Does Realignment Just Reflect Underlying Clusters Of Norms?

Color me skeptical. I don't believe that polarization at the grass roots was nearly as polarized forty years ago as it is today.

We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of partisan polarization between voters of the two main political parties steadily increased since the 1990s, and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Growing partisan polarization in the U.S. is a reflection of partisan views becoming increasingly aligned with the main values-based clusters in society.

Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuno-Ortin, Romain Wacziarg, "Latent Polarization" (May 2024).

Conservatives Make Poor Elites

Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.

Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.

From here via Marginal Revolution.

Juneteenth

Juneteenth, celebrated today on June 19, is now a federal, state, and local holiday.

It memorializes the several days in 1865 when many slaves in the Confederacy were made aware from Union forces that they had been freed by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Until then, that proclamation had been largely an empty promise.

This was a monumental and profoundly life changing event for almost every slave who received the news. But it is a complex memory, because it was also only one huge and critical step in the very long process that still isn't complete. It was an absolutely necessary step, but it wasn't a sufficient one to chance society enough to do justice to those who heard it by itself.

Reparations, in the popular imagination, forty acres and a mule, never materialized. Reconstruction was short lived, and was followed by about ninety years of lynchings, discrimination, and Jim Crow. Many freed slaves continued to do work similar to what they had done while they were slaves, but while migrating from one plantation to another as they saw fit, rather than being bound to a master. Their economic well being improved, but more incrementally than dramatically. Their path to education and business ownership and gaining the skills to be competitive in the economy was winding with one step back for every two steps forward.

A parity of legal rights on paper finally started to be achieved in the 1950s and 1960s, but it took decades longer for even those legal rights to be anywhere close to being fully realized. And, even then, having legal rights, and being able to use them in a way the secured the descendants of the freed slaves who heard the news in the Juneteenth days of 1865 something approaching parity in social and economic well being has taken longer than that. In 2024, we still aren't all of the way to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s promised land.

So, Juneteenth is an important day, but was not a moment of a singular victory whose benefits were reaped right away. It was a beginning and we haven't made it to the end yet.

Why Are Buses And Intracity Rail In The U.S. So Crime Ridden?

The biggest reason for low bus and intracity rail usage in the United States by international standards is that crime in and around transit is high and these means of transportation don't feel safe. It is a long standing issue, and it isn't nearly such a serious problem in countries all of the world. 

Israelis, for example, packed buses in the course of living their every day lives, even when suicide bombers were terrorizing those buses.

A recent Denver Post story quantifies and characterizes the problem in Denver's transit system.

When Denver resident Jana Angelo rides the Regional Transportation District’s buses and trains, she feels trapped and says she sometimes hugs herself for fortitude.

She’s smelled fumes from passengers smoking fentanyl. She’s heard unhinged riders’ rants. Two “really high” men once fought right in front of her, said Angelo, 29.

“I was like, ‘Stop the bus!’ ” she said. “But the driver did not.”

Angelo packs a knife just in case, she said, and wears headphones, avoiding conversation. . . .

Passengers on RTD’s buses and trains were assaulted or threatened at the rate of one per day over the last three years, according to agency records obtained by The Denver Post. RTD drivers also are assaulted regularly — more than 100 times a year on average since 2019, records show — as they work amid crime and antisocial behavior, including riders using illegal drugs and unhoused people who sleep in station elevators and on climate-controlled buses and trains. 

. . .

The agency’s general manager, Debra Johnson, acknowledged the problems and said ensuring safety is critical. She’s discussed rising violence and crime in public transit with her counterparts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We’re all adversely impacted by the same elements of society,” Johnson said in an interview, referring to mental health problems, substance use and homelessness. “These are societal issues. Whatever’s happening in a municipality is going to spill over into the transit system. What are we collectively doing to help minimize and mitigate these societal issues?” 

. . .

RTD bus driver Dan Day, 43, recalled how, on a cold day in 2020 during his first year on the job, he saw a man down, bleeding from his head, while another man kicked him at the Decatur Station along Federal Boulevard.

Day took the bleeding man onto the bus and handed him paper towels. As he steered the bus around the station, the attacker approached it, pointing a gun. He climbed on, aiming the barrel at the bleeding man. Day was caught between them, learned it was a dispute about a sister, and brokered a truce.

“I had a sense he wouldn’t shoot,” Day said. “…I was just trying to follow procedure, to call dispatch, let them know what happened.”

RTD supervisors offered him therapeutic counseling. He declined, turning instead to classic stoic philosophers: “My own tools to just cope with scary and difficult situations,” Day said. “Keep yourself in the moment. This is just a moment in time. It is going to pass.” 

. . .

RTD bus drivers and train operators were physically assaulted 463 times between January 2019 and April 2024 — a rate of roughly seven assaults per month, according to the records obtained by The Post through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

In addition, drivers have reported 501 verbal assaults and threats of violence since 2021 — a dozen per month on average, the records show.

Assaults and threats targeting RTD passengers happen more often, according to the records. Since January 2021, 1,375 passengers have experienced physical assaults and verbal threats along bus and rail routes, records show. That’s an average of 34 a month over the past three years.

The troubles appear concentrated along busy streets including Colfax Avenue, Broadway and Federal Boulevard.

RTD’s transit police have been busy. The agency’s tallies show that, during the first half of 2023, transit officers made a monthly average of 36 arrests. They responded to a monthly average of 60 assaults, 486 disturbances, 1,206 drug-related incidents, 389 trespasses and 58 instances of vandalism, according to an agency document.

This year, a homicide on an RTD bus in west Denver heightened concerns. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting on Jan. 27 of a 60-year-old grandfather whose leg was blocking an RTD bus aisle.

Illegal drug use happens almost daily, drivers and train operators say. 

. . .

Light rail operator Roy Martinez, who previously worked as a bus driver and endured assaults, said he regularly smells illegal drugs on light-rail trains such as the E Line that connects downtown Denver with the south suburbs.

Typically, a rider places a fentanyl pill on a piece of foil and crushes it. Then the rider lights the powder and, hunkering under a hood or blanket, inhales the fumes.

