Doughnut Economics: Human Nurture and System Complexity

In her Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist Brit academic Kate Raworth imagines the human world as a doughnut. If you penetrate the Ecological Ceiling or fall through the Social Foundation, here there be dragons, and you must call in and submit to the activist elite.

What we must do, she writes in "Nurture Human Nature," is attack Homo economicus, the "rational economic man... at the heart of mainstream economic theory."

You see, rational economic man is "an isolated individual -- unaffected by the choices of others" and a useful basis for modeling the economy. But in fact, as critics of economics have pointed out, we are in fact social animals:

We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do, and especially if filled with fear and doubt we tend to go with the crowd.

Economists have tended to think that it is prices that change peoples' behavior. But other social scientists say that "social norms and expectations of what others are doing" can be far stronger influences on behavior. Especially for WEIRD (White Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) people. For instance we act on the basis of:

availability bias -- using most accessible information

loss aversion -- strong aversion to taking losses

selective cognition -- selecting for information that fits our world view

risk bias -- underestimating chance of extreme events

The point is that "just getting the prices right" is not the whole story, especially when it comes "to relationships that we have traditionally managed with our morals." And "money" can erode "social norms."

Well, yes. And social science research has indicated that individuals can be "nudged" into socially beneficial behavior.

The challenge now is to discover how lessons from street-level success... could be scaled up to nudge and network whole cities, nations, and international negotiations with the Doughnut. 

Hey, we can change Homo economicus & Co. into Homo altruisticus and Homo socialis. Under the wise and beneficial control, no doubt, of Homo educatus and Homo Sinistericus.

Of course, what Raworth is really saying is that gubmint economists, up to now, have got it all wrong. So what we need is a new generation of gubmint economists with bright shining new ideas.

But how do we do this? In "Get Savvy With Systems" Raworth attacks the old economics of treating society as a "mechanism" and instead think of it as an "organism."

See, we humans aren't used to dealing with complex systems. 

Our brains evolved to cope with the near, the short term and the responsive, while expecting incremental, linear change... [not to mention] our stories, with their happily-ever-after endings.

And 150 years of economics "has reinforced our biases with mechanistic models and metaphors" with Jevons and Walras trying to make economics into the physics of economic mechanics. And the supply-and-demand curves led to general economic equilibrium theories that dominated economics all the way up to the 2008 economic crash.

It was back in 1948 that Warren Weaver pointed out that a far more useful approach was to think about "what makes an evening primrose open when it does". Instead of thinking about "the economic world as linear, mechanical and predictable" it is time to think in terms of complexity science, the problem of "organized complexity" such as the unimaginable complexity of every living thing, the way that things are interconnected in ways that produce distinct behaviors: "cells in an organism... members of a family, or banks in a financial network." You need "reinforcing feedbacks" to "make a system move, then balancing feedbacks" to "stop it from exploding or imploding."

Actually economists have known this: the problem was to do it. For Raworth the event that forced economists to get a clue was the 2008 crash. Everybody was using economic models that "in which private banks played no role at all" and they all thought we had reached "the Great Moderation." In fact, like in the classic economic bubble, where trends tend to reinforce. Until they don't. And in the process, the successful get more successful. Until they don't. 

Between 1988 and 2008, the majority of countries worldwide saw rising inequality within their borders, resulting in a hollowing out of their middle classes.

Then, she writes, there is not just economic inequality but the nightmare of climate change. Fortunately John Sterman has built a computer game C-ROADS that "instantly adds up all nations' greenhouse gas reduction pledges to show their... implications for global emissions, atmospheric conentrations, temperature change, and sea-level rise." Assuming, I would say, that the experts' predictions about the effect of increasing CO2 are correct and not another South Sea Bubble.

So here we are, with the alarm bells ringing,

we have transgressed at least four planetary boundaries, billions of people still face extreme deprivation and the richest 1 percent own have of the world's financial wealth.

To avoid a fate worse than death we heed to understand

Today's economy is divisive and degenerative by default.
Tomorrow's economy must be distributive and regenerative by design. 

The answer is to change the economist "from engineer to gardener." They should set up "small-scale policy experiments to test out a variety of interventions" stop the ones that don't work "and scale up the ones that do." Donella Meadows has a three-point program to make this work: "healthy hierarchy, self-organization and resilience."

Healthy hierarchy means that "nested systems serve the greater whole of which are are a part" such as liver cells in a liver.

