Tom's Musings

I came of age as an East Coast guy, having been born and raised in Worcester Mass. I took pride in that fact. The Bay State has long been a leader in progressive thought and liberal politics. Even when they occasionally elect a Republican, that person would be considered a leftist elsewhere. Remember that Mitt Romney, while Governor, introduced a version of what later would be known as Obamacare well before Barak fought through Republican opposition for a similar law on a national level.

We Bay Staters did have a chip on our shoulders. I recall the train station in Worcester as a kid (when trains still were a mode of transportation). One of the signs read Albany New York and the West. We sophisticated New Englanders thought anything west of the Hudson River to be barbaric, primitive, and unworthy of interest. Boston was the city on the hill, the paragon of all virtue and enlightenment.

That is why I have long marveled at settling in the Midwest. To me, the vast center of the nation was an undifferentiated sea of conformity, complacency, and boredom. Perhaps Chicago had possibilities but Wisconsin was beyond reclamation. There were nothing there but cows, or so I thought. Who knew, perhaps Indian warriors yet terrorized the villagers.

But life plays funny tricks on one. After training for the Peace Corps in Milwaukee, I returned to the city that beer made famous for a master’s degree upon completion of my service in India. After graduating, I was forced to seek employment (a ghastly proposition). Through a serendipitous series of events, including being interviewed for a job for which I knew nothing, I stumbled into to my first real, adult professional position … as a research analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Health and Human Services. This happened to be located in Madison, Wisconsin.

Gleeful to secure any employment, I considered this a temporary situation while I decided what I wanted to do in life. Never in my wildest thoughts did I imagine settling down in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, or in Madison for the remainder of my life. I was, after all, an East Coast guy who sought the stimulation and excitement of fast-paced urban life.

In the early 1970s, Madison was a different place. Admittedly, the anti-war activities on the University of Wisconsin campus lent a radical patina to the community. Mostly, however, the political power of the county was yet held by the conservative agricultural interests lying just beyond the city’s borders. One example of this was found in the County’s (Dane) decision to provide surplus commodities to poor families rather than participate in the more liberal Food Stamp program. Each county had a choice back then. That decision alone spoke volumes about where political power lay back then.

I can still recall being exposed to advertisements for root worm remedies. I initially thought this was a human affliction until I realized it was something that attacked agricultural crops like corn. At the time, I was not amused. I thought I had moved to a large farming community … a virtual death sentence to a big city, east coast lad like myself.

But things soon began to change. In the early 70s, one of the student radicals of the late 60s ran for city mayor. It was a hard fought campaign but, surprisingly, Paul Soglin prevailed. A number of good citizens panicked, believing his election tantamount to a Communist takeover of City Hall. They sold their Madison Homes to escape the coming authoritarian apocalypse. Could gulags and torture chambers in City Hall be far behind?

Realty turned out to be quite different. Paul, during three long tenures as the city’s chief executive, led our fair metropolis from a sleepy state capital to a growing and thriving progressive community. No longer do root worm advertisements dominate local media. Rather, Madison has transformed into Mad City, a community of innovation and inclusiveness and extraordinary growth.

I was moved to write this paean to my home town after attending a May Day rally at the Capitol yesterday. Schools were closed so that students and teachers might participate in this rally in support of inclusiveness and opportunity for all. The rally embraced the notion that diversity within the American fabric is a strength, not a weakness. It championed the concept that cultural heterogeneity can be a positive national attribute, not a sign of decay. It simply stated that immigrants can contribute to our overall wellbeing, and should not be subject to persecution and prosecution. It was heartwarming to see so many students and their teachers marching in support of a simple notion … that all people have worth.

I suspect that events like yesterday’s rally are why I slowly fell in love with Madison. It is an island of wokeness amidst so much entrenched backwardness. The dominant cultural themes in this area now are civility, community, and compassion. People generally are willing to support efforts at enhancing the overall public good. What a quaint notion lost to so many other communities.

Wisconsin has been considered a ‘purple state’ for some time now, sometimes going Democratic and sometimes Republican. For a while, until recently, the scales have tipped toward the conservative end. But Madison’s (and Dane County’s) impact on state elections has emerged as highly significant, perhaps tipping the scales systemically in a progressive direction.

In one recent race for a state Supreme Court position, a contest that would decide the ideological balance of the State’s highest court, Madison’s salient role became clear. This emerged as a celebrated national contest. Elon Musk spent over $20 million to swing the race in a conservative direction. Overall, close to $100 million was spent on this most expensive court race in national history. In the end, the liberal won with Madison (Dane) turning out in record breaking numbers, even exceeding the vote totals in Milwaukee.

This year, another Supreme Court race was decided. This one would not effect the ideological balance. Thus, much less attention was paid and decidedly less money was directed toward influencing the outcome. Yet, once again, the Madison Community came out in record numbers … supporting the liberal candidate by a 4 to 1 margin. The contest was a blowout with the progressive candidate garnering 60 percent of the total votes statewide.

In many ways, Madison (Dane County) flies in the face of Conservative orthodoxy. Voting liberal and paying more for the public good should be the death of any community. Economic growth, according to neoliberal truth, should be stifled under the oppressive weight of big government. But the opposite has occurred here. The more liberal Madison has become, the faster it has grown. As much of the State has stagnated, Dane County has experienced accelerated growth in recent decades. Everywhere, new businesses have started and new homes and rental units are being erected. The rhythms of growth are palpable.

Now, after living here some five and a half decades, I am proud to call Madison home. It might be an island, the proverbial 50 square miles of fantasy surrounded by reality as Republicans oft say. But Mad Town, with all its eccenticities, is a fantasy world that I now fully cherish.

My recent sojourn back to my Peace Corps days got me thinking about another youthful diversion … my dalliance with holy orders. I imagine it is hard for those who have known me only as a debauched adult reprobate to accept that I once had studied for the Catholic Priesthood. In truth, it is difficult for me to accept such a fact. But, alas, it is true. In September of 1962, I took a bus from Worcester Mass to Glen Ellyn Illinois to initiate my studies toward becoming a Maryknoll Missionary Priest.

A word on the Maryknollers! They were perhaps the best known foreign missionary Catholic order at the time. They worked around the world to bring lost souls into the one, true, holy, and universal church. Well, that was what we Catholics (then) thought of our particular brand of Christianity. After all, many of the true believers thought non-Catholics would wind up in Hell. Couldn’t have that happen now, could we?

As I think back on it, I’m not certain that I ever bought into that mission. What attracted me was less a theological conviction as opposed to working in foreign lands bringing hope and opportunity to vulnerable and dispossessed people. Hey, I was only 18 at the time, hardly a sophisticate of the world. As I oft say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Yet, in my defense, the Maryknollers stood out among the many Catholic religious communities. In addition to focusing on traditional pastoral concerns, they often worked to uplift conditions among the foreign communities they served. In Central and South America, this sometimes brought them into conflict with local oppressive elites by preaching what came to be known as liberation theology. This theological approach positioned Christ and his teachings within a more radical, leftist perspective. Some Maryknollers even lost their lives because they fought to bring social justice to their flock. That impressed me no end.

My early life had been confined to a working class, ethnic, Catholic bubble. While I knew a few Jewish kids, virtually all my friends were of Irish, Lithuanian, or Polish stock … and all Catholic of course. There were four Catholic Churches on Vernon Hill in Worcester Mass, divided among the prevailing area ethnic groups … Irish, Polish,  Lithuanian, and French. I would pop into the nearest one, which happened to be Our Lady of Vilna … the Lithuanian one. For some masses, the service was still in Latin and the sermons in Lithuanian. These were hardly spiritual experiences for me.

Nor was there much in my early years to suggest a spiritual direction of any sort. I did not attend any religious school until high school, and only then chose Saint Johns Prep due to its academically rigorous reputation. I did all the things the other guys did, including chasing young women with the usual lack of success all of us horny guys experienced.

Chasing Catholic girls, I might add, prepared one well for life’s later disappointments. In the Pic below, I am on the right next to Maribeth O’Connor, my high school sweetheart. The fellow on the left was a student at my school from Chile. I liked Maribeth, a lot. She was quick and witty. The last I heard, she had earned a doctorate in literature. Clearly, a road not taken for me or, perhaps, a near escape from one I might easily have taken and then regretted. Then again, she really was out of my league.

