Politics – Auxiliary Memory

Squeezing the System: What Happens When You Ask an AI If Greed Rules Politics

by James Wallace Harris, 7/7/26

Lately, I’ve been thinking that greed is the ultimate driver of modern politics in the United States. Is greed a byproduct of evolution? If it is, then how could we control greed politically? I thought these could be good questions to ask my AI, Gemini. I find chatting with an AI to be educational. Many of my liberal friends have big hopes for the 2026 and 2026 elections, but I wondered if their hopes were practical.

This is my second conversation. I had the first conversation with the AI built into Google, but I wasn’t able to save it. I switched to my paid AI, Gemini, and it was helpful to get the conversation formatted in HTML so I could copy it here.

Each gave similar answers but explained in different ways.

I recommend learning to chat with an AI. It makes you think. They also bring up details you haven’t considered. I’m posting this as an example.

I don’t want AIs to think for me. Nor do I want AIs to create content for me. But I do find talking with them educational. It’s like having a dialogue with Socrates.

Jim: Is greed darwinian?

To kick this off, let’s look at this through the lens of evolutionary biology, where “greed” translates to resource hoarding.

From a strict evolutionary standpoint, the short answer is yes, but only up to a point.

In a world of pure scarcity, an organism that secures more food, better territory, or more resources than its peers is simply maximizing its chances of survival and reproduction. If a harsh winter or a drought hits, the individual with the hoard survives, passes on their genes, and the “hoarder” trait continues. In that narrow sense, capturing resources is entirely Darwinian.

However, evolutionary biology throws us a massive curveball when it comes to social species like humans. Pure, unchecked individual greed actually runs counter to another powerful Darwinian mechanism: reciprocal altruism and group selection.

Here is why pure greed fails the long-term Darwinian test for humans:

The Cost of No Friends: Humans are physically weak compared to apex predators. Our primary survival strategy has always been the tribe. If an individual in a hunter-gatherer group hoards meat while others starve, the group will ostracize, banish, or kill them. In a social structure, losing the protection of the group is an evolutionary death sentence.
Tit-for-Tat (Reciprocity): Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers demonstrated that cooperation operates on a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” loop. True greed breaks this loop. If you never share, no one shares with you when your luck runs out.
The “Selfish Gene” Nuance: Even Richard Dawkins’ famous “selfish gene” theory explains that genes replicate by making organisms act unselfishly toward their kin. Sharing resources with family ensures the survival of shared genes.

So, while the drive to secure resources is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past, unchecked greed is actually a maladaptive strategy for a social primate. We evolved a fine-tuned radar for fairness and cheating because, for most of human history, hyper-greedy behavior threatened the survival of the whole tribe.

Jim: Let’s rephrase it then. In a capitalistic society, does greed drive competition and determine which laws are made?

In a capitalist framework, greed—often rebranded by economists as rational self-interest—shifts from a basic survival mechanism to the primary engine of the entire system.

When applied to competition and the legal landscape, it operates on two distinct levels.

1. Does Greed Drive Competition?

Yes, it is the primary catalyst, but with a massive catch.

In classic capitalist theory (think Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”), individual self-interest drives people to compete. A business owner wants to maximize profit (greed), so they try to build a better, cheaper product than their rival. This competition benefits society by driving innovation, lowering prices, and increasing efficiency.

However, pure greed also carries the seed of its own destruction regarding competition. If an actor is truly greedy, their ultimate goal isn’t to compete forever—it is to win permanently.

The Monopolistic Drive: The most profitable thing a business can do is eliminate competition entirely by creating a monopoly or a cartel.
Systemic Stagnation: Once competition is eliminated, innovation stalls, prices rise, and the market stops benefiting the consumer.

So, while greed starts competition, its natural conclusion is to kill competition.

2. Does Greed Determine Which Laws Are Made?

Yes, through a process economists call “regulatory capture.”

In a capitalist society, the immense wealth generated by successful self-interest doesn’t stay insulated in the market; it inevitably flows into the political and legal spheres.

Writing the Rules of the Game: Powerful economic actors use their resources (via lobbying, campaign contributions, and public relations) to influence the legal system. They don’t just compete under the rules; they try to rewrite the rules to protect their wealth.
Barriers to Entry: Ironically, large corporations often lobby for more regulation, not less, if those regulations are expensive to comply with. This creates a barrier to entry that prevents smaller, innovative startups from competing with them.
Externalizing Costs: Greed drives entities to lobby for laws that allow them to maximize profits by shifting their costs onto the public (e.g., pollution, underpaid workers’ healthcare).

Ultimately, laws in a capitalist society often reflect a tug-of-war between the public interest and concentrated economic interest. When the legal system fails to act as a neutral referee, greed effectively dictates the law, shaping it to protect incumbents rather than foster open competition.

Jim: Isn’t private equity investing mainly greed? Isn’t car manufacturers selling only the most expensive models because they make the most profits really just greed?

These two examples highlight exactly how the pressure for short-term profit can make a system look deeply exploitative to the average person. When we strip away the corporate buzzwords, both situations demonstrate what happens when market incentives align entirely with maximizing financial extraction.