Self-organization means not just the self-organization of the price-mechanism but the commons and the household as well. And "the state should support all three in doing so."

Resilience "emerges out of a system's ability to endure and bounce back from stress".

And economists must get ethical: "act in service to human prosperity... respect autonomy in the communities that you serve... be prudential in policymaking".

So, "we must embrace complexity and draw on its insights in order to... make [economies] distributive and regenerative by design."

Or, of course, we might figure out from all this that when you combine economists with politics you get politics, whether the economists are mechanics or gardeners. And what is needed is not better, more ethical economists, but governments that stop looting and plundering and using economics to help them do it.

Hey Generals! Looks Like You are the Fall Guys!

After Gen. Mark Milley loyally backed the Deep State against President Trump back on the day of the Church of Presidents photo-op last year, who woulda thunk that, after the Afghanistan disaster, the Powers That Be would be selecting him for the high jump? Remember back in the innocence of 2020?

The event took place moments after troops and police cleared a path for the president and his entourage to walk the short distance to the nearby St John’s church, also known as the Church of the Presidents, by violently ousting peaceful protesters chanting and singing amid ongoing nationwide demonstrations in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

And now the Deep State wants to blame Gen. Milley for the Afghanistan fiasco. Is there no loyalty, no justice in this world? I mean, Gen. Milley loyally assured House Speaker Pelosi that she could rely on him not to let Trump start a nuclear war!

Pelosi pushed back.

“What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?”

Pelosi continued, “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”

According to Woodward and Costa, Milley responded, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.”

You know what I think? I think that Speaker Pelosi has a "hate" problem. I think she should seek mental health counseling about it.

So all you Pentagon generals and admirals and all the ships at sea: better get a clue. You are expendable. Always were; always will be. Because, heavens! We Deep Staters sure ain't gonna take the hit. We are the ruling class; we are special; we are indispensable! You generals are just the grunts that we send around the world to make us look good. And if you can't make us look good, you are outta here.

Seriously, my take is that all this tells us that our rulers really don't know what they are doing.

The whole Trump dossier game? Not a good idea.

The four year harassment of Trump? Not a good idea.

The whole wokey thing and the Allyship narrative that makes ordinary white middle-class people the Monster? Not a good idea.

Calling Trump and idiot and then slotting in Biden, who surely IS an idiot? Not a good idea.

Screwing up the retreat from empire in Afghanistan? Not a good idea.

Going full vaccination "papers please" and riling up teachers and nurses? Not a good idea.

Going for broke with a $3.5 trillion spending package? Not a good idea.

Trying to federalize election laws? Not a good idea.

The only thing that really makes sense about the Dems at this moment is that they are out of ideas; out of smart guys with a strategic sense, out of money printer go brrrrr, and on their way out of power.

And, as I keep saying, the only real question is the size of the butcher's bill.

Doughnut Economics: Forget GDP; See the Big Picture

In her Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist Brit academic Kate Raworth imagines the human world as a doughnut. If you penetrate the Ecological Ceiling or fall through the Social Foundation, here there be dragons, and you must call in and submit to the activist elite.

Raworth's first Way is to attack the idea of GDP as the be-all and end-all of measuring the welfare of society. But the ancients considered "household economics" as and art and "Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth."

So Raworth thinks that the GDP growth fixation is like a cuckoo in the nest. It makes its host feed the baby cuckoo instead of its own chicks. But there is another way, with "human welfare, not wealth accumulation, as the goal." Notice the passive voice in the quote.

Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef  proposed that development be focused on... fundamental human needs -- such as sustenance, participation, creativity, and a sense of belonging[.]

Thus the Doughnut.

Below the Doughnut's social foundation lie shortfalls in human well-being... such as food, education, and housing. Beyond the ecological ceiling lies an overshoot of pressure on Earth's life-giving systems, such as through climate change, ocean acidification, and chemical pollution. 

All the world's experts agree that we should set a target date for every human living above the social foundation, including "gender equality, social equity, political voice, and peace and justice." But the Great Acceleration in humans living above the social foundation has caused "an accompanying surge in ecological impacts." And this could mean the end of the Holocene climate optimum of stable, warmish climate of the last 12,000 years. Experts propose keeping CO2 below 350 ppm, keeping 75 percent of once-forested land forested, and limit fertilizer use to 62 million tonnes of nitrogen and 6 million tonnes fertilizers per year.

