Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
Thomas Piketty (1971)
Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
793 pages

The dramatic economic growth experienced globally since the end of World War II has lifted millions out of poverty and spawned a dizzying array of new technologies. The past decade, however, has seen a growing pushback in wealthy Western liberal democracies against the new economic order of globalization and free trade. A sense has developed among the working poor and middle class of having been left behind economically, and that their prospects for the future – and perhaps more critically those for their children – look increasingly bleak.

One consequence has been a series of populist uprisings, including the Brexit campaign, the Yellow Vests rallies in France, and in the US the Tea Party and Occupy movements, as well as the election of Donald Trump. Although these movements share a broad concern for the impacts of globalization, on particular topics their participants often take strikingly contradictory positions: some argue that rising government debt endangers our economic future, while others dismiss austerity programs as a cure worse than the disease; some argue for increasing tax rates on the wealthy, while others call for reducing taxes. And deepening political polarization confounds attempts to achieve consensus about the true nature of these problems or potential solutions, with opinion and conjecture – often driven by vested interests – overwhelming nuanced consideration.

French economist Thomas Piketty seeks to bring some clarity to this impasse in his monumental work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Arguing that growing wealth inequality represents a dire threat to continued economic and political stability, he rejects the idea that capitalism and free markets, whatever benefits they have, naturally lead to stable outcomes:

There is no fundamental reason why we should believe that [economic] growth is automatically balanced. It is long since past the time when we should have put the question of inequality back at the center of economic analysis and begun asking questions first raised in the nineteenth century. For far too long, economists have neglected the distribution of wealth. (20) 

And so, in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the distribution of wealth, its origins and consequences as well as policy solutions to address it, he proposes a structured, data-driven approach:

If the question of inequality is again to become central, we must begin by gathering as extensive as possible a set of historical data for the purpose of understanding past and present trends. For it is by patiently establishing facts and patterns and then comparing different countries that we can hope to identify the mechanisms at work and gain a clearer idea of the future. (20)

Piketty makes clear from the outset that his goal is not to completely overthrow the current economic system. “I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se … [but rather] in contributing … to the debate about the best way to organize society and the most appropriate institutions and policies to achieve a just social order … [based on] democratic debate.” (40)  In measured tones, then, and with repeated acknowledgement of the limits both of the historical data at his disposal and the ability of models to provide precise policy prescriptions, he proceeds to lay out a remarkably clear and trenchant analysis of the historical evolution of capital, what it portends for the future, and what can be done to stabilize it. Setting a hopeful tone early on, he states

Democracy can regain control over capitalism and ensure that the general interest takes precedence over private interests, while preserving economic openness and avoiding protectionist and nationalist reactions. The policy recommendations I propose … are based on lessons derived from historical experience, of which what follows is essentially a narrative. (2)

Given the topic, and the 700+ page count, one might be tempted to imagine that Piketty’s tome is one only an economist could love, but nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, the ongoing series of plots demonstrating the evolution of capital, income and other values over the past few centuries, and the accompanying discussion describing their implications, can be a bit technical at times for the uninitiated, but Piketty brings an extraordinary liveliness to his narrative, with sparkling prose that engages even as it informs.

As just one example, he repeatedly references French and English literary works from the 18th and 19th centuries. These sources support his arguments and reinforce his data, but also animate his telling. And, though offering his interpretations, opinions and proposals where appropriate, Piketty is careful to stick close to the data, to what it can tell us – and what it cannot – while making clear the quality of the data, and how this quality varies from country to country and over time.

More generally, he acknowledges the limitations of economic analysis, arguing that it must needs be complemented by the work of other social sciences, such as history, sociology, anthropology and political science. In particular, he rejects the term economic science, for its implication that economic decisions can be made purely from dry calculation. Always he falls back on the need for democratic debate to decide our policy future.

After a helpful Introduction that briefly but efficiently lays out the history of economic analysis since the late 1700’s, Piketty sets about defining the terms and quantities that play a fundamental role in his discussion, including among others: income versus capital, labor income versus return on capital, and the capital/income ratio, which defines the amount of capital as a number of equivalent years of nations income, a value he tracks as an indication of the importance of capital in a society.

Having established these preliminaries, he then turns to the historical economic data he has gathered, which reveal a crucial theme that will run throughout his narrative: in the context of the past several hundred years, the 20th century represented an aberration in the evolution of capitalism.

As an example of this, he charts the economic growth rate, which is a combination of per capita output and demographics. After spiking in the late 20th century, with growth rates for both per capita output and population peaking at over 10 times their long-term average, it has more recently begun to decline. And, looking forward over the course of the 21st century, both of these metrics are projected to return to their long-term averages, with the consequence, Piketty declares, that the economic environment of the past half century, supported by high growth rates, will not persist.

Similarly, tracking the capital/income ratio as an indicator of the relative importance of capital, he shows that high levels of capital, and capital concentration, had been reached by the late 19th century, a period variously known as the Belle Epoque in France and the Gilded Age in the US. They then dropped precipitously from 1915 to 1950, with the destructive shocks of the World Wars and the institution of progressive taxation to both support the wars and create social programs aimed at reducing extreme inequality. More recently, however, they have begun to climb again, as conservative governments lowered tax rates on high incomes since 1980, and the economic growth rate has dropped off.

A dangerous consequence of the anomalous period of extremely high growth rates and extreme shocks to the global economy in the 20th century is that it has, according to Piketty, come to inform present-day intuitive understandings of and assumptions about the evolution of capitalism. In particular, it has instilled an erroneous belief that capitalism somehow righted itself in the 20th century, and that left to the dynamics of the free market a stable long-term economic trajectory can be achieved.

On the contrary, he argues, the historical evidence predicts that, with the projected downward trend in the economic growth rate over the course of the 21st century, the capital/income ratio will return again to the high levels seen in the late 1800’s.

And this rise in the amount of capital, he warns, will make visible again that “capitalism is undermined by its internal contradictions,” as first recognized in the late 19th century. The danger for capitalists in such a regime is that as the amount of capital increases the return on it eventually declines. Although this relationship, notes Piketty, can be countered “(to a certain extent) [by] permanent growth of productivity and population,” in an environment of declining productivity and population,

capitalists do indeed dig their own grave: either they tear each other apart in a desperate attempt to combat the falling rate of profit … or they force labor to accept a smaller and smaller share of national income, which ultimately leads to a proletarian revolution and general expropriation. (287)

Although this reckoning was held off in the 20th century, with the return in recent decades to regressive taxation and in a projected low growth environment, these ameliorating conditions are absent, and so capital growth has returned, along with its internal contradictions. And compounding these challenges, notes Piketty, is the historical evidence that as the amount of capital grows, its importance in national income relative to labor increases, along with its concentration among an elite few.

One bright spot that Piketty finds to have arisen out of the 20th century disruptions is that current-day capital ownership among the top 10% in the US (and similarly in Europe), although again high and rising, actually represents a reduction from levels of 80-90% at the beginning of the 19th century. During the disruptions of the mid-20th century a small but significant shift in capital ownership occurred to those in the middle class (defined here as 50-90% of the wealth distribution), leading to the emergence of what Piketty refers to as the Patrimonial Middle Class. (At the same time, he points out, the bottom half of the population saw no benefit from this shift, their share of capital ownership remaining at or below 5%.)

Piketty describes the development of the Patrimonial Middle Class as “a major transformation, which deeply altered the social landscape and political structure of society and helped redefine the terms of the distributive conflict.” (328). Nonetheless, despite this

important, if fragile, historical innovation … wealth is still extremely concentrated today…. [T]he historical reduction of inequalities of wealth is less substantial than many people believe. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the limited compression of inequality that we have seen is irreversible. (327)

And countering this shift in some capital wealth to the middle class has been a phenomenon, mostly in the US and other anlgo-saxon countries, that Piketty refers to as “the rise of the Supermanager” or, alternatively, Supersalaries. This can be seen in that the share of labor income for the top 10% has increased by 10% since 1970, with the share for the top 1% alone increasing by roughly 7%. Piketty points out that is overwhelmingly the result of increases for top managers, not athletes, actors, artists or “super entrepreneurs” (such as Bill Gates).