Here is how each of these plays out under the hood:

1. Is Private Equity Investing Mainly Greed?

If we define greed as maximizing wealth extraction with little to no regard for human or systemic fallout, then yes.

The core business model of private equity (PE) is to buy companies, “optimize” them, and sell them for a massive profit within a few years. Because PE firms rely heavily on debt to buy these companies—placing the burden of that debt onto the purchased company itself—they are forced to squeeze out cash quickly.

The Squeeze: To pay down the debt and hit double-digit returns for investors, PE firms frequently cut labor costs, reduce service quality, strip real estate assets, or raise consumer prices. We see this acutely in sectors like healthcare, nursing homes, and local journalism.
The Shield: The PE structure largely protects the investors from the downside. If the acquired company goes bankrupt due to the heavy debt load (as Toys “R” Us did), the PE firm often still walks away with millions in management fees, while workers lose their jobs.

In economic theory, PE is supposed to find inefficiencies and make businesses leaner. In practice, it often functions as an engine that converts functioning community institutions into short-term financial capital for wealthy investors.

2. Are Car Manufacturers Killing Cheap Cars Out of Greed?

Yes, it is a deliberate “profit pivot” that completely abandons the needs of the working class.

For the past several years, major automakers (especially the big American brands) have systematically killed off smaller, affordable sedans and compact cars. They have shifted their factories almost entirely to massive, expensive trucks, SUVs, and high-trim crossovers.

The Margins vs. Volume Math: Automakers discovered that the profit margin on a $60,000 fully loaded truck can be $15,000 or more, whereas a $22,000 economy sedan might only net them $1,500. From a pure spreadsheet perspective, selling fewer cars at a much higher price is far more lucrative than selling lots of cheap cars to regular people.
“Trimflation”: Even when they do offer base models, they purposefully limit production on them, forcing buyers to choose higher, tech-loaded trim packages that push the average transaction price toward $50,000.

By prioritizing Wall Street’s demand for higher profit margins over the public’s need for basic, affordable transportation, automakers have effectively priced millions of average households out of the new car market entirely, trapping them in high-interest, long-term loans.

Jim: Is it possible to create laws that would be more equitable to the majority and not to just those who have money?

Yes, it is entirely possible to create laws that are equitable to the majority rather than just the wealthy. In fact, a major part of political history is a continuous tug-of-war between concentrated wealth trying to shape the rules and public movements pushing the legal framework back toward fairness.

When a society successfully shifts the legal balance back to the majority, it usually happens through three specific legislative pillars:

1. Insulating the Political System from Money

The most direct way to stop the wealthy from dictating laws is to cut the link between cash and political power. When money is required to win elections, laws naturally bend toward those who have it.

Campaign Finance Reform: Forcing strict transparency and placing hard caps on political donations—including banning “dark money” Super PACs—stops wealthy donors or corporations from buying access.
Publicly Funded Elections: Some democracies give candidates a fixed pool of public money to campaign with once they qualify, meaning they don’t have to spend their time begging billionaires or corporate interests for funding.
Closing the “Revolving Door”: Passing strict laws that ban politicians and regulators from immediately taking high-paying lobbying jobs at the very corporations they used to regulate.

2. Rewriting Market Rules (Antitrust & Corporate Law)

The laws governing how businesses operate are not laws of nature; they are choices. Governments can rewrite corporate guardrails to force capital back toward the public good.

Aggressive Antitrust Enforcement: Breaking up monopolies and heavily scrutinizing private equity “roll-ups” (where a firm buys up dozens of small, competing businesses in an area to kill competition and raise prices). By enforcing competition, laws protect small businesses and consumers.
Ending Short-Termism: Changing tax and corporate laws so that companies are penalized for prioritizing short-term stock buybacks over long-term investments in worker wages and product safety.
Stricter Corporate Liability: Holding corporate executives personally and criminally responsible for systemic fraud, environmental damage, or labor violations, rather than just hitting the corporation with a fine that they treat as a mere “cost of doing business.”

3. Strengthening Collective Power

When individuals stand alone against massive capital, they lose. Laws can be designed to give the majority collective leverage.

Labor Protections: Making it legally easier for workers to unionize and collectively bargain. Historically, a strong labor movement is the single most effective counterweight to corporate greed.
Consumer Protection Frameworks: Building robust regulatory agencies (like the CFPB or FTC) with the teeth to ban predatory lending, hidden fees, and deceptive pricing outright, rather than relying on consumers to read 50 pages of fine-print legatory terms.

The challenge is never a lack of ideas or legal mechanics; it is a lack of political will. Wealthy interests will always use their resources to resist these changes. Passively waiting for the system to fix itself rarely works—historically, equitable laws are only passed when a highly organized, sustained public movement forces politicians to choose between the voters and their donors.

Jim: What chance would of these changes being made in the current political culture of the United States?

To be blunt: in the current political culture of the United States, the chances of passing sweeping, systemic changes to curb the power of money are very low near-term, but highly volatile long-term.

If we look at Washington today, the system isn’t just stalled by accident; it is operating exactly as it was designed to by the interests that fund it.