But how do we get into the Doughnut "safe and just space?" It takes: population control; "equitable distribution" of resources; control of aspiration for "faster cars and slimmer laptops, for exotic holidays and the latest-craze gadgets;" technology to replace private cars with urban transit, fossil fuel with rooftop soar power, self-heating self-cooling buildings; and governance "that is suited to the challenges we face."

Yes. Well, I tell you something, Kate Raworth. You educated government-funded experts are not up to the job of doing all that. Because human society is not a top-down administration like a government bureaucracy or a university. It is, at the very least, an emergent, network phenomenon that nobody really understands.That is the point of economics. It is a first, limited guess at how things work. To Be Continued.

And the question is: what if you are wrong? And how would you know? The advantage of GDP as a guide for government is that it is "real simple" as they say in The Manchurian Candidate. Any politician can figure out that he is in a whole heap of trouble if the GDP goes down. But nobody can figure out what is up or down with the complicated top-down agenda of the Doughnut.

Having told us how wise and credentialed government-funded experts should run things, Kate Raworth now proposes to de-legitimize the two brands of economics of the past half-century: Paul Samuelson's economics that, to her, is symbolized by his simplistic Circular Flow diagram, and the "neoliberal" agenda of the Mont Pelerin Society founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, Milton Friedman and others. Actually, La Wik regards the term "neoliberalism" more circumspectly than Raworth. And I would suggest that it has become yet another left-wing pejorative; Raworth, born 1970, probably only knows it as a pejorative. Against the pathetic narrative of Samuelson and the Mont Pelerin Society Raworth proposes a different narrative, the Doughnut narrative.

Here is a table of the two narratives.

	Mont Pelerin Society	Doughnut Economics
EARTH	which is inexhaustible -- so take all you want.	which is life giving -- so respect its boundaries
SOCIETY	which is non-existent -- so ignore it	which is foundational -- so nurture its connections
THE ECONOMY	(no entry)	which is diverse -- so support all of its systems
THE HOUSEHOLD	which is domestic -- so leave it to the women	which is core -- so value its contribution
THE MARKET	which is efficient -- so give it free rein	which is powerful -- so embed it wisely
THE COMMONS	which is tragic -- so sell them off	which are creative -- so unleash their potential
THE STATE	which is incompetent -- to don't let it meddle	which is essential -- so make it accountable
FINANCE	which is infallible -- so trust in its ways	which is in service -- so make it serve society
BUSINESS	which is innovative -- so let it lead	which is innovative -- so give it purpose
TRADE	which is win-win -- so open your borders	which is double-edged -- so make it fair
POWER	which is irrelevant -- so don't mention it	which is pervasive -- so check its abuse

Notice that the "neoliberal" Mont Pelerin Society narrative is represented as basically a Do Nothing philosophy. Since I know something about the Hayeks and Miseses and Poppers and Stiglers and Friedmans that founded the society, not to mention their lives, their ideas and their tendencies, I would suggest that Raworth's take is profoundly dishonest.

But the nagging question for me, as a racist-sexist homophobe that profoundly mistrusts the educated ruling elite, is who gets to "do" all the things that Kate Raworth wants done? And who gets to appoint them?

And that was the concern of the Mont Pelerin Soiety "neoliberals." The reason that they proposed to "do nothing" was because they mistrusted anyone once they were given the power to direct traffic. "All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Said Lord Acton.

For instance, who is the who that gets to embed The Market wisely? And how would we know?

Who gets to make Finance "serve society?"

Who gets to make The State "accountable?"

Who get to "unleash" The Commons "potential?"

Who do we trust to check the "abuse" of Power?

Let us just take The Commons as an example. Raworth uses the work of Elinor Ostrom who researched the Commons and found that "successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them." But, she adds,

the commons have, for centuries, been encroached upon by the market and the state alike, through the enclosure of common land, the division of enterprise into workers and owners, and the rise of market-versus-state rivalry."

Well yes, but how do you split the difference? My understanding of the commons in the Middle Ages was that the common land was land that the feudal lord was not interested in using. So the peasants within his domain got to use it and decide how to share it out among them. How did common land get "enclosed?" Because the lords of the land started to learn that they could "improve" the land and make money off it. And they needed the money to strut their stuff as courtiers in the capital. So, get out of there, peasants.

Just axin', but who would be the guy to curb the enthusiasm of the lord for "improvement" and "enclosure?" The king? The Church? A colloquium of wise Doughnut economists?

