“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskey

What if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station [https://www.davidmccloskeybooks.com/london-station], David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the war.

McCloskey [https://www.davidmccloskeybooks.com/] spent eight years as a CIA analyst working on Syria, then a spell at McKinsey, before writing a series of successful spy novels and co-hosting the popular The Rest Is Classified [https://davidmccloskeybooks.com/the-rest-is-classified-1] podcast. The Dallas-based author has also, he admits, become an Anglophile — which hasn’t stopped him giving MI6 what the Brits would call a “good kicking” in London Station.

His returning heroine is Artemis Aphrodite Procter, so named by a father obsessed with Greek mythology and raised on a Florida alligator farm. Described by another of McCloskey’s characters as a competent extremist, she is short, dark, hard-drinking and equally mirthful and menacing. Probably not the type of Yank best suited to a pseudo-diplomatic posting in the capital of the former empire. Although I’m guessing there are many British fellows, both inside and outside MI6, not averse to spying on Ms Artemis Aphrodite Procter.

Further Reading:

• London Station [https://www.davidmccloskeybooks.com/london-station] by David McCloskey (W. W. Norton, September 29, 2026) — his fifth novel, after Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor and The Persian.

• The Rest Is Classified [https://davidmccloskeybooks.com/the-rest-is-classified-1] — the espionage podcast McCloskey co-hosts with the BBC’s Gordon Corera, where he and Gordon Corera have also discussed Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.

• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, a recent guest on this show [https://keenon.substack.com/p/is-london-really-falling?r=ktr9] — the dark-money London that runs in parallel with McCloskey’s subterranean city of espionage.

• Earlier this year on Keen On: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-art-restorer-who-came-in-from?r=ktr9] — the other American spy novelist with a thing for the Brits. 

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       What If We Fell Out With the Brits? McCloskey never expected to set a novel in Britain, for a technical reason: the CIA–MI6 relationship is so institutionalized that it is hard to get the stakes right, and a thriller needs life or death. Then the question arrived — what if we fell out? What if the two services started spying on each other again? That is not fantasy, and the history is the reverse of what most people assume: before the Second World War the British spied on the Americans, broke their ciphers and ran influence campaigns in New York designed to pull the United States into the war. The novel imagines a new administration installing a brash CIA director skeptical of the cousins across the Atlantic, agents on both sides beginning to die, and a thriller that turns into a mole hunt. He is rude about MI6 throughout, which his British friends appear to enjoy — his theory being that Brits are self-deprecating enough to relish being picked on.

•       Classified Journalism. He joined the CIA in 2006 as an undergraduate intern and left in 2014, working almost the whole time on Syria. His description of the job is the best short account of intelligence analysi

London Station: David McCloskey on the CIA, MI6 & the End of the Special Relationship

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth

 

Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher [https://keenon.substack.com/p/eureka-in-silicon-valley?r=ktr9] promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, however, may have already occurred. Not with AI, but with big pharma. At least according to Barry Werth [https://barrywerth.com/] who has spent the last thirty-five years writing about American pharma. Indeed, his new book The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Cures/Barry-Werth/9781668067833], a twentieth century history of big pharma, completes a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule in 1994.

 

When it comes to medical breakthroughs, Barry Werth isn’t particularly optimistic on the AI front. It will add more data to preexisting mountains of data, he warns. And Werth reports that many leading scientific designers of drugs don’t think it will change much. Given, however, the hundreds of billions of dollars now being poured into its ecosystem, what today’s AI revolution does instead is remind you what a real scientific breakthrough costs, both politically and economically.

 

Thus the significance of The Age of Cures, which The New York Times is already recommending [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/books/review/new-recommended-books.html]. In his new history, Werth reminds us that ninety years ago there were almost no drugs for anything. Penicillin was discovered by accident in 1928, and by 1941 there was only enough of it to treat a single London policeman — who began to recover, then died when the supply ran out.

 

Cutting edge technology plus state investment changed everything. The engineer and scientific mandarin Vannevar Bush (the guy who also first imagined the internet) persuaded FDR to fund science publicly without conscripting the scientists. And Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, the same state institution that fathered the Manhattan Project, made penicillin for D-Day its number one priority. Bush then ensured the arrangement continued in peacetime, which it did, for eighty years.