The more I reflect on those days, the more I can now see red flags that I should have heeded. During my career at St. Johns, I would sit through four years of religion (theology) while arguing with the dogma being spoon-fed to us. When I say argue, I mean only within my own mind. To overtly argue with the good Xaverian Brothers who instructed us would likely result in a whack to the side of one’s head. Discipline was more straightforward back in my day.

At various points, for example, we would be told that non-believers  or the non- baptized or non- Catholics were consigned to eternal damnation. What, I would say to myself! A Chinese kid who had no exposure to the true church would suffer the ultimate penalty, and for all eternity. That struck me as utterly arbitrary and unfair. Surely, a loving God would not sanction such crap. The loophole in this unfair lottery was something called Purgatory but that seemingly fabricated  post- mortem destination did little to assuage my growing doubts.

Birth control? That also seemed illogical to me. Only natural methods were permitted. But God gave us all kinds of unatural medicines that we were permitted to use to offset afflictions that the same God struck us down with. Already sensing population growth as a future problem, I stuffed that particular dogma into my growing secret reject pile.

And don’t get me started on sex. That was only permitted for the purposes of procreation. What fiendish divinity would give us large amounts of testosterone and then say ignore all that. Perhaps God enjoyed teasing us poor, pathetic males. But why would He?

I only recall one vignette from my Freshman religion instructor. It went like this. Tommy and Susie were parked at night on a lonely road. Passion overcame them and they committed a mortal sin. Horrified, they tried to recall the words to the perfect act of contrition, which presumably would protect their souls until they could get to confession. But before they could recite it, or even remember the damn thing, a large truck hit their car from behind and sent these two decent kids directly to Hell. Come on, really? It was years before I could go parking with a girl without having a panic attack.

Despite all that, as I approached my senior year in high school, I thought more seriously about this missionary avocation. I would compartmentalize my doubts and focus on the positives. I would be doing the Lord’s work even though many of my boyhood friends thought this slightly nuts. To them, I would be giving up women, theoretically at least. As I saw it, chasing Catholic girls already was tantamount to taking a vow of chastity. So, I wouldn’t really be making much of a sacrifice.

In the Pic above, I am with Father Beck, a Maryknoll recruiter. He was good at his job but I didn’t need much selling. I strongly wanted to choose a meaningful future for myself. So, I stuffed all doubts aside and decided to give this Priest thing a shot.

It is now hard to pinpoint any transformational moment. I was never struck by lightening on the road to Damascus like Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul). Perhaps the movie Keys of the Kingdom played a role. In it, Gregory Peck plays Scottish missionary named Francis Chisolm who spends most of his life working in pre- Communist China. This fictional Priest was loose on Catholic dogma but strong in compassion and love for the community he served. Now, that’s what I wanted to be.

Remember, what I entered in 1962 was a minor seminary, the equivalent to getting your college degree. The Maryknoll Seminary fortunately had a decent academic reputation. Four additional years in a major seminary, located on the banks of the Hudson River in Ossining New York, were required to become an actual Priest. It would be a long haul.

In the Pic above, I am with my two first- year roommates … both named Peter. What I recall most were the endless, highly regimented, days. It was up at some ungodly hour, perhaps 5:45 AM? Then there were mandatory prayers and Mass, followed by breakfast and then classes. At some point you went to mandatory assignments designed to keep the building functioning. I recall one of my duties was waxing the corridor floors. There were also mandatory study halls, recreation periods, and more chapel time.

Throughout the day, there were long periods of enforced silence (which we oft ignored when we could). Even at meals we had to eat in silence while selections from holy sources were read to us. The headmaster would ring a bell when we were permitted to converse. The overall experience struck me as something like being in one of our military academies. You had few free moments.

Still, there were moments of emotional depth. I recall Easter Sunday morning for example. We filed into the circular chapel around midnight, each of us being given a unlit candle. The lights were dimmed but a growing illumination slowly came from each candle being lit one after the other in a circular motion. Then, in the quiet hush of the flickering light, we all began to sing He is risen. That memory still gives me goosebumps. There is something about a close community dedicated to something inspiring that can be comforting.

But My Priesthood dream was doomed from the start. I realized I had to abandon this spiritual journey part way through my second year. I had arrived at a place that could not longer be denied …  a reason for leaving that was both direct yet compelling.

I could not escape the reality that a belief in a personal God, and in Catholic dogma, were basic requirements for the job. I possessed neither of these. I had been driven by an elemental desire to do good for people. That was not enough. Besides, perhaps there were better ways to pursue such a vision.

In the Spring Semester of 1964, I enrolled at Clark University, which was located in my hometown of Worcester (there was no money to go away to school). Clark was just about as far from the Seminary as one could get. While virtually all of my high school classmates went on to college, I don’t recall any of them matriculating at Clark, despite its proximity and excellent reputation. Within the Catholic community, the school had a reputation for being a haven of Communists and atheists. Those suddenly struck me as decidedly attractive qualities.

I rationalized my choice as being one of convenience. Holy Cross, a local Jesuit institution and my other natural choice, didn’t take spring admissions. That made my decision easier to explain to others. In truth, though, I desperately wanted to escape the cultural cocoon in which I had been raised. I was beyond ready to shed my conservative Catholic roots.

This is my college yearbook pic. While I look quite conservative for the 1960s, looks can be deceiving. As I recall, I lost my faith within weeks of enrolling. It didn’t take long before I had become radicalized against the war in Vietnam, joining the first anti-war march in Worcester very early in that movement. Soon, I was forming the leftist group on campus … called SACC, the Student Action Coordinating Committee. I even joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), before they fell off the edge into self-destructive nihilism.

In retrospect, that sounds like a dramatic transformation. I went from a straight- arrow seminarian to a collegiate leftist. In reality, it was a very short journey. Both at the seminary and at Clark, I was looking to do something meaningful. To support myself in college, I worked in a hospital (11-7 shift) and also with disadvantaged kids. I could have found easier work but, for me, everything was about making a contribution.

The trappings of my life had changed, but not who I was inside. That remained constant. Not surprisingly, the first thing I did after college involved spending two years in India as a Peace Corps Volunteer. That’s sort of like missionary work.

But here is what was remarkable about my experiences and about that era. When I entered my religious studies in 1962, the seminary had just been expanded to accommodate additional students. Yet, the incoming class still exceeded capacity. At the very beginning, a few incoming freshmen were sleeping in the halls. A decade or so later, I took my new wife down to look at the place. Shockingly, I discovered that the seminary had closed. It was now a Community College. The inflow of new recruits had suddenly slowed after 1962 and then virtually stopped within a few years.

In retrospect, 1962 had been a seminal year. Up to that point, vocational dreams were common among Catholic youth. After that  moment, the idealistic young went in different directions. Alas, the reasons for this radical shift must await some future musing.

I ran across a story recently that caught my attention. Apparently,  a professor mentioned to his college class that his early Peace Corps service had motivated his subsequent academic career in Ag Economics. One of his students, clearly puzzled, finally asked: Professor, what is a P – Score?

I have been in that poor prof’s shoes. How many times had I used a familiar term, to me at least, and then realized just how young my students were. What did the post-war period mean to them, which war? Many of them might remember the Vietnam conflict but WWII was tantamount to ancient history to be catalogued next to our Civil War or the Hittite invasions of antiquity.

And take The Great Depression. While I never experienced that social trauma first hand, my parent’s generation did. In many ways, the scars left on their psyches from that global challenge informed the way they lived and how I was raised. To my youthful students,  though, that economic disaster was a vague prehistoric shadow, something largely irrelevant to my youthful students … like rotary phones.

So, I guess it is not surprising that the Peace Corps, a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, is now an item for a trivia quiz. Still, having personally run off to India as a volunteer during my misguided youth, I find that a bit sad.

President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps by executive order (10924) in March, 1961, a program that would subsequently be authorized by Congress the following September. In some ways, it was an accidental product of fortune and timing. Candidate Kennedy arrived at the Ann Arbor airport one October evening in 1960 after a televized debate with his opponent, Richard M. Nixon.

In that famous verbal joust, tricky Dick had suggested that Republicans were the party of peace while the Dems typically led us into war. That did not sit well with Junior Senator from Massachusetts who had stewed upon this allegations during the subsequent plane ride.