Those fumes rise and spread through the train’s air system, Martinez said, noting he detects odors inside the locked front cabin where he runs the train. There’s no option but to push through to the next stop. “Then you stop the train, open the doors, air it out,” he said.

From the Denver Post.

The story presents a mix of questions and answers, some tucked away behind the scenes.

One obvious issue is that the U.S. has a weak social safety net, and the highest percentage of people who drive their own cars, if their licenses aren't revoked, and don't use transit. Transit is disproportionately left with people who are too disabled to drive, people whose licenses have been revoked, and people who are very poor. Even people without licenses who have money often ride share instead.

So, transit is heavily weighted with very poor people and is not well counter-balanced, most of the time, with middle class and more affluent people. It is also heavily weighted with people who have lost driver's licenses due to illegal conduct and substance abuse.

Big cities in the U.S. with transit systems also tend to have riders who lack social cohesion that can impose order through nearly universally held social norms, in lieu of formal law enforcement.

But another issue is that policy makers and people who talk about policy and involved in politics, like me, struggle to understand why people who act in anti-social ways in and around transit are acting the way that they do.

I can completely understand why someone might become addicted to smoking fentanyl. But I can't fathom at all why someone would feel like this is an activity that makes sense to engage in while riding a bus or a light rail train.

I'm comfortable trusting that Debra Johnson, the general manager of Denver's Regional Transportation District has a better handle on what's going on that I do. She blames mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness.

In other words, mentally ill and homeless drug users tend to use drugs on buses and train cars because that's more comfortable than doing it on the streets, under a bridge, or in an alley.

Public libraries, which are one of the few places you can just hang out without paying money, in a place shielded from the weather, face similar problems, although seemingly, fewer violent assaults.

Anecdotally, at least, the assaults seem to be driven by poor people with a lack of an ability to control anger and impulse, and a lack of access in terms of both personal social skills and formal access to other recourse to resolve situations where they feel aggrieved. 

It isn't that working class and middle class people don't often do some of the same things. But they don't do that at bus stops, on buses, and on light rail trains. Driving a car reduces the amount of potentially triggering interactions you have with other people, although even that doesn't stop road rage incidents.

These situations on transit and in urban neighborhoods are something that urban people can't ignore, which is one of the reasons that urban people tend to be more liberal.

The whole situation is also an apt example of what makes illegal drugs a problem that we have invoked the criminal justice system to address, even if it has done a very poor job of it. Most vices, including illegal drug use, are primarily a problem because they are instrumental in creating a "bad neighborhood." 

If drug users were out of sight in an opium den somewhere, and didn't bother everyone else, we'd care less. And, modern opium dens might even be equipped to deal with overdoses and other forms of drug induced anti-social behavior.

Incentives

Too many people in our society have nothing to lose and few prospects of great progress. Perhaps half of adults who own perhaps 2.5% of our society's wealth.

Too much of our society's wealth is owned by people so wealthy that neither absurd failure, or extreme success, will change their material condition. Perhaps, the top 1-3% who own more than a third of our society's wealth.

Too few people in our society have to behave because they have something to lose, and have realistic prospects of great improvements in their material condition is they do something right. Maybe 10%-25% of people are really in that sweet spot.

The rest of the people are blends of these extremes.

Stress Test

Yesterday was the wettest day in Southern California history (and much of Nevada and Arizona history as well). Southern California had a 5.1 magnitude earthquake and high winds at the same time.

There was some property damages, but there were very few casualties. SoCal survived this extreme stress test well. People took the warnings seriously. First responders were prepared. California has endured disasters and hardships, but it has produced a resilient and prosperous state.

Manhood, Self-Governance, And More

Recent op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post both bemoan the perception that men don't have a model for manhood on the left. The Scholar's Stage blog, well off the beaten path, quotes a historian and reaches back to the 19th century U.S. to aptly address the dilemma:

In the face of suffocating managerialism or institutional decay, it is easy to lionize the outputs of previous eras like the nineteenth century. Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, nor to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness,” similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities.

The same analysis also highlights "the benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal", a "commitment to formality", and "the usefulness of scale and hierarchy". Noting that:

The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. . . .

Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule. Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action. . . .

an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…. neither hierarchy nor scale is inherently opposed to agency. Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems.

These chapters thus not only served as vehicles of self-rule at the lower level but also prepared leaders for successful decision-making at higher levels of a hierarchy. Wielding authority at the lower levels of a nineteenth-century organization closely mirrored the experience of wielding authority in its highest echelons. Absent such training, leadership does in fact become the impenetrable closed circle that disturbed the advocates of “human scale.” Centralization, not hierarchy, caused the demise of local dynamism.

The blog's analysis is embedded in the theme that:

America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone. The social conditions that gave the Americans their competence and confidence have passed away. Where Americans once asked “how do we solve this?” they now query “how do we get management on my side?” . . .

Self-government is communal. It comes with the confidence that you and the citizens around you are capable of crafting solutions to your shared problems. Self-government is less a particular set of institutions than a particular set of attitudes. If the institutions needed to solve a problem locally do not exist, the citizens of a self-governing community will create them.

The author makes some important points, but I don't wholeheartedly agree with this analysis either. 

The focus on brotherhood didn't have to be male exclusive and their rituals now strike the average educated person as stupid and childish. Formality taken too far leads to wasted time, stilted and empty discourse, and undue emphasis on lawyer-like parliamentary procedure skills over more useful knowledge. Hierarchy is prone to harmful centralization and bureaucracy if the organizational garden is not subject to perpetual and ruthless pruning.

I've spent plenty of time in far-left political circles and can attest that extreme aversion to hierarchy is as problematic and self-defeating as excessive centralization. It leaves you disorganized and forces you to walk through the social mud of endless meetings and consensus building to get anything done even when the right course of action should be obvious. 

Certainly, "agency", which is to say a belief that it is your place to make things happen in your own life, is the lifeblood of change in business, civic society, and politics. But taken too far, an excessive sense of "agency" can lead to unjustified dismissal of developments that are sweeping the larger society, and of the importance of being part of the larger society and the broad social movements within it, which can leave people too trapped in their own bubble to be aware of their larger context prone to making decisions that are ill-informed. Self-determination often entails copying the ideas of others and implementing those ideas in your own community, in order to allow your own community to participate in progress.