 

According to Werth, both big pharma’s idealism and its now much derided financial ambition were real. George Merck’s famous line about medicine being for people, not for profits, is true — as long as we remember that those profits will follow from life-saving drugs. What broke this virtuous cycle, Werth argues, was the Wall Street short-termism of the greed-is-good Eighties that focused only on quarterly profits. So today, the term Big Pharma is mostly used as an insult. Big Tech moguls like Richard Socher should thus read Barry Werth’s The Age of Cures with particular care.

 

Further Reading:

 

•       The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Age-of-Cures/Barry-Werth/9781668067833] by Barry Werth (Simon & Schuster, September 22, 2026), one of the New York Times’ recommended books this week [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/books/review/new-recommended-books.html] — the third book written, and the first chronologically, in a trilogy that began with The Billion-Dollar Molecule (1994) and continued with The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma (2014).

•       “The system that saved your life is being destroyed” [https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/barry-werth-age-of-cures-book-excerpt/] — Werth’s own excerpt from the book, in Fortune

The Age of Cures: Barry Werth on How Big Pharma Once Saved Your Life

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions [https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/4128a72a-abfd-4910-aaa0-a513ce7e1b6d] and surging yields [https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/stocks-are-defying-surging-bond-yields-heres-what-history-says-could-come-next-7d13bb2d]. While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity.

 

For all their financial geekiness, Robin Wigglesworth [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750210/a-fabulous-debt-by-robin-wigglesworth/] knows that bonds matter. He edits Alphaville, the Financial Times’ splendidly geekish markets blog, and he’s the author of A Fabulous Debt [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750210/a-fabulous-debt-by-robin-wigglesworth/], a new book that tells the “epic” story of how bonds built the modern world. The bond market matters, Wigglesworth reminds us, because when it breaks — as in 1873, 2008 and very nearly in 2020 — then the whole world suffers.

 

So what, exactly, is a bond? Wigglesworth explains that it’s a tradable loan which the Venetians accidentally invented in 1171 to pay for a war with Constantinople. In Venice, it became a forced levy on every citizen, sweetened by its annual 5% interest payments and by the right to sell its paper on the Rialto. From there it runs through Amsterdam with the Dutch East India Company to modern America, where Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was financed by bonds sold by the London merchant bank Baring Brothers — remarkably, while Britain was at war with the France it was paying, and earning Barings what may have been the largest banking fee in history. Then there’s the deliciously named Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor, a bond bad boy who invented an entire country, Poyais, and successfully sold its bonds in London.

 

In spite of the shady MacGregor, the moral of the bond story, Wigglesworth reassures us, is that transparency pays. Britain could borrow more cheaply than its rivals because parliament controlled the purse and published its accounts. Europe’s greatest banker, the London-based Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who brought Prussia, Spain, Russia and the new Latin American republics to the London market after Waterloo, thus cajoled other governments into opening their books to get the same rates. Accountability was, literally, cheaper. And so the modern world — with its leviathan state and the financial muscle to conduct global wars — was born.

 

Does Wigglesworth lose sleep about today’s bond ructions and surging yields? Not exactly. But he is a tad nervous about the fact that tech giants have issued over $500 billion of bonds this year to build data centers. So rather than the feared AI stock market bust, Wigglesworth does raise the more apocalyptic specter of a bond bust. Not an imminent fabulous crisis, he reassures. Not yet, anyway.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Stock Bubbles Don’t Matter. Bond Bubbles Do. Wigglesworth’s opening move reverses the usual hierarchy. Stock market bubbles are mostly inconsequential and sometimes even welcome — we occasionally need people to dream rather than be careful, and to throw money at the hot new thing, because that is when big leaps happen. The dot-com bust is his proof: the American stock market lost half its value from peak to trough, and the recession that followed was among the shortest and shallowest in US history. Credit is the dangerous part. When the bond market breaks bad — 1873, 2008, and very nearly 2020 — it tends to be very painful for the world. The structural reason is asymmet

A Fabulous Debt: Robin Wigglesworth on How Bonds Built the Modern World

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks.