Doughnunt Economics: For Well-born Activists

In the rarified heights that I live I had never heard of Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Brit academic Kate Raworth until last week when I encountered the book in a used book store. It's a manual for well-born women activists like this one.

Yuan Wang arrived at Oxford University to study economics. Born in China and raised in Yorkshire... [she] was determined to make a difference in the world.

She thought that economics was the way to do it, but soon got "frustrated."

She found the theory -- and the maths used to prove it -- absurdly narrow in its assumptions.

She found that there was a huge disconnect between the economic theory she was being taught and the real world "visible in the gulf between the preoccupations of mainstream economic theory and growing real-world crises such as global inequality and climate change."

Ms. Wang is a stand-in for author Kate Raworth who "is an economist focused on exploring the economic thinking needed to address the twenty-first century's social and ecological challenges." There isn't an "Early Life" section in La Wik's piece on her, but she describes herself as a former "London schoolgirl." Another website says she was raised in Surrey, a wealthy suburb of London, the daughter of a businessman and a florist.

My take is that well-born young women in the world today all want to get into "activism" working for some NGO. So I experience Doughnut Economics as a manifesto for their world-saving faith.

But what is this "doughnut" Raworth is talking about? It is a world model, rather like the Solar System model we are all brought up to believe in (Image By DoughnutEconomics - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75695171).

The idea is that the outer ring of the doughnut is an "ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond" and the inner ring of the doughnut is a "social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below."

You can see that this is almost a perfect view of the universe from the perspective of an educated elitist that wants to make a difference in the world. If there is a global ecological problem then global-minded ecological activists should be tasked with policing the ecological ceiling and solving the problem. If there is a social problem, social activists should be tasked with policing the social foundation and solving the problem. All with manipulations of the economic system through taxation, subsidies and government force. It's another top-down secular-religious fantasy in the tradition of rich-kid Marx and rich-kid Engels and their determination to make a difference.

Yes, what is the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" from the perspective of a Yuan Wang or a Kate Raworth? Look no further than the Doughnut.

To make it "real simple" know that if we are predicted to penetrate the "Ecological Ceiling" then the ruling class activists must intervene. If we are reported to have fallen through the "Social Foundation" then ruling class activists must intervene. All roads lead to Rome.

The interesting thing is that Yuan Wang and her generation of well-born activists seem to think they are rebelling against the ruling class. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Wang and "her fellow rebels" all over the world got together to demand that economics "catch up with the current generation." Economics needed to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, "from financial stability, to food security and climate change."

I'll believe that when I see it.

But what is it that Raworth and her well-born activists want to do?

1. Change the goal from GDP to "meeting the human needs of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.
2. See the big picture and move from the hydraulic "Circular Flow" model of Paul Samuelson and the "neoliberal" faith in "the efficiency of the market, the incompetence of the state, the domesticity of the household and the tragedy of the commons" to "the power of the market, the partnership of the state, the core role of the household and the creativity of the commons.
3. Nurture human nature and move from a vision of "rational economic man" to a vision that is "social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world."
4. Get savvy with systems, moving from supply and demand curves to systems thinking and feedback curves. Go from "control levers" to an "ever-evolving complex system."
5. Design to distribute, going beyond redistributing income to "exploring ways of redistributing wealth."
6. Create to regenerate. Don't think of a "clean" environment as a luxury good, but build build clean into the entire economy.
7. Be agnostic about growth. Nobody has created the dangerous diagram of the long-term path of GDP growth. It may be hard to give up growth as an economic goal.

Actually, many of these ideas make sense. The devil, of course, is in the details. Will the noble activists insist that they and only they are allowed to direct traffic. And in regard to the "dangerous diagram" of GDP growth, how about this, from my usgovernmentspending.com?

Isn't it interesting. It shows that growth is slowing in the US and Europe and Japan, while China and India are in the exponential phase of growth, with China showing a slight indication of slowing down after its meteoric growth since 1978. But Kate Raworth says that we are merely focused on growth. I wonder why.

We'll see, in the next exciting installment of this series on Doughnut Economics. Of course, there is bound to be a disconnect between me and Raworth. Her story of economics goes through Quesnay, Marshall, Samuelson, and introduces Kuhn's paradigms, Goffman's "framing," Korbyski's a-model-is-only-a-model, Lakoff's demand for "an alternative frame," e.g., "tax justice" to counter "tax relief."

