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Hope it’s a good one for you, whether you celebrate or not. If it’s miserable, my condolences and a virtual hug. Life is often ass, may it be better for you soon.
I never fully bought into the consensus ideas of what constitutes a successful life. Money, power, 2.3 kids, a house in the burbs.
I was an only child and I spent a lot of time around adults as a kid, especially before my teens. Most of them were spending their lives doing things they wouldn’t have done if they didn’t need money, and most of them didn’t seem happy—in some cases happy about their work, in other cases happy about their lives.
I grew up, went to work because I had to eat and keep a roof over my head and heat on in Canadian winters, and I didn’t find much to recommend itself in most jobs. Half the time the work didn’t need to be done, the rest of the time it did need to be done, but we were stopped from doing it properly due to management wanting to increase profits, and often what they did would only increase profits in the short run and hurt them in the long run while alienating customers and employees.
I could have respected my job in life insurance if we’d actually been looking out for those we insured more. There were a few old school underwriters left who did, and I could see my employer had once been run honorably, but by the time I got there all that remained were a few guttering embers. A lot of people got rich under the new regime, but long term profitability went down. (Doing good isn’t always stupid even in terms of greed.)
But the bottom line really was “would I do this if I didn’t need the money?” The only jobs I ever had where that was somewhat true were being the managing editor at FireDogLake and the Agonist, and writing this blog, though even in those three cases I’d have done less if I didn’t need the money.
“I worked all my life and most of it I would never have done if I didn’t want or need more money” doesn’t seem like success to me. (I’m talking only for myself. If it does to you, great. There’s certainly honor in providing for one’s family even in a job one hates, for example.)
There’s a lot of chatter about falling fertility rates and lots of pro-family propaganda these days. I’m not anti-family or pro-family, both stances seem absurd to me. I’m pro-good families and anti-bad families and I’ve sure seen plenty of people have children who fucked their kids up beyond belief and none of them seemed happy in their family life. “I produced 2.3 fucked up kids and was miserable almost all the time” doesn’t smell like success to me. Again, talking only for myself. If it does for you, awesome.
Then there’s power. It seems, in the West, that almost everyone who has power does more evil than good. Corporate or political, this is true. I’m hard pressed to think that “I became President of the US and bombed five countries and killed a million people and made another 5 million homeless in an unnecessary war justified by lies” is success. Or it’s not any success I want and if it’s a success you want, you’re human filth.
Of course, the power is a Western issue (and Africa and a lot of other places, but especially the West in this time period). I have issues with Xi, but I think he can legitimately claim that he uses his power more for good, especially for the Chinese, than evil. FDR could have said something similar. But right now power in the West is poison. Even people like Bernie Sanders and AOC have voted to send Israel weapons while they commit genocide.
I do think that getting power and then doing more good with it than harm is admirable and a life worth living. So I guess there’s that.
But in the end we all share the same fate: death. All the money, all the power, all the wealth, even our families will be lost. I’ve been close to death more than once, a whisper away, and I live my life in the knowledge that everything I have here, in this life, I will one day lose. Perhaps my knowledge is an exception, perhaps I will be reunited with people I love at some point. Perhaps. But for sure the money and power and possessions are all lost.
I don’t have any real answers. I’ve tried, personally, to live a life where I spend as much of my time doing what I want to do as possible, and not what someone else wants me to do. I’ve tried, not always successfully, not to hurt people except to protect others from them and to be kind, because life is often shit and I don’t like it when others make life worse for me and do like it when people are kind to me. I’ve tried to speak the truth as best I can, hoping that the truth is something good. Obviously I’ve failed at times, truth being a slippery thing.
I don’t view myself as successful or as a failure (though I certainly thought of myself as a failure for years). Just as someone stumbling around, trying to live a life I like more than I hate and to not do more harm than good. If I die and can look back and think “yeah, I more or less enjoyed a lot of that and helped more people than I hurt” then I’ll consider my life a success no matter the scale or the stage.
But thank God I never bought fully into what society considers success. The idea of being Obama or Trump or Musk or Zuckerberg or most executives I’ve ever met is nauseating.
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Which is saying something, because worthless has been in charge of the West for generations. There are no leaders in charge of any major Western country who aren’t functionally morons.
Europe is run by utter idiots who want war with Russia, refuse to acknowledge that Ukraine is losing, are actively speeding up their loss of industry and imagine they can bully China and think America was their friend before Trump.