He notes that these supersalaries are not a question of technology level (as continental Europe has not seen such wage increases), or supply and demand of talent. Rather, the data provide 

convincing proof of the failure of corporate governance and of the absence of a rational productivity justification for extremely high executive pay …. This is particularly clear in the case of US corporations: Bertrand and Mullainhatan refer to this phenomenon as “pay for luck.” (422)

Equally troubling, he points out, is that the decline in top tax rates since 1980, in the US and Britain, has created an 

amplifying mechanism [that] can give rise to another force for divergence that is more political in nature: the decrease in the top marginal income tax rate led to an explosion of very high incomes, which then increased the political influence of the beneficiaries of the changes in the tax laws, who had an interest in keeping top tax rates low or even decreasing them further and who could use their windfall to finance political parties, pressure groups, and think tanks. (423)

Examining the concept of using marginal productivity increase as a method of understanding the appropriateness of higher wages for particular jobs, he finds no evidence to support the idea that it can explain the high wage levels of these Supermanagers. He also notes that such an approach encourages 

a far too instrumental and utilitarian view of training. The main purpose of the health sector is not to provide other sectors with workers in good health. By the same token, the main purpose of the educational sector is not to prepare students to take up an occupation in some other sector of the economy. In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization. (386-7) 

Certainly, in a US context in which education already from elementary school on is too often seen as one long race to maximize an eventual paychecks, his sentiment seems almost quaint – a disturbing commentary in itself on the current state of our civilization. And beyond health care and education, Piketty’s comments are echoed in science write Colin Tudge’s conclusion in The Time Before History that the merciless logic of capitalism has created the fundamental reality that “the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.”

One way that the wealthy in the US have promoted their success, according to Piketty, is through the particularly American belief in the gospel of meritocracy, a concept he dismisses with malice:

The conventional wisdom that modern economic growth is a marvelous instrument for revealing individual talents and aptitudes … has all too often been used to justify inequalities of all sorts, no matter how great their magnitude and no matter what their real causes may be, while at the same time gracing the winners in the new industrial economy with every imaginable virtue. (107) 

He argues that this view has been “largely created by the United States over the past few decades.” (331), as the gilded age inequality based on inherited wealth has been replaced by 

a very high level of total income inequality [which] can be the result of a ‘hypermeritocratic society’ (or at any rate a society that the people at the top like to describe as hypermeritocratic) … a very inegalitarian society, but one in which the peak of the income hierarchy is dominated by very high incomes from labor rather than by inherited wealth …. It is hardly surprising that the winners in such a society would wish to describe the social hierarchy in this way, and sometimes they succeed in convincing some of the losers. (331)

 And these “winners” extend their meritocratic justification beyond just increasing their out-size salaries. As journalist Anand Giridharadas writes in his trenchant and disturbing book Winners Take All, these

elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change…. How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm. In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up.” (8, Winners Take All; my review at right)

It is the increasing concentration of capital, however, that Piketty returns to as most concerning, globally.

He notes that historically capital has always been more unequally distributed than labor. In the US in 2010, for example, the upper 10% of the labor income distribution took in about 35% of the total labor income, while the bottom half took in about 25%. In terms of capital ownership, however, the numbers are more extreme: the top 10% own some 70% of the wealth, while the bottom half own only 5%. And Piketty argues that these numbers can only be expected to worsen: “It is an illusion to think that something about the nature of modern growth or the laws of the market economy ensures that inequality of wealth will decrease and harmonious stability will be achieved.” (475) And aggravating this tendency to concentration is that the rate of return on capital is generally higher the more wealth one has, due in part, he argues, to the wealthier being able to be more patient in their investments, but also able to employee more and better financial advisors.

One notable social consequence of the increasing concentration of wealth in rich countries has been fears of foreign ownership of domestic capital. But Piketty argues – again with data – that “currently prevalent fears of growing Chinese ownership are a pure fantasy.” More generally, “this feeling of dispossession … is partly irrational, [arising] no doubt [from] the universal tendency to look elsewhere for the source of domestic difficulties.” The real threat, he argues, is “an oligarchic type of divergence, that is, a process in which the rich countries would come to be owned by their own billionaires.” (588-9)

In the final part of the book, Piketty explores potential approaches to reversing the current trends toward concentration of wealth in an economic environment projected to have continued low growth rates.

He first charts the growth of taxation and the social state over the course of the 20th century, from tax rates of about 10% in the early 1900’s that only supported what he refers to as regalian functions – police, justice, military, and general administration – to present day tax rates of 30-50% that support a variety of social programs – health care, education, transfer payments to the unemployed and poor, and public pensions.

The mid-century support for the social state, he notes, came amid a time of strong productivity and demographic growth, with rising incomes predisposing citizens to accept paying higher tax rates. And the stability in tax rates since the 1980’s indicates a general consensus about maintaining the social state, if at different levels in different countries.

But the challenge going forward, into a period of expected low growth rate (economic plus demographic), is whether societies will choose to find ways to continue supporting these programs. Though Piketty discusses this challenge for countries globally, his analysis of the situation in the US over the past century is particularly enlightening.

As elsewhere, tax rates in the US up to WWI were less than 10%, including for the highest incomes. However, Piketty argues, the excesses of the Gilded Age created a climate for change in the US. 

[The] fear of growing to resemble Europe was part of the reason why the United States in 1910-1920 pioneered a very progressive estate tax on large fortunes, which were deemed to be incompatible with US values, as well as a progressive income tax on incomes thought to be excessive. (440) 

Then, a decade later, “the Great Depression of the 1930s struck the United States with extreme force, and many people blamed the economic and financial elites for having enriched themselves while leading the country to ruin.” (650) Consequently, income tax rates and inheritance tax rates rose to well over 50% for those in the highest income bracket between 1910 and 1980, as a strong social support network was created.

However, he writes, “perceptions of inequality, redistribution, and national identity changed a great deal over the course of the twentieth century, to put it mildly.” (440) And so, starting around 1980, the pendulum began to swing back again. Piketty notes that, supporting this turn against the social state, “US prejudices in regard to the poor … seem to be more extreme than European prejudices, perhaps because they are reinforced by racial prejudices.” (608n17) And that, more generally 

In the United States there is less of a consensus [than in Europe]. Certain substantial minority factions radically challenge the legitimacy of all federal programs or indeed of social programs of any kind. Once again racial prejudice seems to have something to do with this. (612n24)

These changing perceptions led, starting around 1980, conservative administrations to lower tax rates on the highest earners, eventually shifting from a progressive to a regressive tax structure, with opponents of high taxation among the wealthy often using hypocritical, misleading or specious arguments against it. (Countering, for example, the argument that high tax rates on the highest incomes stifle growth, Piketty notes that the US saw its highest growth rates in the 1950’s, at a time of extremely high, and progressive, taxation.)

And, with the current tax structure heavily weighted toward taxation of only income, and not capital or wealth, this shift toward a regressive tax structure has put significant strain on the ability to continue supporting social programs in the US, as well as elsewhere.

But Piketty proceeds from the assumption that the consensus on the need for social programs will continue, if not rise. And so, to fund such programs in an environment of projected low economic growth and increasing capital and capital concentration, he recommends instituting progressive taxation of income, estates and capital, noting that “these three progressive taxes play distinct and complementary roles [with] each … an essential pillar of an ideal tax system.” (675)

In support of taxing those with significant amounts of capital (particularly in a world of increasing capital concentration), Piketty describes both a contributive justification – that the extremely wealthy tend to have a significant amount of their income not from taxable wage income – and an incentive justification – that taxing capital will encourage investing it as opposed to simply sitting on low yield investments, leading to more benefit to society. In response to those arguing that such a taxation scheme would undermine capitalism and the free market, he counters that 

A tax on capital would be a less violent and more efficient response to the eternal problem of private capital and its return. A progressive levy on individual wealth would reassert control over capitalism in the name of the general interest while relying on the forces of private property and competition. (687) 

Based on historical evidence he argues that the alternatives, such as protectionism and capital controls, will never work as efficiently as progressive taxation.

The principal technical challenges to the taxation of wealth, according to Piketty, are the need to develop and implement rules of global transparency in capital so that the wealthy cannot hide their wealth, and global, or at least regional, agreement to impose this kind of taxation so that the wealthy cannot shift their wealth to places with lower taxes, encouraging a destructive race to the bottom.

Issues of taxation and support for the social state have also played a key role in arguments around public debt, which Piketty explores toward the end of the book. He argues that concern over debt levels has more to do with disagreement about what level of support should be provided to improve society, rather than any type of true economic argument about them per se.

[In Europe] net public wealth is virtually zero, given the size of the public debt, but net private wealth is so high that the sum of the two is as great as it has been in a century. Hence the idea that we are about to bequeath a shameful burden of debt to our children and grandchildren and that we ought to wear sackcloth and ashes and beg for forgiveness simply makes no sense. The nations of Europe have never been so rich. What is true and shameful, on the other hand, is that this vast national wealth is very unequally distributed. Private wealth rests on public poverty, and one particularly unfortunate consequence of this is that we currently spend far more in interest on the debt than we invest in higher education. (740) 

Here again, an example of a myth propagated by the wealthy to promote a reduction in their contribution to social support.

