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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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California has a likely new Senator, and her background is a doozy if you're someone as cynical as I am about political figures. With Diane Feinstein having died, Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like, and had promised that the position would be selected from a strict affirmative action pool of black women. He apparently failed to find anyone that actually lives in California that fits the bill, so he has instead selected Maryland resident Laphonza Butler for the position. What, you might ask, are her exquisite qualifications that would make her the top candidate for such an important position? Wiki's summary suffices:

Butler began her career as a union organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee, janitors in Philadelphia, and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she moved to California, organizing in-home caregivers and nurses, and served as president of SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, SEIU Local 2015.[4][5][6]

Butler was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013. She undertook efforts to boost California's minimum wage and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.[4] As president of SEIU Local 2015, Butler endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.[7]

In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California.[6] She resigned from her role as regent in 2021.[8]

Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.[9] She was known as a political ally of Harris since her first run for California Attorney General in 2010, when she helped Harris negotiate a shared SEIU endorsement in the race.[4][10]

Butler left SCRB in 2020 to join Airbnb as director of public policy and campaigns in North America.[11][5]

Butler was named the third president of EMILY's List in 2021. She was the first Black woman and mother to lead the organization.[12][4]

What exactly is EMILY's List?

EMILY's List is an American political action committee (PAC) that aims to help elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights to office. It was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985.[4] The group's name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast". Malcolm commented that "it makes the dough rise".[4] The saying refers to a convention of political fundraising: receiving many donations early in a race helps attract subsequent donors. EMILY's List bundles contributions to the campaigns of Democratic women in favor of abortion rights running in targeted races.[5][6]

From 1985 through 2008, EMILY's List raised $240 million for political candidates.[1] EMILY's List spent $27.4 million in 2010, $34 million in 2012, and $44.9 million in 2014.[3] The organization was on track to raise $60 million for the 2016 election cycle, much of it earmarked for Hillary Clinton, whose presidential bid EMILY's List had endorsed.[7]

Chalk up a win for patronage models of politics! This is someone whose entire career is built on raising money for politicians, culminating in heading a powerful PAC that is more explicitly built around money, money, money even in their very naming than any other PAC I've seen. Obviously, anyone paying attention knows that PACs are always about raising money and that's their express purpose, but I don't think I've seen one literally just make their name an acronym for the patronage enthusiasm. Big donors give money to politicians and get what they want and the organizer for acquiring that wealth is awarded with a seat in the Senate. In all, I see three things of note that are often the subtext of various choices and decisions, but I rarely see so blatantly:

  • The appointment will be explicitly about race and gender. If you're anything other than a Black Woman, you need not apply.

  • The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway.

  • The appointment will go to someone that has demonstrated loyalty and usefulness in assisting with the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars to preferred sources.

On the one hand, it's all rather offensive, but on the other hand, I can think of no better Senator from California than a transient grifter that makes her living off of identity politics.

One other point is that she's got zero chance to be competitive in the election next year. So Newsom makes no enemies within the party by favoring one candidate or another.

So Newsom makes no enemies within the party by favoring one candidate or another.

If reports are true, Lee is angry about not being picked. Does this mean she's not as favoured as thought, or that Newsom thinks he can weather any action against him she might take in the party?

On Sunday, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford wrote to Newsom urging him to appoint Rep. Barbara Lee, a candidate for the Senate whom the governor recently ruled out over worries about giving someone a leg up.

Newsom fulfills the promise he made to name a Black woman to the upper chamber following the departure of Harris to the vice presidency and his selection of Sen. Alex Padilla to her old seat in 2021. Newsom also avoids veering directly into next year’s Senate contest between rival Reps. Katie Porter, Adam Schiff and Lee, all Democrats from California. Lee had spent years angling for the possible Senate appointment, only to learn in recent weeks that Newsom was intent on not tipping the scales in her favor, prompting her to sharply rebuke his public pronouncement.

Does this mean she's not as favoured as thought

She is not favored at all, neither by the polls nor by fundraising.

Yikes. On the money end, Porter and Schiff are way ahead of her (for now). No wonder she wanted to be a shoo-in by Newsom. I guess this demonstrates he really does know how to play the game in Californian Democrat internal politics, and that he figures pissing off Lee won't be enough of a liability to harm him when he goes for the big stage, because Butler will deliver the black women's vote for him in quid pro quo.

Either he miscalculated, or he wouldn't pick Lee anyway so he was going to piss her off in any case, or he figures her support would have been worth less than the enmity of the others had he picked her.

She's also a lesbian

I think the appointment effectively accomplishes Newsom's two goals of appointing someone who (1) will be a reliable Dem vote in the Senate and (2) has a low chance of winning re-election in 2024. I'm sure there are plenty of prominent California Democratic party politicians Newsom could appoint, but is concerned about how many of them could finagle that into re-election. His stated goal is to not decide the 2024 race with this appointment. I think appointing a relatively unknown outsider does this effectively.

The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California

An odd argument re someone who moved to California at age 30, was a labor leader in the state, was a regent of the University of California, worked for Kamala Harris, and moved out of state 2 years ago only to pursue a job opportunity

She doesn't live in California. I have associations with states other than the state I presently reside in, including business interests and property ownership, but I would be blatantly and obviously lying if I claimed that I am a legitimate representative of those states.

Let's try it another way - do you think she would be a legitimate representative for Maryland? If so, what parameters are the relevant limiting factor for which state one can represent? In any sense that I would think of as legitimate, you would need to pre-select the state and/or locale that represent, not simply carpetbag to any state that you have a tenuous connection to when it's convenient. I'm sure I have no legal argument on the matter, as carpetbagging is a time-honored and perfectly legal tradition in many cases, but it seems pretty clear to me that you can't actually be simultaneously just as legitimate a representative of Maryland as California.

She doesn't live in California

So, if Jerry Brown had moved to Maryland two years ago to head Emily's List, he would be an illegitimate pick as well? Clearly, "moved to Maryland for a job two years ago" is not per se proof that you can't be a legitimate representative of California.

Correct, my position is that moving to a different state, establishing your residence there, declaring that you reside there, and registering to vote there means that you are no longer a legitimate representative of your former state. I would be open to the position that someone should instead only be eligible for their previous state since two years is obviously not long enough to become legitimate in the new residence. I reject the idea that someone can be Schrödinger's representative, equally legitimate in all places that they could register in once appointed.

Well, that seems a bit extreme, given my Jerry Brown example.

I reject the idea that someone can be Schrödinger's representative, equally legitimate in all places that they could register in once appointed.

That is a strawman that you have created. No one has argued otherwise.

I am indeed the kind of extremist that reads Article I, Section 3 as applicable, even if it were the venerable Jerry Brown that had moved:

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

I guess you can get around that by saying that she's not being elected. That would suggest that it would be perfectly legal to select a teenager from Australia though, which doesn't strike me as likely.

Regarding Schrödinger's representative, I suppose the correct analogy isn't that they could register in any place, but merely that they are equally resident in both places as necessary until declaration. That does seem to be exactly what you're claiming, no? That Butler would be legitimate in Maryland or California and that Brown would likewise be equally legitimate in either place if he moved. As mentioned, I'm open to the suggestion that Brown could only ever be a legitimate representative of California and that two years residence in Maryland wouldn't change that one jot, but it doesn't really match up with a plain reading of the text.

Dude, that is a completely different issue than the one you raised. If Jerry Brown moved to Delaware, he might be constitutionally ineligible to serve as Senator from California, regardless of whether he is capable of representing the interests of Californians. Your claim was re the latter.

I believe those claims are entirely consistent - someone is ineligible precisely because it's fairly obvious that they're not representative of a state that isn't actually their state of residence. This was codified precisely because someone's residence does actually inform us about who they represent.

More comments

The relevant factors for which state one can represent are best determined by the voters in that state. It's a persuasive rather than a dispositive factor. It's a perfectly legit criticism to lob, but voters are perfectly free to ignore it if they feel an outsider represents their interests better than an insider for various reasons.

It's a tradition that dates prior to the revolution, wealthy Englishmen were known to buy "rotten boroughs" where there were few enough votes and they were obedient enough that enough money could buy a seat in the Commons.

I'm on the record here crucifying Dr Oz for running for the PA Senate seat, on the other hand I support(Ed) McCormick's run for the same seat. Neither currently lived in PA, McCormick grew up in PA, and his family was prominent in PA before. Oz' ties were based on his in laws and part of his education, at best. That's a judgment I made personally, at the booth.

From Newsom’s perspective he doesn’t want to pick winners in the 2024 race, and Butler definitely isn’t going to win.

And his presidential bid, like any ‘moderate’ or business democrat’s, will rely on winning the heavily black southern primaries, where most black voters are black women. This prevents any issues on that front.

She's being selected to represent the median voter in California, not you. Given the prominence of abortion issues these days, being the president of EMILY's list is a pretty great qualification for that! Also taking into account the issue pointed out here, she seems like a pretty great choice overall.

If there was a vacancy in Alabama instead, I could imagine myself making a similar rant about the possible literal creationist the Governor there might appoint---there's nothing more to it than not liking representatives from parts of the country with prevailing political views far from your own.