 

It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives of their own. Trump renamed AI as superintelligence.

 

But none of this changed anything. The UN continued its kabuki theater of making global pronouncements without having the power to change even the most local of things. Britain and Australia remained not-great powers with delusions of grandeur. In the autumn of his patriarchy [https://keenon.substack.com/p/trump-has-finally-lost-the-plot?r=ktr9], Trump continued to flail with pathetic powerlessness. And Dario and Sam increasingly seem like bit actors in the unfolding AI drama.

 

So where’s all the power in AI? What’s this week’s real story? In Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjurAWAr_nY] with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which That Was The Week [https://thatwastheweek.com/] publisher Keith Teare called “an interview for the ages,” Huang, the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, reveals himself as the guy running the AI show.

 

The $5 trillion dollar man talks with the quiet authority of the AI headmaster, fearlessly scolding his riotous sixth form. And his most riotous pupils are Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. So, in response to their latest handwringing about AI’s existential threat to humanity, Huang’s message was unambiguous. If you can’t align it, “don’t ship it,” he said of these supposedly humanity-destroying AI products, and if you truly cannot contain your own experiments, “then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”

 

The most revealing part of the Klein interview was about Nvidia’s astonishing economic clout in the AI economy. Huang put his chip manufacturer’s investment in this ecosystem at around $100 billion — larger, as Klein noted, than Joe Biden’s entire CHIPS and Science Act. This guy has serious clout, equivalent to or perhaps even surpassing the US state. He doesn’t waste his time at the UN. He’s not running wannabe great powers like Australia or Britain. He doesn’t play senile semantic games like you-know-who.

 

Huang can lay down the law to Sam and Dario (and Trump) because he doesn’t fear them. As the Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar reveals in a revealing interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI9mGMEaZ8E] this week with Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, Nvidia isn’t dependent on the walled garden innovators at OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither lab actually buys Huang’s hardware — they rent capacity from the cloud companies that do, which makes them tenants rather than customers. Meanwhile the cheaper and maybe even better open weight models now pouring out of China run on the same Nvidia silicon. Whoever wins the AI race, Jensen “Levi Strauss” Huang sells them the chips.

 

So Mr Chips to Sam and Dario: heads you lose, tails I win. Shut up or shut down. That’s what happened this week.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Theatre of the UN. Altman and Amodei chose the Security Council rather than the General Assembly — the biggest forum available, and one with at least some teeth. What they want, in Keith’s reading, is political globalization: a super-state view of AI, with rules set from New York. But AI has already globalized, through the spread of open-source models, and not in a form they like. His analogy is Facebook’s Libra, launched on the condition that every government agree, and dead for exactly that reason. The second motive is liability. The conversation of the past fortnight has moved to who g

And Now For Something Completely Similar: Untangling the Power from the Pretense of Our AI Circus

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch

 

As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/postmodern-patrimonialism-trumps?r=ktr9] and Peter Wehner [https://x.com/Peter_Wehner], who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/opinion/trump-vance-turning-point-minneapolis.html] lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed?

 

Rauch and Wehner note what’s failed and what hasn’t. MAGA’s revolutionary project — the regime change, the campaign against the universities, the idea that America had become Flight 93 — was an attempt to rout liberals from the commanding heights of American culture. At first this conservative Leninism succeeded, with universities and law firms folding in the face of a bullying state. But then civil society reorganized, fought back on the streets and in the courts, and district judges mostly held the line. But while the atmosphere of fear has evaporated, Rauch notes, what Trump has won is the transformation of the American state into a patrimonial form of government. With the complicity of Congress, it’s hard to untangle the state as personal property and as a family business.