To understand why the odds are so long right now, we have to look at three structural barriers dominating our current political landscape:

1. The Supreme Court’s “Free Speech” Iron Wall

Even if Congress miraculously found the political will to pass massive campaign finance reform, it would run headfirst into a judicial brick wall. The U.S. Supreme Court has spent decades cementing the legal doctrine that money equals speech. Following the landmark Citizens United ruling, the Court has consistently struck down attempts to limit political spending. Under the current judicial philosophy, spending unlimited amounts of money to influence an election is protected by the First Amendment. Short of a constitutional amendment or a generational shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court, the legal avenues for major campaign finance reform are effectively blocked.

2. Systematic Congressional Gridlock

The incentive structure in modern Congress actively rewards non-governance. Because of extreme gerrymandering and intense polarization, most politicians are not afraid of losing a general election to the opposite party; they are terrified of being primaried by the most extreme wing of their own party. Furthermore, congressional paralysis has hardened into a routine strategy. Passing major, structural reform requires building broad coalitions. Today, lawmakers face immediate backlash from their donors and media ecosystems for compromising, while obstruction carries almost no political cost.

3. The Power of “Cultural Disruption” as a Smokescreen

When a society is deeply divided on cultural and identity issues, it is very easy for concentrated economic power to maintain status quo economic policies. If a politician wants to protect a private equity firm or a major automaker from regulation, they rarely stand up and say, “I want to protect corporate greed.” Instead, they shift the public conversation to highly emotional culture-war topics. Because voters are hyper-focused on these identity issues, economic consolidation happens quietly in the background with very little unified public resistance.

Where the Chinks in the Armor Are

While federal legislation faces bleak odds, change is creeping in through different, less visible avenues:

State and Local Laws: Individual states are increasingly passing their own right-to-repair laws, data privacy protections, and state-level labor rules that push back against corporate consolidation.
Executive Agency Action: Federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) are using existing, century-old laws to launch aggressive antitrust lawsuits against tech giants and corporate monopolies.
The Boiling Point: Public frustration with the cost of living, housing, and healthcare is reaching a historic peak. History shows that when the middle class is squeezed tightly enough, it eventually creates an unpredictable political wildfire that can shatter institutional gridlock entirely.

Jim: How likely are any of these changes being made in the 2026 and 2028 elections?

To be direct: the probability of passing any of these structural changes during the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential cycle is virtually zero at the federal level. In fact, the legal system is currently moving rapidly in the opposite direction.

Just at the end of June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered another major blow to campaign finance limits in NRSC v. FEC. In a 6-3 decision, the Court struck down decades-old limits on how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with their candidates. This means billionaires can now hand massive checks to political parties, and the parties can act as an alternative checking account for a candidate’s media campaigns.

Because the legal landscape is shifting toward more money in politics rather than less, the 2026 and 2028 cycles will likely be defined by a massive arms race of political spending, making structural reforms highly unlikely.

Here is how the realistic probabilities break down for 2026 and 2028:

1. The 2026 Midterm Landscape: High Friction, No Room for Reform

Midterm elections are rarely moments for deep, structural economic reform; they are usually reactive backlashes against whoever holds the White House. Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority in the House and a 53-45 majority in the Senate. Even if control of Congress splits or flips by a tiny margin, neither party will have the 60-vote supermajority in the Senate required to bypass a filibuster. Neither party will have the legislative strength to pass sweeping antitrust or campaign finance overhauls.

2. The 2028 Presidential Cycle: Rhetoric vs. Structural Reality

By 2028, public frustration with everyday costs—like the private equity squeeze on housing or automakers eliminating affordable economy cars—will likely become central campaign issues. You will hear an immense amount of anti-corporate rhetoric from both sides in 2028 because that is what voters want to hear. However, even if an administration wins on a platform of economic populism, it will still have to contend with the Supreme Court. Because the Court has dug in on the “money equals speech” doctrine, any new federal law trying to curb campaign finance or corporate influence would likely be struck down within a year of passing.

Where Real Change Will Actually Move the Needle (2026–2028)

While sweeping federal legislation is off the table, the next two years will see major battles fought through alternative channels that don’t require passing new laws through Congress:

Executive Trust-Busting: The FTC and DOJ will continue using existing, century-old laws to sue monopolies. The outcome of the 2026 and 2028 elections will decide whether these aggressive antitrust lawsuits against Big Tech, corporate landlords, and healthcare conglomerates are allowed to proceed or are shut down by a new administration.
State-Level Rebellion: Because Washington is locked down, states will be the primary battleground. Over the next two years, we will likely see more states bypass federal gridlock by passing localized consumer protection laws, right-to-repair bills, and state-level labor protections.

Ultimately, 2026 and 2028 will not be the years in which these major changes are made. Instead, they will be the years when public frustration builds up even more pressure against a rigid, money-driven system—setting the stage for a much larger political breaking point further down the road.

Jim: Looking at the long term, is there any reason to believe some kind of social/poltical revolution occuring that changes the status quo? Will current politicies cause a tipping point?