I think I stated three objections, in bullet points, that are not mere policy disagreements. I expect California's governor to select a senator that wouldn't be to my liking, but I would have generally expected him to select one that lives in California, to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, and to pick someone that had some career history other than attracting and dispensing patronage dollars. Likewise, I would expect Alabama to select someone far to my right and quite religious, but I wouldn't expect them to pick someone that lives in the Dakotas and inform everyone that isn't a white man that this is specifically a White Man seat.

By the by, Latinos hate the use of the x suffix. If you're looking to speak on their behalf, you'd best start with not using a meme that is essentially an implicit attack on their language.

My framing above is intended to indicated how I would expect the governor of California to behave, which would include use of the term "Latinx".

Even some of the progressives have picked up on this, and are moving to "Latine", which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

which has the advantage of not sounding absolutely stupid.

Unless you speak Spanish, in which case it still sounds stupid.

I mean, come on, English already has ‘Latin’ and ‘Hispanic’ as a gender neutral term. Inventing much dumber ones is, well, dumb.

It still sounds less stupid than any attempt at pronouncing "Latinx" in either language.

Latine would be the correct gender-neutral Spanish form, if Spanish-speaking culture cared about being gender neutral. So I don't think it sounds stupid in Spanish, just like a word only a politically correct person would use. In much the same way that "African-American" is a perfectly cromulent English word, but the group it refers to mostly prefer "Black".

Spanish doesn’t have a gender neutral form that wasn’t made up 30 seconds ago, and most -e words are masculine anyways(what would be the article, anyways? Le is already taken, it’s a masculine objective form).

Hopefully it's pronounced differently than "latrine".

It is an attack, an awkward one at that, but fully deserved. Grammatical gender is a dumb feature and I will fight the whole of the world West of the Urals and South of the Himalayas on that point. At least English somehow managed to have some positive changes to it during the middle period even with the Normans doing their best to make things worse.

to have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role

Latins are way below blacks on the oppression hierarchy, though, and most of the qualified Latinos are quite light skinned and prone to going off the reservation(remember, affirmative action hires aren’t Shaniqua either- these are PMC black women immersed in democratic patronage and have more in common with their white coworkers than with the hood granny from last weeks thread).

have at least pretended that the Latinx community had a legitimate claim to the role, an

The last time Newsom appointed a Senator, to a de facto permanent seat, no less, rather thana de facto 15 month gig, he appointed Alex Padilla, a Latino.

The three objections you list seem to be about par for the course for senator badness. I could list five that are equally objectionable about one of the current senators from Alabama, but I'm not sure simply listing flaws of ideological opponents is a productive way to discuss anything. It's a bit too close to making isolated demands for rigor.

The point is that Butler's pros as pointed out by many other commentators outweigh the specific cons you listed for the sort of voters whose opinion matters to Newsom even though they may not do so for you. This is the exact sort of thing thing I would say to myself about Tuberville or Trump.

She's being selected to represent the median voter in California, not you.

No, she's being selected to represent the median Democratic voter, or even the median Democratic activist/fund raiser.

Despite California's reputation for being on the loony left, that characterization is more about the political class than it is about the increasingly Hispanic population. 57% of Californian's are pro-choice with 38% believing that abortion should be illegal.

Few will have views as extreme as an abortion activist.

You are are correct that in Alabama, a vacancy would likely be appointed by someone equally on the right, but let's not pretend this represents an average voter in any way.

If a governmor is going to making an appointment where people don't get to vote, one would hope for a more conciliatory choice, even if we would never expect it from Newsom. Using race and gender as the overriding factors feels icky to me as well.

Using race and gender as the overriding factors feels icky to me as well.

Shouldn't it feel icky? It's open racism and sexism, no different than the old days of "XXX need not apply" job postings. Not to mention it would literally be illegal for a private company to hire this way. What's weird to me is that Dem elites are so immersed in identity politics that this doesn't feel icky to any of them.

Doesn't really feel icky to me. The selection criteria for the appointment seems to be a reliable and unelectable Dem to keep the seat warm until the next election.

If you can do that and appoint a diverse candidate that will please part of your base, seems like a win-win.

Huh? The primary selection criterion, stated clearly and up front by Newsom, was "is a black woman". All other considerations, including the unobjectionable non-icky one you just changed the subject to, were secondary.

Do you think in a world where his choice was between a politically unreliable black woman who might run for election, or a non-descript white guy who wouldn't rock the boat, he would still choose the former? I don't.

The pool of "warm reliable bodies" is large enough where he can choose whatever arbitrary conditions he wants to score some political points.

So, I guess your argument is that it doesn't feel icky because you claim he's lying when he says he's doing the icky thing, and his hidden motivation is more practical (and, well, moral)? That's still beside the point - the fact that Dems are completely fine with announcing a racist appointment is the problem, not the 4D chess Newsom might be playing.

Also, I actually do think Newsom would have chosen somebody completely unsuitable, with the right characteristics, if he'd had to. We've seen a string of skin-colour-and-genital based appointments already from the Dems, from Karine Jean-Pierre to Ketanji Brown Jackson to Kamala Harris herself. I'm sure there are more, but I don't pay that much attention. It would be coincidental if all these people, selected from a favoured 6% of the population, really were the best choices. It really does seem like this is just what you have to do to play ball on the Democrat side.

The primary selection criterion

Unless you think there is any chance he would have picked a Republican black woman, I think it's highly likely the primary selection criteria is "being a Democrat", whether being black or a woman ranks above being reliable or not being too powerful, or not having already announced they would run for the full seat is probably debatable, but it's not going to have outweighed political affiliation.

So, were you in Newsom’s unenviable shoes, who’d you have picked?

I have a sneaking suspicion that we could write similar blurbs for anyone with any political experience in the state. Even the Republicans. This list was a little more optimistic, suggesting various high-profile Californians and a few local functionaries.

It does mention Ms. Butler, emphasizing her role in the Harris campaign. More important, apparently, are her intersectionality credentials. Newsom has a track record of appointing LGBT candidates.

I don’t know about putting much stock in the state of residence. It feels more like a tan-suit situation, where any pick gets mined for political points. Also, I liked Silver Springs when I lived there.

@The_Nybbler is right that nonviability has taken on a perverse importance. Newsom is on record avoiding any of the candidates for next year’s election. In a functioning system, that would rule out all the best options. Since this is California, though, who can say?

So, were you in Newsom’s unenviable shoes, who’d you have picked?

Probably Karen Bass, if she wanted it. I still get the Black Woman points, but also select someone that has a more impressive political resume; there's at least a veneer of it not just being a national political favor.

If she didn't want it and I really wanted to pick someone that has zero chance of winning in 2024, I would not be inclined to have made the affirmative action promise in the first place. If you're Newsome, you don't actually have to go around promising things to black women all the time. Who else? I don't know California politics well enough to say, but I'd wager I could find a Latino guy or an Asian lady or even a white dude that actually lives in California, is sufficiently progressive to be a legitimate choice for the state. It's a big state! I don't know, grab the secretary of transportation and plug them in for a year, I'm sure they'll vote D and they don't have the ugliness of this selection. Here, grab this lady, I'm sure she's fine.

But really, I think the whole point is that Newsom is doing patronage politics because he's an effective politician, as where I'm a nobody that's viscerally offended by handing things out based on race and money. Newsom seems like he's angling for a 2028 run and securing things like donor money and national black support are smart moves. This is why he's going to be the Blue Caesar and I'm still going to be whining that it sucks that we have a Senator that was selected in this fashion.

Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.

A union-busting group having a name that so closely resembles "scab" is like something out of a very unsubtle parody.

No, no. They were going for “Some Cops Aren’t Bastards.”

I think it's more productive to imagine who Gavin Newsom might have appointed, given political constraints and his national ambitions.

  1. They have to be a solid Democrat. This is uninteresting and would apply just as much to a Republican appointing a replacement for a Republican Senator.

  2. They can't be someone with ambitions for the seat. This is a bit less obvious, but choosing a particular candidate for the seat gives them a substantial advantage against rivals for the seat and generates bad blood.

2a) They can't be someone who plausibly would have ambitions for the seat. Once appointed, the Senator can very well say "actually I am going to run," which they will if it's best for their political ambitions. There'd be a bloody primary, but the appointee would know that should they win, everyone will rally around them (exact calculations complicated by California's jungle primary system). Newsom, on the other hand, has to deal with the fallout of causing a nasty, bloody primary.

So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions. Within those constraints, why not choose the person who earns you the most diversity points? And that's how you land on Butler. The fact that she's an out-of-state apparatchik is a plus in that constraint context, if anything.

My personal preference, for what it's worth, would have been James Sauls, Feinstein's Chief of Staff. Satisfies all the constraints and provides continuity of service in the meantime.

I read some articles over the weekend that Newsom was under pressure to appoint Barbara Lee. Supposedly she's angry that he didn't give her the seat (with all the electoral advantages of the incumbent.)

FWIW, I addressed this some in this comment.

Sauls seems like an excellent choice for, the reasons you outline. As in other comments, I'm really not just trying to whine that a Democrat picked a Democrat, that is both unremarkable and entirely appropriate, especially in a state that certainly will be electing a Democrat. That part is completely fine.

So Newsom has to choose someone who 1) is a solid Democrat and 2) has absolutely no political base within California for any ambitions.

Except that the news story I read about it made a point that she was not barred from running in the proper election. So while I get why Newsom didn't appoint Lee (who seems to be spitting feathers over this), it's because out of the three Representatives going for the seat (Lee, Schiff and Porter) if he picks one, he's going to piss off the other two, and he doesn't need that kind of in-fighting in California. Especially if he has ambitions himself for the presidency in 2028.