One consequence of the wealthy owning the conversation around support for the social state is reflected in Piketty’s expression of concern regarding underinvestment in education, as he mentions in the above quote and repeatedly throughout the book. As described earlier, in a 21st century already witnessing declining demographic growth, and with per capita output growth also projected to decline as the rest of the world expected to catch up by mid-century with the technological frontier established by the wealthiest countries, overall economic growth will decline. The principal way to lessen the decline in per capita growth, and so economic growth, he argues, is through improved education; but this requires funding government investments in education.

Parallels to Piketty’s concern over the defunding of support for public education and more generally a comprehensive social state, can be found in the arguments of Yuval Noah Harari in his thought-provoking 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari argues that we are headed, if we don’t actively work against it, to a dystopian future in which advances in bio-tech and info-tech lead to a concentration of health, wealth and skills that leave most people “irrelevant” – unneeded for any task – and so unnecessary to be supported. (My review at right.)

The challenge posed to humankind in the twenty-first century by infotech and biotech is arguably much bigger than the challenge posed in the previous era by steam engines, railroads, and electricity. And given the immense destructive power of our civilization, we just cannot afford more failed models, world wars, and bloody revolutions [as were experience in the 20th century in pursuit of solutions to those earlier challenges]. This time around, the failed models might result in nuclear wars, genetically engineered monstrosities, and a complete breakdown of the biosphere. We have to do better than we did in confronting the Industrial Revolution. (34, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century)

Nonetheless, Piketty offers a hopeful vision for “an ideal society in which all other tasks are almost totally automated and each individual has as much freedom as possible to pursue the goals of education, culture, and health.” He notes that “we are to some extent already on this path [given] the considerable share of both output and employment devoted to education, culture, and medicine.” (387) These comments have parallels to philosopher Martin Hägglund’s concept of spiritual freedom, which Hägglund describes in This Life (my review at right) as the ability “to ask ourselves what we ought to do with our time [in this life].” (12)

Despite the similarities in their visions for an ideal society, the two authors remain far apart in their proposals for our economic future. However challenging it may be to realize Piketty’s prescriptions for the dangerous levels of inequality his analysis of the data portend, he does not propose a move away from capitalism. He notes that even “the progressive tax is … a relatively liberal method for reducing inequality, in the sense that free competition and private property are respected.” (648) Rather, he seeks democratically discussed and selected policies to balance out capitalism’s natural tendency to increase wealth concentration, without eliminating what he finds to be its benefits: 

if democracy is someday to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again. (745)

Hägglund, like Piketty, finds the problems with capitalism to be immanent in the system itself. However, he differs from Piketty in that he is convinced that these problems will inevitably overwhelm any attempts to reform capitalism that keep its core principles in place. Thus, for example, Hägglund argues that instituting redistributive policies (such as progressive taxation) just requires more of the bad aspect of capitalism to provide the funds to redistribute, and so doesn’t solve the fundamental issue. 

The attempt to achieve social justice through the redistribution of capital wealth is inherently contradictory. The more welfare policies and state regulations that prevent the exploitation of living labor, the more restricted are the possibilities of extracting the surplus value, and the less “wealth” is available to distribute in the economy. To take a striking example, when health care, education, and other public services are run by the welfare state, they are not sold as commodities that generate a profit that is reinvested as capital, which means that they do not contribute to the “growth” of our social wealth as measured under capitalism. Inversely, when these public services are privatized and commodified – transformed into a matter of buying and selling for profit – they contribute to the growth of capital wealth. This is the economic rationale for the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and deregulation of the job market. As long as we accept the capitalist measure of wealth, social democratic reforms will tend to reduce the wealth that they aim to distribute more equally. (283, This Life)

And in a comment that echoes Piketty’s concern that a marginal productivity approach to explaining salaries “instrumentalizes” basic human goals, Hägglund notes that

as a capitalist society, we are not collectively committed to producing for the sake of consumption. Rather, we are committed to providing for the sake of extracting surplus value [profit] that can be converted into the growth of capital. (297, This Life) 

Thus, the very point of the capitalist system is its own furtherance, not the well-being of society, and this inescapable logic leads Hägglund to view capitalism as unsustainable, and to argue for the pursuit of an alternative.  (And, to be clear, arguing that capitalism is unsustainable into the future, does not dismiss nor negate the past benefits that the capitalist economy has provided in dramatically transforming lives over the past several centuries, as argued perhaps most passionately by Steven Pinker.)

Like Piketty, Hägglund argues for the centrality of democratic processes in rectifying the fundamental inequalities arising out of unfettered capitalism, though calling for a much broader transformation. Hägglund defines the term “democratic socialism” as a system that he characterizes as placing democracy and the democratic process at the heart of developing a post-capitalism future.

To subordinate the state to society is to transform the state into an actual democracy. … While the commitment to serve the interests of society as a whole will always be challenging and contestable, it is in principle impossible to sustain such a commitment under capitalism. Because of the social form of wage labor, democratic politics and democratic states necessarily serve as organs for representing class interests that are competing for control. We cannot actually deliberate on how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, since we must prioritize the private interests of capitalists. This prioritization is not optional, since under capitalism there can be no production of social wealth without the profits of privately owned enterprises. (268, This Life)

 One can argue that Piketty, the renowned economist, is a better source for understanding the possibilities for capitalism in a democratic state going forward, than Hägglund, a philosopher. And Hägglund freely admits that he does not have a precise prescription of how to arrive at democratic socialism from our present state; his point is to define the necessity of such a transformation.

But, interestingly, the prescriptions of both authors suffer from the same apparent predicament, one that each touches on without quite resolving, and that has been clearly identified by Yuval Noah Harari, as described above: that the capitalist system as it exists today has created an increasingly wealthy and powerful elite that has come to have inordinate control over the levers of government and so policy.

Thus, the question for Hägglund becomes, how could such an elite ever be convinced to fundamentally re-structure a system in a way that would surely diminish their power and wealth?

And, similarly for Piketty, though perhaps more directly: is it realistic to believe that democracy can rein in capitalism over the long run, given the immanent tendency of capitalism to lead to concentration of wealth, that concentration of wealth to concentration of power, and that power to policies that sustain this relationship. Piketty argues that to not do so will lead eventually to “revolution,” but does that not simply mean in practice that if we do not fundamentally transform our economic system, we will remain trapped in a cycle in which it takes wars and revolutions to tame capitalism, only to see it rise again?

I, for one, would enjoy a debate on these points between the two of them. Not with the goal of determining a winner and loser, but rather to achieve a deeper understanding on these critical questions.

In his engagingly written and eminently readable Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty demonstrates that levels of wealth inequality, while having changed in structure, have returned to almost the same levels as seen during the Belle Époque in France, and the Gilded Age in the US. He argues persuasively that this inequality can be expected to continue to rise over the course of the 21st century if nothing is done to counteract it, threatening the social state that has been built in Western democracies, and likely leading to extreme social disruption.

Based on his analysis of what has been seen historically, he argues for a progressive taxation of all wealth – income, capital, and inheritance – to rein in the dangerous levels of inequality naturally generated by an unfettered capitalist system. But he makes clear it will not be easy, and emphasizes the need for democratic deliberation for settling on appropriate economic goals, including the level of the social state and approaches to taxation, noting that these must be political policy decisions based on citizen engagement: “there is no mathematical formula for answering this question, which is a matter for democratic deliberation.” (683)

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Other notes and information:

More quotes from this book

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

What Does The Robbers Cave Experiment Really Tell Us About The Current Political Polarization?

 The On the Media episode from 30 October 2020, Chaos Reigns (linked to at right), opens with an interview by co-host Bob Garfield of Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland. Their discussion explores, according to the notes accompanying the podcast, “why our political landscape became so polarized, and where we might go from here.” Garfield introduces the segment by noting that it had first aired “two years ago,” so in the 2018 time frame.

Early in the interview (starting at 6:27), Garfield asks Mason about a recent book she had published: 

Now what you’ve described is really the wholesale resorting of the electorate into more easily defined worldviews, right? Leading us not just to parties, but to tribes. What is the psychology of that tribalism? And maybe we can begin with the Robbers Cave Experiment that you’ve written about. 

Mason then describes that experiment as follows: 

In 1954, some psychologists collected a bunch of fifth grade boys from the Oklahoma City area and really tried very hard to make sure that all the boys were very, very similar to each other psychologically, socially, in terms of their academic abilities, traits - sort of in every possible way, they were similar to each other. They were all white and Protestant boys.

They divided them into two camps and they kept the boys completely separate for the first week of camp. And the boys came up with their own names for what their camps were called. One was the Rattlers and one was the Eagles. 

And in the second week, they let them know that there was another camp down the road. And immediately the boys wanted to have a competition, and the experimenters encouraged this. And the more the boys competed, the more they began to hate each other. They called each other nasty names. They began throwing rocks at one another. And at one point it got so violent that the experimenters had to separate them because they were so worried about the boy's safety. So really, all that it took was separating them into two different groups and allowing them to form an identity and then letting them sort of have at each other.” 