The author isn't wrong that a capacity for self-organization is a remarkable national virtue when it is present, and is deeply rooted in a nation's culture. The British and the Japanese, for example, are both much better as self-organizing than Americans, something that is apparent during natural disasters and when citizens of the respective nations were interned in prisoner of war camps, for example. 

More generally, the author's focus on the importance of a healthy civic society isn't wrong. But, later research, by scholars such as Richard Florida, has also shown that Robert Putnam's civic capital, which can be so strong in small towns, can also stifle innovation despite the sense of agency that these communities possess. Innovators do better in societies where they have large fragile networks of shallow acquaintances and society's power to sanction people who break the mold is weak. Communities with unshakeable networks of smaller numbers of people with whom leaders have deep bonds that have the institutional capacity to regulate behavior tightly in their communities, look agreeable. But they are also stagnant and are prone to being backward.

I have a more jaded opinion of local self-government than the author. When I worked as a lawyer defending county governments in Western Colorado from lawsuits, our informal wisdom was the the smaller the government, the less competent its leaders were, and the harder to defend its grossly misguided, petty, and personal their wrongdoings became. Small local governments lack the professionalism, competence, and even handedness of larger local governments. I've seen the same trends in the rural small towns where my parents grew up where I still have many relatives.

As I was taught in introductory political science classes in college, politics is about both power and choice. You need power to implement your choices, and you need to make good choices for your exercise of power to produce good results.

But back to the beginning, and building new scripts for "manhood", I prefer to favor as a starting point, the image of manhood associated with the notion of a gentleman to the image of manhood associated with chivalry. A gentleman understands that powerful, effective people eschew violence when not absolutely necessary, embrace acting honestly but act with sophistication and civility, and are at home in the urban environments that are the center of modern civilization. In contrast, chivalry is the modern embodiment of the values of a warrior class of the thinly populated rural estates of the anarchic dark ages, for whom episodes of violence are their raison d'etre. Chivalry also often crosses the line into being patronizing.

The modern scripts of manhood should also embrace at least two key virtues: effectiveness (a term I prefer to competence, as effectiveness implies better than competence the importance of working well with others and seeking guidance from others when appropriate to achieve one's ends) and unselfishness (which captures a mix of generosity, charity, heroism, and loyalty to others).

The Paper Belt

Today is the first time I saw this term and it deserves a mention because it makes novel conceptual connections.

The Paper Belt is an informal analogic term referring to the four metropolitan areas where several important industries and political infrastructures converged during the post-war era: Boston (education), New York (publishing, finance), Los Angeles (media, Hollywood) and Washington DC (politics, law).

Some alternative definitions focus on the northeastern coast of the United States by excluding Los Angeles and including Delaware, where a large number of corporations are legally headquartered due to its more generous tax laws for corporations.

It came into attention after Balaji Srinivasan's 2013 talk titled Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. In the context of the talk, the term was used as a contrast with the emerging influence-structure of Silicon Valley.

From here. Hat tip to Wired.

The breathless and excited original speech the spawned the term says in some key excerpts:

So what I’m going to talk about today is something I’m calling Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. So as motivation here, it’s a bit topical: is the USA the Microsoft of nations? We can take this sort of thing and we can expand it: codebase is 230 years old, written in an obfuscated language; system was shut down for two weeks straight; systematic FUD on security issues; fairly ruthless treatment of key suppliers; generally favors its rich enterprise customers but we still have to buy it.

And if we think about Microsoft itself, there’s a great quote from Bill Gates in 1998: what displaced Microsoft, what did he fear, it wasn’t Oracle or anybody like that, what he feared were some guys in a garage, who happened to be ultimately Larry and Sergey back in 1998.

And the thing about what Larry and Sergey did is: there’s no way they could have reformed Microsoft from the inside. At that time, Microsoft already had 26,000 employees; joining its numbers as 26,000 and 26,001 and trying to push for 20% time or free lunches… they probably wouldn’t have gone too far. So what they had to do was start their own company: they had to exit. And with success in that alternative, then Microsoft would imitate them. And this is actually related to a fundamental concept in political science: the concept of voice versus exit. A company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system, a new startup, or to join a competitor sometimes. Loyalty can modulate this; sometimes that’s patriotism, which is voluntary, and sometimes it’s lock-in, which are involuntary barriers to exit.

And we can think about this in the context of various examples and start to get a feel for this. So voice in the context of open source would be a patch; exit would be a fork. Voice in the context of a customer would be a complaint form, whereas exit would be taking your business elsewhere. Voice in the context of a company, that’s a turnaround plan; exit is leaving to found a startup. And voice in the context of a country is voting, while exit is emigration. So if there are those two images on the left is the Norman Rockwell painting on voice; on the right is actually my dad in the center, and that’s a grass hut on the right-hand side, so he grew up on a dirt floor in India, and left, because India was an economic basket case and there’s no way that he could have voted to change things within his lifetime, so he left.

And it turns out that, while we talk a lot about voice in the context of the US and talk about democracy… that’s very important, but you know, we’re not just a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of emigrants: we’re shaped by both voice and exit, starting with the Puritans, you know, they fled religious persecution; the American Revolutionaries which left England’s orbit, then we started moving west, leaving the East Coast bureaucracy to go to the Western nations; later, late 1800s, Ellis Island, people leaving pogroms, and in the 20th century fleeing Nazism and Communism. And sometimes people didn’t just come here for a better life; they came here to save their life. That’s, you know, the airlifting at the end of Saigon.

And it’s not just the US that’s shaped by exit; Silicon Valley itself is also shaped by exit. You can date it back to the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor with the Traitorous Eight, the founding of Fairchild… the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California, and the fact that DC funds disruption, not just turnaround. The concept of forking in open source, if you think about the back button, that is, in some ways, the cheapest way to exit something. And of course the concept of the startup itself. That right there, if you guys haven’t seen, is one of Y Combinator’s first ads. Larry and Sergey won’t respect you in the morning.