Maybe she doesn't have ambitions and/or a local power base, so that's why he didn't put any limits on it, she's not a risk to him while on the other hand elevating a pro-abortion fundraiser will give him that all-important 100% rating from NARAL for the presidential campaigning:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to fill the seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, elevating the head of a fundraising juggernaut that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, according to a person familiar with the decision.

...The announcement was expected to come Monday, and an adviser to the governor, Anthony York, told POLITICO that Newsom is making his appointment without putting limitations or preconditions on his pick running for the seat in 2024. That means Butler could decide to join the sprawling and competitive field of Democratic contenders seeking to succeed Feinstein, with special elections now layered on top of the March primary and November runoff.

Except that the news story I read about it made a point that she was not barred from running in the proper election.

She can run, but she would lose. Even if she somehow miraculously did find a way to run a competitive campaign, the point is that no one in the CDP even slightly believes that Newsom chose her thinking she could win an actual election. It'd be hard for Newsom to choose a less electable candidate intentionally (especially given that, until she establishes residency, she's not even eligible to run). Hence, no bad blood.

As far as her Emily's List work, I agree it's relevant, but with a different mechanism than a quid pro quo; NARAL won't care one way or another about this appointment come next Presidential election cycle. The real reason is that she's deeply ensconced in Democratic machine politics: those are her coworkers, friends, even her partner. Defecting in some unpredictable way would be far too costly to her professional and personal lives, so Newsom believes that she's reliable (and more pertinently, so does everyone else, so on the off chance she does go rogue no one will hold it against him).

I can see why Newsom picked her, she's all upside for him. But I can also see why Barbara Lee is furious about this, because this would be the perfect bedding-in for her in the seat she's wanted for ages, and then she'd have an incumbency advantage going into the primary proper. But if Newsom did that, given that Lee seems to be not guaranteed to win the primary, hence the other two going are strong enough in the party, then he'd piss off two other party members who might cut up rough later (and get their supporters to cut up rough) about playing favourites.

Tricky balancing act: has Lee enough clout to damage him if/when he goes for the nomination in 2028, or will Butler owe him a big enough favour that she can throw the women's and black women's vote behind him?

Perhaps someone more versed in the subject can chime in, but my understanding is the U.S. Constitution dictates that senators must be a resident of the state they represent. In California that means being present in the state for 366 days before filing for residency. Is there any likelihood of this being challenged? Has something like this happened before?

The actual language is

"No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen."

The language of the Seventeenth Amendment provides for replacements:

"When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

So it appears there is no constitutional requirement for an unelected replacement Senator to be an inhabitant of the state they represent.

I am skeptical that the Seventeenth Amendment permits the appointment of someone who is ineligible to serve. However, whether she is eligible depends on what "inhabitant" means. Because there is a very important legal distinction between one's residence and his domicile. Whether "inhabitant" refers to "residence," "domicile" or something else is anybody's guess, but I am very skeptical that this issue has escaped the attention of the Governor, and it is very likely that all that matters is where she lives at the time that she is sworn in.

PS: See this Congressional Research Service report which seems to conclude that the only requirement is that the person be an inhabitant at the time that he or she is sworn in.

So it appears there is no constitutional requirement for an unelected replacement Senator to be an inhabitant of the state they represent.

Wasn't there an understanding about US VP that must cover all the eligibility criteria for president even if it is not explicitly stated in the constitution?

Wasn't there an understanding about US VP that must cover all the eligibility criteria for president even if it is not explicitly stated in the constitution?

It is explicitly stated in the Constitution. From the Twelfth Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

Even if we interpret this as a Constitutional requirement that an appointed Senator be a resident of the state, it would be trivial to work around. Newsom could have had her move yesterday and appointed her today.

That said, this was almost certainly a drafting oversight, and Newsom is acting contrary to the spirit of the law. Seriously, there are a million black women in California. How hard could it have been to find one who would reliably vote with party leadership? Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?

Why not just pretend to care about the Constitution, when the stakes are so low?

I stand by my commentary above, that "[t]he Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway". While I think GDanning credibly disputes my framing of whether she represents California here I think the punchline is that it doesn't really matter, that if they needed to reward a good soldier in Maryland, they'd reward her there, and if they instead got the opportunity to do it in California, that's fine too. The point is the national politics, not something that got written down a couple centuries ago; after all, they couldn't even fly then, so what did they know about how what it actually means to represent a state?

She's had a string of jobs in Cali for the last decade, but twitter says she either posted from Maryland, or her bio says Maryland (I don't use twitter). Weighing that evidence, I'd bet she's a California resident.

Edit: actually on her wiki page it says.

They moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in 2021 when she assumed the presidency of EMILY's List.[17][18] Governor Newsom's office stated Butler would reregister to vote in California before taking office as a senator

First, I am going to be very interested to hear why the mods are not telling you "move this to the Sunday question thread".

Second, if she's living and working in California, why is she still registered to vote in Maryland? Family home is back there? Legal address? Tax reasons?

  • -14

Why would this get moved to Sunday questions?

Because it's not Culture War, or that's what I was told about asking who was likely to succeed Feinstein.

Where were you told this?

We had a confusing back and forth conversation in my inbox. I dislike having conversations there unless someone provides a lot of context. But I'd just banned them, so its not like they could have the conversation publicly on the relevant post.

His post wasn't banned for culture war reasons, but it certainly fits as a culture war topic. I told them that the public mod note is why they were banned, which is what SSCReader repeated above:

The mod note was: Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.

I was just being polite, tbh. I saw the conversation, but wanted to confirm he wasn't referring to some possible post I missed. I totally supported what you said back there.

No worries, I saw this and just wanted to clear up the confusion that could happen if only parts of our conversation are relayed.

The mod note was: Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.

So it wasn't because it was not Culture War, but because it was low effort surely?

Because it's not Culture War

It is rife with culture war topics.

I don't have a question, I don't think it's small-scale, I included information that many people wouldn't be likely to know, and I think I articulated a position. Maybe you think it's a stupid position, or so thin that it isn't worth discussing, but I have no idea how it would be a better fit for the Sunday thread.

It's the whole "we don't moderate on length" bit that is chafing me. You basically are asking questions along the same line I was, but you phrased them at greater length. So why aren't you told "go to the Sunday questions thread, this isn't culture war material"?

I'm a little annoyed, but not hugely; at least you're raising questions that are provoking discussion that is giving me the kind of information I wanted in the first place. I'm stubborn enough to not let this go, however, even if it ends up hurting me. Because it honestly does seem, despite protests to the contrary, "stick in enough padding and it's okay".

Just as an FYI, I'm not familiar with the moderation history you're irritated with, which is why my answer above is very literal rather than addressing any comparison. For what it's worth, I didn't wake up this morning and think I was replicating something with padding. I saw the story, thought, "wow, that's absurd, California politics are even more corrupt than I'd expect" and wrote accordingly.

I like your contributions despite normally disagreeing, but I think you're off-base here and being (perhaps unintentionally) rude to OP.

The OP provided helpful background information, stated and backed up his position, and provides a good jumping off point for further discussion.

Doing this adds length to the post, yes. But adding an engine to a car and adding a steel block is materially different despite them both increasing the weight.

I'm a little annoyed, but not hugely; at least you're raising questions that are provoking discussion that is giving me the kind of information I wanted in the first place. I'm stubborn enough to not let this go, however, even if it ends up hurting me. Because it honestly does seem, despite protests to the contrary, "stick in enough padding and it's okay".

I don't think the mods have disagreed with this. The idea is that the padding is a decent enough proxy for quality that it stands. I don't have an issue with it at all.

The extra parts aren't padding, they're a functional element of a good post.

  • Facts provide background which helps outsiders (like me, on this topic) understand what is happening and why it is important.
  • Commentary is the meat of a comment thread, as we are here for discussion. Commentary in a top level comment provides a kickstart to the discussion and focuses it in one direction.
  • Questions are a poor-man's replacement for facts, and the "focus" half of commentary.

Comparing the two posts, I see:

Your post:

  • Facts:
    • Dianne Feinstein's death
  • Commentary:
    • N/A (implicit only)
  • Questions:
    • How do civics work?
    • What will they decide?
    • etc?

This one:

  • Facts:
    • Diane Feinstein having died
    • Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like
    • promised...black women.
    • Maryland resident Laphonza Butler
    • qualifications (quoted/linked)
  • Commentary
    • win for patronage
    • rarely see so blatantly
    • all rather offensive
    • transient grifter
  • Questions:
    • N/A (implicit only)

They aren't similar at all by my framework.

This post is fine, and if your post had put in half this effort it would have been fine too.

The residency stuff seems almost designed to distract. It's very salient, easy to argue about, but ultimately not as substantial as other criticisms.

If I had two candidates before me, equal in all ways except one has this controversy attached, I'd probably pick the one with the extra controversy. Better that the public debate is about state lines than about my commitment to choose a person of specific race and gender, or about the candidate's meager qualifications.

This pick makes sense. She’s spent her entire career in the Democrats’ political machine in some way or other, so she’s a team player who knows how the sausage gets made. She’s a black lesbian, so intersectionality points. She’s an abortion activist, so her pet issue is one she’ll have a hard time derailing the government over. And she’s a political nonentity who’s probably unelectable on her own, so when she loses in ‘24 she’ll go back to working in the political machine while owing Newsome a favor.

