Where does a liberal go from here? That's what Noah Smith asks in his latest post. My advice: hopefully they grow up and change.

I have a confession. I used to be a liberal once myself, in the modern sense of Thomas Hill Green, John Maynard Keynes, FDR, and so on. I believed in a generous welfare state, social safety nets, expansionary fiscal policy, and letting markets and capitalists solve most of our problems with a few appropriate regulations to prevent the worst outcomes. To be sure, I still believe in some of these things (though I definitely don't believe capitalists are going to solve our problems anymore), with critical caveats. But then I did something people like Noah Smith have refused to do: I grew up and learned about how the world actually works, so I had a huge shift in perspective. It's an incredible feeling and I urge everyone to try it out. Step outside the giant cocoon of propaganda for the status quo and you will realize that the system is fundamentally corrupt. Markets are rigged by dominant monopolists. The state is allied with giant corporations that all but dictate public policy at will. Capitalism fuels imperial plunder on a global scale that would have made the Roman Empire green with envy. Ecological degradation threatens the very survival of global civilization in the next few centuries. This is not a system that should be reformed. It should be replaced with better alternatives.

Smith laments that things have gone wrong even though apparently we've made so much progress! For example, he cites a throwaway statistic and shows a chart about American poverty rates (as measured through the SPM) declining slightly over the past five decades. But SPM thresholds are fundamentally arbitrary and can be made to say whatever you want about poverty. Why use 83% of total median spending on an arbitrary bundle of goods as the threshold? How does it make sense to exclude a category like healthcare from the threshold? These problems barely scratch the surface of everything that's wrong with the SPM. Sure the SPM is a better indicator than the OPM, no one disputes that. But replacing one terrible indicator with a slightly less terrible indicator doesn't mean we suddenly have a good indicator about poverty! Better metrics of poverty exist and are already being used by various scholars (see the work of Jason Hickel as an example).

Smith talks about what went wrong in America without seriously delving into the systemic crises of the 1970s and the resulting waves of deindustrialization, deunionization, offshoring, and hyperfinancialization that collectively wrecked the American middle class and American society more broadly. Progress has come to a standstill in modern America. Oh sure, you can find legions of meaningless financial indicators that often show the veneer of progress. Real median incomes are up! But let's pay no attention to the fact that it's silly to adjust nominal wages with CPI and pretend you've really figured out someone's purchasing power, since the CPI says nothing about assets, interest costs, and a million other important spending categories. Trying to figure out purchasing power by only accounting for the CPI is like trying to measure the weight of the atmosphere and only considering nitrogen. More reliable biophysical indicators are starting to break down in recent American history. Rates of homeownership actually peaked two decades ago. The typical first-time home buyer today is approaching 40 years old whereas decades ago that buyer was less than 30. Over 40 years ago, the median home used to cost roughly 3 times the median household income. Today the median house costs over 5 times more than the median household income. American life expectancy has stalled over the past decade, even slightly declining. For the first time ever, China recently reached a higher life expectancy than the United States. And the United States now even has a higher suicide rate than Japan. Food insecurity as measured by the USDA has gone from impacting roughly 10% of all households in 2000 to impacting over 13% in recent years. Diabetes affected roughly 5% of the population 40 years ago and affects something like 12--15% of it today. The rate of diabetes among people 65 and older has tripled since 1980, driven both by technological advances that are allowing people to live longer (the good news) but also exacerbated by skyrocketing obesity rates (the bad news). On the vast majority of important biophysical metrics, it's obvious that American life is now getting worse, not better. And the reason why is not a great mystery: the post-war crises in the late 1960s and 1970s shifted the balance of power decisively towards capital, so America has now become little more than a decadent plutocracy: a lawless playground for the rich and a glorified prison for everyone else.

I understand the psychology of people like Steven Pinker and Noah Smith because I was their carbon copy 15 years ago. I used the same kind of evidence, spoke the same kind of language, probably had a similar frame of mind. Poverty is decreasing! People are fighting less! The number of democracies worldwide is growing! Technology will give us all wings and make us immortal! But then I grew up and realized that data and statistics mean nothing if they're biased, incomplete, fraudulent, distorted, and abused or crafted to serve the narratives of the ruling classes. Steven Pinker seriously suggested in one of his books that the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th century China caused 36 million deaths and was, after certain statistical adjustments, the deadliest conflict in human history! But it's total nonsense. As any third-rate scholar of Chinese history can tell you, post-war imperial censuses routinely undercounted the actual Chinese population because the weakened imperial bureaucracy simply couldn't register everyone and avoided fractious regions and localities. The same was true for the Tang government after the An Lushan Rebellion when they released a census with much lower figures than before the rebellion (that census served as the source for Pinker's claim). No one knows the exact number of people that died in the rebellion, but it was almost certainly closer to 1 or 2 million than 36 million! World War II remains the deadliest conflict in history, an eternal reminder to the horrors inflicted in the name of modern civilization.

Computer scientists have a well-known phrase: garbage in, garbage out. If you use garbage data, you're going to reach garbage conclusions about the world. It doesn't matter if you have vast amounts of data. If it's crappy data, it's practically useless. And if you don't have an effective causal framework for the dynamics of the system in question, you're going to misunderstand the significance of any great data that you might have in the first place. I would love to believe that the world is getting better, for the sake of my children and for all of humanity. But we are going in a very dark direction. Humanity is staring at the prospect of total ecological collapse in the next two centuries unless we tame the cancer of unbounded growth at the heart of industrial capitalism. Imperialism is on the march and we are on the precipice of a New Cold War. Technology keeps improving and AI is rolling along, yet somehow billions of people are still poor and struggling. This is not a world that's heading in a good direction. This is a world that could implode at any moment. So where should a liberal go in the face of all this? Back to the drawing board. Away from corporate donations. To the union floors. To a library so they can read something else besides Ezra Klein and Noah Smith. Any and all of these things are better than whatever they've been doing over the past few decades.