 

Wehner’s ethical diagnosis is starker. Coining it as the autumn of the sociopath, he observes sociopathy fused with visible cognitive decline, an old fool with enormous power and fewer people willing to check him. Rather than Trump losing the plot, the plot has lost the doddering patriarch. Forget Venezuela and Cuba. The concluding series in this North American version of The Autumn of the Patriarch will be aired live from La Casa Blanca.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Losing the Plot. The New York Times piece is, Rauch says, consistent with his earlier Atlantic essay on fascism rather than a retreat from it: that piece argued Trump was a fascist type of leader who would probably fail, and this one says the failure has happened. The plot in question is the revolutionary one — the attempt by the people around Trump to rewire American culture from the White House. Wehner’s account of the man is bleaker than the politics. There were guardrails in the first term, Kelly and Mattis among them, and there are far fewer now; what has changed is a fusion of sociopathic tendencies that were always there with a cognitive decline that is obvious to anyone watching. He would update García Márquez’s title to the autumn of the sociopath. And the image that lands: a doddering old fool wandering out of meetings to opine about the ballroom and the White House grass — except that he is a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power, surrounded by advisers who in some cases want to go further than he does.

•       The Part He Won. Rauch is careful not to declare victory: the article spends its first third on what succeeded, and the most important of those elements to Trump personally is patrimonialism — the organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That is how he runs the presidency, the Justice Department, trade policy, the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington, with a great deal of complicity from Congress. Why did the Republicans fold? Three reasons, in Rauch’s account: members who defied him were primaried and often beaten; they swim in a media and political environment where ninety per cent of the people they meet judge them by their fidelity to Trump; and they are physically afraid — death threats follow a social-media finge

Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot: Jonathan Rauch & Peter Wehner on the Autumn of the American Patriarch

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz

 

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz [https://dersh.substack.com/] says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You [https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-i-quit-the-dems-and-so-should-you-confessions-of-a-reluctant-republican-alan-dershowitz/630047951fec7903] is both a history of his souring relations with the Democrats and a confessional of a reluctant Republican.

 

A good divorce, the twice-married Dershowitz promises, is better than a bad marriage. Like many angry spouses, he says he’s been forced into the split. Today’s Democratic Party, he claims, is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 before it came to power. He names Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani as antisemites, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew, and insists Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro because Shapiro is a Jew who wouldn’t renounce Zionism.

 

What’s his proof on the Harris claim? What other reason could there be? Dershowitz claims. Besides, even if Israel vanished as an issue tomorrow, he says he still couldn’t go back to the failed marriage, because the Dems have abandoned what he calls “meritocracy.”

 

At 88, Dershowitz is perhaps a little more self-reflective than he was in his legal pomp. In conclusion, I ask him to summarize himself in a word. “Proudly-Jewish,” he says, before adding “never-boring.” We can all agree on that, if perhaps little else.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Good Divorce. Dershowitz frames his departure as liberation rather than loss: a good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and he was thrown out, he says, much as Ronald Reagan was. The loyalty he is breaking runs deep — he first voted for John F. Kennedy, defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Senator Alan Cranston, and campaigned for Democrats for most of his adult life. He describes himself now as a convert, and converts, he notes, are the most fervent. What he wants is not the suffering of Democrats — his wife, children and much of his family remain in the party — but their defeat: he does not want them running the House or the Senate, and names AOC and Abdul El-Sayed as people he does not want chairing committees. He first went independent, then concluded that independence wasn’t enough, which is how a lifelong liberal became, in the book’s subtitle, a reluctant Republican — or, as Andrew put it, an angry spouse who says he was forced into the split. President Trump, he notes, endorsed the book.

•       The Charge. The hour’s most incendiary material, and it should be read as his claims rather than as established fact. Dershowitz argues the Democratic Party is closer than any political party in modern American history to what the Nazi Party was in 1932 — specifically 1932, he stresses, not 1935: Jews feeling unsafe at universities, Jews losing jobs, an obsession with the nation-state of the Jewish people. He names El-Sayed and Mamdani as antisemites, says he does not believe Mamdani or his family like Jews, calls Bernie Sanders a self-hating Jew and a hypocrite, and says Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like Jews. His central political claim: no Jew perceived as pro-Israel can now win a Democratic primary, and no Jew will be nominated for president — which is why, in his telling, Kamala Harris passed over Josh Shapiro, a choice he says cost her Pennsylvania and possibly the election. Andrew asked how he could know that. “What other reason could there be?” was the answer, and Andre

Proudly-Jewish & Never-Boring: Alan Dershowitz on His Divorce from the Democratic Party

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher

 

Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-socher/the-eureka-machine/9781541705708/] was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-socher/the-eureka-machine/9781541705708/], which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

 

The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.