For reasons of entertainment, I'm hoping the next elected Senator from California is Meghan Markle. She has identity points, name recognition, and charisma. It would be funny if she ends up with more real power than the British royal family has.

and charisma

This is where it falls down. She really...doesn't. It's pretty telling she has nothing going now, despite being feted by a lot of the famous black elite originally.

Seducing a famously dim and insecure prince isn't a generalizable skill apparently.

My new crackpot theory is that the Palace PR played a blinder here, and it came back to bite them: they made lemonade and got everyone to act like a second-rank name on a third-rate show was Grace Kelly and, unfortunately for them, it stuck.

I hope Meghan Markle runs. She would lose so badly that the resulting humiliation would solve a problem for the Royal Family.

She's the mirror image of an ideal Republican candidate. Imagine 'Wayne Johnson' from Appalachia, graduate of UWV, who worked his way up at Koch Industries in Texas. Having done a decade of group organizing for gun rights, Johnson was elected President of a major Republican PAC in Nebraska, and is now being appointed as interim Senator from Texas. Makes sense.

Butler is 45, from a poor Mississippi town of 1,800 residents (currently). She graduated college and worked he way up to a solid position at AirBNB, having long taken leadership positions in union organizing, and is now President of a major PAC.

The only cynical thing I see is that skin color was mandatory for the latter candidate.

6% of California's population is black. There are far more Asians and there is simply very little political representation for them. Asians are also a much wealthier bloc. It's actually quite impressive how overrepresented blacks are in California politics (LA Mayor and SF Mayor are both black women) given their lower demographic weight and generally speaking lower socio-economic success, which clearly doesn't impede their political influence.

One wonders if this is solely due to their own talents or if white liberals like Newsom is simply more comfortable with parachuted-in black women than he would be with a high-achieving Asian with roots in the state. So to me this is less about blacks than about relative Asian disempowerment in what is arguably their strongest state outside of Hawaii, coupled with a question if black overrepresentation is perhaps at least partly driven by white liberal preferences for that demographic over Asians.

I suspect many white liberals also support affirmative action because they don't want their kids to be outcompeted by Asian grinds at school and thus prefer lower-scoring blacks and Hispanics to create a more "balanced" milieu. Perhaps this is driven by a similar cultural impulse. This is of course all speculation, but I don't think we can disentangle white liberal preferences when things like this keep happening.

The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried begins tomorrow.

As a person that has worked in crypto quant trading[1], I have the tiniest slice of sympathy for him. He still seems like an unsympathetic freak overall, and has done some stuff that seems pretty unethical, and some of his actions are definitely criminal. He has given EA a bad name as well.

There are certainly a lot of process crimes he's guilty of. The fact that the US has pulled his international operations into US jurisdiction means he's in for a universe of pain and if they can't fight that he's going to jail for infinity years. I consider this legal theory a bit dubious but the US has taken the position that it can prosecute crimes that happen in the rest of the world if they even marginally involve US citizens[2]. Is everyone in the world really supposed to follow US laws? That strikes me as a bad precedent; on the other hand, I also do appreciate it sometimes that the US is an international law enforcer of last resort.

That's not really where my sympathy lies though. He knows he was playing a dangerous game. Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court. This is even worse in the crypto era, as the position taken by the SEC and friends is shameful, giving very little guidance on new forms of financial technology and telling firms years later by indictment that they were frowning on their behavior all this time.

Many tradfi firms prostrate themselves before the SEC in the hopes of maintaining a good relationship. Even still, reputable firms who were attempting to operate outside of US jurisdiction have been caught with their pants down in the crypto era e.g. Trading Firm A, B and C in the recent Binance indictment: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-27/the-cftc-comes-for-binance (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/aMi5Q )

It's still not clear to me that SBF and FTX spent user funds as a matter of course, or if it effectively became spending user funds because so much of their other assets imploded. Though, again, that's not necessarily a crime if you operate outside of US jurisdiction, which is what their international arm believed it was doing. But, that's also sort of secondary.

The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".

FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.

One thing that's common to these frauds is that people always seem to have a moment of reckoning where they know they're fucked and they can either pack up and go home and face the consequences, or they double down and hope it'll all work out. Indeed, there are some legendary stories from doubling down: FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.

As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business. Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned. And in this case the burning is fantastic public spectacle.

  1. To be clear I think crypto is not that world changing and its only redeeming quality for the foreseeable future is of the flavor "casinos are fun to build and play in".
  2. Arthur Hayes of Bitmex was busted for something similar, though he was "wink wink" keeping US citizens off of his exchange whereas FTX International was pretty serious https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1323316/download

EDIT: Matt Levine's newsletter today is about SBF's trial, which hit my inbox right after I submitted this comment. Amazing, as usual. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-02/sbf-s-defense-will-be-tough

EDIT2: As replies have pointed out, I am probably technically wrong for calling what Uber did fraud. Sorry to distract. I should've made my case that Uber was more like a plan to openly disregard and defy taxi regulations across many jurisdictions with the excuse that this isn't a taxi it's a "carpooling app" tee hee. I think this is an insane business plan and it depended on them delivering an amazingly useful app. And if they hadn't succeeded (by delivering an amazingly useful app) they would've all been busted for something rising to the level of organized crime.

The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".

With crypto, there are certainly gray areas where the customer knows the company is taking risks, knows the assets are risky, but is not fully aware of just how much risk the company is taking, and the company is happy to keep the customer unaware by burying the risks in the fine print.

But this is not the case of FTX. FTX is just run-of-the-mill embezzlement.

FTX said in its terms of service that customer deposits were the property of the customer, were fully controlled by the customer, were not the assets of FTX, and would not be loaned out. FTX was acting as a custodian. Instead, FTX took the customer funds and gambled with them. This is analogous to a bank manager who is dealing with too many failing loans and so drills into people's safe deposit boxes, takes the money and gambles it at a casino. He cannot do that, that is theft, he needs accept bankruptcy, let the those who lent and invested in the bank to take losses, but allow everyone who trusted the bank as a custodian to pick up their own assets from their safe deposit boxes.. It seems like FTX also took the funds and sent them to SBF's other business (Alambeda), which is even more obvious and blatant theft. This is classic, go-directly-to-jail do not pass go crime.

You might enjoy Matt Levine's take in Everything Everywhere is Securities Fraud

You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud. Even if the company does immediately tell shareholders about the bad thing, which is not particularly common, the shareholders might sue, claiming that the company failed to disclose the conditions and vulnerabilities that allowed the bad thing to happen.

And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.

...

But the principle of the thing is that U.S. securities law is a global universal regulatory regime: If a foreign company never issues shares in the U.S. and files its financial statements and other reports only abroad, it can still be sued in the U.S. for securities fraud. And in the U.S., everything is securities fraud.

He also has a take on the Bankman-Fried trial in today's issue.

In the FTX case I think the case for fraud is pretty simple.

  1. As an exchange FTX was a custodian of customer assets. If a customer bought 10 BTC then FTX was obliged to hold that 10 BTC in case that customer wanted to sell it or transfer it or whatever.

  2. FTX did in fact represent to customers that it was a custodian of their assets and did have their assets.

  3. FTX did not actually have custody of the relevant assets. They sold them or lent them or sent them to Alameda or otherwise did not retain the assets they were obliged to.

Well, it's fraud if you do that on purpose. It's a mistake if you have an accounting accident. And, as per Matt Levine, I agree your accounting accident is not sympathetic if you were also spending lavishly on yourselves. Where did FTX fall here? I'm slightly inclined to believe in the accounting accident story, but only because I've made multi-million dollar accounting mistakes before, which we thankfully discovered immediately. More than once. And I wasn't in a "move fast and break things" grow to the moon kind of place that FTX was.

I realize SBF arguing "accounting accident!" doesn't sit well with people amongst all of his other horrendous behavior. Poor slob.

I think part of it was an accounting error but it's an error that's ubiquitous in crypto: valuing your shitcoins at their spot price * volume. My understanding is a bunch of the loans from FTX to Alameda were "collateralized" by billions of dollars of other coins Alameda held. The problem comes when you need to turn those coins into dollars and find out the market is not as deep or liquid as you supposed.

Levine again:

And then the basic question is, how bad is the mismatch. Like, $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion of liquid dollar-denominated assets? Sure, great. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion worth of Bitcoin assets? Not ideal, incredibly risky, but in some broad sense understandable. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting entirely of some magic beans that you bought in the market for $16 billion? Very bad. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting mostly of some magic beans that you invented yourself and acquired for zero dollars? WHAT? Never mind the valuation of the beans; where did the money go? What happened to the $16 billion? Spending $5 billion of customer money on Serum would have been horrible, but FTX didn’t do that, and couldn’t have, because there wasn’t $5 billion of Serum available to buy. FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t!

One simple point here is that FTX’s Serum holdings — $2.2 billion last week, $5.4 billion before that — could not have been sold for anything like $2.2 billion. FTX’s Serum holdings were vastly larger than the entire circulating supply of Serum. If FTX had attempted to sell them into the market over the course of a week or month or year, it would have swamped the market and crashed the price. Perhaps it could have gotten a few hundred million dollars for them. But I think a realistic valuation of that huge stash of Serum would be closer to zero. That is not a comment on Serum; it’s a comment on the size of the stash.

...

In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.