Mason then proceeds to use the outcome of this experiment as a basis for concluding that human beings have 

a deep-seated, psychological motive [to sort into groups]. Once we are in a group, we think our group is the best and we think that the other groups are less good. And if we're in competition with those groups, we begin to hate them. 

One consequence of this conclusion becomes that the aggressive efforts being made by factions to encourage polarization are understood as being in the context of reinforcing the putatively natural human tendency to sort into antagonistically competitive groups.

As I listened to the interview, and in particular Mason’s description of the Robbers Cave Experiment, I eventually recalled having heard it upon its initial release, two years before, and having at the time found it plausible as an explanation for the political polarization we face in the United States – as demonstrated by the presidential election in 2016, and the increasing antagonism since. Thus, the results of the experiment had found purchase, as I listened to the initial airing, with my underlying expectations about human behavior.

But. Hearing the interview this second time also triggered a recollection of a description of the Robbers Cave Experiment I’d read more recently, in historian Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind: A Hopeful History, published in 2019. As I subsequently described in my review of his book (linked to at right), Bregman opens by observing that, based on a deep-seated belief that competition and greed are fundamental and even necessary characteristics of human nature, it has come to be widely accepted that absent a thin veneer of civilization people’s true, selfish nature would emerge, thereby precipitating an inevitable collapse of society into violent anarchy.

Bregman goes on to argue though, as the thesis of his book, that our received wisdom about human nature is not only wrong, but worse it undermines our ability to progress further on our project of civilization. Using a fresh analysis of human history, he rebuts the presumption that humans are inherently selfish, an assumption that he notes has been largely unchallenged doctrine for millennia.

Exploring in detail numerous examples, Bregman demonstrates how misunderstandings and misinterpretations of historical events and, in particular psychology experiments, have captured the popular imagination, and thereby supported what he refers to as a cynical view of human nature. 

Among the experiments he examines, some are relatively well-known, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, while others, such as the Robbers Cave Experiment, less so. But his research into them reveals that incorrect interpretations of their execution and conclusions have fit neatly – too neatly as it turns out – into existing cynical assumptions about human nature, both among the general public, as well as psychologists, historians, journalists and others, few of whom have apparently gone back to the original case studies to verify the actual details of these experiments.

Regarding the Robbers Cave Experiment in particular, Bregman first gives the standard understanding of what happened, a telling that largely aligns with Mason’s description above. He then notes, in a paragraph that reads as though he had just finished listening to Garfield’s interview with Mason, that: 

The story of the Robbers Cave Experiment has made a comeback in recent years, especially since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I can’t tell you how many pundits have pointed to this study as the anecdotal key to understanding our times. Aren’t the Rattles and the Eagles a symbol for the ubiquitous lashes between left and right, conservative and progressive?

Having played to our expectations, Bregman then, however, reports on what he eventually learned had actually transpired during the experiment, as contained in the “original 1961 research report” by the organizer of the experiment, the “Turkish psychologist Muzafer Sherif.” And he turns out to have discovered a reality quite different from the prevailing understanding of what happened.

He quotes Sherif as writing “on one of the first pages [that] ‘Negative attitudes towards outgroups will be generated situationally.’” Reading further, Bregman notes that: 

I found some interesting facts. For starters, it wasn’t the kids themselves, but the experimenters who decided to hold a week of competitions. The Eagles weren’t keen on the idea. ‘Maybe we could make friends with those guys,’ one boy suggested, ‘and then somebody wouldn’t get made and have any grudges.’ 

And at the researchers’ insistence, the groups only played games that had clear-cut winners and losers, like baseball and tug-of-war. There were no consolation prizes, and the researchers manipulated scores to ensure the teams would say in a neck-and-neck race.

More damningly, Bregman discovered through the work of Gina Perry, an Australian psychologist who had taken the time to review the source material from the Robbers Cave Experiment and wrote a book on it, that Sherif had tried the experiment before, in Australia, in 1953. For her book, Perry “dug through reams of notes and recordings, [in which] she uncovered a story that contradicts everything the textbooks have been repeating for the past fifty years.” It turns out that that experiment had failed miserably, as the boys simply refused to fight, despite the experimenters having “deployed every trick in the book to turn the two teams against each other.” 

Thus, notes Bregman, far from these experiments demonstrating in the boys a natural tendency toward aggression and competition, the results seemed to indicate a predisposition toward cooperation and alliance.

The irony, for me, is that I was first led to Bregman’s book (if indirectly) through an interview he had with Brooke Gladstone on … On the Media! (5 June 2020 episode, linked to at right). Thus, the result has been two interviews on the same program that seemingly contradict one another in their presumed understanding about a documented experiment. Admittedly, Bregman’s findings about the Robbers Cave Experiment were not specifically mentioned in Gladstone’s interview with him. But, based on how their discussion developed and the many other examples from the book that were discussed, it seems clear that Gladstone had read the book and so would have learned about Bregman’s surprising discoveries about this particular experiment.

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan (and supporter) of On the Media, and I’m not blaming Gladstone and Garfield for not making the connection between these segments recorded almost two years apart. But one of their hobby-horses on the show over the years has been that the media so often tend to pass along uncritically popular statements and conclusions, and so there is more than a bit of irony that these two interviews end up pointing out an apparently long-standing, uncritically passed down understanding about an experiment whose actual results can be accurately ascertained from available documentation.

And, ultimately, this is more than just a ‘gotcha’ moment.

To have any real hope of addressing the increasing polarization the US has experienced over the past decade, we must first come to a sound understanding of its origins. Is it fundamental to human nature that people separate themselves into opposing groups, as has come to be commonly assumed, and as the psychologist who organized the Robbers Cave Experiment was convinced is true? Or, as Bregman argues, has such polarization actually been driven by leaders intent on maintaining their power, and who, in fact, have encouraged a cynical view of human nature, consciously working to overcome a natural human tendency toward cooperation and collaboration?

Lamentation 5: A golden cup his mistress // Gave him, with parting breath

Midway through Goethe’s Faust: Part One, Margareta returns home unsettled by a first meeting with Faust on a nearby street. Ruminating on her uneasiness as she undresses in her room, she absentmindedly begins singing a lament that tells of a king who has lost his wife. To his dying day the king keeps the memory of his beloved alive through a golden chalice she had given him, a gift he holds dearer than all else he has.

In Thule there reigned a monarch,
And he was true till death.
A golden cup his mistress
Gave him, with parting breath.

That was his dearest chalice,
No other did he prize,
And ever, as he raised it,
The tears stood in his eyes.

Then came his time of dying,
His wealth of state was told;
He left his heir his treasure,
Except his cup of gold.

Surrounded by his vassals
A royal feast held he,
High in the castle’s state-room,
Ancestral, by the sea.

There stood the royal master,
Drank, in life’s sunset glow,
And hurled the sacred goblet
To the ocean, deep below.

He saw it plunge and founder
And sink deep in the sea.
The light sank from his vision,
And never again drank he. (126)

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Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Book Review: "All Adults Here" by Emma Straub

All Adults Here (2020)
Emma Straub
356 pages

Emma Straub’s novel All Adults Here traces the fitful journey of a family working through the long-simmering consequences of unrevealed events, precipitous choices and misunderstood conversations, all within a crucible of a town where, as Nick Cave sings, “to share a sworn secret was a solemn duty.” (John Finn's Wife)  Through moments and interactions by turns profoundly moving and heartbreakingly funny, Straub explores the complexities and conflicting expectations of current day lives and relationships.

Set in the small, fictional town of Clapham, a few hours up the Hudson river from New York City, the story builds around Astrid Strick, a widow with three adult children. Her daughter, Porter, and one of her sons, Elliot, have remained in Clapham, while her youngest son, Nick, lives in New York City.

A dramatic pair of events sets things in motion: Nick’s daughter Cecilia, having gotten into trouble for reasons that only gradually become clear, has been shipped off by her parents to her grandmother for the upcoming year of middle school; and Astrid, on her way to pick up her granddaughter at the train station, witnesses a hit-and-run accident that kill Barb, a woman she has known for decades.

Despite having “never liked” Barb, Astrid finds herself profoundly impacted by the sudden, seemingly random nature of Barb’s death. Confronted with the fragility of life, she begins to shed her normally reserved nature, overcoming her anxiety about revealing the secrets and regrets that she has kept carefully hidden from her children.

And Cecilia, come to live with her grandmother in the family home and hometown she had previously only experienced as an occasional visitor for holidays, faces an upcoming school year at a small-town junior high far-removed from the school and friends she knew in New York City. Like Astrid, she comes to seize the unexpected shift in circumstances as an opportunity to reinvent herself: thrust into a school where no one knows her, she decides to try and leave behind the shy, uncertain girl she has been.