So the concept here is that exit is actually an extremely important force in complement to voice, and it’s something that gives voice its strength. In particular, it protects minority rights. In the upper left corner, for example, you imagine two countries, and country 1 is following policy A, and country 2 is following policy B. Some minority is potentially interested in following policy B, but policy A is very stridently promulgated by the majority. However, there’s some other country, maybe a smaller country, maybe another country, that’s actually quite into B, and so that person leaves. And they’re not necessarily super into B, but they think it might be interesting, thus B question mark. And what happens is that all the other guys in A see that people are actually leaving. They really care about this particular policy so much that they actually left. It could be a feature where people are leaving for a competitor; it could be a bug that you haven’t fixed so people fork the project and take it somewhere else—what happens is that exit amplifies voice. So it’s a crucial additional feature for democracy is to reduce the barrier to exit, to make democratic voice more powerful, more successful. And so a voice gains much more attention when people are leaving in droves. And I would bet that exit is a reason why half of this audience is alive. Many of us have our ancestors who came from China, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, places where there’s war or famine, economic basket cases. Exit is something that I believe we need to preserve, and exit is what this talk is about.

So exit is really a meta-concept: it’s about alternatives. It’s a meta-concept that subsumes competition, forking, founding, and physical emigration. It means giving people tools to reduce influence of bad policies on their lives without getting involved in politics: the tools to peacefully opt out. And if you combine those three things: this concept of the US is the Microsoft of nations, the quote from Gates, and Hirschman’s treatise [ed. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States] you get this concept of Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. Basically, I believe that the ability to reduce the importance of decisions made in DC in particular without lobbying or sloganeering is going to be extremely important over the next ten years. And you might ask, “Why? What does this have to do with anything?” So the reason why is that today it’s Silicon Valley versus what I call the Paper Belt. So there’s four cities that used to run the United States in the postwar era: Boston with higher ed; New York City with Madison Avenue, books, Wall Street, and newspapers; Los Angeles with movies, music, Hollywood; and, of course, DC with laws and regulations, formally running it. And so I call them the Paper Belt, after the Rust Belt of yore. And in the last twenty years, a new competitor to the Paper Belt arose out of nowhere: Silicon Valley. And by accident, we’re putting a horse head in all of their beds. We are becoming stronger than all of them combined.

And to get a sense of this: Silicon Valley is reinventing all of the industries in these cities. That X up there is supposed to be a screenplay, the paper of LA, and LA is going to iTunes, BitTorrent, Netflix, Spotify, Youtube… that was really the first on the hit list, starting in ’99 with Napster. New York right alongside: AdWords, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Kindle, Aereo. We’re going after newspapers; we’re going after Madison Avenue; we’re going after book publishing; we’re going after television. Aereo figured out how to put a solid-state antenna in a server farm so you don’t have to pay any TV fees for all of their recording. Recently Boston was next in the gunsights: Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity. And most interestingly, DC, and by DC I’m using it as a metonym for government regulation in general, because it’s not just DC: it includes local and state governments. Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Square, and the big one, Bitcoin… all things that threaten DC’s power. It is not necessarily clear that the US government can ban something that it wants to ban anymore.

The cause of this is something I call the Paper Jam. The backlash is beginning. More jobs predicted for machines, not people; job automation is a future unemployment crisis looming. Imprisoned by innovation as tech wealth explodes, Silicon Valley, poverty spikes… they are basically going to try to blame the economy on Silicon Valley, and say that it is iPhone and Google that done did it, not the bailouts and the bankruptcies and the bombings, and this is something which we need to identify as false and we need to actively repudiate it. So we must respond via voice: the obvious counterargument is that Valley reduces prices. The top is a little small, but that’s a famous graph: consumption spreads faster today. That shows the absolute exponential rise of technologies over the last century. Anything that is initially just the province of the one percent, whether it be computers or cell phones, quickly becomes the province of the five percent and the ten percent, that ??? that barely works that someone is willing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for allows you to fix the bugs, to get economies of scale, to bring it to the ten percent and the twenty percent and the fifty percent and the middle class and the 99 percent. That’s how we got cell phones from a toy for Wall Street to something that’s helping the poorest of the poor all over the world. Technology is about reducing prices. The bottom curve there is Moore’s Law. And by contrast, the Paper Belt raises them. There’s the tuition bubble and the mortgage bubble and the medical care bubble and too many bubbles to name. The argument that the Valley is a problem is incoherent, but it’s not going to be sufficient to respond via voice. We can make this argument, but the ultimate counterargument is actually exit. Not necessarily physical exit, but exit in a variety of different forms. What they’re basically saying is: rule by DC means people are going back to work and the emerging meme is that rule by us is rule by Terminators. We’re going to take all the jobs. Whereas we can say, and we can argue, DC’s rule is more like an overrun building in Detroit, and down right there is a Google data center. And so we can go back and forth verbally, but ultimately this is about counterfactuals: they have aircraft carriers; we don’t. We don’t actually want to fight them. It wouldn’t be smart.

So we want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like without actually affecting anyone who still believes the Paper Belt is actually good. That’s where exit comes in. So what do I mean by this? What do I mean by Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit? It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years.

Higher SES Friends Lead To Higher Incomes

 
From the New York Times.

Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution quotes from the source studies:

There are two new NBER papers written by large teams, headlined by Raj Chetty.  Here is an excerpt from the first paper:

The fraction of high-SES friends among low-SES individuals—which we term economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date, whereas other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average.

And this as a general introduction to the project:

….we measure and analyze three types of social capital by ZIP code in the United States: (i) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low vs. high socioeconomic status (SES); (ii) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (iii) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other.

The core data are taken from Facebook and anonymized.  And from the second paper:

We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines—measured as the difference in the share of high-socioeconomic status (SES) friends between low- and high-SES people—is explained by differences in exposure to high- SES people in groups such as schools and religious organizations. The other half is explained by friending bias—the tendency for low-SES people to befriend high-SES people at lower rates even conditional on exposure.