If you have one of your companies give another of your companies a loan collateralized by an asset at many times what that asset could actually be sold for, is that fraud?

The core of this is a concept called "Mark to Market." The Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room. 10/10 would recommend) spends some time on it.

It's also the same core mechanism that fucked the whole mortgaged-backed securities market in 2008-2009.

Mark to Market was never really intended for intermediate goods with weird cashflow and long-term appreciation dynamics (like houses). It definitely was never intended for use with Magic Internet Money.

Mark to Market was originally conjured up as a way for oil extraction companies to better value their inventory (oil) as daily markets could fluctuate pretty wildly. The thing there, however, is that that oil was both (a) a thing you had on hand that had a long established market and (b) a commodity that functioned ... like a commodity! There was a spot price and ... that was kind of it. Yeah, there are futures markets, but it's not like a house that has a monthly cashflow (rent or mortgage) but also an asset appreciation profile determined by all sorts of things (mainly location, but also real improvements and hyper local supply/demand profiles). There's just so much more inherent complexity in things like houses that Mark to Market can't really be a stable valuation scheme. [:1]

For a digital currency with zero non-digital assets backing it you're marking-to-a-made-up-market with a formless thought experiment of an asset. Yes ... that's really, really, really obvious dumb as shit.

[:1] To be fair, there are people who will disagree with this and make a (good) point that as long as markets stay liquid enough, they can perform accurate price discovery. I actually think 2008-2009 strongly supports that argument. The crisis point wasn't mortgages going down in value per se, it was in the lack of overnight and short term cash to help firms shift their positions and recapitalize. Firefighting by Bernanke et al. goes into the (quite technical) details of this. To "yes, but," one last time, there are also those who would say that the sheer size of the MBS market and all of the related assets and liabilities made it impossible to "soft land", regardless of any amount of short term credit and liquidity. I can't really refute that because we decided not to test it out back in '09. If we had, and gotten in wrong, we'd be having this conversation in person beneath the rubble of Midgar.

Mark to Market was originally conjured up as a way for oil extraction companies to better value their inventory (oil) as daily markets could fluctuate pretty wildly.

Not really. Mark to Market (in technical accountancy terminology, "fair value accounting") first comes in as a way for financial institutions (banks, trading firms, brokerages etc,) with assets whose price varied based on movements in liquid financial markets to better assess their current solvency than historical cost accounting. It was brought in after the S&L crisis - a big part the reason why the S&L crisis got so bad is that you had institutions that were accounting-solvent (because 30-year fixed rate mortgages with interest rates that were now below-market were on the books at par) but clearly could not meet their obligations over a 30-year time horizon, and so they had an incentive to double down with what was in effect other people's money. (SVB was in the same situation, but had a lot of tightly-networked, financially sophisticated depositors with balances over the FDIC limit, so they got taken out by a run).

The thing that made Enron special was that they applied the mark-to-market accounting that made sense for the energy trading division of the firm to things that would not usually be marked to market like long-term contracts for wholesale gas supply, and that this allowed them to recognise revenue and profit earlier than competitors. It also meant that the business model wasn't sustainable because the contracts didn't produce long-term profits, so Andrew Fastow ended up having to double down repeatedly until he ended up ratting on Jeffery Skilling for a light sentence.

You are correct!

I had an EPIC brain snap and swapped the Mark to Market for Master Limited Partnerships in discussing their original application to Oil and Gas. Wow, yeah, my mistake. Thanks for correction.

For a more detailed discussion of how mark-to-market accounting affected the 2008 crisis, see chapter 12 of Peter Wallison's book Hidden in Plain Sight.

At the peak of the panic in 2008, the [mark-to-market] value of available-for-sale non-agency mortgage-backed securities declined by almost 25 percent from the value they would have had under historical cost accounting. Needless to say, if historical cost accounting had been permitted at the time, it might have had a major stabilizing effect on public perceptions of the financial condition of many large financial firms.

 

Companies required to write down the value of their mortgage-backed securities when they had not actually suffered any losses were desperately aware of the absurdity of their situation.

Firefighting by Bernanke et al. goes into the (quite technical) details of this.

One of the points that got bandied around in the aftermath of that crisis was that the US government could have simply made the mortgage repayments on every delinquent mortgage for less money than they actually ended up handing out - but furthermore, that this wouldn't actually be enough to prevent the crash from happening due to the precarious financial structure involved. Given that you seem to know a fair bit about what happened, is there any truth to this?

Three points worth considering.

  1. "Speed of Money" - It's hard to overstate how fast moving the 2008 financial crisis was. It wasn't hour to hour, it was minute to minute. We actually got lucky that some of the critical events took place late in the week so that there was a weekend (markets not open) to stop, think, and re-orient. The government paying back all of the mortgages directly would've taken too long. Remember during COVID how everyone got checks? How long did it take between announcement and the check arriving. IIRC, a couple weeks (at best). Even when Congress faces a crisis and passes a bill, the machinery of government can only go so fast. The best thing to do is what they did - telling the market to help itself out as much as possible while also passing TARP and constantly repeating "the full faith and credit of the USA is behind this."

  2. Because everything was moving so fast and the scale of the collapse was unprecedented, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury didn't exactly know if what they were planning on doing was legal. This is also in Firefighting. It wasn't just saying, "have general counsel look at this" it was literally unknown constitutional waters with (allegedly) the potential for personal liability. You can have differences of opinion with Bernanke et al., but those guys had to make some Big Time decisions under massive stress that could've (maybe) landed them in jail no matter how noble their intent.

All of this is to say, the government blanket paying mortgages might have some legal traps within it. Even if it did come back "clean" the time taken to review it would've been catastrophic (see point number 1)

  1. Organizations don't have all of the information and sometimes getting it is illegal. Remember AIG? They were an insurance giant who collapsed in 2008. This was (to oversimplify) because they wrote a bunch of insurance policies to other financial entities that went really bad really fast. Well, why didn't AIG just do better diligence? (1) There were layers and layers of counter parties, derivatives, and reinsurance. Impossible to trace through all of it (2) In some cases, getting a complete picture of a counter-party's risk or exposure is illegal as it would involve revealing trade secrets. How do mortgages fit into this? At the time, I'm not sure it was readily apparent that mortgages were the root cause of all of this. The crisis itself was on liquidity and short term financing for big financial instiutions, everyone could see that. What caused that may have been more mysterious, so I don't think the Gov't was in a position to quickly say "let's get these mortgages figured out." And, to beat the dead horse, taking the time to figure it out would've been the wrong move.

2008 is fascinating to me for tons of reasons. People experienced a lot of pain in the years following and it has a non-trivial part in the political situation we have today. But it could've been so, so, much worse, and I think we avoided it just barely.

Thank you for the well thought out reply! Of course I actually think that the guillotines not being rolled out for the people responsible for the crisis was a societal failure, but I appreciate your analysis here.

But this can't possibly be a "mistake" because by the time you're even asking how much your customers' assets are worth, you're already committing fraud.

If a customer entrusts me with 2 BTC and 100 DOGE then I must keep precisely 2 BTC and 100 DOGE for them. However much the value of those assets fluctuates, I'll still be able to pay them back. But if I do some math and determine that I can trade off those BTC and DOGE at a certain ratio, the problem is not with the math. Even if my market predictions are exactly correct, it's still fraud.

It's really not any more complicated than that. It's frustrating when "asset valuation" keeps getting brought up in the context of FTX because it's obviously an attempt to muddy the waters and confuse people about why what FTX did was bad.

FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.

Probably not fraud, since the investors have given the CEO broad discretion to spend and risk company funds in order to generate a return, with the expectation that they may lose it all. (As opposed to FTX customers who had not delegated any such discretion to FTX) Nor was the CEO was the making the gamble for any personal gain. (As opposed to FTX lending funds to SBF's other firm, Alameda).

As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away.

I don't see the fraud here.

It is an interesting case -- what is going on is that Uber is facilitating the rampant commission of misdemeanor/summary violations of municipal codes. This reminds me of how Google maps will send notifications if there is a speed trap coming up. I'm not actually sure who would be responsible for trying to indict Uber, and what actual statute they would cite as Uber having violated.

I am quite sure that if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas, that counts as a breach of fiduciary duty.

I am quite sure that if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas, that counts as a breach of fiduciary duty.

As a matter of company law, the objectives of the company in the articles were almost certainly "make money" and the choice of how to do it was protected by the business judgement rule. If FedEx had been a public company at the time, then it might have been securities fraud. But the rules are much laxer for private companies.

Securities law applies to private companies as well, if you take investments and issue equity. That you make a distinction between public and private companies here suggests to me that you don’t have much idea what you are talking about.

Lots of securities laws only apply to public companies - in the US this includes Reg FD and most of SarbOx. The general pattern is that public companies are required to disclose a lot more information than private ones, with making a false disclosure punishable as securities fraud. A private company that doesn't make a formal disclosure can't commit securities fraud by making a false one.

If I was trying to prosecute a company for gambling shareholders' money in Vegas, I would argue that they had made corporate disclosures which implicitly said they were not gambling shareholders' money in Vegas, and were therefore fraudulent. That is much easier to do with public company disclosures than private company ones (which are basically just the accounts).

I definitely wouldn't argue that it was a breach of fiduciary duty - under the circumstances in the Fedex story that argument would be a loser in both England and Delaware that would definitely lose in court because of the business judgement rule.