Shockingly, a crowd of 10,000 were still awaiting his arrival around midnight, many being students from the University of Michigan. A few unprepared words were required of the exhausted candidate. Besides, who would recall anything from a few random, late-night remarks.

Paraphrasing a portion of his remarks, Kennedy, while drawing on a vague concept he had toyed with in the past, spontaneously threw out a challenge to this largely youthful gathering: how many of you would be willing to volunteer one or two years of your lives as educators, ag experts, or engineers in underdeveloped foreign lands before suggesting that the fate of the free world might well rest on just such sacrifices. The term Peace Corps was never mentioned but a seed had been planted.

About fifty years later, I was in Washington for a gathering of India-44, my own P.C. group. Peace Corps, as a federal program, was celebrating its 50th anniversary at the same time that included a number of public events. At a panel on the program’s origins, a woman stated that she had been in the Michigan crowd that night when Kennedy laid out his challenge. His chance remarks, she shared, surged through the young crowd like a bolt of lightening.

In the days before social media, word about this new volunteer program (that didn’t exist) spread from campus to campus like wildfire. Soon, the now President-elect’s office was inundated with requests for information about an initiative that had only been a throwaway line in a late night campaign speech. But now there was no turning back.

Many among the college youth of that day thirsted for a way to express their higher ideals. Though still in high school, I certainly felt that tug. Many of those who later would join me in India vividly recalled Kennedy’s clarion invocation during his inauguration speech: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

For many, that sentiment sparked something in our generation … a desire to make a difference. That desperate need to seek our better angels burned bright at that very moment in time when nuclear apocalypse seemed so present and so possible. Civilization did appear to hang in the balance.

Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for Kennedy and other icons of that era, said the following to a early group of volunteers: “Peace Corps touches on the profoundest motives of young people … that idealism, high expectations, and ideological convictions are not inconsistent with the most practical, rigorous, and efficient of programs. … every one of you will definitely be judged – and will ultimately judge himself – on the effort he has contributed to the building of a new society.”

Peace Corps did seem to capture the spirit of the times, evoking the more salubrious instincts of my generation as it then was coming of age. In 1966, when I started my own training, some 15,500 volunteers were serving in 46 countries. The program in those years was flooded with tens of thousands of  applicants, way more than could possibly be used. If you survived the selection process and rigorous training, you felt you belonged among the privileged few.

In those days, that sense of privilege segued into a test of our individual characters. Being assigned to rural India was not for the faint of heart. Heat, isolation, disease, cultural conflicts or misunderstandings, loneliness, and poor program planning became everyday challenges for us. This was still what was called the wild west days of the program, when they were still turning a vague concept into a functioning system (see Our Grand Adventure for the entire story).

The Peace Corps program has remained active all these decades later. In recent years, some 8,500 volunteers yet serve in 77 countries. In some critical ways, the program is much better now. The volunteer sites are more thoughtfully planned and the skill sets of the volunteers are matched more closely to their expected roles. And, of course, with global communications today’s volunteers do not experience the raw isolation and loneliness we endured.

Yet, in other ways, something has been lost. We in India-44 were thrown off the deep end, placed in remote sites largely without any creature comforts (often without running water, electricity, indoor plumbing to name a few). Worse, we were expected to perform tasks we were not exactly prepared to do. All this while confronting searing heat, monsoons, snakes and other reptiles, dysentery (and worse), language issues  (incomprehensible local dialects), and so much more. And there was, as I oft note, that debilitating sense of isolation.

While surely trying, these challenges didn’t matter in the end. We still were Kennedy’s children, inspired to go forth and do our best. We stubbornly believed that a better world was possible. We even grasped at the naive aspiration that we might conceivably contribute to that new world.

In truth, we fell far short of changing the world. At the 2011 50th Peace Corps anniversary, the Indian Embassy had a reception for the former volunteers who were in town. In his remarks, one of the Indian officials talked about what he thought Peace Corps had meant. It was, he asserted, not really about the technical contributions we made. They were inconsequential in such a huge country. No, it was more about the lasting connections between two very different cultures. It was, at the end of the day, mostly about greater human understanding.

He was right. Each of us in India-44 had been stretched as young adults. And each of us came away with a better understanding of who we were as individuals and with an appreciation of the wonderfully complex world in which we lived. I oft have looked upon my fellow volunteers in wonder and admiration. What a marvelous and talented group, each of whom would contribute much throughout their lives.

Of course, they might have done so anyways, without any volunteer service. But I suspect that Peace Corps had something critical to do with what each managed to accomplish in the ensuing decades.

Of course, the 1960s turned out to be a very mixed bag … hope and the promise of change was mixed with anger, assassinations, riots, and excessive drug use. Change is never easy. But I personally will never forget those moments back then when we dreamt of a better world where all of us would be valued, and where each of us had at least the opportunity to seek our full potential.

Were the kids today to be so fortunate!

From which sources did I draw the moral sentiments that have generally governed my life? Was it my early Catholic faith, family and neighborhood, or something borrowed from the tenor of the times. Hard to say for sure but something on this matter has been nagging at me. Bear with me for a bit.

Aldo Leopold, the poetic conservationist who wrote The Sand County Almanac, died in 1948, just as television would separate people from nature. In that masterpiece, he wrote about the dance of the Woodcock. “The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.” Aldo was lamenting what he saw as the very beginnings of a societal pattern where people would be separated from nature by technology, where their attachment to what was really important would be fractured.

Harry Truman turned down many offers to get rich when he left office in 1953. He drove back to Missouri to live again in his modest family home, living on an army pension of $1,350 (in today’s money) and modest royalties from his memoirs. His sentiments back then sounds quaint to modern ears, “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency.” Can you imagine Trump issuing such a sentiment?

George Romney (father of Mitt Romney) was CEO of American Motors, Governor of Michigan, Cabinet member in the Nixon administration, among other achievements. As a top industrial manager, he actually argued for restraint in what we paid top people in industry. He thought that a balance between the compensation levels of management and labor was important to our overall wellbeing. He quaintly saw greed as a destabilizing force to our social fabric.

Students in my day, back when I came of age in the 1960s, admittedly were all over the place. There were those who missed the 60s altogether, those who dived into the abyss of the counter-culture experiment, and those who naively tried to correct America’s obvious failings (like me). Yet, many of us were focused on making the world a better place. We certainly talked about that a lot. And change did come about, for a short while at least.

But something fundamentally changed by 1980. I can recall Reagan’s inauguration as President. It was not just a change in power but in our national ethos. Money and status were rudely inserted into the national psyche. Gone were Nixon’s claims about modest Republican cloth coats (in his famous Checkers speech) or Jimmie Carter’s humility and simplicity. Enter hubris and the gratuitous display of wealth and status. His inauguration was a grotesque display of limousines, mink coats, and ultra chic (and expensive) evening wear. A new ethic was in town.

The dominant political patois of neo-liberalism soon segued into corporate board rooms. In my youth, a form of what Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich would call stakeholder capitalism attenuated the rougher edges of corporate life. For a while, profit-oriented organizations explicitly recognized that they had managerial concerns beyond their fiduciary responsibilities to company shareholders … concerns extending to their workers, their communities, and to the future. Quarterly statements and shareholder prices were important, but not every thing.

The 1980s ushered in a new (and old) ethos, the seeds of which had been planted in 1947 at a gathering of intellectuals at Mont-Pelerin in Switzerland. Conservatives like economist  Milton Friedman and philosopher Friedrick Hayek laid out the argument for economic liberalism … a world where individual liberty was sacrosanct and virtually all public (i.e  government) action was tantamount to tyranny. They offered an old argument founded on the notion of homo- economicus where the sum of all individual self-optimizing decisions would magically result in maximum economic efficiency. Great stuff if you believe in the tooth fairy. In reality, it proved merely to be a transparent rationalization for unbridled greed.

It took many years for this neo-liberal perspective to overcome the Keynsian alternative that had rescued the nation from a global depression and introduced a decades long era of prosperity and promise. The world, however, eventually forgot what a focus on the public good as opposed to private gain had achieved.