There is then this concrete result:

…friending bias is higher in larger and more diverse groups and lower in religious organizations than in schools and workplaces.

The cross-social class connectedness of people varies geographically (red places on the map below are more social class segregated and blue ones are less social class segregated in friendships):

Notably, there is great variation in cross-socioeconomic class connections within both "red states" and counties (politically) and "blue states" and counties (politically).

Within conservative leaning areas, the Great Plains and northern Mountain West are very connected across socioeconomic class lines, while the South and Southwest are very segregated.

The Rural v. Urban Political Divide And Adults Our Economy Doesn't Need

What Was Wrong With Real World Socialism?

The standard Econ 101 explanation for the failure to communist-socialist economic systems is that by separating rewards from productive activity, they destroy the incentive to be productive and efficient. In Econ 201 you may further learn about the deep flaws in the Marxist Labor Theory of Value.

Neither of these explanations are entirely wrong, but they give rise to a misleading narrative that can lead to bad policy focused on monetary incentives for individuals to make them individually more productive.

In truth, the connection between rewards that serve as incentives and the nature of the work that most people do is only indirect and attenuated for the vast majority of actors in the economy who don't interface directly with the market. For most people, the main incentive to work and work well is to avoid being fired and to be promoted by managers hired by an employer, and that holds just as true in socialist economies as it does in capitalist ones.

It turns out that in practice, the number one thing that socialist economies do poorly and capitalist ones do will, is shut down firms that fail to be economically self-sufficient at the firm level. In socialist economies, failing firms are subsidized and given far too many second chances.

The United States has relative few large, economically not self-sustaining, firms. The most notable of them is AMTRAK, the national passenger rail company, which survives only on large, wasteful operating subsidies for an inferior product in an a company that is not at all innovative. 

Socialist economies, historically, have had vast numbers of AMTRAKs that constituted an immense drain on their national economies and impeded progress.

Why Is There An Urban-Rural Divide?

What does this have to do with the urban-rural political divide in the U.S.?

The connection is that the urban-rural political divide in the U.S. and many of its other current political pathologies, are to a very large extent, although not exclusively, driven by a prosperity gap. Urban areas in the U.S. are economically productive and affluent and have political values that are associated with affluence and economic security. Rural areas in the U.S. are far less economically productive, poor, and economically insecure, and have political values that are associated with those conditions.

In particular, conditions in "red America" which is disproportionately found in rural areas and small towns, have been so profoundly stagnant economically for the last fifty years that whole political communities have given up on improving the system and are resorting to nihilism, sour grapes, and a "burn the whole thing down" attitude towards democratic capitalism, science, and any notion of a shared factual reality that can be discerned from trustworthy sources.

Why does this happen?

In an idealized Econ 101 world, disparities between poor economically unproductive areas and rich economically productive areas are resolved by people moving from poor areas to rich areas until an equilibrium is reached.

If this happened, there would still be urban v. rural political divides in the U.S., but they wouldn't be nearly as severe and would have a very different character.

But, of course, we don't live in an idealized Econ 101 world. There are barriers to migration from unproductive rural to productive urban areas that undermine these incentives, there are barriers to migration generally that act as "friction" in the system regardless of the incentives, and there are factors the tie people to unproductive areas.

Technology has relentlessly reduced the need for rural workers from the year 1800 to the present, in almost every single year. There has been gradual migration to cities, but it hasn't kept up and hasn't been rapid enough to resolve the imbalances.

A huge array of subsidies and regulatory incentives allow rural business and towns to continue with minimal disruption when they no longer make economic sense, and despite the externalities, like misallocation of scarce water supplies, environmental damage, and worker mistreatment that results from these choices. Most of the farms in the United States aren't productive enough to support even a single family, but policy incentives and sentimental attachments to those farms, keep them from going anyway. Our nation's rural economies have millions of AMTRAK firms that are not failing and being shut down when they should be. Rural America also has millions of retirees outside the workforce who cling to homesteads where it is vastly more expensive to provide them what they need than it is in urban areas, leaving the difference split with both higher costs, mostly subsidized by the government, and inferior services.

There is also a sorting effect. 

Economically productive urban areas have lots of meaningful work that requires educated and skilled people to do it, but struggles to find opportunities for work that is productive enough to support a living wage for people who are less educated or less skilled.

Rural areas, due to a steady flow of outmigration (even though it isn't fast enough) have low housing costs which keep the costs of living low, and have industries that haven't modernized because government policy buffers make it possible for them to stay in business without doing so, and these less modern businesses have more uses for less educated and less skilled workers that are sufficiently productive to cover a local living wage, although these jobs too are increasingly scarce leading to stagnant wages and regular bouts of unemployment.

As a result, urban areas get to first pick of the labor market, and rural areas are left with the gleanings and with people who are continuing to live there despite strong economic opportunities elsewhere for non-economic reasons. This just further magnifies the productivity gap and makes the divide worse.

Alleviating The Urban-Rural Divide

We could, as a matter of government policy, gradually "take off the training wheels" and "crutches" that prevent unproductive rural firms from failing. 

We could cease to allow rural retirees to make an extremely costly economic choice to remain where they lived their working years free of incentives to align themselves with the economic costs that society faces as a result of their choices.

If we did so, rural areas would depopulate faster, rural economies would modernize and become more productive, and the people who remained in those areas would be more affluent and economically secure. 

As a result of these changes, the "fuck the system" and "damn the truth" subculture that has evolved in rural America would fade away. So would deaths of despair from causes like suicide in rural areas and opioid overdoses in rural and small town America. The urban-rural divide in the American economy would wane to a manageable level that would enhance the long term health of American democracy.

The Problem Of Adults Our Economy Doesn't Need

Of course, that's only half the problem.

Ending subsidies for the rural economy and people unreasonably staying in rural areas when they retire would solve the rural-urban political divide to a manageable extent. 

But it would leave unresolved a second and distinct problem that isn't intrinsically related to it, even though they coincide in the early 21st century United States.

The other problem is that our society has lots of people, especially working age men, who aren't college educated and don't have skills that continue to have economic value sufficient to justify paying them a living wage in a modern economy, but who are unable or unwilling to do what it takes to become more useful and more productive, as a larger share of their female peers have. 