This is a much more reasonable comment.

A private company that doesn't make a formal disclosure can't commit securities fraud by making a false one.

Yes, but this is precisely why I phrased my comment as such:

if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas

I simply don’t see how you can argue that spending all funds on gambling in Vegas is just a business decision, anymore than you could argue that spending all investor funds on buying yourself a villa and a Lambo is just a business decision.

I definitely wouldn't argue that it was a breach of fiduciary duty - under the circumstances in the Fedex story that argument would be a loser in both England and Delaware that would definitely lose in court because of the business judgement rule.

I assume, though, that the gambling was done under his own name? If he lost the money in gambling, he might have a tough time proving to a jury that he intended to give the winnings back to the company. He would have to prove that he really was gambling on behalf of the company, rather than embezzling the money to himself and gambling it on behalf of himself, that might be tough to do.

SBF had a weird double-or-nothing gambling philosophy vaguely informed by EA stuff, sure. The weird thing seems to be that he didn't think there would be another severe crypto crash when it had happened like 5 times before in the last 10 years before FTX collapsed.

Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court. This is even worse in the crypto era, as the position taken by the SEC and friends is shameful, giving very little guidance on new forms of financial technology and telling firms years later by indictment that they were frowning on their behavior all this time.

As @Gillitrut suggests, the SEC (and US taxation regime under the IRS too, if you're talking about personal risk) is essentially the epitome of anarcho-tyranny in the modern age. It has unlimited global jurisdiction to ruin your life; anyone with any money or indeed any business can be fucked for something; the only "defense" is that you (a) help them enough to get other people (or in some other way) so that they let you off, (b) that they show mercy for some other reason (like political connections) or (c) that you have something that makes them look bad. I don't know that all quants operate in this area, the issue for them is that as the LME situation last year showed (where quants made hundreds of millions in losses after the LME reversed $7bn in trades to prevent the whole sector from imploding because pursuing the Chinese metals guy for his assets in China would have been legally impossible; JS etc are now suing), they're not the biggest fish and regulators and exchanges have very little sympathy for them.

Billionaires don't really have a lot of power in the West, or at least most of them don't. If you make it to billionaire status in any way that isn't the most boring, legitimate tech business where your sole pre-IPO investors are legitimate domestic VCs, diligently file everything, pay everything, and operate exclusively domestically in a way that satisfies everyone (and even then...), you can get got for something. The only reason Elon Musk is fine is because the government relies on him for the Ukraine War and for NASA, which means he has leverage. But that leverage isn't because he's 'rich', it's because he controls technology that the state has deemed useful.

(where quants made hundreds of millions in losses after the LME reversed $7bn in trades to prevent the whole sector from imploding because pursuing the Chinese metals guy for his assets in China would have been legally impossible; JS etc are now suing)

That was the biggest BS ever. Trading strategies very rarely just buy and hold, they hedge their exposures. If your trades get cancelled you suddenly have exposure that you didn't account for, and it's likely going to be quite toxic too if everyone else has been handed exposure in the same direction and they all try to get rid of it at the same time.

I agree that it was toxic, but they didn’t really have a choice. Metals is a very small world and if he’d been called and the banks had to try to seize $10bn in Chinese assets (majority located in mainland China and Indonesia via networks of holding companies) they knew they’d be completely screwed. The Bloomberg article said the bankers knew everyone was losing their job and never working in the business again if they fucked it up. As it is there are likely obscure provisions in some ancient administrative bylaw of the LME that mean they can win the lawsuits against the angry traders, but we’ll see. I don’t envy them, but quants also need to know when they’re playing in markets that are a lot less fair than their historical favorites.

FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.

See, this is strange. Because I find it incredibly difficult to put myself in SBF's shoes and see why he does certain things, but I find the actual failure of FTX/Alameda...totally boring and banal at this point?

Maybe it's because I've seen a ton of other crypto sites go under. My model is quite simple: things were...looser in cryptoland, SBF and co. were on drugs/in their own little world and so they did dumb things (play with customer money) when they started to lose money. Simply because they could.

People will always fuck up like this given an inch of leeway. Human nature.

I guess I see it as "this is the sort of story I expect to see in a Wikipedia article about banks in the 1800s that led to X regulation"?

As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.

Disagree here. It's not fraud. They just exploited one glaring huge loophole in every law that lawmakers ignore it so often that the only reason I could think of it is purposeful. The loophole is - quantity has quality of it's own.

Think of it that way - driving people has always been legal. Carpooling is also universally legal. Being reimbursed on expenses that you incur while helping people is also legal. Posting a message on your condo message board - I am working here, so I can drive back and forth 3 people every day to this point in the morning and evening is once again legal. It is also legal if a friend calls you with - my girlfriend is here, she needs someone to pick her up at the airport, and leave her at my apartment, and I am out of town. Now come Uber - the ever helping carebears - they just provide a software that makes coordination and communication easy, and they just help people with the reimbursements. They are not a taxi company. They are saving the planet by increasing carpooling. Think of the trees. And the saved CO2. And if you have good and expensive lawyers they can explain for a long long time the stark differences between them and the taxi companies. Same with airbnb. They take some informal behavior and turn it up to 11.

This is an interesting way of seeing it. I can think of a lot of regulated activities that can simply be broken down into a series of unregulated activities. Does this ever win in court, or do judges always slap it down with something like "don't try to be cute; the greater picture is obviously that you ran an unregulated taxi"?

*EDIT: I guess this is probably why legal systems rely so much on subjective human judgement rather than applying purely mechanistic rules, as the latter would be tricked by breaking down a regulated activity into a series of unregulated ones, but humans would probably just see what happened for what it is.

The Uber thing isn’t even as clever as you’re describing. At least in New York the rule was you couldn’t do flag stops unless you were a “taxi.” But you could always call someone and arrange a pickup. Uber is that with an app instead of a catchy commercial and a memorable phone number.

There are additional rules for livery car services beyond the requirement to book in advance - notably that people driving commercially should have commercial insurance. My understanding was that Uber initially ignored these rules in NYC but eventually ended up complying.

London was a slightly unusual case in that our minicab law was sufficiently flexible that Uber decided to comply from day 1. For the same reason, there was a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber arrived. Uber outcompeted them on price and convenience by being willing to lose money hand-over-fist. Now that Uber are making a (tiny) operating profit, they have the same prices as traditional minicab firms.

Giving your congressman money is legal. Having your congressman vote on a bill is legal. Giving your congressman money so that he will vote a particular way on a bill is illegal.

The loophole doesn't work. In cities where only taxis can offer rides for hire (including San Francisco at the time Uber started), Uber is an unlicensed taxi, and therefore illegal. Every city that has litigated this point has won, and driven Uber out. The exception is the one that matters - in San Francisco, where it all started, Uber were able to delay for long enough to build up sufficient lobbying power that they could get the California legislature to change the law before the case got to trial.

In cities where pre-booked livery cars (AmE)/minicabs (BrE) are legal, Uber has generally ended up complying with the laws and operating a licensed minicab service.

The model of 'success has many legal theories, failure has one' isn't wrong -- Levine has made it and he's pretty far from an SEC skeptic -- but I don't think it's really the big driving factor, here.

Uber, most clearly, was based on illegal conduct (with Uber/Lyft making a lot of kinda marginal arguments about whether they were 'really' unlicensed taxis/limousines), but it didn't lie about the illegal things it was doing (uh, much). FedEx's founder either had a really good winning streak at blackjack or just trafficked drugs, depending on how much you trust the official story, but it didn't tell consumers or investors something that FedEx knew was false.

((Unlike their tracking number system.))

Bankman-Fried is alleged (indictment here) to have told customers that their banked assets would be segregated and protected and not be used as investment capital, and also claimed to banks to be doing different things with different organizations than he was. Many of those customers were U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and at least one of those banks was an American bank specifically trying to separate whether FTX was transferring coins to dollars and vice versa in a way that triggered extra overhead, or if "North Dimension" was a solely-cryptocurrency business doing just cryptocurrency things that didn't require that extra overhead.

These are frauds for regulatory purposes in a different way than 'I'm not a taxi wink-wink'. This is 'I'm not a taxi, ignore the yellow spray paint, and also I'm going to submit a bunch of advertisements and legal documents where I have "TAXI" on a sign ontop of my car'. There are good philosophical issues the argue that this law isn't Correct -- not because FTX would have been a legitimate company if only lying to customers about the safety of their funds were legal, but because it is genuinely pretty vague and, even in cases like this, it's often used as a simple way to trigger criminal liability rather than describing the actual harm (ie, I care a lot more that FTX was passing customer funds to Alameda than that he didn't put a tiny legal disclaimer).

FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.

I'm not sure it was. (and not just in the janky 'is it an exchange or a futures' bulls). It spent like a successful business, and it had an unusually competent customer interface.

But the simply rates-and-flows problem was awful: even the rosiest numbers for FTX had reasonable incomes, ridiculously high outflows, and no particularly compelling argument that it was going to bump the first half of that equation with the second. Worse, FTX was publicly promoting increasing those outflows continuously, on fairly short time frames.

It wasn't an immediate issue so long as a) it had a ton of investors eager to give it cash, b) the paper value of various coins were growing, and c) no one called Alameda's bluffs. But even for those rosy numbers, a lot of FTX's balance sheet consisted of values it have never bought or bet on. Now, Alameda's bluffs got called (maybe to the tune of 8-10 billion USD?) and that exploded the whole mess first, and maybe Alameda's bluffs were a necessary part of the whole scheme to keep pumping coin values.