My story of economics goes through Adam Smith to Marx. Then to Menger, Jevons and Walras in the marginal revolution and Bagehot on central banking. Then to von Mises and Hayek and supply-sider Arthur Laffer. And to me your Keyneses and Samuelsons and MMT advocates are fools and knaves, tools of the globalist ruling class. Like I assume Kate Raworth to be.

And what I want to know is how come little Yuan Wang didn't know about Walter Bagehot and his understanding of central banking and thus did not know that the 2008 crash was all about the ruling class ignoring the advice of Bagehot after the Crash of 1873? Hey Kate Raworth: Didn't you teach her the central banking facts of life?

Governing When "The Natives are Restless"

I guess I understand why the Biden administration decided to go full emergency on COVID. Government is nothing unless it has a war to fight. 

And if you've just lost a war, what better than to start a new one, and replace the dastardly Taliban with dastardly anti-vaxxers as the Enemy, the Other du jour.

But, on the other hand, I'd say that we are getting definite signs that "the natives are restless." That was supposed to be the line of the British colonial administrators when the native hordes in their dominions became uncomfortable under British rule.

We see college kids chanting "eff Biden" at college football games; we get mothers shouting at Biden at his photo-ops. And last night I heard about unruly passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight who weren't being properly obedient on the masking front. Bit of a problem on the natives front?

But here's a take. I was to dinner with my liberal neighbors last week and they were clearly feeling angry about vaccination resisters. So maybe Biden's COVID emergency is just about nailing down his base.

Of course, when your political acts are about solidifying your base rather than attracting moderates, it suggests that there might be a bit of a cock-up on the governing front.

And that is the question that keeps returning to me. Why? Why did the Democrats in 2021 think they had to go pedal to the metal with every single progressive initiative from climate change to systemic racism. And with a bare majority in Congress.

Seriously. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are political veterans going back decades. You would think they would be the adults in the room holding back the over-enthusiastic young'uns. But they are not. 

Why not? Are the old'uns just going along for the ride? Has the Democratic Party has got to the point where if you don't go full Woke you are toast? Or are we just seeing the internal logic of the progressive movement, that there must always be a new program, with new loot and plunder, because without some new bauble to dangle before the voters you are nothing?

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back on track, trying to normalize it as much as possible after the disruptions of the past year and a half that have hurt many millions of ordinary Americans -- but not well-to-do Americans like me. I would be thinking that, yeah, educated Americans that can work from home are doin' fine. Welfare state recipients that live from government checks are doin' fine. But ordinary Americans in the middle, they are the ones whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID lockdowns and restrictions. I would be telling my supporters: look, I want to enact your stuff, but we can't do it until we fix the economy.

I don't see any recognition from our rulers that they care about this.

And that is really weird because if there is Rule One in politics it is to make sure that the voters know that their leaders "care about people like me."

And I would say that the one kind of voter that the current Biden administration shows, by its actions, that it does not care about is the ordinary middle-class voter, the sort of voter that is easily seduced by politicians like Trump.

Has the Democratic Party just flat given up on voters like that? Are they completely consumed by pandering to their own base? Have they developed a new strategy where ordinary middle-class Americans are the new Other that all good people oppose, because racist-sexist-homophobe?

I naturally assume that the Democratic leaders and their acolytes know what they are doing, and that there is a deep cunning in what they are doing.

But what if they are not cunning? What if they are blindly reacting to the day's events and hitting out blindly because they really don't know what they are doing?

Surely, that can't be the case. Can it?

Straight White Males Not Going to College

I'm sure we've all seen the latest on college entrants, that girls are in the majority and white males are not signing up, not much. From The Wall Street Journal:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. 

And working-class white males are the cause of the decline.

In The American Spectator Scott McKay goes into details of what is wrong, including wokism and female teachers all the way through that tend to regard boys as "bad girls who need to be managed." And there is power.

Drunk on the power and money their predecessors left them, and unfettered by any accountability that politicians (at state schools) and donors should have imposed on them, they decided a couple of decades ago that they were to be the molders of a brand new kind of American. 

 But do you know? I think that there is less here than meets the eye.

I don't think that anyone is really thinking about what they are doing. They are just picking up the Zeitgeist and going with it.

If you read a book by any liberal, what jumps off the page is the assumption that the way of liberals, as of right now in 2021, is the eternal way of the Universe. It is not that other ways are marginalized; it is just that nothing exists except the liberal way.