When future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid out a strategy in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce through which neo-liberalism might gain control of key societal institutions, the game was on. Conservative money poured into the movement conservative agenda. Traditional institutions came under attack while new ones (like right-wing think tanks) were created. Within a decade, the White House was theirs.

The concept of stakeholder capitalism now seemed quaint. It has been replaced by the concept if shareholder capitalism. Nothing matters other than optimizing the well-being of shareholders. That became the moral foundation of corporate life in the 1980s … a world in which workers, communities, the environment, and our futures be damned.

So, when pharmaceutical companies make pricing decisions that effectively kill thousands, it is just business. When extractive energy companies actively fight against safer alternative energy sources, they are doing the moral thing. When weapons manufacturers lobby against sensible gun control policies, they are just looking after their shareholder’s needs. It is Orwell’s dystopia made real. This greed is good mania now has us with a public debt approaching $40 trillion, mostly to give further tax breaks to the Uber-wealthy who are blessed with the wherewithal to buy favorable tax preferences.

There is a second social change from which I was spared during my critical formative years. Smart phones and virtual reality had not yet arrived, those technologies which have separated people from one another. Just explore Jonothan Haights The Anxious Generation if you want the background on this phenomenon. I read today about a 19 year old who melted down on a plane because he was without his phone for a day. Nothing helped until he was provided a substitute phone and he could get back to his Snapchat, tic-toc fix or whatever. He was addicted.

AI may well be the next technology to interpose an artificial chasm between humans and their traditional purposes. Most of the angst these days focuses on AI replacing traditional jobs and tasks traditionally carried out by humans. Everything from computer programming, middle management tasks, repetitive manual labor, legal services and medical diagnoses suddenly face highly uncertain futures. 

But these are just the initial challenges posed by our god-like machines. It took a hundred years to recognize the full potential of the industrial revolution and just several decades to see the digital revolution play out. Who knows where AI will be in just 10 to 15 years. Will humans be confronted with their own obsolescence by 2040? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Back to my original issue … from where did my core moral sentiments originate. I suppose all the traditional factors played a role. Of that I am reasonably certain. But I also was lucky enough to be aware of excellent role models in the public sector,  men and women of uncommon virtue. There existed salient public sentiments that explicitly seemed to value life. As my late colleague, economist Robert Lampman pointed out, a common litmus test for new public policies in the 1960s was what will it do for the poor.

In addition, I was raised largely without our modern digital communication miracles. Okay, we eventually had a 12 inch Fada television in our home (later than most). But that did not prevent me from spending endless hours playing with friends in ways that sharpened my social skills, my independence, and my initiative. I even had time to learn basic multiplication tables and to diagram sentences. As Aldo Leopold feared in the mid 1940s, we had not yet lost our connection to other people and to the natural world.

Despite my rough, working class environment, I even knew where the public library was. When I wasn’t marauding our streets with my friends (without any supervision), I was greedily reading anything I could acquire. Now, being a member of three book clubs at age 81, it is clear that some early habits stay with you.

Im short, I feel blessed. Oddly enough, I’m not sure just how blessed I was at the time. But I do now!

A common discussion these days, at least among my crowd, focuses on how someone so unfit for the Presidency can hold the nation’s highest office. Clearly, we have become a global embarrasment, aware that residents of our peer nations are shaking their collective heads while asking each other … what’s wrong with those Americans?

Responses to this question abound, some quite convincing: identity politics, chauvinism, caucasion paranoia, the uncertainty related to rapid social change, the slow decline of working class and rural America, and even the price of eggs. Oh, and one should not forget that Americans, in general, are a criminally backward lot.

Recently, I was musing about one aspect of this conundrum … a quirk within the demographic dimension of the issue. In the recent election, younger males flocked to Trump in unexpected numbers, white males in particular. That fact struck me as slightly counter-intuitive. Aren’t the young supposed to be liberal? They were in my day, or so it seemed. What’s going on here?

Let’s look at a few numbers. In general, white youth without college experience chose Trump by 14 percentage points. But young white males with less education supported Trump by an overwhelming margin … 63% to 35%. For males, being young, white, and less educated was a strong predictor of support for the least competent candidate in living memory. Why support someone, and a party, that has never had your interests at heart. Good question, Tom.

We pretty much know that working class males feel threatened. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the laboring class has struggled. After decades where increasing productivity was matched by pay increases, that link was broken in the 1980s. Since then, the monetary rewards of our increasing GDP have gone to the owners of capital, not the nation’s workers. Some $50 trillion dollars has been siphoned from the lower segments of the income distribution for the benefit of those at the very top. While Republicans historically lamented the systemic redistribution of income, they rather like it when their wealthy benefactors profit from the trend.

While seeing their earnings capacity stall and then decline, younger white workers faced a new threat. Not only did their jobs disappear in an emerging global economy that was rigged against them, but they sensed there was another looming concern … being replaced by the other side in the gender wars.

When I was young, most women were not in the labor market, not after marriage at least. Men anticipated and accepted their role as provider, or breadwinner. That stereotype was challenged over time as it became apparent that females were supplanting males in many ways not previously imagined. Recently,  non-farm female workers outnumbered their male counterparts males by 200,000. While a tiny plurality given the size of the labor market, that is a stunning achievement. Females were taking control of the labor market.

But the signs of female progress have long been there.  Women began outnumbering males in college enrollment by the late 1970s. What followed could be expected. Females began to outnumber males as college graduates in 1982. The education related gender-shift trend has continued since then. By 2006, females surpassed males in earning doctoral degrees.

The signs of emerging female dominance in education (and in many professions) were everywhere, if you managed to look. When my wife first worked as Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Court system, the judiciary was a male bastion. Today, females dominate that state’s highest court with six of the seven Wisconsin Supreme Court justices being from the gentler sex. There is an election for a Wisconsin Justice on April 7 (today). Not surprisingly,  both candidates, once again, are females. This is not shocking at all given that women have outnumbered men in law schools for the past decade, now taking up over 56 percent of all law school seats.

Some years ago, I had to take our dog to the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School since he needed high level care for a heart condition (His heart specialist was, no surprise, a woman). While waiting, I found a hall where pictures of the yearly graduating classes were posted. The trend was clear. In the early years (late 1970s I believe), the classes were about 80 percent male. In the most recent years, they were 80 percent female. In the medical clinic where my primary physician is located, they have a wall with pictures of all the Clinic’s doctors. When I first began going there some four decades ago, virtually all the docs were male. Today, 18 of the 21 docs are female. Oh, and I have to see my dentist today for a loose tooth … a female of course.

This leads to another fact potentially disturbing to insecure males. By 2028, females are expected to control 75 percent of all discretionary spending. What little money young males have probably are going for drugs and booze to forget about their sorry plight. Oblivion is preferred to a bleak reality.

Think about this for a moment. You are a young, white, working class male with, at best, a high school education. Manufacturing jobs are rare. Where they exist, they don’t pay nearly enough to support a family. If you live in rural America, it seems as if your town, and your prospects, are dying. Jobs are vanishing. Farms are being swept up into huge conglomerates. The sense of opportunity, the so-called American dream, has been lost in your eyes. Worse, that dream had you as head of the family, a role that increasingly seems out of reach.

What are you to do if you are a young, struggling kid. Some clearly give up. The Opiod and Meth crises testify to that. Others look for traditional scapegoats like immigrants and minorities. Many look for a strong leader who will ease their fears and provide pat answers to their concerns. They surely will respond to an opportunist who tells them whom to blame for their troubles. Besides the traditional scapegoats (people who look, speak, and believe differently), this now includes a new group to be castigated and rejected … uppity, aggressive women who have been helped by ‘woke’ Democrats and by affirmative action. It turns out that those white, working class voters who agree that society as a whole has become “too soft and feminine” were some 5 times more likely to support Donald Trump. Apparently, he was just the man who could save them. Irrational fear of females might just be a real thing.

Trump doesn’t have to deliver on his promises. He merely has to cater to the subconscious fears and prejudices of his base supporters. He must have chortled when his opponent in the last election turned out to be a Black woman. How convenient for his authoritarian, male dominated persona and message.

The fact that the vast majority of Americans vote against their self interest cannot be explained by logic. It can only be understood in terms of unreasoned fear. We have whites fearing loss of their privileged racial status to non-whites. We have native born Americans fearing competition from immigrants. Now we even have males worried that women are taking over the world. And just around the corner, there lies a dystopian future where AI machines will render humans irrelevant. Panic and despair abound.