Trump is the stupidest president of my lifetime. No one else even comes close. Reagan with Alzheimers was better. Congress is a sewer of morons. Every major American politician, even AOC and Bernie, are functionally psychopaths. (Yes, both Bernie and AOC have repeatedly voted to send more money and weapons to Israel.)
Britain’s Starmer is the stupidest PM of my lifetimes and stunningly incompetent and evil. Yes, his job is to make rich people richer and suck off Netanyahu, but a competent pol would do that without destroying Labour as a party.
Macron has accomplished nothing for France except to make it weaker and its citizens poorer. Germany’s government is presiding over the destruction of a German industrial base that is 150 years old and one of the greatest in the world: the very foundation of Germany’s power and affluence.
Australia is acting as if America is more important to them than China with a military buildup, which is insane since Australia’s future is with China, or it has no future. Japan is antagonizing China, again, insane, without a serious plan. Either make nice or try and get nukes, there are no other paths.
Everyone is destroying free speech to symp for a genocide. Everyone is immiserating their own populations, setting up serious future political instability.
The US is all-in on AI, spending trillions it does not have, driving up energy prices, and creating a larger more concentrated bubble than the real-estate bubble which caused the 2008 crash. If AI is everything they say, it will utterly destroy the US economy by replacing 30% of workers, and if it isn’t, it’ll never pay back all the resources spent. Plus China will win the AI race anyway, since no one with sense will pay for a proprietary model when Chinese open source models are about as good and mean you can’t suddenly be hit with a massive price increase or rate restrictions.
Politicians are either ignoring climate change and doubling down on fossil fuels (which are more expensive than solar) or using climate change as an excuse to immiserate their own people.
Britain is destroying their own farmers.
Meanwhile morons are constantly whining about fertility rates when humanity is in population overshoot so severe that it is causing the second fastest great extinction in Earth’s history. Most countries would be better off with fewer people, but because they don’t know how to stabilize an economy whose population isn’t always growing leaders and their intellectual dupes are panicking.
Only China is handling this with some grace, but they’re not Western. They’re trying to increase fertility somewhat but have accepted there will be population decreases and are moving hard on robotics to care for an aging population and reduce the need for workers.
There isn’t a single major challenge that the West is facing that our leaders are not actively making worse, not better. Not a single one. It’s extraordinary. Even Nixon managed to sign Clean Air and Water Act and to pivot on China. Reagan reduced nuclear weapons. Clinton made everything worse long-term, but was able to manage the economy during his Presidency, at least, so that it felt good to ordinary people, including pushing oil prices under $20/barrel. George Bush Sr. managed the collapse of the USSR with grace. Biden had good anti-trust policy and half decent industrial policy. Trump has done nothing good of significance. Nothing. Even when he has a good idea (tariffs, reduction in H1-B Visas) he fucks it up completely because he can’t execute and has the attention span of a coked up flea.
This reminds me of the Weimar Republic or the late Roman Empire. Most things can be fixed in principle: in theory. Nothing can be fixed in practice because leadership is beyond corrupt and incompetent, high on their own wealth and convinced they are the masters of universe and that reality is what they want it to be.
Prepare, if you’re in the West. By all means feel free to keep working at the politics, but don’t count on it. Instead prepare as individuals and groups. Government isn’t going to save you, not in the West. Your leaders are the number one danger to you, more than any outsider, “terrorist” or “foreign enemy.” Treat them as such, and protect yourselves from them.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 21, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Harold Meyerson, December 03, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…As Emma Janssen has reported in these pages, marketers are going where the money is, like bank robber Willie Sutton. First-class and business-seat travel on the airlines is booming, so much so that seating arrangements on Delta and United are being reconfigured to create more room for the affluent, while coach seats are going unfilled and “discount” airlines struggle. Revenues are up 3 percent this year at the Ritz-Carltons, the Four Seasons, and other luxury hotels, yet down by 3 percent at economy hotels. And when it comes to life’s biggest purchase—a home—the median age of first-time buyers reached 40 this year, an all-time high according to the National Association of Realtors….
Life in the nonaffluent nation is getting harder. According to a Brookings Institution analysis from last year, 43 percent of American families don’t earn enough to pay for housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation; every week, they must juggle which to pay and which not to pay. Among Black and Latino families, those figures rise to 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively….