Historians, sociologists, and macroeconomists generally agree that long-term status quo changes are inevitable, but they rarely happen through neat, organized policy changes. Instead, history shows that major social and political revolutions occur when a system reaches a structural “tipping point” where it can no longer resolve its own internal crises.

Rather than a single, cinematic explosion, modern researchers view societal tipping points as a slow, systemic erosion of institutional capacity that suddenly accelerates due to an unexpected trigger.

The primary catalysts driving the current status quo toward a long-term tipping point span three major areas.

1. The Biophysical Tipping Point (Climate & Resources)

The most concrete threat to the current global status quo isn’t ideological; it is physical. [6]

The “Limits to Growth” Model: Decades of data tracking the famous MIT Limits to Growth study demonstrate that humanity remains locked onto a “Business As Usual” trajectory. This economic model predicts that unchecked exponential growth will result in a structural peak and subsequent decline in industrial output, food production, and welfare.
Ecological Cascades: Scientific consensus from the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 warns that human activity has pushed critical Earth systems—such as warm-water coral reefs and major ocean currents like the AMOC—to the brink of collapse.
The Political Tipping Point: When environmental degradation causes localized agricultural failure or water scarcity, it triggers mass migration. Historically, sudden demographic shifts and resource competition have severely stressed existing legal frameworks, forcing governments to rapidly adapt or face collapse.

2. Structural Demography (The “Elite Overproduction” Crisis)

Sociologist Peter Turchin utilizes data-driven historical models (Cliodynamics) to predict political instability. His research highlights a repeating historical cycle that triggers revolutions: Elite Overproduction.

The Dynamic: In a highly unequal capitalistic society, the education system and economy produce vastly more ambitious, highly educated, and wealthy individuals than there are positions of actual political and economic power (e.g., thousands of law graduates competing for a handful of congressional seats or judicial appointments).
The Tipping Point: This creates a massive class of “frustrated elites” who are shut out of the status quo. To gain power, these individuals stop playing by the traditional rules. They weaponize the grievances of the working class, funding grassroots populist movements to intentionally dismantle or rewrite the governing system from within.

3. Technological Disruption (AI and Cognitive Automation)

Historically, revolutions happen when the economic base shifts faster than the political superstructure can manage. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence represents an unprecedented shift.

The Wealth Gap Explosion: If AI automates white-collar and cognitive labor, it will vastly increase corporate profit margins while displacing millions of workers. This creates a hyper-concentration of wealth that the current tax and welfare infrastructure cannot handle.
The Friction Point: When a majority of a population realizes that hard work no longer guarantees housing, healthcare, or upward mobility, the psychological contract holding society together dissolves. Distrust in the system peaks, rendering traditional laws unenforceable due to widespread civil non-compliance.

What Does a Modern “Revolution” Look Like?

A 21st-century revolution is unlikely to mirror the French or Russian revolutions with storming palaces. Instead, macro-historians suggest it will take one of three paths:

  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │                           FUTURE SCENARIOS                              │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                       │
         ┌─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┐
         ▼                             ▼                             ▼
  [ Democratic Renewal ]       [ Neo-Feudal Autocracy ]     [ Networked Regionalism ]
  Mass civic organizing        Corporate elites use         Central government fails;
  forces a "New Deal" style    AI & surveillance to         local communities build
  restructuring of the system. lock down the status quo.    parallel legal/food systems.

Democratic Renewal / The Concession Path: Faced with immense civil unrest or the threat of systemic collapse, elites often make massive concessions to save themselves. This is how the U.S. avoided a communist revolution during the Great Depression—by passing the New Deal to redistribute wealth and stabilize the majority.
Neo-Feudal Autocracy: If the status quo changes via a right-wing or corporate consolidation, technology could allow elite classes to effectively “lock in” their power. Using algorithmic surveillance, automated policing, and legal control, they can suppress majority dissent far more effectively than historical empires ever could.
Networked Regionalism (The “Slow Crumble”): If the federal government becomes completely paralyzed by polarization, power naturally diffuses. States, cities, and regional coalitions will begin ignoring federal mandates, creating their own localized healthcare, environmental, and economic laws, effectively rendering the old national status quo obsolete.

The Verdict

Current policies—specifically the refusal to regulate campaign finance, the failure to address structural climate change, and the lack of a safety net for technological displacement—are absolutely creating the objective conditions for a tipping point.

JWH

ABUNDANCE by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

by James Wallace Harris, 4/17/26

When I bought Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I assumed it would be about creating a post-scarcity society. Instead, it’s about the supply-side progressivism. A post-scarcity society was a concept created by futurists and embraced by science fiction writers. It’s based on the idea that technology could produce such a surplus of everything that it would invalidate capitalism. It turns out supply-side progressivism (or the abundance movement) is somewhat related, but a smaller subset of post-scarcity.

The book Abundance originated with an essay by Klein in The New York Times and an essay by Thompson in The Atlantic. Before buying the book, I suggest reading those two essays and the Wikipedia entry. If you still feel a need to deep dive into this subject, the book is where to go. 40% of my Kindle edition is references and index. Klein and Thompson have done a massive amount of research.

