I touched on the unexpected ability of US and Soviet authorities to avoid destroying the planet in my first post on Denethor. I’m no expert on international relations and military strategy, so it’s gratifying to see that someone who is an expert has done the research and backs up my suspicion that it was, first, the intended consequence of the policies and plans of the leadership and, second, something that J.R.R. Tolkien would not have had any reason to expect.

Bruno Tertrais (who just published a book entitled The Backlash of History or maybe “the revenge”; either way, yikes!) writes in the Washington Quarterly that, “Most strategists of the 1960s would be stunned to hear that as of 2017, there still has yet to be another nuclear use in anger,” and goes on to explain why that wasn’t just coincidence.  It was a consequence of the procedures put in place to control nuclear weapons, and the extreme seriousness with which the leaders of the nuclear-armed countries took their jobs.

So, as Stephen Winter and I ended up agreeing, Denethor was right all along.

This was a bad year in a lot of ways.  Among the wars, crimes, and self-inflicted sucking chest wounds of politics, an unnaturally large number of artists died, some before their time.  The artists got a great deal of the attention. I think that’s because we all had them in common. We all have our own sets of events, but losing David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds (et depressing cetera) is in the overlap of the giant Venn diagram. Good riddance, 2016.

But I’d like to close out the year by celebrating two people who died this year, whose books taught me a lot.  No tragedy here; their combined age was 174.  But I thought about them today, and they match the theme of this blog perfectly.

Sidney Drell was a brilliant physicist.  His Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Fields, both written with James Bjorken, were the texts that really cracked quantum field theory open for me.  Writing well about quantum field theory is hard.  With most authors, by chapter 3 I give up on the words and just read the equations.  Bjorken and Drell’s books go the other direction.  Reading the words was good enough that I could figure out the equations for myself.  Prof. Drell also became one of the leading US authorities on national security, leading a group called JASON. When I got my first job after leaving academe in 1990, all the books I needed weren’t in my building; they were in the JASON library.  Seeing Sidney Drell’s name there was the only familiar thing about that job.

Umberto Eco was Umberto Eco.  How on earth a semiotician became a celebrity is a thing at which I’ll always marvel.  A friend who’s better at reading than I am gave me a copy of The Name of the Rose when I was in college.  The way Eco wove his erudition seamlessly into a page-turner plot was a new experience for me, and I started digging up all the other works by him I could find.  From his literary criticism I learned a new way to look at books, after which I finally “got” what so many twentieth-century authors were doing with non-linear flows of time.  And then, he published Foucault’s Pendulum.  That book was practically written for me and my friends. There might have been a few half-drunken dramatic readings from it at various parties over the years (eyewitness accounts differ).  And Belbo’s disquisition on the types of people in the world let me finally come out of the closet and embrace my identity as a Moron.

So adieu, maîtres. This wouldn’t be the same blog without you.

Brad DeLong has a great post about regional economic revitalization that’s attracting a lot of attention across the Web.  He’s responding to an article by Noah Smith that looks at the woes of the Rust Belt and presents four ideas for what can be done about them.  Prof. DeLong is less sanguine.  He sees real obstacles to any kind of government redistribution, and from conversations I’ve had with the demographic group in question (aka “my family”), he’s probably right.  But I think I have an idea for this one.

I’m already on the record with one idea for job growth, which was aimed at humanities scholars.  They’re not the primary problem, though.  The big need for employment in the USA these days is among people who didn’t finish college.  The older generations are particularly precarious.  Once we get into our fifties, we just don’t adapt as fast as we used to, so the turbulent pace of the new economy can be a strain.

As Lyman Stone has pointed out [1], and everyone else seems to agree, universities are the key to economic growth in this century, but the people we’re interested in aren’t to be found in universities. How do we bridge the gap between the solution and the people who need it?  The traditional response from the government has been to re-train and re-educate workers in new technology.  That hasn’t worked so well, so it’s time to turn it sideways.

My answer is not quite “technology”, it’s τεχνόω, to instruct in an art. We need universities to create institutions for the preservation of twentieth-century τέχνη.  Those old manufacturing workers, sheet-metal-benders, caregivers, farmers, weavers, etc. know a lot of things that are in danger of disappearing because they’re not in a Web-accessible format. [2]

Interlude:  Just this once, I’ll bring in an example from my day job.  The separation that air traffic controllers maintain between aircraft en route has to be at least five nautical miles.  Why five?  There are several likely explanations, but the truth is that nobody knows. It was set in an era when investigations weren’t formalized like they are today.  Those old controllers, long gone now, tried a lot of things and this one works so nobody’s changed it.  Let’s never forget important knowledge like that again!

The workers for whom the new economy has no place shouldn’t be students of these new institutes, they should be staff. I imagine them as the shop-floor equivalent of Senior Fellows at think tanks. That type of position always seems to be available for high-ranking political figures when their terms are up. Why just them? Frankly, society would derive value from listening to my father-in-law explain how to re-use waste heat from a fireplace to make a water heater more efficient, just as it does from former Secretaries of Whatever writing op-eds about their policies. [3]

The other half of the staff would be young people who are familiar with the most-recent means of mass communication via the Internet.  This Institute would be dedicated to the knowledge of people who will never write a book, and perhaps their knowledge is better suited to audio, video, or HTML5 animation anyway.  The younger half of the staff will get everything into a transmissible format, properly cross-linked, human- and AI-readable.  On top of all this newly-available knowledge, a superstructure of journals, peer review, synthesis, and scholarly progress can be erected in the usual manner.

Good universities that can sponsor these institutes exist in all fifty states.  Institutes like this would naturally be dispersed, and might even be naturally concentrated in areas forsaken by the flashier parts of the economy.  The Institute for Preservation of Technology doesn’t have to suffer from the negative reactions big government gets in rust-belt America, because it isn’t a “jobs program”.  It isn’t a handout. It would create important jobs that can’t be performed by anyone else. It would give proper respect to the people who kept the USA running for half a century, making sure that they and their hard work are remembered.

[1] Readers of Idiosophy already know Lyman Stone from his opus on Westeros.
[2] We saw this during the mobilization to prevent the Y2K bug from destroying civilization.  Old COBOL programmers were called out of retirement because much that once was, is lost.
[3] My father-in-law’s name is Frank.

Writing from his perch above the Ice Bay of Forochel, Brenton has a proposal for ordinary people to sponsor humanities scholars, with expenditures beginning at zero dollars. As a good blog post should, it provoked a swift series of associations in my mind.

1. Cool! I can be a Renaissance prince!
2. No, wait, I would hate that.
3. This is what Patreon and other crowdfunding sites are for. This is more personal, but the dollar figures will be much smaller.
4. Thinking back to my days as an impecunious scholar, some of these would embarrass the daylight out of me.
5. In a modern liberal democracy, we’re supposed to set up public organizations to do the things that used to rely on princely patronage. That solves the stabby/poisonous parts of #2 and replaces the embarrassment in #4 with the tedium of filling out forms. (Much better.)

We’ve built things like the National Endowment for the Humanities here in the U.S. of A., but they’re chronically under-funded.  The checkbook is under the control of people who want the agency to be as small as they can make it.  But that point connected me to something else I think a lot about.

Economic interlude

Depressing though it is these days, I stay abreast of macroeconomics.  Since the financial crisis of 2008, the fundamental problem in the developed world has been that all the rich people want to sit on their money. The economy is sluggish because the demand for money is so high that the demand for everything else is too low, so people don’t have work. The interest rates that would re-launch economic growth (according to most models) are less than zero. But that’s not generally possible, so holding cash is better than investing it.

Now here’s where things get weird: in conditions like this, the way to fix the problem of too much demand for money is to print more money. And then you give it away to people. In some people’s imaginations, you just drop cash out of helicopters, but perhaps we can think of something less contusive. With a lot more money sloshing around the economy, that will generate some inflation, which is exactly what we need. The rich people (which includes sovereign wealth funds from oil-producing countries) will see their bank accounts losing value, so they’ll look for things to spend it on before it diminishes. That will re-launch demand, and put everyone back to work.

We’ve even gotten to the point that the old idea of the Universal Basic Income is coming to life again. It differs from helicopter money only because it’s a fiscal program initiated by the legislature, not a monetary program run from the Central Bank.

Resuming

What does this have to do with patronage? (Oh yes, patronage. This post was about patronage, wasn’t it?) Universal Basic Income is probably a bridge too far in our current north-atlantic superculture. I’d propose instead a Universal Research Fellowship program. A grant of (I don’t know; I’ll pull a number from Brenton’s post) $25,000 per annum for anyone who wants to conduct research. Recipients would have to submit a prospectus that’s good enough to pass electronic review (which only checks for plagiarism), and produce an annual paper in the public domain.

Benefits: relaunching the economy; removing a bunch of people from jobs they hate; employing rafts of detectives to track the free-for-all in identity fraud; new golden age of the humanities.

Disadvantages: Brenton’s call to action has the advantage that it’s something that an individual can do, so it’ll probably happen much sooner than my idea. But once the robots take all the manufacturing jobs, collective action will be the only solution big enough to match the problem.