 

So what about the imminent apocalypse feared by the AI pessimists? Socher patiently dismantles the doom scenarios — everything from the paperclip machine that somehow never notices nobody is buying paperclips, to the engineered virus that would need a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein, to the robot factory with magical supply chains. Rather than an AI doomsday, he promises, we are only a few years away from the most profound scientific revolution in human history. Richard Socher better get some sleep now. Apocalypse or Renaissance, the AI maven is going to be seriously busy in the future.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Century in a Decade. Socher’s thesis is that the AI era will rhyme with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution together, compressing a century of scientific breakthroughs into the next ten years. His analogy for how: AI is to biology what calculus was to physics — we understand one neuron and one synapse well, and lose the thread when billions act together, which is exactly the kind of complex system AI can model. The examples are concrete rather than visionary: bacteria engineered to eat plastics and then die when the plastic runs out; new battery materials already being discovered; plasma balanced inside tokamak fusion reactors; more efficient solar panels; and the precursors, he says, of cures for particular cancers. He also makes an equality argument that he thinks philosophers and politicians have missed — the multibillionaire and the middle-class teenager carry the same phone, and most goods still bottlenecked on intelligence will follow. And science, he notes, is one of the rare industries where everyone agrees the goal is to maximize output rather than employment: nobody ever marched for more jobs in cancer research.

•       Recursive. The new company, fewer than thirty people and valued at more than $4 billion, exists to automate the scientific method itself — ideation, implementation, validation — starting with the science of AI, hence the name. Andrew’s response: “Couldn’t you be a bit more ambitious, Richard?” Socher’s framing is a history of abstraction layers: computing has climbed from assembler to C++ to Java to Python and now to English, so everyone can program — and the next layer up is the scientific method. It works best where results can be formally verified, in software and mathematics, and gets harder in large physical systems with long time horizons. His pitch to scientists is that every researcher has a long list of experiments they will never get to: this is, in his phrase, a cheat code for science. On the n

Eureka in Silicon Valley! Richard Socher on Why AI Will Unlock a New Scientific Renaissance

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape

 

Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen [https://keenon.substack.com/p/when-america-broke-up?r=ktr9] to Stephen Marche [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2036-stephen-marche-author-of-the-next-civil/id1448694012?i=1000652886464]. Today’s guest Robert Pape [https://thenewpress.org/books/our-own-worst-enemies/] has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks rather than the next ten years. In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies [https://thenewpress.org/books/our-own-worst-enemies/], Pape argues that tens of millions of Americans, on both left and right, now support political violence.

 

When it comes to an American age of violent populism, his comparison is 1968 rather than 1861. What produced that era of assassinations, violent protest, and state violence, Pape argues, was rapid social change outpacing the political system. Back then, it was fueled by the gap between the Great Migration of African-Americans and the absence of political representation, and a military draft falling hardest on the unrepresented. And it only ended in the early Seventies, with the end of the draft in 1973 and the arrival of Black mayors and the Congressional Black Caucus.

 

Today, rapid social change is once again outpacing the political and economic system. On the one hand, America is a country moving from white-majority to white-minority — with its non-Hispanic white population dropping from 76% in 1990 to 57% today. On the other, America is experiencing a dramatic economic transformation that has moved something like a tenth of American wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

 

The details of Pape’s observations are unsettling. Only one in ten of the 1,575 people prosecuted for the January 6 insurrection belonged to a militia, with 45% being doctors, lawyers, CEOs or government employees. While five to seven per cent of the George Floyd protests turned violent. But social media, he insists, is the gasoline, not the fire, of this crisis. So at least we can’t blame the internet for everything.