What would America look like if the gap between worker pay and productivity hadn’t opened? A RAND Corporation study from earlier this year found that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received about 67 percent of all taxable income in 1975. In 2019, the last year for which this data was available, they received 46.8 percent. Had that bottom 90 percent continued during the past half-century to make the same share of the national income they’d had in 1975, RAND calculates that by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion. Just in the year 2023, they would have made an additional $3.9 trillion. As the size of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. workforce is roughly 140 million people, that means that the average earner would have made about $28,000 more in 2023 than they actually did.
Where have all those missing $28,000 paychecks gone? Well, our nation was home to 1,135 billionaires this year, whose aggregate net worth in 2024 came to a cozy $5.7 trillion. That’s $1.8 trillion more than what it would take to cut 140 million $28,000 paychecks.…
[TW: Meyerson then summarizes the responsibility of Ronald Reagan for this economic devastation, enumerates the specific policy changes Reagan implemented, and seven policy changes needed to reverse this descent and begin to rebuild the US economy and restore general widely shared prosperity.]
The Housing Crisis Is A Democracy Crisis
Evelyn Quartz, Dec 16, 2025 [The Lever]
…French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, among the young nation’s first chroniclers, came to believe that Americans’ propensity to form civic associations created the lasting bonds that were the country’s real defense against tyranny. Without communal ties and shared responsibilities, Tocqueville feared individuals would fall prey to paternalistic “soft despotism,” in which top-down state administration replaces self-government.
In such an arrangement, he wrote, “Each [citizen], living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest… he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”
In 2025, both Jefferson’s and Tocqueville’s warnings could not be more relevant. An all-powerful corporate state has robbed ordinary citizens of the ability to put down roots. Without a stable, affordable place to live, civic associations, and the bulwark they provide against tyranny, wither away. The housing crisis is thus a democracy crisis….
America’s housing stock — once supported by strong public initiatives like the New Deal housing programs — was steadily financialized with the help of policymakers. Under the rhetoric of “individual choice” and the rise of neoliberal economics, public housing programs increasingly subsidized the private market.
The clearest example of this is the federal Section 8 voucher program, launched in 1974. The program required qualifying tenants to redeem affordable-housing vouchers in the private housing market. This allowed policymakers to back away from bold investments in public housing and hand responsibility instead to private actors.
In 2008, the neoliberal outsourcing of the housing market to Wall Street imploded the global financial system. As a result, millions of Americans lost their homes and were driven deeper into financial instability, as banks and private equity firms tightened their control over American life.
President Barack Obama inherited a collapsing economy, much as Roosevelt had seven decades prior. But instead of rescuing the common citizen — a mission central to Roosevelt’s response — Obama bailed out banking executives while offering struggling homeowners technocratic private-sector solutions like the Home Affordable Modification Program, which sought to modify loans rather than provide direct relief.
As a result, private equity giants subsequently cashed in on the financial crisis by buying up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes to rent out for profit.
Now, instead of helping more people become rooted in their communities, housing is dominated by rentier capitalism: a system in which homes are treated not as places to own, nor to participate in democratic life, but as financial assets. Today, a handful of consolidated private landlords dominate the rental market. The largest, Greystar Real Estate Partners, manages nearly a million rental units in the United States and was sued by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for allegedly burdening tenants with hidden junk fees…
A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance
Cory Doctorow, 18 Dec 2025 [Pluralistic]
How Capitalism Replaced America
[Murtaza Hussain, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
Why economic policy matters for the Greens
Richard Murphy, December 15, 2025 [Funding the Future]
… This results, first, in their inability to explain the role of money, tax, borrowing, and the whole fiscal management cycle that lies at the core of macroeconomics, and second, in their failure to confront how economic power is exercised in modern economies, which confrontation is inevitably required to deliver the green transition we need….
The green transition, on which I have campaigned for a long time, will not be delivered by good intentions, ethical markets, or better pricing signals alone. It will only be delivered when political movements are willing to challenge the power of finance and markets directly, together with the flawed ideas on which their supposed power is based. And that cannot be done without understanding the role of money creation and the state’s capacity to use it for public purposes.
The problem is not that the Greens care too little about economics. It is that too many of them might accept an economic framing that treats markets as the ultimate arbiters of what is possible. Within that potential framing, government is cast as financially constrained, dependent on private capital, and permanently at risk of market punishment. As a result, green ambition could be trimmed to what markets will tolerate, not what climate science demands, and that is how radicalism is quietly neutralised, as I fear might be possible if those whom I am challenging get their way.
