, or took in sunset vistas of the Pacific from grassy clifftops above Santa Monica beach. Oh, it wasn’t easy at first; I ended my first year in L.A. twenty grand in debt and survivor of more than a few clumsy first dates. But those early, painful months as a new arrival gave way to a gig as a technical writer and my first work visa, a product of NAFTA, turns out. Politicos, please note: I was indeed paid the prevailing wage for that position, and for every other I held during my time as a non-American. While I have no illusions about the shenanigans many companies pull on this front, I’m happy to report my citizenship status was never used to deny me or any native-born American or citizen of any nation any employment right or benefit or means of advancement.

    A job may bring you somewhere, but a life is what’ll keep you there. For me, two fantastic bosses at that first job saw potential (and needed a new database) and sent me back to night school at UCLA—this time for a vocation I’d long neglected, computer programming. With the dot-com boom raging, I again packed up my life and headed north, to San Francisco. I watched the millennium turn, filed an application for a Green Card, and met my first American boyfriend in those Red Bull and (for some) MDMA-fueled late nights of the early Internet age.

    But the story didn’t end there.

    As boom turned to bust and airplanes exploded into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, I got laid off with my immigration petition still pending. Some new laws allowed me to keep the application alive, but only if I uprooted my life yet again. So I did some soft time, in Lansing, Michigan, working a tech job for an insurance provider while nervously awaiting final approval. When that finally happened, a year later (and almost six after that initial arrival in L.A.), I wanted to put down roots. Good thing about a big, diverse country like America: it gives you options. In my case, a friendly, welcoming, urbane yet surprisingly affordable spot lay right across the lake: Chicago. I bought a condo in East Lake View and entered a four-year relationship with a native-born Wisconsinite and (yes, really) became his living liver donor after a congenital childhood illness threatened his life. I did it all proudly and willingly, of course, but score one for immigrants giving back.

    Oh, but the story didn’t end there either.

    The relationship, in spite of all that, didn’t quite work out. So I packed up my life yet again and returned to the West Coast. Not long after, I took the oath of U.S. citizenship, renouncing allegiances to other princes and potentates. Some years later, with America joining a growing chorus of nations (including that of my birth) in making same-sex marriage the law of the land, I met and married my love and life partner here in San Francisco, where we are now in the process of remodeling a home amid the city’s hurly-burly property market.

    It seems every group, every religion, every nation in its most fevered imaginings thinks it’s got things figured out. America sure does: I mean, part of the country’s origin story’s got city upon a hill on the marquee. My native homeland professes a greater modesty, but don’t let that fool you either: Canadians sometimes think they’re America done right, Yankeedom with the rough edges smoothed out. In truth, my becoming a Twencennial American has taught me that both places, indeed all places, have so much to learn from one another—which is the best argument for a more open world I can possibly imagine. For me, the true essence of globalization is found not in the market-driven calculus of corporations but in the wanderings and discoveries of inveterately curious people.

    And so, too, the American Dream, or whatever you want to call it. Just as the world is shaped by its wanderers, its misfits, its personalities unsatisfied with the status quo; so, too, America, a nation of nomads going back to the Pleistocene. It is this very melding of peoples and cultures that has made the nation a place grand, creative, and wondrous. Politicians and polity alike would be wise to remember that this election season.

    Because that’s what one scared, closeted twenty-six year-old stepped up to an Immigration podium, twenty years and half a lifetime ago, to come to America to find.