 

Pape does, however, offer a couple of glimmers of hope. Firstly, he reminds us that 70% of Americans still abhor political violence. Secondly, he notes that all gaps eventually close, and that we should expect American government to eventually address economic inequality. But that won’t happen before the November 2026 midterms which, he warns, might be a return of the political violence of 1968.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Democracies Don’t Sleepwalk. Pape’s opening correction: the danger isn’t a civil war five or ten years out, it’s the next few months. Democracies don’t die silently — they die through periods of serious political violence, and America is in one now. He calls it the era of violent populism, and what makes it different from the familiar extremism of recent decades is that political violence has moved from the fringe to the mainstream: tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle now support it. His image is a layer cake — bottom-up violence from the left in the George Floyd protests, bottom-up violence from the right on January 6, and violence by the state, with a whole chapter on ICE and the two protesters killed in Minneapolis. Conversations about this era usually seize on one layer as though it were the whole thing. And the state violence isn’t a few rogue agents: tens of millions of Americans support the president using force against Democratic protesters.

•       The 1960s Rhyme. Not since the 1960s, Pape says, has political violence ru

Our Own Worst Enemies: Robert Pape on America’s Age of Violent Populism

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall

 

Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691284934/governing-growth], a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691284934/governing-growth], names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,” the digital, globalized capitalism of the 21st century.

 

The knowledge economy made San Francisco, New York and Boston very rich. It left almost everyone else behind. Out of that came a new political cleavage — college degree versus no college degree — and, on both sides of the Atlantic, the populist wake-up call.

 

But as Jonathan Rauch [https://keenon.substack.com/p/postmodern-patrimonialism-trumps?r=ktr9] and Jeff Kopstein [https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2254-why-trump-wants-to-be?r=ktr9] have argued on this show, populism has since curdled into something worse: patrimonial capitalism, government on behalf of pitchfork-wielding oligarchs like Orbán and Trump. Ironically, it only deepens the inequalities that produced it. And it’s going to get worse. In the AI age, I suspect, we may end up looking back with nostalgia at good old late twentieth century neoliberalism.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Three Growth Regimes. Hall’s framework is simpler than it sounds. A growth regime is the combination of what governments do and what firms do, reinforcing each other. The postwar era of modernization ran from 1945 to the mid-1970s, as Europe rebuilt to compete with American industry. Then came liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s — Thatcher and Reagan, shareholder value, companies shedding everything but their core competencies and outsourcing the rest. And around 2000 a third regime began: knowledge-based growth, driven by digital technology, investment in intangibles such as research, marketing and organization rather than plant and machinery, and the explosive growth of global value chains. His distinctive move is to treat corporations as agents of change on a par with governments — his own life, he notes, is shaped as much by Harvard’s practices as by Washington’s.

•       Thirty Cities. The knowledge economy has a geography. Skill-biased technological change rewards people with college degrees, and it concentrates: about half of US GDP growth over the past twenty-five years, Hall says, has taken place in some thirty large metropolitan areas. His example is Kendall Square next to MIT, which when he arrived in the late 1970s was auto body shops and small machine tool shops and is now a centre of pharmaceutical engineering. Andrew’s is Central Square down the road, where he bought his first place in the early nineties — “you should have held on to that place,” Hall told him. The effect of all this is that many people feel left behind, and most Americans and Europeans now expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own.

•       The Populist Cleavage. Politics follows economics through what Hall calls cleavages — systematic divisions between social groups. In the 1950s and ’60s the dominant one was class, blue-collar against white-collar, and it pushed working-class grievances to the top of the agenda; that, he argues, is what built the welfare state, in Europe after the war and in America in the 1930s under a Roosevelt who sounded, Hall says, like a raving leftist. Today the dominant cleavage is education. Its roots lie in the inequality of the 1980s and 1990s, supercharged by the knowledge economy and now by AI. Mainstream parties have responded by turning back

Patrimonial Capitalism: Peter Hall on Trump, Orbán & Other Pitchfork-Wielding Plutocrats

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein

 

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged [https://keenon.substack.com/p/mortgaging-the-american-dream?r=ktr9]. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein [https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9780063427068], who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.

 

Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness [https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9780063427068], Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.

 

So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.

•       Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you und

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: George Loewenstein on Why We're Wired for Misery

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