Now occasionally someone has a strategic idea in education, like Horace Mann and the common school. He had been to Germany and liked the system there, and also, as an upper-class Transcendentalist, liked the idea of educated kids away from the middle-class Puritanism and Catholicism of their parents.

Then, at the turn of the 20th century, leading minds thought that children should be educated in high school to be good factory workers.

And then people thought that women should be educated just like men.

And then, after World War II and the GI Bill, people thought that everyone should go to college.

Then, after the Civil Rights era, people thought that minorities should go to college.

Now, with the Woke Era, we have everything being turned into a Woke Revival.

And, because almost all education is non-profit, government-funded, we have the problem of all government programs that they are loot and plunder for the supporters and you can never reform them.

I think that we should think of education more as if it is the US in Afghanistan. Where, it turns out, we have been teaching young girls how to be modern 21st century woke feminists. Hoo boy. In other words, the people in charge have No Idea.

Personally, I think that the sooner education crashes and burns the better. Then we can build an emergent system, driven by the needs and the culture and the beliefs of each of us, based on home-schooling and pod schools and micro schools, parental authority, child labor connected to a new apprenticeship system paid for by corporations, men teaching boys, and on and on.

But not run by the government: run instead by parents.

Because the way of the centrally organized top-down culture of ruling-class orthodoxy is the way of disaster -- don't you think Joey S, and Mao Z.D.?

As we will soon find out.

Political Chemistry: Organic and Inorganic

Over the last few years a few things have surprised me on the politics front. Why? Because they didn't look like they were ruling-class approved. 

What am I talking about? I am talking about the Tea Party that emerged in early 2009 in response to a call by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party". Although La Wik wants us to believe that it was a Republican Party thing, my recollection is that it basically confused the GOP bigwigs. And Nancy Pelosi called it out as "AstroTurf," because that's the only politics she knows.

So I say that the Tea Party was "organic;" it was an emergent phenomenon that came out of the natural and organic opposition of ordinary middle-class Americans to the Obama administration's agenda.

But most US politics is "inorganic." It is top-down, regime-approved and supported. You know, like Black Lives Matter.

I'd say that Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades are "organic." They were organized, at least originally, by Trump supporters on Facebook. Now, in the last week, we have Eff Biden chants at college football games. And we have angry moms confronting President Biden at photo-ops. I suspect that these are populist, spontaneous, "organic" eruptions, not GOP-planned and executed.

And I suspect that the January 6 Capitol Hill Riot was mostly organic. I suspect there was quite a bit of FBI informants and lefty activists egging the rioters on. But the guy with the fur cap, the guy lounging at Nancy Pelosi's desk: you would never see a left-wing protest like that. Instead, you would see earnest 20-something women in the House Chamber with placards and a chant.

Any time you see something called a "riot" it is not regime-approved: probably organic. Any time you see something called a "peaceful protest" or even a "mostly peaceful protest" it is regime-approved: probably inorganic.

The point is, of course, that ruling-class supporters all think that the regime-approved street action is the genuine Voice of the People: the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. But if you are not a regime supporter then you see fake everywhere you look.

I was to a neighborhood dinner a few nights ago and one of the women there had the liberal party line on everything. She couldn't understand how all of a sudden we were all "divided."

Of course. You wouldn't understand if you lived in the ruling-class bubble. But if you were a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, and you believe the following:

1. Politics is division
2. Government is war plus loot and plunder
3. There is no such thing as justice, only injustice

Then you would think that people who have been excluded from the councils of power, people who are on the losing end of government, would very possibly think that the system was rigged against them, and start to organize.

Very likely these people would not be organized by some ruling-class clique, because whether you are Inner Party or Outer Party you wouldn't really know or care what the "outs" were experiencing. As in The Hunger Games, life is good in the Capitol.

My point is that if you are a ruling class worth your salt you have your ear to the ground and you make adjustments to keep the natives from getting restless.

But, it seems to me, our present ruling class doesn't know, or doesn't care, that the natives are restless. Maybe it is because internal Inner Party politics is so fraught right now that the current Inner Party leaders are running scared: they are reacting to the lefty extremists because they fear for their jobs and power. E.g., fixing the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination to keep Bernie Sanders from winning.

All I am saying here is that my ear is tuned to sounds of "organic" spontaneous eruptions from ordinary middle-class Americans.

And I think the volume turned up a notch in the last week or so with the Eff Biden chants at college football games and the angry folks raining on President Biden's photo-ops.

To be continued.