Basically, Klein and Thompson are liberals attacking the government for too much regulation, and telling liberals that some of those laws designed to help people for liberal reasons are now hurting people that liberals also want to help.

The two cases Klein and Thompson focus on are finding homes for the homeless and for people who can’t afford one, and making healthcare more affordable. They go into great detail about how zoning laws are keeping us from solving the housing problem. The second focus is on how the federal government is now stifling innovation.

I agree that zoning laws keep us from solving housing problems, but I don’t think undoing those laws is possible or the full solution. I thought San Francisco was the wrong city to analyze, and considered Houston an unfair counter-example. San Francisco’s growth is limited by geography, and Houston has endless sprawl, so zoning may not be the defining factor.

I believe wealth and greed control zoning laws, and that’s not going to change. The American tech oligarchs have no trouble quickly building giant data centers, even when they face significant protests. I don’t think asking average Americans who are NIMBYs to become YIMBYs is a fair request. Or one that will bring about change.

I found their story of Katalin Karikó far more fascinating. I especially recommend chapters 4 and 5 on Invent and Deploy.

Karikó spent years submitting research proposals to study mRNA, which were routinely rejected because those who decided who received research grants didn’t think mRNA was worth studying. Yet, years later, her research led governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop Covid vaccines within one year, even though it normally takes years to develop a new vaccine.

Klein and Thompson praise the quick development of the mRNA vaccine under the Trump administration and wonder why Trump never took credit for it. They guess that Trump didn’t want to promote a huge success for big government, and a success for vaccines to his anti-government, anti-vax followers. They do recommend the book Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds by Paul Mango. It proves how successful governments can create abundance when the need arises.

Klein and Thompson show how the federal government wastes huge amounts of money on scientific research through its current procedures and often backs the wrong research. They give a history of how the federal government was successful in the past but is now confined by policies and regulations.

Modern liberal politics is made possible by invention. Almost every product or service that liberals seek to make universal today depends on technology that did not exist three lifetimes ago—or, in some cases, half a lifetime ago. Medicare and Medicaid guarantee the elderly and poor access to modern hospitals, where many essential technologies—such as plastic IV bags, MRI and CT scan machines, and pulse oximeters—are inventions of the last sixty years. It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead. Politics itself becomes a mere smash-and-grab war over scarce goods, where one man’s win implies another man’s loss.

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention. In the fight against climate change, the clean energy revolution will require building out the renewable energy that we have already developed. But decarbonization will also require technology that doesn’t exist yet at scale: clean jet fuel, less carbon-intensive ways to manufacture cement, and machines to remove millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

In health care, the last few centuries of invention have turned a death planet—where disease ran rampant and, before 1850, one in two babies perished before their sixteenth birthday—into a world where people can look forward to generation-over-generation increases in life expectancy. But there are still so many mysteries that require fresh breakthroughs. We’ve made disappointingly little progress with many cancers. Complex diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia elude treatment or even basic comprehension. The cellular process of aging is a deep mystery. We still don’t have effective vaccines for adult tuberculosis or hepatitis C, or vaccine platforms that we can immediately scale up in the event of a new pandemic. Decades from now, our children may gawk in horror that people with chronic pain or lingering illness in the early twenty-first century couldn’t take a simple all-purpose saliva or blood test to answer the basic question Why do I feel sick? If disease is a universe of mysteries, we have scarcely explored one minor solar system of its cosmos.

Inventions that may seem outlandish today may soon feel essential to our lives. Streets filled with electric self-driving cars that give us mobility without emissions and free us from the vast number of deaths caused by faulty human reflexes or judgment. Gigantic desalination facilities that transform our oceans into drinkable tap water. An economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work. Wearable devices to scan our bodies for diseases. Vaccines that we can rub on our skin rather than inject at the end of a needle. As unrealistic, or even ludicrous, as some of these ideas might seem, they are not much more ludicrous than a rejected, ignored, and unfunded mRNA theory that came out of nowhere to save millions of lives in a pandemic. To make these things possible and useful in our lifetime requires a political movement that takes invention more seriously.16

So, where is that movement? Invention rarely plays a central role in American politics. In health care, for example, Democrats have spent decades fighting for universal insurance, while Republicans have consistently fought its expansion. But while the dominant fight in Washington is typically about how we buy health care, we rarely talk about the health care that exists to be bought. After all, in the future, progressives don’t just want everyone to have an insurance card; they want that card to provide access to a world of treatments that liberates patients from unnecessary disease and debilitating pain. Technology expands the value of universalist policies.

If progressives underrate the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention. “The government has outlawed technology,” the investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel said in a debate with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2014, echoing a popular view among techno-optimists and libertarians that government laws mostly block innovation. But many of Silicon Valley’s most important achievements have relied on government largesse. Elon Musk is now a vociferous critic of progressive policy. But he has also been a beneficiary of it. In 2010, when Tesla needed cash to launch its first family-friendly sedan, the Model S, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration Department of Energy.17 His rocket-launching company, SpaceX, has received billions of dollars from NASA under Democratic and Republican administrations. Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together.