It gradually becomes clear, however, that Astrid and Cecilia’s fears and uncertainties run throughout the family, as both Porter and Elliot also carry secrets, things they are afraid to reveal to Astrid for fear of the consequences. Nick too struggles with the impulsive decision he and his wife have made to send their daughter away from home.

Once Astrid decides to open up, however, the barriers that have arisen between her and her children begin to crumble. And, as their secrets emerge into the light of day, the family struggles to redefine and reanimate relationships that have grown distant and formal. Will they find a way to fully reengage with one another, to find the happier atmosphere Astrid remembers from their childhood?

Straub builds a veritable potpourri of contemporary social challenges into her story: a hidden homosexual relationship; someone fearful to reveal they are trans; a sperm bank pregnancy; an internet predator; and the economic social impacts of large retail coming to small towns. Certainly, each of these reflects pressing present day social realities and discussions, and Straub handles them delicately and persuasively. But it’s hard not to feel that this one, relatively small extended family has suddenly managed to intersect with a surprisingly wide variety of social issues as one late summer turns into autumn.

It also stands out that, although all the main characters in the story have issues to resolve over the course of the story, a fairly bright line exists between the male and female characters. While the female characters seem sympathetic and easy to empathize with in their problems, the major male characters are universally, head-slappingly unsympathetic dolts: one ships his daughter out of town at the first sign of trouble, while another is a stereotypically clueless husband and father, whom his wife disparages, taking a broader backhand to the other sex, with a dismissive smirk: “Women can do anything. All the things that men are useful for – think about it, what are those things? Lifting something heavy? Taking out the garbage? Grilling steaks? Please. [He] has never properly cooked a steak in his life. And I have to tell him when it’s garbage day. And I can pay someone to move a couch.” (217) Even one of the minor male characters comes across as little more than a mindless oaf. The only one who doesn’t fit the pattern turns out to have a secret that, apparently, explains his being the anomaly.

But, these quibbles aside, Straub keeps a reader fully engaged in the story from its dramatic beginning to its comforting conclusion. The secrets the characters try to hide are not evil in nature – they each simply fear the backlash of revealing they are human, and generally fear most the reactions of those closest to them. Finally, however, they realize that, indeed, we are all adults here: we can own our foibles and uncertainties and longings, and open up about them – and most especially to those closest to us.

And in so doing, Straub’s characters come to some powerful moments of inner clarity, such as when Porter realizes that “The good news is that I think you have to stop [obsessing about the other people you could have married] when you have children, because you know that [your children] wouldn’t be there if you’d made different choices. … You look at them and say, fuck, I’m glad you’re here, and not some one else, and whatever choices you made led you to that person, your little person, and so the past becomes perfect.” (103-4) A sentiment that one would hope all parents can identify with – and must pity those who don’t.

And, at the other end of the long process of raising children, having watched them go off into the world turning out however they have, comes this melancholy realization from Astrid, who notes that “her children were the way they were because of all the things she had done and all the things she had not done.” (127) Letting go is not just the act of allowing our children to eventually make their own way in their lives, but, as Astrid discovers, also forgiving ourselves for what may not have gone quite as perfectly as we may have wished in raising them.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Until the End of Time" by Brian Greene

Until the End of Time (2020)
Brian Greene (1963)
428 pages

Late in his deeply engaging and thought-provoking book Until the End of Time, physicist Brian Greene recalls being asked a question that would turn out to have a profound impact on his thinking: “Which news would affect you more … being told you have a year to live or that in a year earth will be destroyed?” (318) Reflecting on it, he came to recognize that although knowledge of his own death might trigger a range of intense reactions, “contemplating the end of the entire species seemed to do the opposite, yielding a sense of futility.” (319) For what we do and what we value to have meaning, he concluded, we must believe that there will be future generations to receive it; death may give an individual life meaning, but the death of the species thoroughly destroys that meaning.

Aside from concerns about an apocalypse of our own making however, most of us serenely take for granted that the human race will continue on into a future without end. Not so Greene. Through his training and work as a physicist, he has come to understand that although it may be unimaginably far into the future, our universe will “almost certainly” (16) end at some point.

Given that awareness, he explores what impact it has on the meaning we each discover for our individual lives, “assess[ing] the prospects for everything we hold dear … reality as we know it, from planets and stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind.” (16) In particular, he considers the future of thought – in the broadest sense of the concept – and whether there may come a point in the future evolution of the universe when it will be impossible for thought to take place. For, he argues, if such a point will be reached, then all that has been thought and learned and passed down will irrevocably disappear, with direct implications for how we understand the meaning of our lives.

To prepare the path toward examining these questions, Greene first introduces “two forces sharing the role of leading character” (7) in the development of the universe.

The first, Entropy, is commonly understood as leading inevitably to increasing disorder. We come to learn, however, that it plays a decisive role in the opposite sense – enabling the formation of complex, highly ordered systems. The second, Evolution, figures in ways well beyond the commonly understood sense of natural selection among living systems. Greene describes how evolutionary processes have also impacted the development of inanimate objects, a process referred to as “molecular Darwinism” (7). By taking this more general interpretation, evolution becomes an on-going force at work throughout the universe.

With these concepts in hand, Greene then proceeds to situate life and thought within the scope of the unfolding universe by first looking back to the big bang, and the evolution of the universe from that starting point to the present moment. Though physicists continue to refine their understanding of these past roughly 13.8 billion years, some level of consensus has been achieved around an inflationary model that, while not proven, is backed by a “formidable” (51) amount of experimental evidence.

The inflationary model arises out of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, from which, in the late 1970’s, the physicist Alan Guth demonstrated the mathematical possibility “that if a region of space was filled with a particular kind of substance … and if the energy contained … was spread evenly throughout the region … then the resulting gravitational force would … be repulsive.” (47) As happens through the book, this fascinating, if relatively prosaic, description leads to a bewildering conclusion: 

Guth’s calculations revealed that if a tiny region, perhaps as small as a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across, was suffused with a certain type of energy … distributed uniformly, ... the repulsive gravitational push would be so forceful that the speck of space would inflate explosively, almost instantaneously [within a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second] stretching to as large as the observable universe, if not far larger. (47) 

That is, the universe would inflate from a size unimaginably small, to one unimaginably large, over a time scale unimaginably small.

Already in the first 50 pages we discover that we need to buckle up for a wild ride that will, at nearly every turn, challenge our natural intuitions and understandings about the physical world.

So it is with Greene’s description of the development of stars and galaxies. The basic processes of stellar formation seem, if wondrously complex in their details, relatively straight-forward at a high level: gravity pulls clouds of matter together until the resulting body becomes so dense that nuclear forces cause the fusion of hydrogen into helium, creating a counter force, and so a balancing act leading to stars that burn for billions of years.

But then some troubling questions arise!

For one, if the leading theory for the big bang requires an extremely uniform initial distribution – as any non-uniformity would have led to the gravitational force being attractive – then where did the variability come from that allowed gravity to no longer be repulsive, and instead act to build up increasingly dense clumps of mass? The answer seems to lie in the presence of quantum uncertainty according to Greene: physicists theorize that at the quantum level, in the very early period after the big bang, there were tiny, quantum variations in energy that led to temperature differences on the order of “one part in a hundred thousand.” (51) Unimaginably tiny non-uniformities, but, over a time scale of millions of years, sufficient to initiate the clumping of matter that has led to stars and galaxies.

Another important question about the development of stars and galaxies arises from the second law of thermodynamics, which “declares that over time there is an overwhelming tendency of entropy to increase” (31); how, then, can a star be born, given that a star represents a relatively low entropy condition? The answer, according to Greene, is what he refers to as the entropic two-step: entropy can decrease in a portion of space (a star, or a life form), as long as such low entropy configurations raise the entropy of the surrounding environment. Thus, for example, the human body continually “dispens[es] entropy to the environment through waste and heat.” (108)

This requirement that heat be expelled to the environment by a lower entropy, ordered configuration like a star, a body or a brain, so that the overall entropy increases, becomes central to Greene’s pursuit of the ultimate future for thought, and whether it will continue to be possible in the distant future of our universe.

With molecular Darwinism and the entropic two-step as a basis, Greene describes how succeeding generations of stars provided the crucibles for the creation of the heavier elements. These elements end up a part of the formation of the planets, including earth, and play a fundamental role in the path to life. While Greene provides a concise introduction to these processes, a more detailed exploration can be found in the book Stardust, by astrophysicist John Gribben, who notes:

[although] we still don’t know exactly how life began … we do know, very precisely, what mixture of chemicals is required for the existence of life as we know it. And we know exactly where those chemicals come from --- as a natural by-product of the processes of star formation and evolution. (17, Stardust)

Gribben provides an engrossing portrait of the build up from a universe filled nearly exclusively with hydrogen to one in which the elements necessary for life emerge.