If you accept that the state must first persuade or appease financial markets before it can act, then the green transition is already compromised. Large-scale public investment becomes conditional. Industrial strategy becomes hesitant. Public ownership becomes politically “difficult”. And climate action is reduced to nudging private behaviour rather than reshaping the economy….
Markets do not lead transitions that undermine their own profitability. They resist them. That resistance can only be overcome by a state willing to act decisively: investing directly, owning strategically, regulating firmly, and accepting that public purpose must take precedence over private return. But that requires abandoning the idea that the state must ask permission from capital before it acts….
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A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)
Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.
We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.
We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.
The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”
It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)
Many, many more.
They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.
There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)
China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.
It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.
And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.
And in that is a genuine hope.
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What the Ivies have tended towards for generations now are “super conformers” — straight As and spent all their time in adult run extra-curriculars. People who spent all their time doing what authority wants. But in the past, they did seek out a few of the very smartest, too.
But, with the triumphal fall of the USSR and the “End of History” the Ivies decided that the system no longer needed smart people and stopped looking for them, they wanted nothing but super-conformers. But every system needs some smart people who aren’t entirely conformist.
This was anecdotal but fit everything I was seeing. Now here’s another data point:
This tracks my interactions with Ivy League grads exactly. Some of the older ones are brilliant, but anyone younger than their later 40s is a drone. Perhaps an intelligent drone, but a drone nonetheless.
People who are super conformers can’t actually be good analysts or creatives, because they can’t think original thoughts or challenge consensus views. And if you can’t do that, you can’t do paradigm changing real things or say “uh, boss, what we’re doing won’t work.”
American elites didn’t want any non-conformists any more. They wanted smart yes-men. So they lost Russia and sold their military, technological and industrial lead to China. They got filthy rich in exchange, in dollars that in 20 years won’t buy anything that matters internationally, leaving them as the equivalent of rich Indians in 1990. Yeah, you have servants and gold toilets and a mansion, but you run a country that doesn’t actually matter, and outside your gilded circle your society is a garbage dump. (If you visited India in those years you know that’s barely a metaphor. It’s just a description.)
What I have seen over and over again thru my adult life is that being right against the consensus is a career killer. (It sure did nothing for my career, but I’ve seen it in plenty of cases so this isn’t just “Ian is a bitter failure!” Heh.) I remember a study looking at media pundits who got the Iraq war right: people in the system already—fired, laid off or never promoted again. Pundits who got it wrong, but with the consensus? Their careers did well, thanks.
Incentives like this are picked up on quickly. You want everyone to be wrong with the elite consensus? You’ll get it! (See Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the centrist pundit versions.)
And this is just as true in most corporations. Look at all the morons jumping on the AI train. Spending trillions rather than just waiting and buying the tech once it’s clear which models work (and probably just using a Chinese open source model.)
Now, of course, this “be wrong with the crowd” incentive has always been most of the case in the sense that being wrong against the crowd would get you fired, and being wrong with the crowd wouldn’t usually hurt your career. But there was a time when the mavericks who were right against the crowd were rewarded and glorified, and that mattered.
Post collapse of the USSR and during the “End of History” era (Fukuyama is the poster boy for “got everything wrong but said what elites wanted to hear so was rewarded far beyond his merits”) elites didn’t want to hear anything but how everything they produced, including their shit, smelled like roses. There was no competition, so they didn’t have to be competent or care about results.
Or so they thought. Turns out that Russia wasn’t down permanently, just for a generation or two, and that China was real competition, but being smart they followed Deng’s prescription “Hide your strength, bide your time” and sucked up to American elites, whispering “send us your industry and we’ll make you rich and you won’t have to put up with uppity American workers and unions!”
American elites got what they wanted. The pure peace of being able to smash anyone who contradicted them, the joy of forcing workers to work for less and less and shut the fuck up about wanting to share in profits, vast wealth, plus two generations of courtiers who were entirely yes men, telling them how wonderful they were. “Oh no my lord, your shit smells like lilacs! Yes my lord, I’d love to lick it up, it tastes like bacon!”
China got what it wanted: the tech and industrial lead and the end of American hegemony.
No leader worth his salt doesn’t have a few people around him saying “you know, Jack, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
It’s been a long time since America had any leaders worth their salt.
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