Fear and desperation are the basic catalysts leading to tyranny and authoritarianism. Worse, they  are just about the hardest challenges for democracy to overcome. As I always say … I’m glad I’m old.

Let me start by asserting that I am a big fan of science. Contemporary society has only been possible through a radical cognitive revolution that encompassed inductive reasoning, rational thought, and core scientific methods. Such a conceptual revolution typically is associated with Francis Bacon (b. 1561), known as ‘the father of empiricism,’ though earlier but (alas) temporary conceptual breakthroughs along similar lines occurred during the Islamic Golden Age almost a millenia earlier. Obviously, many others contributed to this ‘revolution.’

Nor should we forget the long  struggles to free society from its preferences for understanding the world about us premised on superstition or revealed truths. Think about Galileo’s (b. 1564) struggle with Pope Urban VIII over his heliocentric theory of our solar system and many other conflicts all the way down to the 1920’s Scopes trial that convicted a Tennessee teacher of exposing his students to the dangerous theory of evolution. Even today, entrenched right-wing ideologies ridicule and attack those products of our best scientific processes when research challenges sacred preconceptions and values. Consider HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s dismissal of accepted  medical research in favor of agenda- driven beliefs as he directs our nation’s premier health agency. In case you missed it, vaccines generally do work. Good science confirms that.

Moreover, I have spent much of my professional life in the academy. Admittedly, I was never a scholar by disposition but, as the saying goes, most of my friends and colleagues were of that ilk. Being the Associate Director of a top university- based multi- didciplinary research entity for many years afforded me great opportunities to see rigorous analytical methods being applied to our more pressing social policy challenges. I remain grateful for being able to associate with the best and the brightest.

Nevertheless, even these best and brightest can succumb to errors derived from self-interest and cultural myopia. That is only human. Let me only touch on two, shall we say, methodological conundrums.

Economic rationality. I spent the vast majority of my professional life surrounded by economists. In general, I liked them even if they were a testy and disputational lot. Surprisingly, they seemed to like me, significantly more than did my social work colleagues. Nevertheless, I am moved to quibble with a dominant pillar of economic research.

Somewhere in the 1960s, there was a significant revolution in what would be considered good science within the discipline of economics. Descriptive work suddenly was replaced by quantitative techniques and a highly theoretical approach to the discipline. Higher mathematics and abstract manipulations replaced broader or more balanced attempts to understand our economic world or society in general.

Fancy econometrics became the sine qua non for acceptable analysis and, most critical to academics, publication in peer reviewed journals. Practitioners of the dismal science wanted their discipline to look more like physics. Complex equations were the way to do that, and to further separate economic members of the academy from those in the softer social sciences and, of course, the public. Obscurity was its own reward.

These fancy econometric explorations have their uses, don’t get me wrong. But they also have built-in limits, especially when one seeks to apply results to the real world. Over time, it became clearer to us doing applied work in the academy that newly minted Ph.D.s in economics were interested in theory, not practice. Even the character of the doctoral students had visibly changed, increasingly being dominated by Asian and Eastern European countries which produced math and computer whizzes who knew little about institutional realities, key historical lessons, or human idiosyncrasies. A close economics colleague at the time bemoaned this trend that we all observed.

To my mind, the core issue with the new economics boiled down to this. Increasingly, at the start of each Institute (the Institute for Research on Poverty) brown bag, the presenter would go through a litany of assumptions that the audience must accept in order to make the math work. Essentially, these assumptions turned humans into stick figures only motivated by achieving one’s optimal utility or wellbeing as measured in dollars. All cultural factors, institutional idiosyncrasies, and emotional intrusions were dismissed. People were reduced to mini calculators operating in perfect markets that dismissed annoying issues like externalities or asymmetrical information flows. In such an ideal world, with everything monetized into dollars, the math worked very well indeed. Economics did look like physics until you looked closely.

I considered this quirk early in my career. This tendency to reduce humans to homo- economicus struck me as overly stylized and simplistic. I decided to test my concern. There was a poverty policy tactic generally termed wage-bill subsidies. Essentially, the government would subsidize the wages of harder to employ job seekers, thus improving their labor market prospects, at least according to economic theory.

After all, classic economic theory had reduced decionmakers to utility- maximizing automotons. Hiring supervisors would see a reduced  wage bill (the outlay to secure a unit of labor services) and favor the subsidized individual. That was obvious … no? The problem arose when it became clear that such programs were significantly under- subscribed. In short, the subsidies went under- utilized. Most economists were flummoxed.

So, I conducted an unorthodox study of this reform strategy by doing something unconventional. I and my team did a series of paper surveys, personal interviews, and focus groups. That is, we talked to decision-makers … real people! That was something respectable economists seldom did. Good thing I was not one of those.

Amazingly, our results suggested that people simply are not human calculators nor utility- maximizing automatons. Their reasoning is far more complex than economists assume, too complex to cover here. One perverse outcome of my research suggested that wage subsidies could hurt job seekers in some circumstances … a counter- intuitive outcome. Some hiring supervisors saw the public subsidy as a red flag, suggesting that the cost of taking such a person might well exceed the value of a subsidy. In general, however, the hiring process involves more than estimating future utility, a fairly subjective endeavor indeed. Feelings, intuitions, and preconceptions enter into such decisions.

The bottom line, for me, was this. Humans are more than calculating stick- figures that go around calculating monetized utility all day. They are, inconveniantally, quite human.

The ‘gold standard’ of social science research. Among my other observations of methodological conundruns stood a counter- intuitive blasphemy. Good science might just confound good policy making, at least in some situations. Now, what could that possibly mean?

This story goes something like the following: I spent a year on leave from the University of Wisconsin working at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This was during the early years of the Clinton Administration. My primary reason for this segue into the real world was to work on welfare reform … a hot issue at the time. Now, remember this, welfare reform had been described by a previous Secretary of HHS ((Joseph Califano) as the Mideast of Domestic Policy. These issues were so contentious that I oft remarked that I knew I was getting closer to the truth when no one agreed with me. It was not an avocation for the faint of heart but I thought it grand fun.

Planning for national welfare reform was to be headed by two Harvard Profs (David Ellwood and Mary Jo Banes) who had accepted high political positions at HHS. In addition, a number of academics and research types had been recruited to spend time in D.C., as I had been. The point of all this was to guarantee that Clinton’s welfare reform would be guided by the best research possible, not by seat-of-the-pants ideology. Science, not politics, would prevail.

I recall the phone call from Ann Segal asking how quickly I could get to Washington. I told her I would have to finish my semester teaching responsibilities and take care of my mother’s affairs (she had passed that Spring of 1993). Ann suggested I get to D.C. as promptly as I could … they would be moving quickly on the reform agenda. Surely I wouldn’t want to miss working on this policy vessel before it was launched. It turned out I had nothing to worry about; I saw on day one that the reform agenda was yet stuck in dry dock and would remain there for some time.

Unlike Trump’s menagerie, Clinton’s team was filled with really smart people. These truley were the best and brightest who expected, more like demanded, decisions to be based on excellent science. By ‘excellent,’ they wanted support based on rigorous observational studies or, preferably, by interventions supported by gold standard experimental studies. A ‘gold standard’ study employed  randomly assigned subjects into one or more experimental groups along with a control group. This approach would ensure that extraneous factors would not confound any observed effects. Other protocols are essential but random assignment is key.

Now, here’s the rub. Random assignment studies worked best for distinct, segmented interventions where individual subjects could be assigned to separate treatments and a control group. At the time, we had plenty of those studies to examine. The difficulty, in my eyes, was that the true impacts (as opposed to spurious results from non-randomized studies) usually were quite small even though statistically significant. You could reduce welfare use and raise family income but not by much.

While scientists can get excited by statistically significant results, policy makers demand something more … substantive significance. Take the following situation as an example! Clinton said reform must be budget neutral. He also implied that his package would include a time- limit on receiving assistance. Thus, we were forced to come up with interventions that would land large portions of the welfare population in jobs, and decent jobs at that. If not, public jobs would be required and that would be more expensive than just giving recipients a monthly check. There would go budget neutrality. Nor was there any political will to kick people off assistance when they hit their time limit if they had played by the rules.