Greene turns in the middle section of his book to the current theories about how the combination of the entropic two-step and evolution that supported the creation of the solar system also collaborated on the development of life on earth. Over several chapters, he traces the path from the origins of the earliest individual cells to more complex forms that over several billion years came to develop mind and consciousness, and then examines the distinctively human characteristics of imagination, storytelling, the concept of the sacred, and ultimately the appearance of creativity.

Exploring each of these steps in some detail, he introduces readers to a sample of the competing theories proposed for how these features might have arisen. Some of these explanations, such as the biochemical theories for the development of cells with an ability to reproduce, can be analyzed and evaluated through experimentation. Others, he notes, such as hypotheses attempting to explain the origin of language, myth-making and the importance of the sacred, rely only on interpretation of an extremely limited and spotty historical record.

Throughout his review of these topics, Greene personalizes and enlivens the discussion by bringing in his impressions and opinions regarding the various theories. He describes his thinking as based on what he refers to as his reductionist approach to understanding phenomena, which he defines one in which it is considered at least theoretically possible to understand how any phenomenon works by breaking it down to the fundamental physical particles of the universe and the laws that govern them.

Then, during his discussion of consciousness, he introduces a related term, physicalists, which he defines as referring to those who believe that consciousness can be explained by “traditional scientific methods, solely invoking physical properties of matter.” (127) Not surprisingly, given his preference for reductionist approaches of understanding, he also takes on the mantel of physicalist, convinced that consciousness arises out of the complexity of the brain, and not due to some extra-physical property. Along those lines, he argues that we humans do not have free will, and, as opposed to finding this unacceptable and unthinkable, that we should celebrate that the feeling we do have free will has arisen out of the complexity of our minds. (In a public interview with Krista Tippett for her program On Being he has an entertaining exchange on free will with a doubting audience member, the transcript of which can be at the end of my review of Edward O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence.)

Greene places a high level of significance on the human development of language and then storytelling. This recalls the wonderful book on this topic by historian Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, in which Harari describes the creation and telling of stories as having been central to the social development of Homo sapiens: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” (28, Sapiens) And, Harari argues, this ability to create shared myths and fictions gave us a decisive advantage over other human species.  (My review of Sapiens is linked to at the right.)

Different from Harari’s focus in Sapiens on the implications of story-telling, however, Greene examines in detail various of the proposals of how language and eventually storytelling may have developed. He provides a fascinating introduction to these theories – and the uncertainty that surrounds them, given the difficulty of evaluating or demonstrating them through experimental techniques.

Having traced the path from the big bang to current day humankind, Greene then pivots in the final part of the book to explore potential futures for our universe, not only for the matter and energy in it, but also particularly for the possibility of thought being possible given what is theorized about the universe of the far future. And if the timeframe over which the entropic two-step and evolution have operated since the microbes came into existence on the earth of four billion years ago is challenging to grasp, know that that period becomes the merest blink of an eye in Greene’s push into what the future may hold.

In order to provide some small handhold for grasping the timeframes he considers, Greene asks us to picture the Empire State building. He defines street level as when the big bang occurs, the first floor as 10 years of the universe after the big bang, and then every subsequent floor as representing the passage of 10 times as many years as the previous one. Thus, the second floor is a hundred years after the big bang, the third floor a thousand years after, and so on. The effect of that increasing rate first truly sinks in when Greene notes that the time from the birth of our sun to its eventual death as a collapsed “dense ball of carbon and oxygen … ultimately transitioning to a dark frozen orb” (253) will be the short distance from a few steps below the 10th floor to a few steps above it. And yet, before his exploration of the future ends, he will have gone past the top, 102nd floor, 10120 years after the big bang. Far beyond it.

Although he bases his considerations of the future of the universe on the current understanding of its physical properties and laws, substantial uncertainty exists. This is reflected already in the first possibility he considers – that the energy that is thought to be causing the current expansion of the universe may not be constant, and so could increase. Currently, this repulsive force is extremely small, overwhelmed by the other forces in regions of space where matter is present – thus the extreme uniformity requirement for the big bang. Indeed, it is only in the huge, empty regions of space between groups of galaxies that the repulsive force dominates and so drives expansion. Some physicists, however, have modeled a scenario in which an increase in that repulsive force could overwhelm the other forces in the universe, shattering all matter apart in a so-called big rip, already around the 11th floor.

Comfortingly, Greene finds that scenario “unlikely,” and proceeds up the stairwell.

A fascinating event plays out just another floor higher, however, assuming the current expansion continues. By around the 12th floor, galaxies beyond our local group will have redshifted to the point of no longer being visible, due to the expansion of space having them moving away from our region of space faster than the speed of light. (Greene points out that this doesn’t violate Einstein’s theories, because these galaxies are not actually moving faster than the speed of light; it’s the fabric of space that is expanding ever faster, while the light coming to us from those galaxies is constrained by the speed of light.) By that point, the cosmic background radiation will also have dissipated to the point of becoming undetectable. Thus, astronomers of that future time will lack the two key experimental indictors that demonstrated to current day scientists that the universe is expanding, and they will thus find the observable universe to appear static!

Farther out, beyond the era when the stars begin winking out and the available matter for forming new stars becomes scarce, Greene considers the kinds of events that have low probability, but, when the time frames become long enough, can no longer be discounted. To demonstrate this idea based on a simple example he uses elsewhere in the book: one might dump a bag of pennies on a table once per minute, and not expect to get all heads for weeks, months and even years; but, do it for 10 million or ten billion years, and that very unlikely occurrence can no longer so readily be ruled out.

Some such events are not so surprising. For example, stars passing close enough to disrupt each other’s orbits around the galaxy, or their planets’ orbits, may be a once in a million years occurrence. Consider timescales of many billions of years, however, and the disruption of solar systems and even galaxies becomes likely. More dramatically, Greene points out that at the timescales represented by going to still higher floors, matter itself will decay.

Eventually, then, Greene arrives at his central question: at what point will thought become impossible? Clearly, having reached an epoch characterized by an “absence of complex atoms and molecules” (269), he is not considering thought in the sense of something performed by the human mind. Instead, he considers the broadest possible view: “our only constraint … being that the process of thought fully conforms to the laws of physics, can thought persist indefinitely?” (269)

What follows is a fascinating examination of the basic physical function of a human brain: take in energy, carry out processes related to thought, and release waste heat. And here again, entropy rears its head, as Greene focuses on the requirement that for thought to occur, there must be the ability to expel waste heat. The question then becomes, at what point might it no longer be possible to expel that waste heat, thus making thought impossible. Putting aside the possibility of intelligent life interceding in unimaginable ways in the future to counter the dissipation of the universe, and uncertainty over the future evolution of the physical laws and constants of the universe, he demonstrates that “the far future of thought is precarious” (278), at timescales well before we reach even the top floor of the Empire State Building.

At time scales far beyond the top of his tower to time, however, come truly mind-bending possibilities, again arising out of the current mathematical models of the universe and timescales that allow even highly unlikely events to occur. Among these oddities comes into play “that the second law’s decree is probabilistic. Entropy can decrease.” (269) A theoretical consequence of this are Boltzmann brains: spontaneous accumulations of particles which come together to form the exact configuration of a thinking brain – say, your brain as it exists at this very moment, or this next one, with all the “thoughts, memories, and sensations that currently reside in your brain.” (297) The implications, including whether I at this moment writing this, or you reading this, might in fact be a Boltzmann brain, are unsettling to consider.

And he has yet to come to his discussion of the possibilities of the multiverse…

In the concluding chapter, Greene returns to the question of the meaning of our lives in the face of the likelihood that thought will at some point come to an end in the universe: “even though we can contemplate eternity, and even though we can reach for eternity, apparently we cannot touch eternity.” (309)  He argues that it makes no fundamental difference whether we know that the earth will be destroyed in 100 years, with all humankind lost, or that the universe will end in 10¹⁰⁰ years, extinguishing all thought. In either case, eternity is lost to us, to all we think and do and learn. But, far from despairing over this conclusion, he finds it a reason to value and cherish our lives all the more, and proposes that “in our quest to fathom the human condition, the … direction to look is inward. … It is a direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of construction our own meaning.” (325)

In Until the End of Time Greene takes readers on a fascinating tour of the history and possible futures of our universe, as well as humankind’s place in that story, from the origin of the first cells to the development and ramifications of consciousness and thought. Where there are competing theories about a topic, he gives a sample of the different directions in thought on a topic, while still personalizing the account with his take on it. By including references throughout his narrative from pop culture, as well as classical literature and thought, he enlivens his presentation; his writing style transmitting the wonder he himself clearly feels as he engages on these topics.