Beyond merely regulating technology, the state is often a key actor in its creation. An American who microwaves food for breakfast before using a smartphone to order a car to take them to the airport is engaging with a sequence of technologies and systems—the microwave, the smartphone, the highway, the modern jetliner—in which government policies played a starring role in their invention or development. Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.18 “There is widespread agreement that scientific research and invention are the key driver of economic growth and improvements in human well-being,” the Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams said. “But I think researchers do a poor job of communicating its importance to lawmakers, and lawmakers do a poor job of making science policy a major focus.”19

The pandemic proved the necessity of invention yet again. The mRNA COVID vaccines saved millions of lives and spared the US more than $1 trillion in medical costs.20 But they might have never existed if it weren’t for Karikó’s force of will—and the cosmic luck of an extremely well-placed Xerox machine.

Klein, Ezra; Thompson, Derek. Abundance (pp. 134-137). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, Abundance brings little hope. I think the book showed too many examples of how we can’t create abundance and why. It thoroughly convinced me that our current political evolution is in the wrong direction.

Yes, Katalin Karikó and mRNA are shining examples of what’s possible, but one great example does not prove that change will happen. All the other examples Klein and Thompson used were from history, suggesting that Americans will step up to the plate when they face a great challenge, but not in ordinary times.

AI and data centers are a major challenge, and we aren’t stepping up. Please read “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale” by Tim Murphy. Greed drives us. Klein and Thompson even use examples of how monetary prizes can be used to solve problems.

The Tech Bro Oligarchy promises a post-scarcity society with AI, which is the kind I was expecting the book Abundance to be about. But I don’t believe in that kind either. At 74, I doubt the pie-in-sky dreams science fiction promises. Just because we live in science-fictional times doesn’t mean they’ll lead to science-fictional futures.

AI-generated abundance will ruin us. Old-fashioned human-generated abundance is possible, but greed will always keep the wealthy from sharing it.

p.s.

This essay was not written with any help from AI. All the ideas are my own. But are they? My ideas come from reading books and magazines. I train my mind on information just like AIs are trained. I’ve cancelled my AI subscriptions. I’m putting that money into buying more books and magazines. Reading Abundance did me more good for my mind than reading what AI has to say about it. Gemini produced excellent summaries, but they didn’t stick in my mind.

Grinding through the book word by word will not help me remember everything, but I do think it helps me remember more than reading AI summaries. But in the long run, what’s important to remember is that we could live in a saner, more compassionate society.

JWH

12 Reasons Why I’ve Stopped Watching the NBC Nightly News

by James Wallace Harris, 7/29/25

I developed the habit of watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite when JFK was assassinated in 1963. I had just turned thirteen. Cronkite had been the first to switch to a half-hour evening news format that September. I only had a vague sense of what the news was before that. I stuck with CBS until the 1980s, into the Dan Rather years. For some reason, my wife and I then switched to ABC for a couple of decades before finally switching to NBC. When Lester Holt retired, I decided to stop getting my news from television.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about what it means to follow the news. Does it require a daily habit of studying current affairs? Should we consider the news to be any reporting of significant events that have recently happened? How much information can be crammed into twenty-two minutes of television? Who decides what is worth knowing? Recently, NBC chose to make the deaths of two celebrities the lead story two nights running. Were the careers of Ozzy Osbourne and Hulk Hogan the most important information I needed to know on those two days? Think about it. Of all these events happening around the world on those two days, were their deaths the most essential for me to learn about?

Reason 1

I’m not picking on NBC. All the broadcast networks and the cable news networks decided what their audiences want to watch based on ratings. It’s not that Ozzy and Hulk’s deaths are more newsworthy than famine in Gaza, but NBC knows its audience is tired of hearing about starving Palestinians, and more people would watch their show if it opened with Osbourne and Hogan.

Decision 1: I need to decide what’s newsworthy.

Reason 2

Is twenty-two minutes enough time to learn about the critical world events that happened in the last twenty-four hours? Just how much time should I devote to being well-informed? If it is as little as twenty-two minutes, then television is the wrong medium. Reading just the headings of all the news stories from a quality newspaper app on my phone serves me far better.

Television news spends most of its time on visual news. Often, NBC repeats exciting film clips several times. That’s not an efficient use of time. Airplane crashes and flooding rivers grab our attention, but is it really news we need?

Decision 2: I need to decide how much time I want to spend on the news. Additionally, I need to decide on the best medium that maximizes that time.

Reason 3

Too much of television news is taken up by reporters and anchors. Often, reporters take more time asking a question than the time given to the eyewitness’s reply. I’m not interested in reporters or anchors.

Decision 3: I need to look for news sources where the journalist is in the background. That excludes television and most podcasts. Generally, good print reporting only includes the reporter’s byline.

Reason 4

Television news offers low-quality information. A major article in The Atlantic might have taken months to research and write. Such articles are information-dense. TV news is written and edited quickly. There’s not much time for fact gathering or checking. It’s often based on eye-witnesses who mainly add emotional impact rather than inform. Television news relies on soundbites, which are mostly opinions. Experts interviewed on TV news are often selected by convenience rather than their authority.