But the best science we had said that existing reform initiatives (those that had been rigorously tested) would have marginal impacts, outcomes well short of what was required to be cost neutral while keeping to a time- limited program structure. I quickly realized that the best research was leading us astray. How was that?

The so-called best research focused on topics that lent themselves to gold standard randomized experiments. That is, they typically focused on one or two isolated interventions. What I (and a few others) realized was that we needed radical changes that would transform the entire culture of welfare offices as well as radical changes in basic programmatic concepts. But there was no existing research support for such radical ideas, especially in a policy area rife with political turmoil. Washington was a difficult town in which to effect dramatic change. More to the point, changing the culture of larger systems presented so many logistical and methodological challenges that they were seldom, if ever, subject to rigorous study.

At one point, I and another academic colleague on leave (Rebecca Maynard from the University of Pennsylvania) argued that Clinton should not propose a national package. Rather, make the states a true laboratory of reform with support for dramatic transformation in the way business is done. Perhaps in that environment, some states could experiment dramatically while others would follow the best examples supported by existing research. In effect, states would become the unit of analysis in a national experiment.

But that was not to be. Clinton had promised to end welfare as we knew it. The planning process plodded on. By the time the President’s plan was released, it was too late. The Republicans under revolutionary House Republican leader Newt Gingrich would soon take control over the reform agenda. And they had no interest in research.

Concluding thoughts. I have been out of the policy and research games for some time now. But I was moved to comment on a couple of my old concerns after reading The Road to Freedom by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. He took apart contemporary classical economics while attacking the use of utility- optimizing stick men at the center of so- called rigorous analytics. I could not agree with him more.

One final thought on my assertion that the best research can thwart good policy. Sometimes after my time in D.C. I was asked to participate on a National Academy Expert Panel to look at the best ways to evaluate the national welfare reform passed in 1996. I had an opportunity to express my concerns and found the panel sympathetic. The final report reflected that but welfare would soon disappear as a major issue.

The thing is that, despite all limitations, science and inductive rationality are the most promising avenues toward progress. But we must always remember that science is not ultimate truth. We must continue to assess our techniques and question our assumptions. The search for truth never ends.

Perhaps the AI machines that will soon replace humans in doing high level cognitive tasks will do a better job.

“By any historical measure, the new data … by the ‘Partnership for Public Service’ is documenting the worst employee engagement and workforce sentiment I’ve seen for the federal government. To put things in perspective, in a typical year, agencies work hard to get their scores from the high 60s to the mid-70s, or even the 80s. This year the average is 32. No federal agency is the ‘best place to work’ at this point.”

                     Elizabeth Linos        

                     Harvard University

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On occasion, I have commented on the systemic erosion respecting the very notion of public service in government. For example, there had been a time when the best and the brightest vied for positions within America’s foreign service elite. In addition, from the 1930s through the 1960s, top college grads from the best schools migrated to Washington to contribute their skills toward solving society’s challenges. During that final decade (the 1960s), agencies like the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the Peace Corps attracted top academic talent. It was seen as an honor and privilege to confront the nation’s issues.

Even in the late 1970s, federal agencies boasted highly skilled personnel. NASA traditionally was a bright star in the federal constellation. The top planning entity in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), was another. It was said that ASPE’s technical staff in the late 1970s could rival a top 10 university’s economics faculty in quality.

The concept of an exemplary public service began to decline when President Reagan asserted that government was not the solution to our problems. Rather, it was the problem. Republican orthodoxy routinely associated the civil service with inefficiency and waste. Nothing exemplified that trope more than Trump’s unleashing of Elon Musk and his DOGE team. They promised $2 trillion in savings. After mindlessly ravaging through the bureaucracy, and then silently backtracking on most cuts, few dollars were ‘saved’ but any remaining staff morale was utterly devastated. Musk’s rampage surely left remaining staff with the impression that their work was unimportant at best, perhaps even incompetent or utterly useless.

Data from the most recent Partnership for Public Service annual survey is revealing. The average score for staff engagement and positive sentiment fell by over 40 percentage points during the first year of the ‘second’ Trump era. That is a galactic decline in morale. Almost three-in-five survey respondents asserted that they are less engaged than in the previous year, another tectonic shift.

Part of the problem could be assigned to political indifference or even interference. Only 7.5 percent of respondents said that high-level agency political leaders generate supportive motivational sentiments among staff. All agencies are bad but some are incomprehensibly abysmal. Less than 3 percent of survey respondents say that Robert Kennedy’s political staff at HHS provide them with any positive motivation.

Ideological loyalty, not agency mission, dominates institutional culture today across federal agencies. Some one-in-four report being afraid to report wrongdoing. Fear and job insecurity are rampant. Few wish stand out, or take chances, or innovate. Staff are tolerated at best, not encouraged to be innovative nor inventive. An aura  of authoritarian rule, and top-down control, now permeates institutional life. People merely want to survive, not serve a larger purpose.

The result is a radical decline in service quality. Some 37 percent claim that their working unit now provides services of lesser quality. Try getting help from Social Security, the IRS, or the Center for Disease Control these days. In a recent blog, I mentioned chatting with a former NASA consultant. He confirmed that recent NASA mishaps widely are being attributed to a degraded quality of management.

But the decline of our public service ideal obviously did not start with Trump, nor is it entirely the fault of Republicans. Back in the 1970s, my late wife was appointed to a high level Wisconsin Gubernatorial panel (aka The Stevens- Offner Commission) that was devoted to overhauling the State’s civil service system. She had recently managed a large study of ‘women in state government and thus was considered an expert in personnel matters.

At the time, Wisconsin was still considered a positive outlier in terms of good government performance. When I worked in Wisconsin’s state government during the early 1970s, federal officials and outside consultants routinely observed how extraordinarily high was the quality of the state’s bureaucracy. Wisconsin had long been thought of as a laboratory for democracy. My experience in Wisconsin’s civil service generally supported the kudos being received.

I considered that fact on numerous occasions. One contributing factor, it seemed to me, was the manner in which the civil service was organized at that time. Politics were separated from the execution of policy by an organizational framework that depended on civilian boards to oversee agency operations. These citizen boards were structured in a way to minimize political interference into agency operations. Politicians set policy but technical experts executed it. Governors eventually could reappoint these citizen boards but it took time. (Note: the University still functions this way.)

Anyway, I recall my spouse coming home from one of her high-powered Civil Service committee sessions with the news that they would recommend dismantling this semi– independent governing board concept to give the governor much more control over the bureacracy. She argued that the top political executive was elected by the people and therefore should exercise more control over the execution of his or her policies.

I smiled at her pronouncement before predicting that, in about a decade, Wisconsin would lose its preeminent reputation for excellence in government. It might not happen immediately, but the state eventually would forfeit its reputation as a well-run state. Alas, Wisconsin soon would come to look like all its’ other peer jurisdictions.

My spouse and I debated the issue for some time, a discourse I cannot detail here. In the end, sadly, Wisconsin did go the way of other states … beginning when the governor was given more control of the state bureaucracy. By the way, it was a decade later that she surprised me one day by stating that I had been right on that issue, and the panel (including herself) had been wrong. I believe that was the one and only time during our 50 years together that she said I was right about something … about anything. I think it took me a week to recover.

Of course, once given some control, politicians want more. Political appointments extend further and further into the bureacracy. Merit is replaced with loyalty. Ideas increasingly flow down, not up. Experience and expertise are replaced by unthinking obedience. I had enjoyed my time working in Wisconsin government (1971 to 1975). But I was grateful that I escaped to the University when I did, before the shining light that had been Wisconsin’s concept of public service had faded into mediocrity.

I also had an opportunity to spend a year working at the top planning entity (ASPE) for the federal Department of Health and Human Services. This was in the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration was working on Welfare and Healthcare reform. As I suggested earlier, the staff at ASPE were yet bright and hard working. Still, they could no longer attract the top talent they once did. Few of the permanent staff had doctorates by this time. Former members of ASPE from the late 70s were now ensconced in think tanks like The Brookings Institute or were on the faculties of R-1 research universities.

Later, while I was Assistant Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Director Barbara Wolfe and I worked with ASPE management to develop a pipeline for newly minted Ph.D.s to accept ASPE staff positions. We had some success but could not reverse the longer-term trend.