Late in the book he touches briefly on the human longing for immortality. After summarizing the concerns many philosophers have expressed about how boring immortal life would likely turn out to be, he sounds a more optimistic note: 

 I suspect that we are sufficiently resourceful – and endowed with endless time we would become all the more so – to grow into thoroughly well-adjusted immortals … to conclude that we would necessarily grow bored suggests an unduly parochial vision of the immoral mind. (317) 

Greene turns the immortality question on its head, arguing that the significance immortality has for us makes clear how important we must take each day of our mortal lives.

In a sense, Greene’s conclusion echoes a writer who comes from a completely different tradition, the Christian philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno argues in his essay Tragic Sense of Life that to see death as

a beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed in God and, as it were, lost in him” is misguided, and that, indeed: “man’s highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man’s pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. (201, Tragic Sense of Life) 

It is this passionate pursuit of learning that seems to drive Greene’s life and work, and that he imparts to readers on each and every page of his writings.

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Other notes and information:

Though I didn’t go into Greene’s discussion of the concept of a multiverse, those who come away from it wanting a deeper dive can find that in physicist Max Tegmark’s fascinating book, The Mathematical Universe. A link to my review of that book is at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman

Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020)
Rutger Bregman (1988)
461 pages

Based on a deep-seated belief that competition and greed are fundamental and even necessary characteristics of human nature, it has come to be widely accepted that absent a thin veneer of civilization people’s true, selfish nature would emerge, thereby precipitating an inevitable collapse of society into violent anarchy. So profoundly convinced are most of this dark understanding of people’s true motivations that even altruistic acts have become broadly tarred as self-serving.

According to historian Rutger Bregman, however, our received wisdom about human nature is not only wrong, but worse it undermines our ability to progress further on our project of civilization. In his enlightening book Humankind: A Hopeful History, Bregman uses a fresh analysis of human history to rebut the presumption that humans are inherently selfish, a belief that he notes has been largely unchallenged doctrine for millennia.

Through startling examples, he demonstrates how this bleak view of human nature has led scientists, journalists, politicians and the general public to develop and propagate inaccurate interpretations of both historical events and psychology experiments. More critically, he explores the impact this misunderstanding has had on how society has been structured, politically and economically, and points out the destructive consequences evident in our present-day world. His hopeful history concludes with heartening examples of localities and businesses that have been organized around what he considers a more accurate, positive understanding of human nature, approaches that he proposes can serve as a basis for rethinking the structures and goals of our broader political and economic institutions.

Bregman opens by describing findings from a range of scientific disciplines that reveal that humans, far from being selfish by nature, have in fact evolved to value cooperation. He cites work done by biologists and geneticists over the past half-century, for example, that indicates that Homo sapiens have followed an evolutionary path that favored selection for friendliness, a trait that led to the development of an extremely powerful ability for social learning. This ability meant that relative to Neanderthals, for example, who had larger brains and were possibly smarter individually, Homo sapiens were able to spread new skills decisively faster across large groups.

The historian Noah Yuval Harari makes a similar argument in his captivating work Sapiens, describing Homo sapiens as having, some 200 thousand years ago, developed the capability for fictive language during what he refers to as the Cognitive Revolution. This enabled them to effectively aggregate and transmit large amounts of information about their physical world and their group relationships, and so create social constructs he refers to as imagined orders. These imagined orders, Harari argues, enabled the successful cooperation necessary to support the formation of large, cohesive groups with rapidly evolving social structures, giving Homo sapiens a critical advantage over the other species of humankind. (My review of Harari’s book is linked to at right.)

Bregman and Harari arrive at strikingly different conclusions, however, when turning to the unresolved question of what ultimately happened to the Neanderthals, and why Homo sapiens became the only surviving human species.

The common understanding for the disappearance of the Neanderthals has been that they were in some way overwhelmed by migrations of Homo sapiens into their territory. Harari, for example, suggests that either “Homo sapiens drove them to extinction” by using their creativity to out-complete Neanderthals for resources, or, more dramatically, that a predisposition to intolerance among Homo sapiens led to “the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” (Sapiens, 17-18). Harari justifies his suggestion that Homo sapiens may have carried out an “ethnic-cleansing campaign” against the Neanderthals by extrapolating backward from more recent history, observing that “in modern times, a small difference in color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.” (Sapiens, 18)

In contrast, Bregman argues that for the idea of Homo sapiens

wiping [Neanderthals] out …there’s not a shred of archaeology to support it. The more plausible theory is that we humans were better able to cope with the harsh climatic conditions of the last ice age … because we’d developed the ability to work together. (71)

The idea that Neanderthals succumbed to Homo sapiens in aggressive competition or outright conflict is, he argues, an example of the assumed selfishness of human nature leading to conclusions apparently unsubstantiated by existing evidence.

More generally, Bregman rejects what he considers to be the widespread belief that warfare has been a constant part of human history, noting that there has been little indication of large, violent clashes among early humans. On the contrary, war appears to have only become a significant part of human behavior after the transition from hunter-gather to agricultural societies.

Settled farming communities not only increased the amount of possessions to be defended, but their inhabitants generally lived a more precarious existence, due to the rise of diseases from farm animals and an increased susceptibility to natural disasters. [Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the intriguing argument that the Agricultural Revolution represented an evolutionary trap for Homo sapiens: “the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. … Nobody agreed to this deal.” (83, Sapiens)]

(Along with humans in farming societies becoming more defensive, Bregman suggests that the transition to such settlements and the associated challenges “triggered a seismic shift in religious life … to [a belief] in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done.” (105) The development of a “whole clerical class … in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry” (105) represented a significant shift in religious beliefs and behaviors from what the evidence hints at as having been common among hunter-gatherers.)

An important role in the development of farming communities’ tendency to go to war, Bregman argues, is the apparent human preference for those like ourselves over strangers – he notes recent research that has demonstrated such preferences as already being exhibited by infants as young as six months old.

Admittedly, this result aligns with the spirit of Harari’s “ethnic cleansing” comments, quoted above. Bregman, however, argues that such distrust might have had little impact on hunter-gatherer societies, where meetings with strangers would have tended to take place with small groups of people at a time, and so “any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.” (211)

In the settled communities that developed after the transition to agriculture, however, leaders actually exploited our xenophobic tendencies, in order to promote conflicts. The fomenting of an ongoing feeling of uncertainty about and threat from others allowed (and, for that matter, continues to allow) leaders to promote their importance and so increase their hold on power. In general, warriors who successfully protected their communities became indispensable, and, not surprisingly, learned to profit from the strength of their position.

Bregman acknowledges that the all-to-common descent of such leaders into corruption and self-aggrandizement would seem to challenge his overall hypothesis: if people are basically friendly, why do leaders (in whatever context, at whatever time) so often become mean? In response he attributes this to the well-known observation that power corrupts, noting experiments that show that having power tends to turn-off people’s empathy and to make them feel separate and distant from others, leading them to become socially shameless. And, unlike in hunter-gatherer societies, which were small enough to quickly put such shameless members in their place, within farming societies’ growing, anonymous populations, leaders became so powerful that they could not be easily removed without, say, a revolution – which, as famously observed by The Who in their song Won’t Get Fooled Again, generally tended to result in a new, similarly shameless leader.

Thus, the transition to farming communities introduced an increasingly precarious existence for humankind, and the growth of these settlements led to leaders who exploited these threats and the human tendency for xenophobia to maintain their hold on power. By creating an environment in which, absent the steadying hand of the state, people felt the imminent risk of violence, leaders effectively trained people to assume the inherent selfishness of human nature. And this mistaken understanding of humankind has carried through to the present day.

Bregman’s demonstration of the many consequences of this misunderstanding of human nature represent perhaps the most dramatic portion of his book. Examining several well-known historical events and psychology experiments, he demonstrates how an unwavering belief in the fundamentally selfish nature of humankind has led to false interpretations, and lasting misunderstandings of their implications. In each case, he first lays out the commonly held understandings, before then re-examining them – not re-interpreting them, but rather simply exposing the facts of what is known about them, facts that have not been so much suppressed as ignored, because they didn’t align with the expectations of investigators or the general public.

It would spoil the dramatic impact of his telling of these examples to describe them here in detail. Suffice it to say, however, that most readers will come away with their core assumptions and beliefs about these well-known and seemingly well understood events shattered – as Bregman acknowledges happened to him also. He effectively demonstrates how the basic assumptions that humans are selfish and prone to monstrous evil at the slightest whim have led scientists, journalists, politicians, economists – and, in fact, most all of us – to accept miss-interpretations and at times willful miss-characterizations, and then to pass such conclusions on uncritically, even when contrary evidence is readily available.

