One of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign.

The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions, has stalled in Congress and won’t apply to the current election. A further reason for optimism is that Trump is now so unpopular that he would lose even a rigged election, as long as there was some attempt to preserve a pretence of electoral competition.

These points may be correct, but they are contingent and circumstantial. The bigger lesson of 2024 is that a plurality of American voters are willing to vote against democracy, and a majority are willing to vote against or abstain. That’s a depressing conclusion for believers in democracy, and one that runs against a lot of previous evidence.

Although there have been many previous periods when government crises have produced a demand for a “man on horseback”, most voters have almost always rejected such candidates. Democracies have been overthrown by coups or (in Germany’s case) by governments which lacked majority support, but rarely in free elections.

So far, we have seen no such rejection. Trump is massively unpopular, but mainly for reasons that apply to many previous presidents: he promised lower prices and instead delivered higher inflation, and he promised to keep the US out of Middle Eastern wars, but started them instead.

By contrast, his attempted overthrow of the constitution in 2021 is barely mentioned. His immigration policies, with masked secret police, concentration camps and deportation of people who have lived in America since infancy, are disapproved of by a slender majority, but remain by far his most popular policy position.

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“Spiders don’t socialise. Spiders don’t work together. Spiders don’t hunt as packs. Spiders don’t use tools. Spiders don’t organise large structures.

“Because if they did, we’d all be dead.”

— As it turns out, this isn’t quite correct.  Some spiders do work together!  They’re called social spiders, and they cooperate to build large webs that can hold hundreds or even thousands of spiders at once.  There aren’t a lot of them.  There are over 40,000 species of spider, and only 20 or so are social.  Still, they are a thing that exists.

(This is a Halloween post.  So, trigger warnings for — let me think a moment — cannibalism, body horror, and spiders.  Lots and lots of spiders.)

(But also some cool science!)
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Last week, my partner and I performed a familiar ritual of modern co-parenting: I told him that I felt overburdened by mental labor, and we made a plan to adjust. The logistical work of managing our kids’ lives has recently ramped up steeply, and while we’d been sharing the hands-on work equally, a lot of the ramping up had fallen into the category of family managerial work that can get out of whack without anyone meaning to shirk or to let-shirk. The challenge, of course, is that managing and feeling responsible are often invisible. But there’s more to it than that: You could easily miss that you’re not doing a full half of the managing and feeling responsible because even without doing a full half, you are still doing a lot of managing and feeling responsible! There’s just so much to think about, keep track of, and hope to avoid fucking up. It’s a challenge for even two earnest people to tend to it all with enough time left over to just enjoy the adventure of living with and raising kids.

A timely moment, then, for me to stumble upon this article asking “Can A.I. Apps Be a Mom’s Second Brain?” (I think that should be a free link.) It opens like this:

‘One recent evening, Lisa Green’s 5-year-old son, Fitz, came home from school bummed. He couldn’t check out a book from the school library because he hadn’t yet returned his last book.

His mother, a 34-year-old medical resident in pediatrics, said the family…hadn’t realized that books were due on different days each week in accordance with a rotating printed schedule that Fitz had brought home from kindergarten.

As a solution, she located the schedule, took a picture and uploaded it to an artificial intelligence agent named Ollie. Now, Green gets a text message reminding her to pack Fitz’s library book before it is due.

“I was at the point where all the balls I’m starting to drop feel like the glass ones,” Green said, “and that was kind of a breaking point for me.”’

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I went to see NAZA last week. In case you haven’t heard yet, NAZA is a documentary on the Israeli machinery of mass killing in Gaza. It draws a picture of this machinery by interviewing 24 Israeli who work(ed) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The interviewees describe how the machinery of killing Palestinians in Gaza works and relies on AI. Israel is able to listen to the phone conversations and read phone messages of people living in Gaza. It uses that information to guess who works for Hamas, and where those people might be. It then bombs the houses of those AI-identified targets, and in that process allows their families or anyone else in the house also to be killed, hence the title of the film: NAZA means ‘collateral damage’. “20 NAZA” then means that the Israeli military accepts that there will be 20 other people as collateral damage for the attempted elimination of one (presumed) member of Hamas. The numbers mentioned in the film vary – I recall the numbers 15 and 20, but also one situation where “500 NAZA” allegedly was approved by the IDF.