If the slack that subsidies create in the rural economy were removed, the uneducated and unskilled men in those economies would have no haven or way to survive, and would be even more desperate and alienated.

Our entrepreneurs have failed to come up with work for them that is economically productive enough to support a living wage for more than a small minority of them.

Their economic malaise drives a great deal of crime, family failure, child abuse and neglect, political resentment, civic distrust, and general societal malfunction.

So, the second half of the problem is to find something worthwhile for them to do.

Finding Something For Unproductive Workers To Do

Perhaps this means finding ways to transfer wealth to them with dignity in order to prevent them from causing trouble for everyone else.

To some extent, rural subsidies have been a backdoor way to achieve these ends, but they've produced considerable unforeseen political and economic side effects that are reaching a breaking point.

In times of war, we've addressed this problem as a society by widespread military enlistment. Yet, at the moment the U.S. military has a near record low number of active duty military personnel and yet the Army is still struggling mightily to recruit enough people who meet its minimum standards to fill its ranks. Even the Army struggles to find any use for many of the members of this alienated group of uneducated and unskilled men. (Note that one can be skilled and can be smart without  higher education, but the skilled and smart uneducated men aren't the problem.)

In the Great Depression, less successfully, we tried to address this problem with programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and public works construction programs. 

Today, it is a difficult, complex, and central problem faced by our society that I don't have an easy answer for while writing this post. 

A higher minimum wage solves the living wage problem, but leaves other people who aren't productive enough to justify a minimum wage pay as an economic proposition more often unemployed. 

A low minimum wage, however, results in backdoor subsidies of marginally productive for profit businesses that can continue to do business only if they pay their employees a living wage, when their employees need government support on top of their wages to survive. 

It creates a legion of AMTRAKs, even though it does it less obviously. It is something of a Goodwill Enterprises business model, with hidden subsidies for marginal workers (in the case of Goodwill, financed with charitable organization tax breaks and private in kind charity in the form of donations of unneeded goods).

Also, when the minimum wage is too low, very profitable businesses can pay workers much less than their economic productivity as a result of government welfare benefits to those workers that makes the situation sustainable, because the ability to survive with a sub-living wage undermines the bargaining position of overabundant unskilled and uneducated workers, with an economic effect that transfers money spent on government welfare benefits for low income workers to top executives and owners of firms that pay wages far lower than they could afford to the workers receiving those subsidies. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Walmart and is, at least in from my perspective, even more problematic.

There have been dozens of serious efforts in the post-World War II era to establish job training programs for displaced workers, and pretty much every single one of those programs, except public higher education and military enlistment, have been dismal failures that end up on the scrap heap of failed policies that are forgotten when policy makers go down that path once again.

This post merely motivates the need for a solution and the nature of the problem, rather than offering up a simple solution to it and briefly illustrates the difficulties associated with some of the most obvious solutions. 

I'll ponder better solutions to this problem on another day.

Unions and Meritocracy

I've frequently argued that an important result of widespread greater meritocracy in college admissions and business hiring (which really started to take hold in the late 1960s) has been to co-opt into management people who otherwise would have become union organizers. 

The New York Times in an article today entitled "The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class: Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.", which documents something similar happening now that has been critical to recent major gains by the union movement.

Bullies

Almost every place has some kind of bullying. But this masks important differences that shed light on the societies in question.

In Japan and Korea, bullying is a pervasive and serious problem in schools and workplaces. But there bullying is characterized by bullies abusing power that comes with higher socio-economic status, that authorities overlook, in part for that reason, against victims with lower socio-economic status. In England, the same thing is true, or at least was true prior to very recent history, although perhaps not quite as intensely. Notably, all of these societies have a lot of school discipline dispensed by deputized students - typically a student council disciplinary committee in Japan and Korea, and historically, at least, prefects in British boarding schools.

The U.S. has bullies too, but the character of the bullies is different. The typical U.S. bully is socio-economically marginal and picks on victims who are in some way defenseless getting one up on them so that they aren't at the bottom of the social hierarchy entirely. Bullies in the U.S. in schools and workplaces are also much more likely to have biologically based mental illnesses and/or learning disabilities. While in Japan, Korea, and England bullying is an abuse of privilege, in U.S. primary and secondary schools, bullying is an act of losers. U.S. primary and secondary schools rarely vest disciplinary authority in students, with student councils being more social event organizing committees than bodies with any power.

This kind of crass bullying by losers is mostly absent in higher education in the U.S. (the losers don't go to college), where there is instead there is some "abuse of power" bullying although much more limited, mostly within fraternities and sororities, and by professors abusing students who are especially dependent upon them such as graduate students dependent upon their thesis advisors. 

Crass bullying is also largely absent from middle class workplaces in the U.S., although there is some "abuse of power" bullying by superiors over subordinates in the workplace, most typically characterized as sexual harassment. Still, the "me too" movement has produced swift and severe consequences for every C-suite executives in both big businesses and academia, for those caught doing so, and even the anomaly by U.S. standards, of abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic church has come to roost and to be addressed, although it is less clear that change has occurred in other, more fragmented religious institutions, non-Catholic private schools, and in various youth oriented groups.

The crass bullying by losers seeking to be not quite at the bottom seen in elementary schools and high schools in the U.S. does manifest, however, in other institutional settings, especially in the prisons often leading to prison gangs and prison rape, and in abusive hazing in the U.S. military, mostly in the enlisted ranks. This accompanies institutions like internal management of prisoners by prison "trustees" and by limited authoritative self-governance within military units by non-commissioned officers.

In contrast, in Scandinavia and much of Northern Europe, prisons are quite tame by comparison, practically free of prison gangs and bullying of one prisoner by another.

Extreme bullying appears to be pervasive in the Russian military and to a great extent in other military forces built on the Soviet model. It also appears to be not uncommon in other facets of society, like schools, workplaces, and prisons, although I don't know that society well enough to distinguish the extent to which it involves "abuse of power" bullying or crass bullying by losers. Perhaps both area present.

