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One of the doomsday scenarios promoted by my Facebook friends is that the election of OrangeHitler (a.k.a. Trump) will cause an economic collapse, a stock market collapse, and a U.S. currency collapse. If we ignore the most dire predictions of a worldwide economic collapse, but assume they’re right about dollar-denominated stuff, what’s the best way to hedge against this possibility?

Let’s assume that Trump being elected dictator causes a typical basket of U.S. assets (stocks, real estate, etc.) to fall by 20 percent and that the S&P 500 tracks this as well as anything.

Assume that a Millionaire for Hillary has $5 million in assets (the house in Cambridge, Brookline, or Berkeley; stock portfolio; dollar-denominated pension and Social Security entitlements). A 20-percent fall in the value of these assets needs to be counterbalanced by a $1 million profit.

What’s the most efficient way to buy protection? A betting site shows Donald Trump paying out at 5/2. So a bet that would pay $1 million would cost $400,000, right? That seems excessive.

What about an S&P put option priced at 15 percent below the current S&P value? The option expires after a week and we buy enough that a 20-percent drop in the index results in a $1 million profit. This is where I need help from readers! What is actually the most efficient way to do this and what is the current price?

[Note that I’m asking for “my friends”; I think the market will go up about 2-3 percent after the election, whoever wins, due to the removal of uncertainty. If Trump is elected, rich investors can celebrate having someone in the White House who advocates for lower tax rates (not that Congress needs to listen). If Clinton is elected and the slow-per-capita-growth-but-high-immigration expanding Welfare State is continued, rich investors will still do fine because the S&P 500 can grow based on (a) foreign countries getting richer per capita, and (b) the U.S. being stuffed with more consumers via immigration. One of the reasons that there is a Trump v. Clinton divide in this country is that people who work at Apple or own Apple shares can prosper even as the U.S. stagnates. 62 percent of Apple’s revenue is from outside the U.S. (fourth quarter results). A voter who is living paycheck-to-paycheck actually does need for America to become great again (in GDP growth) in order to be wealthier; a voter with substantial assets can buy growth from Singapore, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, et al., even without doing anything more exotic than buying the S&P 500. I don’t need insurance against future U.S. economic stagnation because I get it by owning Apple and Google stock (indirectly through a Vanguard fund) as well as by owning foreign stocks.]

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I found an easy test for deplorables in the frozen aisle at Whole Paycheck:

If a guest complains about the taste or texture of the hempburger, you know that he or she is stupid, sexist, and racist (in that order)!

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) says that the “No Farms, No Food” bumper stickers that are popular in Cambridge (an important farming center!) might have it wrong.

The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps. While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats – such as the Kalahari Desert – work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.

Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty-five-year-old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5–8 per cent of the population is over sixty.

There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Without Donald Trump around at the time, whom can we blame for this fraud?

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

Why does your back hurt?

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

Yet life is more predictable, right?

Wheat did not give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of species to survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of preserved food. If the availability of one species was reduced, they could gather and hunt more of other species. Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions.

What then did wheat offer agriculturists, including that malnourished Chinese girl? It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially. Around 13,000 BC, when people fed themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, the area around the oasis of Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most one roaming band of about a hundred relatively healthy and well-nourished people. Around 8500 BC, when wild plants gave way to wheat fields, the oasis supported a large but cramped village of 1,000 people, who suffered far more from disease and malnourishment.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

… the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Why did humans keep toiling to serve the wheat god?

For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ … The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? … population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.

Related:

• important medical video regarding the health effects of wheat

More: Read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

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One of the differences between Trump and Clinton seems to be that Clinton promises to use American cleverness to achieve diverse foreign policy goals while Donald Trump promises to refrain from meddling with disputes outside of our (fully walled?) borders. We have already seen how this worked out in Afghanistan, where building up jihadists against the Soviet-allied regime resulted in us facing a formidable enemy twenty years later. Was that a unique blunder?

Lawrence in Arabia suggests otherwise. Germany is today facing an influx of millions of refugees from wars in Islamic regions that were, 100 years ago, governed in an orderly fashion. What were the best minds of German foreign policy doing back then?

Max von Oppenheim wanted to rearrange the regional political chessboard through stoking the fires of Islamic jihad. He had begun formulating the idea shortly after taking up his consular position in Cairo. In Oppenheim’s estimation, the great Achilles’ heels of Germany’s principal European competitors—Great Britain, France, and Russia—were the Muslim populations to be found within their imperial borders, populations that deeply resented being under the thumb of Christian colonial powers. As the only major European power never to have attempted colonization in the Muslim world, Oppenheim propounded, Germany was uniquely positioned to turn this situation to its advantage—especially if it could forge an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. If it came to a Europe-wide war, Oppenheim posited in a flurry of reports to the German foreign ministry, and the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople could be persuaded to call for a holy war against the Christian occupiers of their former lands, what would happen in British-ruled Egypt, or French Tunisia, or the Russian Caucasus? One person who was itching to find out was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Forwarded some of Oppenheim’s “war by revolution” treatises, the German emperor quickly became a committed proponent of the jihad notion. Wilhem saw to it that Oppenheim, “my feared spy,” was promoted at the Cairo embassy, assuming the somewhat ironic title of chief legal counsel.