But all of those bluffs were moved into 'assets' with paper values, and even at those paper values FTX's debts were growing faster. Without Alameda, or if Alameda had only broken slightly-less-than-even rather than at tremendous loss, it might have outlasted other exchanges/futures in the current crypto downturn, but it'd still be a really bad bet.

That's kinda annoying! I think there is (admittedly small) business cases for coins as a way to handle (weakly) committed transfers without a lot of conventional financial system weaknesses or abuses. But you're not going to be a business doing that and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on sponsorships.

I mostly agree with you. Though, I contend during the peak of cryptomania, banking these bluffs as assets sounded "reasonable". Unless you mean something by bluffs that I'm not understanding. Bitcoin grew from $11,000 to $67,000 in a couple of months, there were 10000% APY DeFi yield farming plays, and SBF was on a podcast with Matt Levine describing innovative new ponzi schemes magic box technology and instead of derailing the train it blew people's minds even harder.

The party is now well over, everyone is hungover and people are regretting their life choices.

SBF was obviously high on his supply. Or he's an extremely manipulative criminal mastermind. But this seems more easily explained by untethered (ha!) speculative mania to me?

I'm not very strong at economics, but my understanding of the problem as a naive outsider :

FTX (bizarrely) didn't have possession of much actual bitcoin, and did have liabilities in bitcoin, during the rush. A lot of what they did have were weird (often self-minted) project tokens, or tokens where a lot of the value was, charitably, FTX employees buying high or making offers to buy high.

Weird self-minted project tokens aren't illegal or necessarily even fraudy, but at best they're ultimately like stock in that they operate as a bet that their majority owner will do well: if FTX's business case didn't work well, the coins would not have transaction volume or value, and if FTX's business case worked fine but their financials failed at a large enough scale it would eventually liquidate enough of each token to plummet their value. Similarly, the more that other tokens were dependent on FTX purchases to weather drops in value, the less dollar value they'd have if FTX folded (or even if it had 'merely' tourniquet them).

On its own, those bluffs aren't necessarily clearly bad decisions. If you have a lot of paper value that's probably worthless and you do nothing with it, you're fine. But both FTX and Alameda were hemorrhaging money, and selling a lot of this probably-worthless paper to other people in exchange for more valuable paper, or using it to justify loans. It's not just that it was in the red, but that FTX was spending like it wasn't in the red. The more and more your business case depends on the chance that many or most of these tokens have, if not as meteoric a rise as bitcoin, at least have a stellar result, that's not (necessarily) illegal, but it's a really dumb idea. The more and more your reserve fund depends on selling things no one's buying, the more it goes from really dumb to hilariously bad.

And that's the best-case scenario -- not that Alameda's bad bets were intentional ways for FTX to pump its sales side, no one explicitly calls anything embezzlement in e-mails, so on. There's some fun philosophical questions about whether this is 'really' criminal intent or just so hopped up on adderall that they don't know the difference between right and wrong, or honestly believed that just the next day every coin he owned was going to take off in a way that would grow them massively. For the purposes of fraud, though, he said he was going to do one thing and did another. For the purposes of business decisions, it doesn't really matter what he thought, or what some random person hearing about Magic Boxes thought.

My priors are that the progressive technocracy are the de facto rulers of the planet at this point. That means Trump gets his business (of completed buildings, fulfilled contracts, and repaid loans) taken away for “fraud,” and SBF gets a slap on the wrist and another couple billion to play with.

If we were on Reddit, I’d ask the RemindMe Bot to remind me in a year and a half.

I would bet you a fairly large amount of money SBF will get at least ten years in prison but we're anon, unfortunately. We'll have to settle for fake internet points (which, in the spirit of FTX, I will add to my personal balance sheet as a $10,000 asset).

In all the meme coins that came out a few years ago, I'm surprised there wasn't a coin built around being the currency for personal wagers.

Yeah, 10+ years of work and you still can't do anything useful with crypto. What were we all even doing.

There are surely crypto (interpersonal) betting sites, but again you’d need someone to manage escrow and judge the winner, at least.

I'm pretty sure there is a coin for that, can't recall its name though.

I don’t see a good reason why he wouldn’t get the same years as Madoff. I guess slightly smaller crime but still in the billions. It seems like the same crime to me.

It depends what you consider a slap on the wrist but unless the prosecution has built a terrible case SBF is going away for 8+ years at the extreme leniency end of the spectrum. He won’t get Ulbricht tier (because he’ll likely be less obstinate at the end, and it wasn’t the drug + hitmen hiring combo) or Madoff tier (because he was ripping off VCs, pension plans and tech schmucks rather than very well-connected elderly ladies in Palm Beach), maybe there will be some leniency due to his age, but it could easily be 15 years or more if he’s unlucky.

I'd take the other end of that action.

SBF is a rich white tech-bro with an eminently-punchable face, who appears to have stolen a lot of money. Blue Tribe benefits in no way from protecting him; he already gave them a lot of money, he's never going to have that kind of money to give again, and protecting him would be terrible optics. So they won't, and he's going away for a long time, 10 years+ easy. There's no reason to believe he has blackmail material or any other kind of leverage, and if he did, we'd see that kick in way, way earlier in the process, not in some surprise courtroom twist right out in front of God and everybody.

The system is crooked, but even crooked systems still have an internal logic and some connection to reality.

As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away.

How is that fraud? Fraud is when you trick someone into giving you something. Disregarding government regulation is not fraud.

Anyway, the comparison is odd. Sam Bankman-Fried, as I understand, lied to his customers about risking their deposits. He effectively stole and then lost billions of dollars. Uber broke laws - artificially constraining the supply of taxis - which probably most informed intelligent people think are unjust.

horror at this alien thing we call modern business.

That's not really modern business. Merchants and noblemen running estates always did stuff like this. Caesar was perennially in debt and a lot of what he did was an attempt to climb out of that debt. All's well if it ends well is an expression for a reason and we have courts, because it often doesn't end well. The only other option is a totalitarian surveillance state and regulatory apparatus with commissars in every business (and you better hope those commissars aren't corrupt and lawsuits aren't filed anyway).

I agree with the commentators that dispute calling Uber a fraud. Further, you also gloss over just how much of a legal grey area they operating in when they started. New York City is famous for its highly restricted taxi licensing, but even there you've always had the ability to schedule a pre-arranged ride through private livery drivers. This was referred to as "black car service" because the market tended to favor high-end vehicles driven by dressed-up chauffeurs. The big advantage for a taxi license was the ability to pick up customers through street hails or cabstands, and so there wasn't much of a conflict or overlap between the two markets. They existed more-or-less in harmony for decades because "calling ahead" was too much of a pain in the ass and too bougie to be a threat to the taxi industry.

Obviously that changed with smartphones. Suddenly the ability to "call a car" became way way easier, and taxis had the right to worry but they couldn't do shit about it. The regulations that allowed pre-arranged rides existed for decades did not have a "unless pre-arranging gets too easy!" clause. On top of that, Uber's business model had additional layers of protection because of their defense of "We don't own or operate any 'taxis' that's crazy, we just connect you with 'drivers' who will take you places". Taxi companies desperately tried to sue Uber for numerous violations, but they lost every single lawsuit.

In pretty much every jurisdiction in the world there are rules on what you need to do to drive a car for hire and Uber frequently did not require drivers to follow every jurisdiction's rules to start driving. These jurisdictions had the option to shut Uber down for this but they either couldn't get their shit together, they looked the other way, or they did and it became a constant political issue they had to balance against how mad local taxi companies were.

In my town Uber was warned to stop or comply, they ignored the warning, the town fined them, and then Uber disappeared from town. Then the town council got shit for it for years before they changed taxi laws. Uber did some form of this everywhere. As much as I appreciate Uber and love the future we live in, this is a blatantly criminally minded business plan!

In Korea, Uber was kicked out of the entire country, and only foreigners complained, because domestic app companies worked with taxi companies to come up with non-shitty ride hailing services of their own. I think they might have a Korean service now, having miraculously discovered how to work within the confines of existing taxi regulations.

You're right, that did happen in some places. I was pushing back on the idea that it was the primary business plan, by highlighting what the law actually was in major cities when they entered the scene.

Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court.

Can you elaborate on this? I know a bunch of people who work in quant finance and while it seems completely socially useless it also seems perfectly legally legitimate.

If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail.

For what?

Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned.

No, he stole a bunch of money and got caught.

All the libor manipulation convictions I believe got over turned a decade later. And supposedly the desks had official pressure to manipulate libor lower. A lot of the issues is there wasn’t a true market there.

Spoofing is now illegal. It wasn’t a decade ago until they invented it and started prosecuting people for it.

WhatsApp convos just got Banks fined a ton.

I don't think the Libor manipulation was being done by quants. The false numbers were being submitted by banks' treasury markets desks The pressure to submit the false numbers was coming from the interest rate derivatives desks (or, in the case of Barclays in 2008, the Bank of England). Both desks employ desk quants to babysit derivatives pricing models (and, increasingly, risk models) but aren't run by quants. (Tom Hayes has the classic quant background, but he was working as a flow trader, not a quant).