I have the same perception of Latin America, although "abuse of power" bullying seems to be a very real thing there, in addition to crass bullying by losers.

One of the things that is admirable about England and Japan is how remarkably good that people in these societies are at being self-organizing, which manifests particularly in wartime and in natural disasters. But the institutions of self-governance from a young age and internal hierarchy that make this possible also fosters abuse of power bullying.

In contrast, Americans are horrible at self-organizing, but also much more free of abuse of power bullying as a result.

Social, Political and Legal Barriers To Progress

Frequently, our society fails to achieve the progress it is technologically capable of providing for social, political and legal reasons. Often social issues drive political action or inaction, which in turn, creates legal barriers. Most often, the social issues are driven by fear.

The Case Of Affordable Housing

For example, the reason that affordable housing is scarce is not because we don't know how to build adequate housing for modest prices. In fact, a wide array of ways to do so are widely known. Instead, affordable housing is scarce is due to NIMBY (not in my back yard) political pressure at the local government level that officials at higher levels of government have chosen not to address. This is usually effectuated through land use regulations such as zoning and building codes, subdivision limitations, and similar municipal ordinances.

Affordable housing triggers a NIMBY response primarily because existing residents of neighborhoods don't want people who can only afford "affordable housing" living near them. In other words, people oppose affordable housing because they fear poor people. It is the poor people, and especially, concentrations of poor people, that they feel will make their neighborhoods less desirable places to live. 

Also, property owners believe that if their neighborhood is less desirable, because it has more poor people in it, that the value of their property will decline, causing them economic harm. And, property owners who reside in a neighborhood at risk of become less desirable are disproportionately wealthy and disproportionately capable of mobilizing local government political action in local governments, compared to the hypothetical people who would move to the neighborhood if affordable housing were built there, for whom real estate developers are the main political proxy. But, real estate developers can often be encouraged to focus on new luxury housing that does not prompt a NIMBY reaction, in lieu of affordable housing with fairly modest tweaks to land use regulations and the hassles that can arise in both the short and long terms when there is community opposition to development.

The fears are often greatly exaggerated and are frequently fueled by socially shunned rationales, like racism and xenophobia. But they aren't entirely baseless either.

People who seek to live in affordable housing, almost by definition, have average or below average incomes. 

When a neighborhood has more lower income people, especially when concentrated in an income segregated community, rather than blended in with more affluent neighbors, the neighborhood tends to have homes that are less well maintained, more unruly behavior, less respect for minor social norms like picking up dog poop and not littering, more rudeness in the community, more crime, more gang activity, more domestic violence, and more child abuse and neglect.

Most of these impacts of lower income residents also drive up the cost of taxpayer provided services in the neighborhood that must be paid for, in part, with local tax dollars that disproportionately paid by higher income residents (even when local taxes are regressive) who don't directly utilize the services that those tax dollars finance.

Lower income people are disproportionately black, Hispanic, low skilled immigrants, or "white trash" (i.e. culturally Appalachian and/or poor Southern and/or poor rural in their origins). They are disproportionately less educated. They are disproportionately single parents and unstable cohabiting couple who have some children who aren't shared by both parents. 

Higher income people are disproportionately, Anglo whites with urban and "Yankee" origins, or are East Asian or South Asian, and/or are highly skilled immigrants. They are disproportionately more educated. They are disproportionately stable married couples who if they have children have only children shared by both members of the couple.

When a neighborhood has a mix of lower income people and higher income people, especially when there are stark demographic differences between them, members of these two communities often don't share the same social norms and priorities in ways that manifest in the community from parenting practices displayed in public to ideas about how it is appropriate to behave at home when one is home and how to maintain one's home and how to interact with neighbors.

Another factor that adds potency to opposition to affordable housing, where this factor is present, is that most U.S. jurisdictions determine which public schools that a school aged child may attend from of charge at taxpayer expense based upon where a child lives. Rightly or wrongly, parents and community members routinely evaluate school quality by the absolute academic performance level of the children at a school (rather than "value added"). The best and predominant predictor of the absolute academic performance level of children at a school is the socioeconomic status of the parents of the children at the school. So, when affordable housing allows less affluent people to move into a neighborhood, this is perceived as reducing the quality of the local schools, which also makes the neighborhood less desirable. Further, rightly or wrongly, many parents fear that exposure to children who are culturally different from their own children will be a "bad influence" on their children.

When these socio-economic and cultural divisions are absent, neighbors are often unconcerned about housing that they would normally oppose.

Colleges routinely house students in dorms that have very high residential density and don't provide residents with even their own bathrooms or kitchens. Military bases routinely house soldiers in barracks that have the same character. But neither kind of housing generates the same kind of opposition in neighboring communities.

Neighbors rarely mind "granny flats" (a.k.a. "accessory dwelling units) that are actually used to house the parents of the residents of a primary home, or are used to house older children of the residents of a primary home, or are used to house household servants of the residents of a primary home, likewise, rarely generate community opposition.

The main reason that there exists a class of "senior housing" restricted to older residents, which is almost always relatively high in residential density and is often relatively affordable, is the neighbors don't fear elderly neighbors who need someplace affordable to live as much as they fear younger people and families who need an affordable place to live. Elderly people are perceived (mostly accurately) to be unlikely to be significant sources of crime, unruly behavior, gang activity, troubling parenting practices in public display, incivility, and neglectfulness in maintaining their homes.

The Case of Transit

These issues discourage the level of residential density that create an environment that is favorable for transit, and for communities that are geographically compact enough to make getting around by walking and bicycling very viable for a large share of daily trips.

In addition to the indirect effects that socially driven barriers to high residential density and affordable housing create, similar factors also directly discourage well functioning transit systems.

In the United States, with just a handful of exceptions, such as resort communities, some college towns, and extremely dense large central cities (mostly in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest), municipal bus systems are predominantly used by people too poor to be able to afford to have a car of their own, by people whose illegal conduct has caused their driver's licenses to be revoked, and by low to middle income disabled people who can't drive.