Until the blessed day of pan-Islamic jihad came, there was plenty of work to be done in British Egypt. Through the early 1900s, Oppenheim spent much of his time—and not a little of his personal fortune—quietly wooing a broad cross section of the Egyptian elite opposed to British rule: tribal sheikhs, urban intellectuals, nationalists, and religious figures. While he had already won the kaiser to his jihadist ideas, in 1907 Oppenheim gained another adherent in the form of his new subordinate, Curt Prüfer. Enough with scholarly articles and Egyptian shadow plays; under the tutelage of his charismatic supervisor, Prüfer now saw the opportunity to spread gasoline over the region, put a match to it, and see what happened.

Germany suffered millions of casualties in the war that it started against the Soviet Union. What was happened 25 years earlier?

In mid-March, just days after he had set off for Abdullah’s camp, the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty in Russia had come to an abrupt end. Faced with paralyzing industrial strikes by workers demanding an end to the war, and a semimutinous army that refused to move against those workers, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. The provisional government that had replaced the czar vowed to keep Russia in the Entente, but with the chaos worsening, there was growing doubt in other European capitals about just how long Petrograd might stand to that commitment. In fact, though no one yet realized it, the seed of the new Russian government’s destruction had already been sown through one of the most successful subversion operations in world history. On April 1, the German secret police had quietly gathered up a group of leftist Russian exiles, men just as opposed to the new moderate regime as they had been to the czar, and arranged their passage home. Among the returning malcontents was a Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, soon to become better known by his nom de cadre, Lenin.

Lawrence in Arabia is an interesting book that sheds light on our foreign policy challenges today.

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I found an undecided Massachusetts voter’s car in the Whole Foods Alewife parking lot:

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Especially during election years one angle that politicians like to work is “family.” Vote for my party and the family unit will be strengthened.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) says that it is the state and market economy that are inherently the enemy of family cohesion:

Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’ Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.

The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

The market shapes to an ever-greater degree the way people conduct their romantic and sexual lives. Whereas traditionally the family was the main matchmaker, today it’s the market that tailors our romantic and sexual preferences, and then lends a hand in providing for them – for a fat fee. Previously bride and groom met in the family living room, and money passed from the hands of one father to another. Today courting is done at bars and cafés, and money passes from the hands of lovers to waitresses. Even more money is transferred to the bank accounts of fashion designers, gym managers, dieticians, cosmeticians and plastic surgeons, who help us arrive at the café looking as similar as possible to the market’s ideal of beauty.

The state, too, keeps a sharper eye on family relations, especially between parents and children. In many countries parents are obliged to send their children to be educated in government schools, and even where private education is allowed, the state still supervises and vets the curriculum. Parents who are especially abusive or violent with their children may be restrained by the state. If need be, the state may even imprison the parents or transfer their children to foster families. Until not long ago, the suggestion that the state ought to prevent parents from beating or humiliating their children would have been rejected out of hand as ludicrous and unworkable. In most societies parental authority was sacred. Respect of and obedience to one’s parents were among the most hallowed values, and parents could do almost anything they wanted, including killing newborn babies, selling children into slavery and marrying off daughters to men more than twice their age. Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of their child. Mum and Dad are about as likely to be found innocent in the Freudian courtroom as were defendants in a Stalinist show trial.

In the previous posting on this book I noted that the author refused to consider the possibility that there could be either a genetic or a work/effort basis for why some humans are wealthier than others. The only factor was being born into a rich versus a poor family.

This section is kind of interesting for the omission of the rise of no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce in countries around the world, nor of welfare system incentives to have children without a partner (or a job). There is no reference to statistics such as “Fewer than half of U.S. kids today live in a ‘traditional’ family” (Pew Research, 2014; noting that “Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”). People can disagree on what impact this is having on children but surely there must be some impact?

[Separately, the author shows a lack of acquaintance with the U.S. family law system and the U.S. welfare system. Searching for an example of an impoverished person, he uses as an example “an American single mother earning $12,000 a year cleaning houses.” If she got to be a single mother by having sex with a zero-income man she wouldn’t have to work because she’d be entitled to housing, health care, food, smartphone, etc. from the government (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). If she got to be a single mother by having sex with a high-income man (Medicaid dentist?) she wouldn’t have to work because she should be getting $12,000 per month from the biological father of her child (see California, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, for example).]

Was the family all that important in the old old days? Maybe not.

some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centred on monogamous couples. Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of private property, monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. In such a band, a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and women) simultaneously, and all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its children. Since no man knew definitively which of the children were his, men showed equal concern for all youngsters.

Such a social structure is not an Aquarian utopia. It’s well documented among animals, notably our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. There are even a number of present-day human cultures in which collective fatherhood is practised, as for example among the Barí Indians. According to the beliefs of such societies, a child is not born from the sperm of a single man, but from the accumulation of sperm in a woman’s womb. A good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover. If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many.