Although leaders since the early period after the transition to agriculture have encouraged a selfish view of human nature, Bregman notes that it was during the Enlightenment that this idea became institutionalized. Enlightenment period philosophers and politicians celebrated it, he argues, building institutions based on reason and rationality that aimed to encourage and support each individual’s (apparently inherent) selfish behavior as a path to furthering the greater good. Thus were born: economic systems that encouraged people to focus on a desire to make a profit; democratic systems such as the U.S. constitution that created “a system of ‘checks and balances’, in which everybody kept an eye on everybody else” (246); and more generally a rule of law “governed by reason alone.” (246)

Certainly, acknowledges Bregman, “a few centuries into the Age of Reason [a]ll things considered, … the Enlightenment has been a triumph for humankind … our lives … exponentially better and the world … richer, safer and healthier than ever before.” (247)  But he then, in perhaps the most trenchant statement in this engaging and convincingly argued work, fires a direct shot across the bow of the cruise ship filled with end of history celebrants, saying of these Enlightenment approaches to our world: “it was the best answer – until now.” (248)

For, willing to grant the Enlightenment institutions their due in lifting the world over the past several centuries out of the abject poverty and misery that was the inheritance of the shift to an agricultural society, he proposes that these institutions are not the final, best approach. He argues that it has come time to consider the next step in our social evolution, pointing out that:

the Enlightenment also had a dark side. Over the past few centuries we’ve learned that capitalism can run amok, sociopaths can seize power and a society dominated by rules and protocols has little regard for the individual. (248)

The flaw of Enlightenment thinking and the institutions that arose from it, according to Bregman, is in fact precisely the mistaken assumption that selfishness is fundamental to human nature. Convinced that we are by nature generally greedy, easily corrupted and prone to violence, it is little surprise that we lived up to those expectations, and have supported the creation of systems based upon them.

Over the final part of the book, Bregman demonstrates how a world based on an accurate view of human nature could look – predicated, of course, on the possibility of disabusing people of their current, deeply held misconceptions concerning the selfishness of their fellows.

He begins by debunking the Enlightenment (and our) assumption, fundamental to capitalism, that “other people can be motivated solely by money,” (266) or, more generally, that “the only thing powerful enough to spur us to action is the promise of a reward or the fear of punishment.” (267) Reviewing studies that have shown that in fact “bonuses can blunt the intrinsic motivation of employees … and that bonuses and targets can erode creativity” (269), he notes that these approaches actually demonstrate the “parallels between the western capitalist economy and that of the former Soviet Union.” (269)

He deliberately compares the "western capitalist economy" in that quote to the "former Soviet Union", and not communism.  For, having expressed his concerns with the central institution that originated out of Enlightenment thinking about selfishness as central to human nature – free-market capitalism – he addresses the elephant in the room head on: 

“Communism, we’re told, cannot work. Why? Because it’s based on a flawed understanding of human nature. Without private property, we lose all motivation and swiftly revert into apathetic parasites. Or so the story goes. Even as a teenager it struck me as odd that the case for communism’ ‘failure’ seemed to rest solely on the evidence of bloodthirsty regimes in countries where ordinary citizens had no say – regimes supported by all-powerful police states and corrupt elites.” (307) 

Setting aside such totalitarian perversions of the idea of communism, he traces the origins of the word back to Latin to argue that communal ownership – the commons – exists in our present societies to a greater extent than we realize, and in fact represents, he argues, “a vital mainstay of capitalism.” (309)

And returning again to our earliest ancestors, he notes that essentially everything was communal in hunter-gather societies. The transition away from this came, again, with the transition to an agricultural society:

It’s only in the past 10,000 years that steadily bigger slices of the commons have been swallowed up by the market and the state. It began with the first chieftains and kings, who laid claim to lands which had previously been shared by everyone. Today, it’s mainly multinationals that appropriate all kinds of commons. (309)

The trend away from communal ownership saw a brief reversal “in the late Middle Ages [when] Europe witnessed an explosion of communal spirit … an increasing share of pasture land under collective control.” (313)  However, this period was ended by “Enlightenment-era economists [who] decided collective farmlands were not maximizing their production potential.” (313) Thus in reality, he argues,

it wasn’t the invisible hand of the market that gently shepherded peasants from their farms into factories, but the ruthless hand of the state. … [The] ‘free market’ was planned and imposed from the top down ... by states. (313-4)

The goal now must then be, argues Bregman, to move beyond free-market capitalism, to build new institutions that can begin to correct the "dark side" that has arisen out of those that grew out of Enlightenment thinking.   Along with moving toward participatory democracy – bringing a wider variety of voices directly into the decision making process a more autonomous local level – Bregman finds potential new economic approaches already being pursued in a number of places around the world.  He notes, for example, a policy implemented by the Republican governor of Alaska in the late 1970’s, who established a fund that has paid a “wholly unconditional” annual dividend to each Alaskan. Though it was argued that most people would squandered it (again, that enduring assumption of the “stench of human corruption,” to quote from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song Christina the Astonishing), Bregman notes that studies have shown “no adverse effects on employment and that it substantially reduced poverty.” (316) Applying such a dividend (effectively a Universal Basic Income, UBI, though Bregman doesn’t use the term in the book) more broadly he argues “would give each of us the freedom to make our own choices. Venture capital for the people.”

In this, Bregman makes arguments similar to those of Martin Hägglund, in This Life. Though Hägglund uses detailed philosophical arguments to demonstrate that capitalism has fundamental inconsistencies that make it inherently exploitative, his ultimate point, like Bergman’s, is that if what our economic systems valued were not purely the extraction of the value we bring as workers, then we would be free “to educate ourselves and to deliberate on what would count as meaningful activities for us ... rather than being prescribed what should count as meaningful activity by what happens to be profitable for a capitalist at the moment.” (This Life, 259) Also, similar to Bregman’s calls for a more participatory democracy and increased focus on expanding the communal realm, Hägglund argues for what he refers to as democratic socialism, noting that: 

To subordinate the state to society is to transform the state into an actual democracy. … While the commitment to serve the interests of society as a whole will always be challenging and contestable, it is in principle impossible to sustain such a commitment under capitalism. Because of the social form of wage labor, democratic politics and democratic states necessarily serve as organs for representing class interests that are competing for control. We cannot actually deliberate on how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, since we must prioritize the private interests of capitalists. This prioritization is not optional, since under capitalism there can be no production of social wealth without the profits of privately owned enterprises. (This Life, 268)

And though Hägglund doesn’t explore the origins of the capitalist system, he mirrors Bregman in arguing that democracy as currently constituted serves as the mechanism for imposing capitalism.

Bregman provides other examples of alternatives to the institutional forms created during the Enlightenment, examining present-day companies built on a “more positive view of human nature” (277) and outlining the success they’ve achieved, both in terms of their bottom line and ability to attract talented employees, as well as in the challenges they have faced from our entrenched ideas and institutions. Similarly, he explores educational systems that avoid the standard, institutional protocols and top-down organization to allow students to instead learn in a more open environment – structured, but not overly constrained. In these ways, Bregman argues, an understanding of humans as fundamentally friendly and cooperative can lead to a radically better path forward for society, one that addresses the current issues of political disenfranchisement and economic inequality.

A fundamental challenge to Bregman’s hopeful vision for better institutions beyond our current capitalist and political systems is one that he himself raises early in the book, but only lightly touches again onward the end: that power corrupts.  This idea that leaders tend to become corrupted by the distance their position creates for them from others is a point he also raises during an interview for the radio program On the Media with Brooke Gladstone, in which he nonetheless acknowledges the necessity of institutions – he is not in any sense an anarchist. Bregman never returns to address how to avoid such a problem over the long run. Even institutions that in their first generations have enlightened leaders who value and encourage participatory democracy are susceptible to later leaders who become corrupted, and, in pursuit of wealth or power, actively undercut and eventually destroy the good that has been created.

That said, in Humankind, Bregman offers a profoundly transformative vision of human nature as fundamentally peaceful and cooperative. We are not, he argues, the selfish, violence-prone species that we have been led to believe, a belief that was encouraged by the early leaders of agricultural communities to stoke our tendency to xenophobia and so strengthen their hold on power, and more recently has been at the heart of how our political and economic institutions have been formed since the Enlightenment. These institutions have come to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: to excel, or even survive, within them, people have come to believe that others are selfish and greedy, and that to keep up they themselves must also act selfishly and greedily, despite what they perhaps feel is their better nature.

We have come far as a species, particularly over the past several centuries, but our negative view of human nature – of our fellow humans – threatens to undermine that progress. By recognizing and internalizing a view of our fellow humans as fundamentally good, we have a chance to rethink our political and economic institutions, and so to remake them in ways that will enable us to overcome our current social and economic dysfunction.

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Other notes and information:

Bregman discusses his solution to poverty in a persuasive Ted Talk.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf