I have been creating hobby web pages since a long time ago, and keep at it even though the web itself has moved on. I’m still stuck in Web 1.0, and we have since moved on to Web 2.5 or something like that, and apps are going to kill the World Wide Web any day now anyway, but I still maintain my sites because I enjoy it. So one page I have kept maintaining has reviews of books and movies/TV shows; here it is for you to check out if you’d like:
In January I posted a series of “Strategy Reviews” where I examined the thinking of several authors who analyzed the state of politics and war at the beginning of this century. These were Thomas P. M. Barnett with the Pentagon’s New Map that divided the world between Core and Gap, Philip Bobbitt and the market state as defined in The Shield of Achilles, and John Robb with his Brave New War fought in a networked world. Each author’s viewpoint provided a way of understanding the tumultuous events of our time.
I would now like to reexamine these interpretations, but from another viewpoint – that provided by the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe. This is a theory that I have been studying since I discovered it in the early 1990s, when I picked up the book 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? at a book store. That book spoke to my personal experience, and I continued to explore generations by reading the other works of the authors. I won’t expound on the theory to a great degree in this post; you can read a review I wrote here, where you will find links to even more information.
The important thing to know about Strauss and Howe theory for the purposes of this posting is that they identified different social eras called turnings, which are characterized by particular social priorities and proclivities. In the United States of America, we are currently in a Crisis era which began with the financial crash of 2008. Previously, we were in an Unraveling era, which began during the Reagan years.
In an Unraveling, society is inward-driven, focused on the individual and loosely regulated. This changes in the Crisis, as a sense of urgency grows over problems which were allowed to remain unresolved in the previous era. Society becomes focused on the community, and more restrictive in what it allows of the individual.
Since the strategists mentioned above are primarily concerned with security and with international relations, we should examine what the implications of the Crisis are in these realms. The main consideration is that, in a Crisis era, society seeks to close itself off and insulate itself from perceived threats. This is apparent, for example, in the crackdown on illegal immigration which began during the Obama administration and continues bitterly into the Trump administration.
Another way in which the United States is closing off is by withdrawing from the rest of the world, changing its posture with respect to international security relations. This began with Obama’s pullback from the wars started by the previous administration, and continues with the more drastic policies of Trump, who has pulled out of international agreements and adopted an overtly nationalist stance for his administration. “America First” couldn’t be a more fitting slogan for a Crisis era.
Trumpism repudiates the idea of the United States as a responsible global hegemon promoting democracy and free-market capitalism – the role the country took on in the aftermath of the Cold War, albeit a role which proved costly, unpopular – and perhaps hopeless. Trumpism also repudiates economic globalization, which came at the price of high-paying working class jobs in the United States. These Unraveling era policies could be labeled the “neo-liberal regime,” which in the Crisis era has become delegitimized. In fact, John Robb specifically describes the Trump victory as rolling back neo-liberalism.
Thomas Barnett acknowledges this fact about Trump’s appeal in his own election post-mortem post. Barnett’s vision of the United States securing peace by maintaining military overwatch while helping to connect the world into a global economy of functioning, developed states, is not suited for the Crisis era social mood. Americans see the problems that grew in the era of globalization, particularly the erosion of the middle class, as no longer endurable. It is telling that both the Trump and Sanders campaigns in 2016 called for reversing trade policies that are perceived to have driven down wages in the United States.
In his work, Thomas Barnett cautioned against the urge to “firewall the Core against the Gap,” instead promoting the idea of greater connectivity among nations. But that was an idea better suited for the Unraveling era. In the Crisis era the desire is to “circle the wagons” and protect what remains of the social order from further collapse. To the political left this means addressing wealth inequality through government largesse (which the right calls socialism). To the political right this means restricting travel and immigration, even to the point of building a wall on the southern border (which the left calls racism). For neither side, however, is the status quo acceptable.
So what of the fate of Philip Bobbitt’s market state? According to Bobbitt, it is a form of the state that derives legitimacy from maximizing opportunity for its citizens, not from advancing their welfare. But in turnings theory, maximal opportunity for the individual is a priority of the Unraveling era. In the Crisis era, community takes precedence, hence the return of nationalist rhetoric into politics. So is the nation state, which the market state was supposed to supplant, making a comeback?
John Robb isn’t the only way who sees the market state being rolled backed; in another post, a pseudonymous author argues that the failure of the market state paradigm comes from the agency problem: market state elites have not been looking out for the best interests of the citizens they ostensibly serve. This is indeed a primary criticism of the old neo-liberal regime, particularly from the extreme political right, who would go so far as to call internationalists traitors.
The irony of Trump’s electoral victory, of course, is that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was arguably a champion of neo-liberalism, and yet she still received more popular votes than Trump in the election. She was, in fact, the second most popular U.S. Presidential candidate in history, after Barack Obama. The accusations that there was meddling in the election, in Trump’s favor, by hackers sponsored by the Russian government, segues into another area covered by our strategists – network warfare.
The problem with dispensing with Bobbitt’s theory of the market state is that, while he missed the fact that social priorities would alter because of generational change, he is probably correct in identifying a new strategic landscape. Assuming that nuclear weapons really have rendered conventional war between Great Powers obsolete (the M.A.D. doctrine), warfare has shifted to the level of network exploitation. The new threat environment is rife with computer hackers and social media trolls. This is no joke – these bad actors can sway public opinion, influencing election outcomes and paralyzing governments, and can radicalize young people in far-away countries, prompting them to commit mass murder. They can even penetrate the computer networks responsible for operating vital infrastructure.
So the state will still need to adapt its strategy for protecting its citizens, in order to maintain legitimacy. The question of what form it will ultimately take remains open. It is particularly unclear in the United States, since the country is so deeply split along partisan lines. Will Trumpism become entrenched, or will the political tide turn against it, as Trump-resisters hope? Either way, turnings theory predicts that the institutions of government will transform. If the “nation state” returns, it won’t have the same form as the nation state of the World War era.
With the United States having abandoned global leadership, there is now more open competition among the Great Powers for determining the best internal order for surviving in the new international strategic environment. Momentum likely favors what Barnett called the “New Core” – the nations which more recently joined the developed world. All bets seem to be on China as the new world leader – though this thinking could reflect the West’s anxiety more than reality.
The old liberal, international regime which attempted to thwart and contain authoritarianism in the previous era has been hamstrung, and authoritarianism is on the rise, even in formerly liberal nations. The international order will continue to break down, as individual nations become more focused on their own affairs. The Crisis era is characterized by a lack of trust, and it is the misfortune of the United States that this includes a lack of trust across the partisan divide.
A new mode of competition over cooperation clearly presents dangers. There is no ironbound guarantee that the late twentieth century paradigm that rendered WMDs for deterrence use only will prevail. There is no sublime, unbreakable bond keeping the United States united. But whatever events lie ahead, it is likely the Crisis era will last at least another decade, and that the world will look much different when we emerge from it. We are on a journey through one of history’s great turning points.
In my most recent posts I looked at the strategic theories of two different authors. The first was Thomas P. M. Barnett, who divided the world into functioning, integrated Core states, and their danger-producing opposites, the Gap states. His mantra was “disconnectedness defines danger.” The second was Philip Bobbitt, who divided history into epochs in which different forms of the state ruled. He taught us that the nation state is on its way out, and the new market state is taking its place.
John Robb is an author who actually references both of the previous authors, in his book Brave New War. He springboards off of Bobbitt’s concept of the market state to argue that the nature of warfare has changed, becoming network-focused, and refutes Barnett’s mantra. Basically, in the globally networked world, connectedness defines danger, so good luck finding peace through integration. Better to develop doctrines of fighting networked war.
A war fought between social networks is exactly how Robb portrays the current Crisis Era in American politics. He calls this “open source warfare” in that anyone can participate in an era when the Internet gives individuals powers of surveillance and intelligence gathering that were once reserved for governments. You can follow more of John Robb’s analysis of current events here at his blog.
Although the books were published around the same time, it wasn’t until some time after reading The Pentagon’s New Map that I discovered The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt is a constitutional law expert, and this very long book (usually described as “magisterial”) formulates a theory of the evolution of the state as proceeding through periodic “epochal wars” which redefine the constitutional order. As each new form of the state is legitimized, the seeds are planted for the growth of the form which will come to replace it. Thus he describes a kind of historical cycle, to join many others which have been postulated.
Bobbitt traces the emergence of the state to Renaissance Italy and the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli. He then describes an evolutionary sequence from the first “Princely states” of the Renaissance to the modern nation state. Each time the state transforms, it is because after a constitutional order is legitimized by victory in the epochal war, the very factors which led to that victory proceed to undermine and delegitimize it as future events unfold. In the case of the “nation state” order, Bobbitt identifies its legitimization with the West’s Cold War victory, the culmination of a Long War against first Fascism, and then Communism, both constitutional orders competing with the Liberal Democratic Western order. It was advancements in high-speed computing and telecommunications which eventually secured this victory.
In the 21st century, these very advancements have empowered individuals, diminished the state’s ability to influence the economy, and generated new security threats which are immune to the nation state’s conventional means of deterrence. Now delegitimized, the familiar nation state of the 20th century is giving way to what Bobbitt calls the “market state.” A key difference between the two orders is that whereas the nation state serves the welfare of the nation through public services and social safety nets, the market state maximizes economic opportunity for its citizens, while protecting them from environmental degradation and network-infiltrating dangers such as infectious disease and terrorism. The state’s role has evolved from managing the system for the benefit of the people, in competition with other states with different ideologies (the Cold War status quo), to protecting the system’s perimeters while allowing the people to manage themselves in a loosely controlled consumer marketplace of global extent (the Washington Consensus and the “End of History.”)
There is even more to this work, as it covers not just constitutional orders but also theories about international law, which necessarily transform in accordance with the evolving forms of the state. Bobbitt identifies a boundary or membrane between the realm of law, which orders society within the state’s purview, and that of strategy, which orders the interactions among states. The victory which legitimizes an order of the state amounts to the successful application of strategy, but with it comes an alteration of the international milieu, which renders that strategy untenable. In competing for the new strategy which ensures survival and dominance, states must necessarily evolve their own internal orders.
So, for example, the nation state strategy of massive conventional armed forces became obsolete in an era of WMDs (which can take out massed forces) and advanced computers (which make smaller forces much more effective). The United States responded by switching to a volunteer armed force, and developing theories of network-centric warfare.
Bobbitt sees the 21st century War on Terror as the epochal war driving the transition from nation state to market state. Presumably one of the Great Power civilizations will discover a successful strategic response to the security threat created by network-exploiting “bad actors,” one which has eluded the world so far. Whichever power does so will determine the ideal model of the market state.
The Shield of Achilles was followed by the equally magisterial Terror and Consent, which elaborates on the interplay between strategy and law in the case of the challenge of combating global networked terrorism. Bobbitt’s opinion is always worth seeking, because of his erudition and legal expertise, so I always look for his latest opinion pieces and interview. He has no regular column or web site that I know of, but here is a recent interview. As the world order continues to transform radically, I will keep searching for more of his insights.
Some time in the early 2000s I became acquainted with the thinking of Thomas P. M. Barnett, author of the book The Pentagon’s New Map. In this book he outlined a new paradigm for the deployment of U.S. military power in the post-Cold War era. Barnett was a strategist working for the Naval War College, and his geopolitical theory was radical, even – from the Pentagon’s perspective – apostate.
Basically, Barnett took a look at the post-Cold War military conflicts in which the United States had engaged, from the invasion of Panama in the waning years of the Soviet Union, up to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His titular “New Map” divided the world into a “Functioning Core” of developed nations which were successfully integrated into the global economy, and a “Non-Integrated Gap” of failed nations where bad actors ran rampant and the U.S. was compelled to intervene militarily. From this simple concept a theory emerged of a new era of globalization in which the security threats to which the United States was responding arose from the disconnected status of the Gap nations – as he put it, “disconnectedness defines danger.”
The primary strategic goal for this new age was integrating the Gap with the Core, and as sole superpower America had a natural role to play in this process. Her conventional military force with its overwhelming power was what Barnett deemed a “Leviathan” force, and in conventional warfare the U.S. had no equal, as the recent invasion of Iraq had demonstrated. But what was also needed was a “Sys Admin” force for post-conflict stabilization (winning the peace); this is where allies with strong traditions of peacekeeping might come into play. With the right rule set for military intervention in the Gap, the end result would be increased connectivity with the Core. The military would just be kick starting this process; once the umbrella of security was provided, the private sector could take over. Globalization would spread, the Gap would shrink, and the world would be safer.
Barnett gives great presentations, and his “New Map” Brief is a classic. It was made in the early 2000s, at the heyday of his theory. The post-9/11 mind set was still fresh, and the U.S. security establishment was energized, as it struggled with the problems unleashed by the shock of 9/11 and subsequent U.S. response. In the brief Barnett preaches against the urge to throw up barriers to immigration and travel, to “firewall the Core against the Gap,” as he puts it, and encourages embracing globalization. As the 2000s continued, two sequels to the book followed which further developed his ideas.
Meanwhile, the Iraq War fiasco played out, and post-conflict stability proved elusive. I think Barnett’s theory lost its luster as a result, even though it never supported the careless invasion with no follow-up strategy practiced by the Bush administration (what he called “drive-by regime change”). Barnett never advocated that the U.S. become a “global cop” or act unilaterally (I remember him supporting Kerry in 2004), but rather that, with her preponderance of military power, the U.S. would inevitably end up shouldering much of the burden of conventional military action when it was necessary. But to shoulder that burden requires will, and after the long drawn-out suffering of the Iraq post-War, America lost that will, and through the Obama era and into the Trump era has withdrawn from the world.
At heart, Barnett’s theory is not militarily but economically deterministic, as he confirms in a blog post about a historian’s review of the third book in the trilogy. America as the victor of the Cold War had gifted the world with a free-market system which was elevating the bulk of humanity in the formerly impoverished Third World into a global middle class. In a world leadership role, presumably natural for a superpower hegemon, she could guide the development of that system and reap the most benefit from it. But after withdrawing into isolationism (“navel-gazing”), which is the choice the country has made, the system will continue to develop without her, its rules determined more and more by the new rising powers.
It’s nice to see that Barnett is still thinking strategically and creating briefs; there are links to a 2015 presentation up on his site. I recommend checking them out, because he is brilliant, a frank and humorous speaker, and he always makes you see things in a new light, or points out a trend or relationship that you weren’t aware existed before. Just the sort of thinking we need for the 21st century.
This is the third in a series of reviews of books about the Third Turning which I am finally reading in the Fourth Turning (the first two are here and here). I am “revisiting” Bowling Alone not in the sense that I have read it before, but rather in that I would like to examine its thesis about the decay of civic life in the late twentieth century from the perspective of life nearly two decades into the twenty-first century.
Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam, published in the year 2000, is perhaps one of the best known popular works of sociology. Its basic thesis is that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States experienced a rapid decline in community and civic involvement. This thesis is supported by ample data on group participation, social habits and attitudes, all presented in a plethora of graphs and tables. In fact, the book is worth checking out just to see all the data laid out decade by decade, even if you care to interpret it differently.
A key concept in this thesis is that of “social capital,” defined as the value of social networks in providing “generalized reciprocity.” Social capital comes in two forms: “bonding” social capital tightly connects an in-group, whereas “bridging” social capital is a looser connection between people in different groups. There is even a Social Capital Index that the author calculates from a combination of different surveys.
As Putnam sees it, the loss of community in the country and the depletion of social capital is a serious problem. He describes a “fraying civil society” and laments “the erosion of America’s social connectedness and community.” When explaining how group membership rates don’t tell the whole story, because group attendance rates have worsened even more, he writes floridly that “decay has consumed the load-bearing beams of our civic infrastructure.” To uphold this grim description, he presents strong correlations between the Social Capital Index and other measures such as educational attainment, crime rates, and mortality.
In addition to defining social capital, and demonstrating its correlations, Putnam attempts to isolate what factors are associated with its decline at the end of the twentieth century. He does this with multiple regression analysis (explained in the Appendices – this study is very thorough and data driven), and basically concludes that the primary factor is generational change, accounting for half of the decline. Other important factors include television, changing work patterns, and sprawl – in a word, suburbia.
Now personally, as a proponent of Turnings Theory, I believe that generational change tells the whole story. In all of the graphs showing the decline in civic involvement over time, you see the same pattern, as described in the book on page 80: “modest growth in the first third of the [twentieth] century; rapid growth coming out of the Depression and World War II; a high plateau from the 1950s into the 1960s; and a sharp, sustained decline during the last third of the century.”
This pattern exactly tracks the life course of the Greatest Generation, the great civic generation which dominated the twentieth century. The rise and plateau of civic participation in the middle of that century happens in the First Turning era, when the Greatest Generation is in mid-life, the age range that is the peak of any generation’s influence. The decline occurs as that generation ages out of influence, and younger generations with other priorities and values take their place.
By the end of the twentieth century, with civic participation plummeting, to Putnam’s alarm, the United States has reached the Third Turning era. This is an inward-looking, individualist and opportunist social era. The Baby Boomers are now the ones in mid-life (and at the peak of influence) and Generation X is in young adulthood. A shift from a social order based on social capital to one based on financial capital suits both of these generations just fine.
Hence the transformation from a civic society to a market society, and the loss of a sense of stability. The loss of stability worries people, and there is concern over culture and morals even as the economy is booming. In this generational explanation, the factor of the rise of suburbia is a parallel development. The new suburban lifestyle accompanies the emergent generational constellation of cocooning families and prospering Bobos.
In the data presented in the book, there is a glimmer of hope that a turnaround could be forthcoming. In the section on trends in volunteering, an uptick is detected in the age group 25 and younger. That would be a sign that the Millennial generation, who were the teenagers of the 1990s, might be returning to a life of civic engagement.
This data was accumulated and analyzed in the year 2000. So now that 17 years have passed, has anything changed? I am not aware of any studies similar to Putnam’s that have been done since. But the social mood of the United States has grown darker, less confident, suggesting that the curve continues its downward trajectory.
One obvious development of the new era is the rise of social media, which has brought people together, in a sense. If membership in social organizations counted towards the Social Capital Index at the end of the twentieth century, why not membership in Facebook groups at the start of the twenty-first? Bowling Alone poses a similar question when examining the early Internet. However, online connections seem too superficial to qualify as generating social capital. There’s just not much effort involved in liking and sharing memes – the reason for the term slacktivism.
Another characteristic of our time is the partisan divide that splits political opinion into (at least) two distinct camps. This could be seen as an example of bonding social capital developing within groups, but with no bridging social capital to connect them. In fact, the author acknowledges in Bowling Alone that social capital is not necessarily a social good, as it can have the effect of uniting one group against another. For example, the recent protest marches in Charlottesville, Virginia were facilitated by social capital (people on each side of the protest coordinating and travelling together), and then violence ensued.
One interesting observation from Bowling Alone is that, by the end of the twentieth century, evangelical religion had overtaken mainstream religion in popularity. Evangelical religion is concerned with individual piety and proselytization, whereas the mainstream church works for social betterment. This trend is in keeping with the thesis of a decline in civic involvement.
But it also suggests how a new ideology could form in an individualistic age, and then come to drive political change as a new collectivist age approaches. The values that defined piety for the evangelists in the era of civic decline now provide the requirements for political inclusion in the new order. For the Red State these values are conservative religion and aggressive capitalism, and for the Blue State they are the progressive ideals championed by social justice warriors.
As long as the partisan divide remains strong, there won’t be a society-wide return to civic engagement. But once the conflicts are resolved, hopefully with as few Charlottesvilles as possible, it will be back to the First Turning in the social cycle. By then Millennials will be in mid-life, and maybe, through their influence, a sense of community will be restored. Then, if anyone is around to chart the data, those graphs might start going up again.
The latest audio book I have for driving in the car is the provocatively titled White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. It is very well written with knowledgeable and intelligent historical analysis. Basically it is about class structure in America and how the United States was never intended to be an egalitarian society. The founders were creating their own class-based society applying principles of Enlightenment philosophy, but certainly not abandoning the idea that some men were inherently better than others.
So over the centuries, different understandings of the nature of the underclass were prevalent. And different derogatory terms were used to denote them, from the phrase that title’s the book (originating in the nineteenth century) to today’s “deplorables” who elected the current President. Interestingly, an earlier President, Andrew Jackson, was also seen as a champion of the underprivileged who were despised by elite political society. His time’s equivalent of “deplorable” was “cracker.”
Another interesting fact of history is that in colonial times America was, for England, a dumping ground for undesirables. “Transportation” was an official policy to purge the homeland of criminals and debtors by sending them across the Atlantic. As the American colonies grew, each one took on its own unique character. The one where I currently reside, North Carolina, was considered an utter backwater, sandwiched between the more prosperous plantation colonies of Virginia and South Carolina. It was thought of as a “Lubberland” filled with worthless and indigent people.
At some point during the discussion of this time period, the book quotes a source declaring that, in contrast, the poor of Pennsylvania were hard working. As someone whose life currently straddles North Carolina and Pennsylvania (specifically the Philadelphia area, which was really all Pennsylvania was in the colonial era), it certainly feels like life up North is busier, more industrious than the South, though not necessarily to its benefit. I have lived in the South my entire adult life and enjoyed its laid back feel, not to mention affordable cost of living. And sometimes I have felt a bit like a “lubber.” Hey, what’s wrong with Plenty and a Warm Sun?
I recall once, way back in the 1990s, I flew to California for a job interview. Yes, I came this close (holds thumb and forefinger together) to moving to the Silicon Valley area. The hiring manager who interviewed me was middle-aged, with long, graying hair (think old hippie) and told me that he had moved from out East after his children were grown. He thought of the East Coast as having a quieter pace of living than the West Coast – it was ideal for raising a family, whereas out West was where you went to make money.
Just some thoughts on the long reach of the past and the different reputations that parts of the United States have. The South has not had a great reputation, but I have certainly enjoyed living here, and have found the Southern people to be decent and respectful as much as anywhere else. Honestly, everywhere you go people are the same, and there is always a vast underprivileged class.
Looking forward to finishing this book during my next long drive.
This review is my second of a book about the Third Turning that I finally got around to reading in the Fourth Turning (the first is here). This second book is Broke, USA, about what the author calls the poverty industry.
I’m actually reading it on my Kindle:
It is one of the first models of Kindle, and it is full of ebooks, which I will probably need the rest of my life to read. So assuming I don’t lose the device (which I almost did once at an airport) and that it doesn’t break down, this will be the only ereader I ever own.
Broke, USA chronicles the rise, from the 1980s to present times, of financial services targeting people with low incomes and poor credit. The venerable example of such a service would be that provided by a pawn shop: a small loan using some valuable as collateral. Other early examples are auto title loans (putting your car up as collateral) and rent to own (buy a TV for five times what it should cost because you can’t or won’t save money).
But this industry really took off in the 1980s when ambitious entrepreneurs discovered how to tap into credit markets to profit off of the yield spread available when making risky, high interest loans to individuals with poor credit. All they had to do was convince the big lenders to give them access to the money. And so new services were born, such as the payday loan, backed by the promise of future income (just show them your pay stubs). And the “early tax return,” more accurately termed a refund anticipation loan, a sure bet for the lender because there is close to a 100% chance that the IRS will deliver the refund. Easy money because someone can’t or won’t wait three weeks for their tax refund.
These services end up being very profitable, because even though each loan is small, there are so very many of them, and the actual interest rate earned (APR as they call it) is insanely high. Storefronts offering these services popped up all over the country throughout the 1990s, and the men who founded these businesses became millionaires. The easy money they made attracted the attention of the billionaires, and soon these companies were subsidiaries of larger, more established financial corporations.
When I started this book, and read about the pattern of low-income workers caught in a revolving door of interest payments and fees, my first thought was that this was a story about Generation X in the Third Turning – a generation and an era of short-term thinking and risk taking. But as it turns out all the living generations are involved in this saga. Many of the entrepreneurs who pioneered this businesses are Boomers, while the corporate moguls who bought them out are, as you may well imagine, from the Silent Generation. The poor customers in this industry come from all generations.
And many members of the Greatest Generation became victims of what has become known as “predatory lending.” In a particular heinous practice known as “equity stripping,” lenders identify someone with a small fixed income (such as a Social Security pension) but with a home that is all or mostly paid off (perhaps because they are elderly and retired). If they can be convinced to take out an equity loan on their house in not very favorable terms, the lender essentially extracts some of the value of the asset. If they are not very financially savvy, or even declining in mental faculties, they can be convinced over and over again to refinance, transferring their net worth to the lender in the process.
This brings us to the mother of all predatory lending practices, the subprime mortgage. This is, of course, a mortgage loan made to someone with a poor credit rating, structured to pay out more money to the mortgage-holder in compensation for the risk. The now familiar story is that there was an explosion in the origination of these kinds of loans in the 2000s, to the point where anyone who could sign their name could get one. The mortgages were sold on secondary markets, bundled together to dilute or disguise their riskiness, and blessed by irresponsible credit rating agencies. When the inevitable wave of defaults began, the world economy was almost destroyed.
The generation whose archetypal role in this story proves most true to form is the Boomer Generation. From their numbers come the activists and politicians who have campaigned against predatory lending, and tried to regulate it. But also from this generation are the lobbyists for the lenders, and the politicians on the other side of the aisle. The author paints a picture of iniquity, but these practices do have their advocates.
The argument is that they offer access to basic financial services not normally available to people with no credit. Considering the circumstances they are in, someone who does not have a credit card might find it in their best interest to borrow a little cash despite the high surcharge. That cost is actually less than that of a bounced check, or a utility reinstatement fee. They are simply making a choice that is rational for them. Home buyers with low incomes and low credit might not be able to purchase a house at all if there were not subprime mortgages available. Why should the government deny consumers these opportunities and the freedom to choose?
When the Third Turning ended with the global financial crisis, the generations in America played their parts to the hilt. The Boomers politicized the issues involved and created two opposing camps, but failed to avoid the crisis. The Gen-Xers were at mid-life when the bubble burst, and they bore the brunt of the damage. And the Millennials learned from observation to be cautious about incurring debt.
Curiously, Millennial risk-aversion doesn’t apply to student loan debt, a topic which the author reaches at the end of the book. Student loans are being described as predatory now, extending the poverty industry into the solidly middle-class. Considering this along with record wealth inequality, anemic economic growth, and a difficult job market for young adults, the story of broke America has certainly not come to an end.
A tough day at work has put me in the mood to watch Vikings (on Amazon Prime, of course), another in the modern vein of gritty and rough-edged TV series, covering a period mostly neglected in historical drama – the Dark Ages in Europe. As you may imagine, there is a lot of warfare on the show, just what I need to heat up my blood.
One scene from an episode I’ve already watched has a Norse warband defeating a less disciplined English force, which ties into a book I recently listened to – War by Sebastian Unger, a reporter embedded with a platoon of airborne infantry in Afghanistan. In the latter case, as well, the superior training and discipline of U.S. forces allows them to prevail against a seemingly endless supply of hapless Taliban fighters, who are mostly teenage boys with almost no warfighting skills (but armed with deadly weapons and therefore a serious threat).
So across the ages, this simple military principle holds – discipline and training are the key to success in battles, whether fought with bow and arrow, spear and sword, or with rifle, mortar and grenade. But also consider that England is ruled by the English still, and the Taliban remains a force in Afghanistan. So winning battles is not necessarily going to achieve one’s war aims in the long run.
That’s enough thinking for now I am going to watch TV.
One of my many preoccupations is re-reading old sci-fi books from a modest collection I have. Just because it was there I picked up this one by Fritz Leiber:
This turns out to be a short novel where some guy somewhere in the 20th century discovers that he is the only actually sentient human in a world where everyone else is robotically going through the motions of life. Whenever I encounter this theme, as in The Stepford Wives, or Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (they are plant-clone beings who act like robots), I assume I am reading a parable about the human yearning to break free from the shackles of social conformity. After all, science fiction has replaced the old mythmaking as our collective way of exploring and expressing the human psyche.
The fear of being just another pod-person is understandable. We easily fall into patterns, and time sweeps us all too speedily down the course of our lives. We don’t want to look back and feel that life has passed us by, hence the constant rush to have new, authentic experiences.
Scientists call our patterns “behavioral conditioning,” the biological equivalent of programming, and there is even an experiment in which neuroscientists can predict our decisions before we make them (or are aware that we have made them), putting the whole notion of free will into question. But fear not – deep within us is the wellspring of creativity, the true source of freedom, which lets us overcome our conditioning. It requires effort and awareness, but it can be done. Because we are not actually robots, we just act like them a lot of the time.
Back to the book; another fun thing about it is that it has a cigarette ad in the middle of it:
It’s a 1972 edition, and I guess that was a thing then. Advertisers: the ultimate puppet-masters!
I will end this post with a link to a bizarre and brilliant song along the same theme. The lyrics are on the same page as the video to help you follow along.