How did families get to be so big? It was the Agricultural Revolution:

With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children. With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC.

How has the family changed in recent times? We have a lot more bedrooms!

Most Westerners today believe in individualism. They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth. In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in some households it may be accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents may be forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is usually decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Medieval noblemen did not believe in individualism. Someone’s worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy, and by what other people said about them. Being laughed at was a horrible indignity. Noblemen taught their children to protect their good name whatever the cost. Like modern individualism, the medieval value system left the imagination and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles. The castle rarely contained private rooms for children (or anyone else, for that matter). The teenage son of a medieval baron did not have a private room on the castle’s second floor, with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open. He slept alongside many other youths in a large hall. He was always on display

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Martin Lomasney was a Boston politician credited with coining the phrase “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

“Harvard Men’s Soccer Team Is Sidelined for Vulgar ‘Scouting Report’” (nytimes) suggests that this lesson was not absorbed by the recent crop of Harvard undergrads. (The article also shows the sloppiness of the New York Times. The Crimson article on which the Times article is based says that it was Google Groups that got the young men in trouble; the Times reporter conflates this with the (generally private) Google Docs.)

Has anything like this ever happened before in Cambridge? Yes, but it was at MIT and the students did not make their documents public inadvertently. Susan Gilbert and Roxanne Ritchie, who lived in my old dorm (East Campus), actually did have sex with 36 men (unlike the Harvard students who considered the possibility) and then wrote “Consumer Guide to MIT Men” with full names, and it was published in a 1977 issue of a campus weekly (MIT Museum nomination page).

A common thread uniting these events separated by 35 years is that both were the fault of men. In the case of Harvard it was the fault of men for writing the report. In the case of MIT it was the fault of a man for publishing the report (the women who had sex with 36 partners and wrote about them were put on probation; the male editor was suspended).

[Separately, now that these Harvard guys can’t play soccer, will they get so bored that they crack open a book and study?]

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My Facebook friends are getting ever more vocal about the terrifying prospect of a Trump victory. One of the first predicted acts of the dictator Trump will be to abolish Congress. It turns out that folks in neutral Denmark have been preparing for this contingency and have stored a complete set of plans in a secure location. They’ve also made a bunch of duplicates of those plans, as I understand it.

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A friend expressed puzzlement over his former apartment-mate’s Facebook feed: “He used to be a Republican.” The feed contains, interspersed with family and gourmet food photos, links to various anti-Trump articles, e.g., coverage of a preliminary hearing in a recently filed civil lawsuit alleging that, back in 1994, Donald Trump had sex with a 13-year-old girl (“Any woman who wants to make money by suing a man would be well-advised to allege rape,” said one divorce litigator). Underneath the story about the now-35-year-old woman’s quest for cash through litigation is a photo of our former Republican voter shaking hands with Hillary Clinton hash-tagged #ImWithHer.

[The 35-year-old woman didn’t file a criminal complaint against The Donald, so the only remedy available to her is cash. Attorneys promise that an anonymous witness will come forward to say that she observed an anonymous 12-year-old girl being raped in 1994, said nothing, continued to work for the organizer of the rape (not Trump) for eight more years, and is just now ready to speak up, but only in the context of a cash-seeking civil suit.]

How did this former Republican turn into an apparently passionate and certainly well-connected Democrat? Subsequent to his apartment-sharing days he became a high-level executive in a Silicon Valley giant. Why would a rich person support a candidate that promises to raise taxes? “Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run” (Guardian) offers one possible explanation:

the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By “vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

So there you have it! If he wants his kids to get a job ten years from now at a Manhattan-based non-profit, he needs to be at a Hillary fundraiser today.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) has a great of putting the conquest of Earth by Homo sapiens into context:

The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. … Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes, bears and pigs. The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.

Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us.

What if we hadn’t wiped out our genetic cousins?

Whichever way it happened, the Neanderthals (and the other human species) pose one of history’s great what ifs. Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies and political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species coexisted? How, for example, would religious faiths have unfolded? Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species? Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions, or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China? Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?

Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

Our success is making us progressively dumber:

Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely. In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

The book inadvertently shows the bounds of acceptable discourse in modern academia. The author is a professor of history in Israel. The book contains one example after another of genetics determining behavior, sometimes to the point that an entire species went extinct due to uncompetitive abilities. Yet there is one outcome that the author says cannot possibly be influenced by genes:

But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighbourhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans. Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family. … Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. … And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

The work of Gregory Clark, ultimately published as The Son Also Rises, which suggests that there is a genetic component to success, is not referenced. Nor is the fact that intelligence is as heritable as any other characteristic and our modern economy values intelligent workers. Essentially an author who had fully accepted the dogma of modern genetics subscribes to Lamarckism when it is time to explain why some of us are more financially successful than others. (The economist Clark, in The Son Also Rises shows that it can’t be as simple as “rich people inherited money from their parents” because the generation-to-generation correlation isn’t strongly affected by the number of children (i.e., the number of ways in which an inheritance must be divided).)

More: Read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

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