One of the main barriers to increasing municipal bus ridership by people who have other options is the fear of incivility, unruliness, and crime from fellow riders. Prospective riders also disinclined to mingle with riders who they observe are often so ill kept that they are smelly because they haven't had the ability to shower or wash their clothes, beg of money, or otherwise simply make them uncomfortable to be around.

But unless one can overcome a tipping point caused by these barriers, the fact that only those people who absolutely must take the bus do so, means that the frequency of service is lower, especially in communities where fewer people have no choice but to take the bus, and that the ridership per bus that does arrive, especially in these more affluent communities, is often much lower. But the resulting low frequency of service makes taking the bus a slower and less viable alternative to driving, and the low utilization level makes the subsidy per passenger mile higher, increasing the tax burden created by the bus service and generating political opposition from the more affluent people who provide the taxes that pay for these subsidies.

This happens, to a lesser degree, in intercity buses, which people avoid in favor of trains and planes and driving when they can.

The very same people who are loathe to take city buses, have no problem at all traveling by a chartered tour bus, or a school bus to a sports event or field trip, or to sending their children on a school bus to school. The issues are not technological, they are social.

Similarly, Israelis continued to make heavy use of buses even when suicide bombing tactics were common. Europeans, Latin Americans and the Japanese, all of whom mostly have systems that have surpassed a tipping point that prevents their systems from falling into a vicious cycle, make much heavier use of municipal buses and fixed route transit systems.

Solutions

I'll address solutions and ways to address social, political and legal barriers to progress in a follow up post to this one.

Coronavirus Responses As Measures Of National Character

One way to interpret the different trajectories between countries is as an empirical measure of the capacity of each country to mobilize grassroots collective action.

The U.S. and China are marginally worse than most of Europe. Iran seems to be improving. South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong are the stand outs here, as extraordinarily disciplined societies.

Hong Kong is a particularly interesting case as it is both very different from China as a whole despite being a very high in population density and ethnically similar to China as a whole, and has recently witnessed mass protest against the government that is organizing the coronavirus response.

Lots Of People Are Spiritual But Not Religious

It is easy to be lulled into thinking that the rise of the "nones", who don't identify with any particular religion, are basically secular. Politically, this seems to be consistent with their decision making. But, few "nones" are outright atheists or agnostics. A recent Facebook post by a friend, who like me has a quite liberal and not particular Christian identified group of friends illustrates this fact. She asks in her post:

Today's question of the day comes from an elderly friend: Do you believe that there are spiritual beings that interact in some ways in human lives?

My answer was as follows:

No. But, I like the way the your friend asked the question. The definition of what most people think of as "god" or the "divine" is something beyond mankind and smart ordinary Earth animals that intervenes with moral purpose in the universe.

I was struck, however, by the other responses. As of this post, there were 20 people who said "yes" (many enthusiastically), 3 who said "no" (in addition to me), and 2 who hedged.

Where Is Religion Headed In The Modern Western/Globalist World?

I think that most humans are pre-disposed to believe in the supernatural and the divine. Probably only a minority of people in the ranges of human neurodiversity, like me, are more Spock-like. A new age of enlightenment, while tempting to imagine, isn't where I think we are headed as a society.

Lots of liberals and people who embrace modernity are hungry of supernatural beliefs that don't support the anti-technology, anti-feminist, and intolerant/hateful stances of conservative Christians, mainstream and fundamentalist Muslims, Hindu nationalists, and white nationalist neo-pagans.

Sooner or later, I suppose, a faith more in tune with post-industrial reality will emerge meeting needs and supporting values more suited to the current reality*, although it is hard to know what it will look like. The really tiny number of people who have embraced Unitarian Universalist churches and similar religious movements suggest that whatever emerges won't look much like that.

Many liberals with these longings have embraced Eastern religious ideas like Buddhism and yoga (which has Hindu ideas in it, but highly filtered and diluted). The faux Jedi religion of Star Wars has attracted sincere followings in the U.K. and is probably closer to what our religious future looks like than the religiously secular enlightened future imagined in Star Trek.

Another angle that seems plausible for the future is for the West to drift in the direction of Japanese, Chinese and Korean folk religion, with beliefs in ghosts, reincarnation, animistic spirits, and veneration of ancestors in a combination of home shines and temples which are destinations rather than centers of reasonably well defined communities of members of a particular church or parish.

Another direction the West could head towards is the grass roots "attractor" (in the fractal and chaos mathematics sense) of what has been somewhat derisively described as "moralistic therapeutic deism", a term that was first introduced in the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005) by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. The term is used to describe what they consider to be the common beliefs among American youth. As Wikipedia explains in the link above:

The author's study found that many young people believe in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions. It is not a new religion or theology as such, but identified as a set of commonly held spiritual beliefs. It is this combination of beliefs that they label moralistic therapeutic deism: 

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. 

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

On the other hand, to really catch fire, it seems that a religion has to demand significant deviation for prevailing norms from its followers, to embrace something that takes a leap of faith to believe in something impossible or absurd, and to contain "mysteries" that only those who study the faith deeply can understand, providing a basis for the development of a corps of "expert" religious leaders, whether or not formally recognized as a class of priests. Path of least resistance belief systems don't achieve these ends. 

The Satanic Temple might be a model for a new religious organization beyond the pure jokes of the philosophical tropes of the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Flying Spaghetti Monster, with a genuine cultural aesthetic and in your face identity, even if it isn't really metaphysical at this point. Infuse a little pantheism and superstition with some pagan and Kaballah and Sufi flavoring rooted, in part, in ancient mysteries suppressed by more orthodox versions of Christianity and Islam, and maybe you get something that does become a religion.

Images of the metaphysical world likewise tend to reflect the leadership structures of their day, and so, perhaps, the next major religions of the post-industrial era will be a less centralized oligarchy with something like a pluralistic by "crony capitalist" sort of organization.

* I think that one can see the deep roots of Islam and pre-Rabbinic Judaism as meeting the needs of a hunter-gatherer society, and of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as meeting the needs of an agricultural and more urban society in which a culture of honor has become dysfunctional, and it is critical to help people to forgive each other as they live cheek by jowl and constantly slight each other.