The film is deeply disturbing for various reasons. One is to see the use of AI in this genocide, and the mistakes it inevitably makes (a house is bombed because the phone of a target is there, assuming that means the target is asleep; but since the target left his phone before leaving the house, his entire family is murdered, but the target is not). Another one is the evil actions the IDF takes – such as when the interviewees describe that at some point, a mental line is drawn in north-Gaza, whereby anyone who crosses that line will be killed. Civilians have never been informed of that line, and have to find out by trial and error. The dogs know about the line, since they wait until they hear shooting, so that they can then go and eat the murdered Palestinian (bodies are not taken away). [click to continue…]

Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint. My substack about the Sydney mint by rights should come first, but I’m fresh-ish off the plane so I’m doing this one first.

It was a bit extravagant building two mints in Australia. As I flicked through the massive file of equipment to order and repair I wondered why they built another one. I’d assumed it was just that Melbourne was much closer to where most of the gold turned out to be.

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Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission.

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From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to simplify) that deviations from theoretically significant expectations through theory-mediated measurement were made informative in an iterative process over time in the sciences that succeeded in achieving lift-off. While I was much more interested in the social organization of the sciences than George, I never did much better than he did in answering my own question. But I did make sure his version was published in the best possible form and with full detail (see his ‘Closing the Loop.’)

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(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death)

About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment struck me, and has stayed with me ever since. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Freshers’ Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.

I was skeptical. And it hasn’t been true for me. I’ve kept in much closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count; I’ve recently reconnected with someone else I was close to, but we hardly saw each other for 35 years). My first day at Bedford College was spent almost entirely with a girl called Alison who decided the next day to leave (not, I hope, because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving).

But it was also that week that I met Adrian.

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When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions”.

I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.

Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy”. You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian”, has neither. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.

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Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died. International Viewpoint has a long obituary here. I doubt The Graun will carry an obit, and The Times certainly won’t.

I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a fusion with, and then a split from, the International-Communist League), through the Oxford Miner’s Support Group, of which they were the backbone, in the wake of strike’s defeat in 1985. I saw Perry Cullen and Ted Heslin several times a week for the whole of that autumn, and spent less, but quite a lot of, time with Alan; and kept up with them for several years after leaving for the US. Autumn 1985 was when the Workers Revolutionary Party started to fragment, after Gerry Healy’s history of sexually assaulting comrades came to light. (For what it is worth, the SG comrades knew nothing of this, though obviously had experienced serious abuse themselves including, in one case, kidnapping, at Healy’s bidding). The Socialist Group were at that time briefly, and I thought absurdly, hopeful of reconciliation with the less terrible offshoots of the the WRP, so they were in a moment of muted (and unwarranted) optimism.

Nevertheless they were mostly realistic about what it meant to be a revolutionary in the mid-1980’s (or ever, perhaps), and Ted and Perry shared with Alan a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour that doesn’t come out at all in the International Viewpoint obit. We once went to some agitprop performance of a play about the Silesian Weavers Strike, and Ted commented to me “This is going to be awful. I like real plays, and musicals. But, you know, you have to go. For the cause”. Another time, on a particularly rainy day, after 3 hours of shaking tins together, Ted said “You do realise that I’m not going to do any of this after the revolution, right? I want to have an allotment, and enjoy growing vegetables once we actually have communism”.

Alan once told me this about Healy. “For years we were envious of the other groups. Cliff and Grant wrote books, and the IMG had all those intellectuals. But Healy just gave speeches. He was a great, great speaker, but we never really understood what he was saying. So we decided to transcribe some of the speeches, and turn them into books. We did that for about four speeches, and then we pored over them, trying to make sense of them. But we were all working class, uneducated, and couldn’t make head nor tail of them. We just assumed we were stupid, and couldn’t keep up with his brilliance. It was only much later that we realised the problem might have been with him, not us”.

Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist:

“This is already the best archive ever!”

 

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