How can we revitalize public service? Some things are obvious … stop villifying public servants would be a start. But at the heart of the matter lies the corrupting connection between politics and the execution of policy. Deciding what direction to take is one thing. But having the best people possible executing policy is equally important. Let us not forget that some of our most important decisions should be disconnected from political control … justice being one and managing our economy (via the Federal Reserve) being another. We should do the same with conducting our elections and, I might suggest, with attracting and retaining the best people in public service. Some aspects of governance simply are too important to be left to the politicians.

I watched with bemused cynicism as reports of voter sentiments during the last presidential election trickled in. Many reported that prices dominated their choice of leader. In short, bacon cost too much. For that, a majority of Americans were willing to elect a wannabe autocrat who, just a few years earlier, attempted to subvert the Constitution to illegally remain in power. The electorate (once again) chose a malignant narcissist who shows every sign of being a pathological sociopath. Perhaps social norms prevented MAGA supporters from revealing their more authentic motivations … rank racism and virulent misogyny.

Admittedly, costly bacon is a pain in the ass. Still, it distracts us from the 900 pound gorilla in the room. For me, the reelection of Donald Trump is a defining capstone to America’s long march toward rabid self-abuse and a self- imposed decline. What could I possibly mean by that?

America’s economic history over the past century can be divided into two dominant chapters. From the Great Depression through the 1970s, public policy was premised on neo-Keynsian thought. Government would partner with the private sector to offset market failures and smooth out inevitable excesses intrinsically embedded in unregulated capitalism. During that period known as the great convergence (late 1930s through the late 1970s), economic want diminished dramatically (except where perpetuated through pure social discrimination), inequality was reduced substantially, and upward social mobility became a norm. Each new generation could expect to do better than the previous one.

The key policy inflection point reversing all that came with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Call it supply-side economics or the return of neo-classical economic thought, a new paradigm became the default position of policy thinking. Government now was the cause of all our problems. The solution was to be found in a misapplication of Adam Smith’s views on unfettered capitalism (in truth, Smith articulated numerous warnings and caveats about free markets). 

Efficient and unhindered markets, with prices guiding individual and collective decisions, were suddenly glorified. Humans were now reduced to hyper-rational actors whose individual calculations of personal utility, when aggregated, would magically result in an optimal society. Choices based on any notion of the public good were derided as misdirected and wrong-headed, no matter the expressed intentions.

The re-emergence of classical economic thought was no accident. Its conceptual roots can be traced back to the creation of Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 where intellectual giants such as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek laid out the rational underpinnings for turning the clock back. The movement picked up steam in the early 1970s when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell articulated a strategic plan for gaining control over essential social institutions such as the media, the courts, and educational systems. By the 1980s, the policy and economic inflection points were realized. The kind of people and ideas that brought you the great depression were back in charge.

The results should surprise no one. Existential threats such as climate change are being ignored. After all, free markets will take care of that threat. Artificial Intelligence (AI), which some refer to as Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0), is being permitted to unfold absent serious reflection and systemic preparation. Equally serious, classical economic thought allows both wealth and power to be concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs. That is the 900 pound gorilla I mentioned earlier. It is called hyper- inequality.

What does that mean? Well, today the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans hold some $56 trillion in assets, the equivalent to what 90 percent of the remaining population control. Some 87 percent of all stocks are owned by wealthiest households. In 2024, those at the top of the wealth pyramid (the infamous 1 percent) held about one-third of the nation’s goodies while the bottom half fought over some 2.5 percent of what remained. Economists measure inequality by what is known as the GINI coefficient. In recent years, the U.S. has had the highest GINI coefficient among all advanced nations.

The reasons for this growing imbalance are complex but an increasingly regressive tax system that rewards the rich likely shares a good deal of the blame. Unlike the post WWII era, when we expected the wealthy to pay a reasonable portion of the nation’s bills, we now largely exempt them from that basic civic responsibility. As Warren Buffet has asserted repeatedly, his appointments secretary pays disproportionately more in taxes than he does. Today, the federal government spends $7 trillion per year while collecting about $5 trillion in revenues. Trump’s extention of his earlier tax cuts favoring the richest Americans guarantees that our public debt will continue to grow exponentially.

The stock response is that we spend too much. This is nonsense when we comparatively position our spending in light of our peer nations. The real villain is that we don’t ask those who have seen their fortunes explode in recent years to pony up their share. And let’s face it, a $40 trillion dollar debt cannot grow indefinitely absent serious consequences. Our coddling of the elite will come back to bite us in the ass.

There are small signs (based on recent isolated election results) that the average American may be getting it, finally figuring out that classical economic thinking has done nothing except reward the richest among us while slowly impoverishing most of the remainder. Let’s face it, Americans generally are not the sharpest arrows in the quiver.

Prior to Reagan’s election, wages tracked productivity gains among workers with remarkable precision. After that inflection point, productivity continued to increase while wages stagnated. The surplus value accrued to the owners of capital, not to workers. A question remains … can this continue indefinitely? My response … not likely.

Even today, the top 10 percent of earners account for 50 percent of all consumer spending. This is the highest level ever recorded. Households in the bottom 60 percent of the distribution spend 95 percent of their income on essentials. They have no surplus resources. This is a far cry from the the post war period when  public goods were fostered and supported by proactive government actions. During that era, a robust middle class emerged. Back then, the so-called American dream was real. Even an average kid like me from a working class family could easily work his way to a doctorate degree and a marvelous career at an R-1 university. Today, upward social mobility is becoming a dream for the privileged few.

As the elite inches toward measuring their assets in trillions (not billions), might they conclude they have enough. Elon Musk conceivably could pass the trillion dollar threshold soon. Might he conclude that the next billion has such limited marginal utility to him that contributing to the greater good might become attractive. After all, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others followed the example of Andrew Carnegie by pledging a good deal of their fortunes to philanthropic purposes.

That is possible but not likely. Already, billionaires like Peter Thiel are fighting against such impulsive generosity by their fellow members of the elite. History does not afford us many examples of the wealthy voluntarily sacrificing  for the public good.

Looking back at our history, we did have periods of similar hyper- inequality. One period strikes me as particularly illuminating. Our ante-bellum southern society had a class of enormously wealthy plantation owners who were surrounded by poor whites and enslaved blacks (humans whose lives had been monetized and constituted much of the elite’s assets). The future Conderacy was marked by extreme wealth unevenly distributed and a similarly asymmetric power structure. The elite ran things with impunity.

Did the Southern elite ever consider replacing slavery with some model of paid labor, as many northerners advocated? No, they preferred to fight to preserve their privileges at the cost of some 700,000 lives. Even after losing that horrendous conflict, they managed to recreate an unequal society through sheer terror and egregious Jim Crow laws.

One basic problem we face is that disequilibria built into unfettered capitalism is self perpetuating. Inititial differences in economic outcomes increase as concentrated wealth seeks to control decision-making and thus shape future policies to their own advantage. More wealth translates into more power means more wealth and even more power. That cycle will continue unless some exogenous force (revolution or some government response) intervenes. Unfortnately, society’s safeguards have been eviscerated or dismantled over the past several decades. In consequence, that cyclical process appears to be accelerating. Look who controls the media and other key institutions today.

Finally, back to my main point. Think again as to how concentrated wealth has dealt with the public good in the past. In general, they used their superior resources for selfish purposes. Mostly, they fought social legislation tooth and nail. Worse, they resorted to violence to maintain their hegemony. How many robber barons hired private armies to attack workers at the end of the 19th century? It turned out to be a common practice.

Now, think about the following scenario: what is likely to happen when AI renders most humans obsolete. Right now, that is a likely outcome as the next revolution barrels ahead at warp speed. Most jobs, even many technical positions, will disappear.

Do you really think that the elite will say ‘let’s pause and consider the human costs of what is emerging.’ Of course not, at least not when considered in light of history’s lessons. So, let us consider the following conundrum. What will society do with all those (possibly) redundant humans that will emerge in a more robust AI world? And who will make those decisions when the elite fully controls our political processes?

Hmm, a disturbing dystopia indeed!