There have been over 22,500 days since I started watching nightly news programs on TV. There is an incredible sameness to the kind of content TV news presents. I should have abandoned it long ago, but it gave the illusion I was being informed, and it was convenient.

Decision 4: Pick another medium for consuming news.

Reason 5

Television news is narrow in scope. It focuses on catastrophes, tragedies, and political conflict. Over a lifetime of seeing thousands of news reports on wildfires, they all look and feel the same. That’s also true for wars, airplane crashes, riots, elections, famines, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Television news mainly focuses on the types of stories we’ve seen repeated throughout our lives.

Television makes it seem like there is nothing new under the sun. I’ve learned from reading quality magazine articles and newspaper journalism that that old bit of wisdom is completely untrue. Magazine and newspaper articles constantly amaze me with news that surprises me because it’s about people, places, concepts, ideas, and events I’ve never heard of before.

Decision 5: Find more news sources that teach me about reality, inspire my curiosity, and better inform.

Reason 6

TV news is seldom memorable. If John F. Kennedy’s assassination was only reported once on the CBS Evening News on November 22, 1963, I doubt I would even remember the event. I remember it because of constant coverage over several days, including all the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since that day. I remember Project Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions because of the around-the-clock television coverage, as well as the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since those events. That’s why I don’t remember all the space missions since. They didn’t get such coverage.

A thirty-second spot on the nightly news, or even a big event stretched to four minutes of reporting, just isn’t remembered. I don’t need to waste time on ephemeral news stories. I’ve discovered it’s far better to spend thirty minutes on one topic than two minutes on fifteen topics.

Decision 6: Focus on one news topic for most of my daily time spent on the news. Then quickly go over the headlines.

Reason 7

Television news isn’t educational because it focuses on the same topics. Shouldn’t news enlighten us about reality? Shouldn’t we always expand our awareness of what’s going on in the world?

How can short videos and soundbites be truly informative? I want news that adds to my personal growth. News that adds wisdom, not ephemeral data.

Decision 7: Make lists of what I want to learn about and then find news reports that bring me up to date on those topics.

Reason 8

Television news is biased. Knowing the truth is impossible. Content produced for money-making ratings or to promote a political agenda will always be questionable. I even suspect the kind of long-form journalism that goes out of its way to appear unbiased. I expect all writing to have some bias. It’s my job to spot it.

Decision 8: Start analyzing prose for bias. Think about word choices in each sentence. Always wonder if information is left out.

Reason 9

Real knowledge is statistical. Science is our only cognitive tool that consistently explains reality. News is too close to word-of-mouth. We need news to be closer to peer-reviewed science journals. That’s probably impossible, but we need to think about it. Ground News attempts to apply statistics to the news by comparing political bias and the amount of coverage a story receives. Can’t we find other statistical methods to measure the news?

Decision: Don’t trust any news unless it comes from multiple sources.

Reason 10

Replying on a single network for news is dangerous.

Decision 10: Seek out different gatekeepers. Every group or organization has an agenda. Learn what that agenda is before interpreting what they are saying.

I’ve discovered that reading/listening to one well-reported article a day is much more informative and educational than a package of video clips and soundbites. I’ve been achieving this with Apple News+, which offers content from over 400 magazines and newspapers. Each morning, I listen to a single long-form article from magazines such as The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and New Scientist, while I do my physical therapy and morning walk.

Reason 11

Television news can be misleading. It’s not as dangerous as AI-generated fake news on YouTube, but television news is easily corrupted by money, marketing, and politics.

Decision 11: Always consider the source of the news. I need to decide which news sources I will trust.

Reason 12

Most television news gives the United States’ perspective of world events.

Decision 12: Find news sources from around the world.

Conclusion

This is just the beginning of changing a lifelong habit of watching the nightly news on television. I should have made these changes long ago. We all get into ruts that are hard to escape. I believe getting old is making me regret not trying other approaches to understanding reality. However, all the political turmoil since 2016 is making me question everything I know. Human-created and computer-created fake news is disturbing. In recent years, I’ve decided that all of us suffer from multiple delusions.

You shouldn’t ask yourself if you’re delusional, but how delusional. Anyone who feels they know the truth is crazy. We can only guess what might be true by using statistics. Television has always depended on the false assumption that seeing is believing. I have doubts about believing anything.

Television, politics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet have corrupted our perception of reality. I want to rethink everything. I’m starting with my old habit of watching the nightly news.

JWH

What Will Be the Pivotal Issues in 2026 and 2028?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/2/25

Peter Leyden claims that America undergoes 80-year cycles, which he calls epochs, with peaks of upheaval that last 25 years. The past peak was after World War II, from 1945 to 1970. Leyden claims we’re entering a new peak in 2025 that should last until 2050. He zeroes in on artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering as the driving forces. I’m not big on predicting the future or seeing patterns in history, but there are ideas in his theory that are worth contemplating. I do believe we’re living through a historic period of change.

David Brooks claims America is moving away from thinking of itself as an idea that inspires the world to a homeland that we should defend. Brooks has moved away from being a traditional conservative to becoming a spiritual guru who teaches morality. I find all his recent speeches to be both uplifting and inspirational. Brooks feels the changes we are experiencing are undermining our individual characters and altering our collective national character.

CBS News asks if we’re moving into a new Gilded Age. But this time, the oligarchs are far richer and much more powerful. There is a synergy between this documentary and the videos of David Brooks and Peter Leyden. Everyone feels a massive paradigm shift coming. In 2025, I believe we’re living through the largest social and political upheaval since 1968.

If history does go through cycles, can we alter their course? The average person does not have much power. But in 2026, we do get to vote, and again in 2028. I believe the Democrats lost in 2024 because they had no clear vision. Being against Trump is not a political plan. In 2024, the Americans voted for Darwinian rule. Let the strong thrive and the weak die. The current administration is enacting laws to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Essentially, civilization on the cheap. They appeal to greed. They appeal to resentment. They believe everyone should be responsible only for themselves.

It’s a very Darwinian philosophy. There’s no way we could call America a Christian Nation anymore. This is what America wanted through a fair and square election. But now that they are seeing what it means, do they want to keep it?

I don’t think we should wait until 2026 or 2028 to decide what we want. The Republicans won by clearly defining their goals in 2024. Democrats need to produce their own version of Project 2025. Project 2028 needs to be specific, and all Democrats need to support it. It can’t be too radical. It will need to be liberal yet practical. It needs to appeal to independents and old-style conservatives.

I have no idea what that plan should be, but I wish it would be something David Brooks would back. It needs a moral foundation because, as much as I accept the scientific theories of Darwin, I don’t think survival-of-the-fittest makes for an appealing political philosophy.

JWH

The Price of High-Quality Information

by James Wallace Harris, 6/30/25

We all know the internet is full of crappy information. The creators of the Internet intended it to be an information utopia. They wanted information to be free and instantly available. It turns out free information is only worth what you paid for it.

The Internet destroyed the local paper and investigative journalism. Quality magazine journalism is circling the drain. Television news is more abundant than ever, but it’s so predigested and targeted to specific audiences that it’s worthless.

Most of the high-quality sources of information are behind paywalls. Every morning, I get up and listen to Apple News+ narrators reading articles from quality magazines as I do my physical therapy exercises. Usually, that’s one thirty-minute article. Unlike podcasts, magazine journalism features a greater percentage of useful information per minute. I truly despise the kind of podcasts that spend more time on the host’s personality than the topic promised in the thumbnail.

Apple News+ gives me access to over 400 magazines and newspapers. This is the bargain of the century for $12.99 a month. However, it’s doubtful these magazines earn enough money from this service to keep them going. The real way to support them is to subscribe to each periodical. Apple News+ is like Spotify, good for the consumer, bad for the creator. The ethical way to use Spotify is to locate albums you want to buy. And the ethical way to use Apple News+ is to find the journals you should subscribe to.

I know these periodicals have become expensive. The Atlantic is $79.99 for a digital subscription. The New Yorker is $130 for a digital subscription. Why pay those prices when I already get the content in Apple News+? Especially when I will consume the content via Apple News+.

The answer is support. Think of quality journalism as an important charity. However, there is another reason. When I read a great article, I want to share it with my friends. Apple News+ is so locked down that it’s not possible. You can only share with other Apple News+ subscribers. You can’t even cut and paste from the screen.

Many periodicals that publish on the web can be copied to an email or printed as a PDF and shared. However, even those methods of getting around the paywall might disappear.

I often read articles that I know friends would also want to read. Some paywalled publications do allow for limited sharing. It should be a standard feature.

We need to move away from the shitty free content. Sharing is prevalent on the Internet, but consider the type of content people share. It’s mostly mindless entertainment or opinions. We need to learn to distinguish between well-researched articles and endless unfounded opinions.

The easiest way for me to share content is if my friends subscribe to Apple News+. And if more people subscribed, the publications would get more money.

We live in an age where authority is suspect. Everyone wants their views to dominate, and will rationalize their beliefs with any content that supports those views. We have lost the ability to evaluate what is real.

The trouble is reality can’t be understood with sound bites. Any topic worth considering requires significant study and research. TV and podcasts create content too quickly. Their information is presented too soon after events and produced too fast. Long-form journalism explores ideas in depth, and that takes time.

It also takes time to read such content. We’ve trained our minds to consume content quickly that was created quickly. Start paying attention to the information you consume and think about how it was produced. If you’re listening to a podcast that lasts an hour, note how much actual useful information you gleaned from that hour. If you get your news from television, pay attention to how long each news segment lasts. Think about how that news was gathered and why. And pay particular attention to the personalities presenting the news on TV and podcasts. Is it more about them or the content?

The highest quality content is nonfiction books written by well-educated researchers. However, it’s not possible to read enough nonfiction books to keep up with everything we need to know. I believe the best compromise for consuming high-quality information is long-form journalism.

You will be far better educated if you spend one hour a day on one subject than one hour a day on twenty different five-minute topics. This is where a service like Apple News+ succeeds. And it does have competitors, such as Zinio. My library offers a selection of free digital magazines and newspapers through Libby.

JWH