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“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”

                    Robert H. Goddard

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I haven’t written anything since returning from South America in late February. I am sure many of you were hoping I had finally decided to end my indulgences in self-absorbed musings for some more productive pastime … like exercising or dieting. Sorry to disappoint you but that particular shift in focus toward a more healthy and productive lifestyle likely will never happen … ever!

No, since my return to reality I have been catching up on my personal reading obligations. Belonging to three book clubs (plus being drawn to the many other attractive literary works that catch my attention) can keep me quite occupied. It is a bit like being back in school or my professional career with all those endless deadlines, a likely source of those residual anxieties that generate my recurring nightmares.

I have discovered that spending one’s life juggling anxiety- producing responsibilities can’t easily be discarded even upon retirement. You simply find new things to worry about. But that particular life challenge can wait to be explored in a future blog.

Today, I want to touch on a couple of leftover points from my recent ocean travels. Toward the end of our journey, Viking has a tradition that I rather like. They bring in many of the staff that help keep us safe and comfortable during our travels. The staff members walk down the aisles and on to the stage to thunderous applause. (See pic below).

It is difficult to see but the ship’s staff is drawn from around the globe. They represent, in a real sense, the diversity that is our human family. Oh, I don’t want to gloss over the residual classism that exists on the vessel. The top spots on the boat’s staff tend to be filled by northern Europeans … with the lead officers likely to be Norwegians. I mean, really, the captain of this Viking vessel actually was named Vikingsson.

Still, I was taken with seeing the apparent harmony among people drawn from so many different cultures working together. It was as if it really were possible to successfully meld people drawn from virtually every conceivable racial stock and societal perspective into a harmonious whole. I could not help but think there was a lesson in that for us all.

That got me thinking about another experience from our recent trip. The gentleman pictured above was one of the expert lecturers on the Viking ship. Based on his extensive relationship with NASA, he gave a number of fascinating talks on the exploration of space and on the remaining mysteries still extent in the vast cosmos out there. His talks revealed just how little we yet know about our world. This pic was taken when he happened to be on our tour of a maritime museum in Valparaiso Chile. On that occasion, I had a chance to chat with him about a personal favorite of mine … space pioneer Robert H. Goddard.

Goddard was a throwback to an era when individual men (or women) of vision could change the world pretty much on their own. You know, like Albert Einstein reconceptualizing our universe while working in a Swiss patent office. Goddard grew up in my hometown of Worcester Mass during the beginning of the 20th century. As a young man, he dreamed of humanity breaking the binds of earth to explore the heavens above. His fantasies seemed wildly improbable at a time in the early 1900s when airplanes were rickety contraptions with an uncertain future.

Goddard never abandoned his dreams even after becoming a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester (my Alma Mater). While there, he persevered in his work to develop a primitive liquid fuel rocket. Apparently, he was persistent as well as forward thinking.

Almost exactly a century ago, on March 16, 1926, he launched the world’s first liquid fuel rocket on a farm located on the outskirts of Worcester … a site that later would become Pakachoag Golf Course. This was a 9-hole public course on which I spent many hours as a kid cementing the reality that I had no future in the game. His initial venture into space was not an impressive flight. It reached a height of 41 feet, traveled a total distance of 184 feet, and lasted a total of 2.5 seconds.

Still, it demonstrated that a technology was feasible for breaking gravity’s grip. After all, the original Wright brother’s flight at Kitty Hawk was less than impressive, managing to travel only 120 feet during a 12 second flight. Unfortunately, Goddard’s wife was supposed to memorialize the event in film. Alas, she forgot to take the lens cap off the camera. Oh well!

During my misspent youth, I recall one day when I was hacking my way around my favorite golf course. I noticed a group of men in suits gathered at a spot adjacent to the hole I was playing at the time. Curious, I edged closer. I was taken aback to recognize Werner von Braun, the former Nazi refugee who managed America’s space program during the post-WWII era as we raced against the Soviets into outer space. He, and other luminaries, were there to mark Goddard’s singular contribution to space exploration.

Our planet is a bit like the Viking vessel on which I spent over two weeks. People from across our planet worked together in relative harmony to keep the ship functioning and on course. When you are bouncing around on a vast and turbulent ocean, you recognize your own vulnerability. You then appreciate the support and skills from those about you. Surely, there must be a larger lesson there for all of us.

The Centennial celebration of Goddard’s remarkable achievement reminds me of another personal insight of considerable moment. When Goddard launched the first of his many rockets a century ago, our understanding of the cosmos was quite limited. We could only see as far as our own galaxy … the milky way. As we actually began to explore space, and improved our technologies, we realized just how vast the cosmos was. Today, we understand that the Milky Way is merely one of perhaps four trillion galaxies out there, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Appreciating our insignificant and remote position in the cosmos is humbling indeed, or at least should be.

Our human experience in space has resulted in another essential insight. Several astronauts have commented on a similar reaction to seeing our home from the heavens above. Looking down toward our fragile planet, they are struck by a singular emotion. There are no boundaries … no separation into countries, nor ethnicities, nor races, nor cultures. We are an indivisible family, floating apparently alone in a vast cosmos. The things that seemingly separate us are transient and insignificant. What binds us together is central to both our survival and our future.

I will end this message by noting a book just published by an old Peace Corps colleague, Peter Adler. In truth, he was not part of my group but did serve in India during the 1960s (India-40). Importantly, he did have the good sense to marry a lovely gal from my PC group (India-44).

Anyway, Peter’s fictional work is a cautionary tale for our times. His America is torn asunder by those who would destroy all because they want to create some form of singular society based on ethnic purity. In his work, the radicals tearing society apart are dedicated to purging what they consider impure elements within the nation, much like today’s MAGA movement seeks to recreate an Aryan, Christian society in America. it is a very old, self-destructive, impulse. Yet, Peter’s fictional vision of hell may well predict our intermediate fate.

Here’s the thing. When you reorient your perspective, such dystopian aspirations seem ridiculous. We truly are a vulnerable species floating on a fragile planet in a remote part of an inconceivably vast universe. We either see ourselves as part of a single human family or risk perishing as we pursue selfish and destructive ends.

In the final analysis, that choice is ours.

Below is a shot of our ship, the Viking Jupiter, as it lies docked in Valparaiso (Chile). Our final port of call is a quaint city built vertically from the sea. Its patchwork areay of streets are narrow and difficult to navigate. It has the feel of San Francisco but older, more worn, and a bit down on its luck. We were surprised that Santiago, the capital, was yet another 75 miles inland.

We arrived at our final port of call after one last day at sea. I was struck with a bit of nostalgia and even regret that the shifting panoramic scenes outside our veranda would soon be at an end. At the same time, there was an awareness that it was time to go home. A few more days of gorging on the endless array of culinary delicacies laid before us and they would have to pry me into the airline seat. Alas, I see a diet in my immediate future.

The going home process is never easy. We forced ourselves to arise very early on Sunday, the 21st. After mustering off the ship according to a remarkably orderly logistical plan, Viking put all of us with orange 4 tags on a bus to Santiago. After an almost 2 hour trip, we would have a whole day to wait for our Delta 11:00 PM departure that evening. We could have squeezed one more tour in but chose to wait in a luxurious Radisson hotel lounge area reserved for us instead. They fed us snacks and drinks throughout the day.

By the way, you could stay in the President’s suite at the Radisson when you are in town. It will only cost you some $2,500 per night … before taxes. I have no idea what you get for this princely sum, never having experienced such luxury.

We did walk around the area of Santiago adjacent to the hotel. That area had a distinctly different feel from what we experienced in Buenos Aries or Montevideo. Frankly, it looked like any American city. We soon found ourselves in an area of upscale restaurants and a retail mall that would rival any that might be found in the states (and I have been to the Mall of America on numerous occasions).

On thinking about it, this may have been a good way to segue from charming South America back into the more sterile, if convenient, environment that awaited us back home. Perhaps that was the plan from the beginning.

Anyway, after the usual airport crush of international travel and almost 12 hours on airplanes, we were back in Madison. We knew we were back to reality when the brash 25 degree air hit us outside the Madison airport. What happened to the high 80s we had enjoyed just the day before.

I must be old. I’ve been sleeping a lot since returning. Travel never tired me out as much in my prime. Still, we have all these great memories to recall 😀, like the distant past when I was in my prime 😞. They all will remain part of us, the good and the not so good.