The US convictions got overturned on appeal, the UK ones did not. The difference is that the UK appeals court ruled that "What rate can your bank borrow at under the standard LIBOR terms?" is a question with (in principle) a single correct answer, and therefore changing your submission based on pressure from another trading desk implies that you were not submitting your best estimate of the true answer, hence per se fraud. The US appeals court said that there is necessary a range of reasonable answers, that choosing one answer within this range as opposed to another based on pressure from another trading desk is not fraudulent, and that the prosecution did not prove that the rigged LIBOR submissions were outside the reasonable range. I am with the Brits on this - everyone involved in LIBOR rigging knew that what they were doing was wrong (both by conventional ethics and by the situational ethics of well-run financial markets). I expect that they also knew that the market for LIBOR-linked interest rate derivatives could not survive their behaviour being exposed (because clients don't want to be ripped off).

All the crooks are now out of jail having served their sentences. Tom Hayes is still trying to clear his name, but there isn't much sympathy for him among London bankers - even if it is technically not a crime, rigging benchmark interest rates is the sort of thing we need to be seen not to do in order to retain the trust of our clients. London as a centre of interest rate derivative trading is weaker because LIBOR has been discontinued.

The people who I do have some sympathy with (and I note that they were not prosecuted) were the people who made optimistic submissions in 2008 in order to contain the financial crisis. You can argue about whether they were cheating according to conventional ethics, but their behaviour made LIBOR (which was used by the industry as a risk-free rate) closer to what everyone expected it to be, helped preserve financial stability in a crisis, and was what the regulators were fairly clear they wanted to see.

I don’t disagree with your analysis. Though flow trader versus quant are fairly adjacent plus as you said he looks like a typical quant. The reason I mentioned libor is it’s a prime example of mixed regulatory messaging and then they ended up in jail.

I remember when Zerohedge use to run articles on things like some stocks were getting so many order messages the system was breaking. That does sound like purposefully manipulating markets to break the system for edge. I would assume there are plenty of things like that of quants pushing the line to gain an edge.

There were, in effect, two separate Libor-rigging scandals. There was no regulatory mixed messaging about the Libor-rigging-for-profit that Tom Hayes et al were engaged in - even if you accept the 2nd Circuit's argument that it wasn't fraud, it was clearly a violation of market norms about treating customers fairly. The regulatory mixed messaging was about Libor-rigging-to-prevent-bank-runs in 2008.

Still think that ties into his quant concerns. No doubt many push the line for edge. So same thing mixed message.

Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court.

In HFT (which, admittedly, is not "pretty much everyone who works in quant finance"), the issue is that rules about market manipulation designed for humans operating over timescales of minutes become dangerously vague when applied to computers operating over timescales of hundredths of a second. The rules against spoofing and layering are fundamentally the application to modern markets of the rules against the tape manipulation frauds of the 1920's that were brought in by Joe Kennedy's SEC after the 1929 crash. But those rules define crimes based, at least in part, on dishonest intent (which experienced practitioners can infer from behaviour). Inferring intent from behaviour is harder when one computer is ripping off another computer in a novel way, so it is harder to enforce the rules fairly, and more opportunity for unfairness. There are plenty of people who think that the distinction between what Navinder Singh Sarao was jailed for doing and what Citadel and Renaissance do on a daily basis is Who?, Whom?

The other areas of quant finance (derivatives pricing, risk modelling, quant hedge funds other than HFTs) do not operate in legal grey areas. There are also HFT strategies which do not operate in legal grey areas, such as Jane Street's ETF business.

This seems largely correct.

The who/whom thing it always felt to me like they needed to hang someone and he was the easiest to hang. Citadel supposedly has been a big backer of anti spoofing prosecutions because it negates some of their speed advantages and models. But they get sued too they just have better lawyers and do a fine job getting out of trouble. Witness them refusing to pay a WhatsApp fine.

I also fine it funny that the whole GMC/AMC trades (no idea if they made internally) they did seem to lose some money investing in the fund that blew up. I’ve always thought the GMC/AMC longs were guilty of market manipulation. Basically organizing a group to manipulate shorts into trading (puking) their position. Which would be illegal if three people with big war chests organized the move together. But done in a distributed way is tough to nail any one person for.

Do you mean GME (Gamestop) or GMC (Post-BK General Motors)?

I agree with you that the SEC could have got a conviction for market manipulation against DeepFuckingValue if they wanted it, but equity short sellers are even less popular than market manipulators, so nailing a short seller is safe politically. Both the 1920 Stutz and 2008 Volkswagen corners nailed some of the biggest, best connected players in the market, but there was no interference by the authorities. In both cases the longs ended up running out of cash because in the process of executing the corner they bought the target company for more than it was worth.

Doing that in a commodity futures market, where the shorts include non-financial end users hedging their real-world risk, will get you hauled off in handcuffs.

Ya of course.

I mean the law should be the law. I don’t know if deepvalue crossed the line. I know chamath tweeted short squeeze and encouraged people to play which might cross the line. And he’s lost a lot of people money with his promotions.

Short sellers might not be popular but the fund that blew up does provide a real service. They keep retail losses lower by shorting.

I guess that’s a who/whom case but maybe the distributed nature of it protected him. I tend to think not.

Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court.

Can you elaborate on this? I know a bunch of people who work in quant finance and while it seems completely socially useless it also seems perfectly legally legitimate

Every trader makes mistakes: around trading on what turned out to be material non-public information, or discussing business on non-recorded channels, or their company learns they've been failing to record chats (or emails) for months without noticing before, or due to a glitch they accidentally sold a ton of shit short they didn't have the right to short, etc.

All of these things are technically illegal but if you immediately reach out to the SEC (or whomever) and fess up they'll probably just slap you on the wrist. But it's completely at their discretion and they might bring serious charges. Or threaten licenses. Or jail. It very much depends on your relationship with the regulator. Woe is you if the SEC discovers these problems before you've noticed yourself and fessed up.

Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems

One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.

The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.

Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.

This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.

If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.

This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.

Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.

The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.

The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.

Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.

Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.

On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.

Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.

Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.

I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).

As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.

I think there’s a lot of cognitive biases that cause this.

First of all is the “fair” notion. The idea that life is ever supposed to be equal or that people are supposed to get roughly equal amounts of reward and that there’s some ceiling cat to appeal to when someone has “too much” which is actually in practice “has more than ME.” And really, that’s never been reality. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you’re doing more, or providing necessary services, you deserve more. But, that’s not “fair”.

Second is that people always have the wrong idea about just how much work their betters actually do. I’ve seen this when people talk about the CEO. They assume that their work is easy, that they do slacker work and go play golf. Or they assume that it doesn’t take any more intellectual capacity than they themselves have. Again, this isn’t true. Anyone who has run a business— even a small one — can tell you that the business runs your life. Your “vacation” simply means working from a beach instead of an office. Slacking off means working 80 a week instead of 100 a week. You can kiss family time and friend time goodbye unless you can work while hanging around with them.

And it requires serious smarts as well. If you’re not smart enough to understand cultural trends properly, new technologies, regulations, emerging markets, competition, and the entire operation of the business from top to bottom, then chances are you won’t actually have a business in five years. One bad marketing decision cost InBev billions. Misunderstanding digital photography killed Kodak. One reputation killing bad product can tank you. And it’s a constant thing. Technology alone moves so fast that a person who cannot understand emerging technology from day one is at a huge disadvantage. Being too slow to adapt is deadly, but so is backing the wrong technology.

First of all is the “fair” notion.

Maybe not just a cognitive bias at this point. It's reinforced/encouraged by rights discourse which is a neat frame for any situation where you're not getting something you want. It allows/encourages obscuring the logistics of any service and the fact that the laws of economics and physics don't get suspended for anyone. Which then makes it easy to claim an injustice.

You'd think people don't actually believe-believe that but I do find it weird how many people think declaring something a human right means anything. I suppose it does, it means: it's your job to provide it for me even if it costs you (or the government's job to force you to do so).

You buy into that and someone eventually has to be to blame for why you don't have something you "deserve". The rich are always a good bet.

We do see it where fairness in the most obvious sense isn't expected: a lot of the talk around immigration seems to lean on "rights" of asylum seekers as if it resolves a single logistical issue for anyone. The entire discussion then necessarily becomes who's denying these rights.

I agree. I’ve long been skeptical of “rights” discourse because it approaches human dignity in a very narcissistic and narrow way. What you’re implying when you say you have a right is that you have a claim to something regardless of your connection to the wider society. If I have a right to food, even if I’ve done nothing or even been a net drain on society, then I still get that, I have the right to demand it through channels as provided by society. I could have destroyed the entire ability of the rest of society to eat. I’m much more in line with the idea of reciprocity especially in Confucius. The ruler owes his ministers, but those ministers owe the ruler. The teacher owes the students, but the students owe the teacher. On it goes, of course through all of human relationships.

What I think this does better than modern notions of rights is that it undercuts the narcissistic tendency to see society as a thing that’s supposed to cater to me as an individual. Instead it puts me in a series of relationships that each come with benefits and duties. I get more respect as a senior leader, but as a senior leader, I’m expected to help juniors to achieve and teach them what I know. As a younger sibling I’m expected to obey my older siblings and in return they protect me. And thus I cannot simply wave my fist and demand something— goods, respect, or protection— without being in relationship and providing something to other people.

Does the stereotypical CEO work hard? I don't doubt that small-business owners and startup CEOs work hard. But what about CEOs like the head of a big bank or an oil company, where there are profits semi-automatically coming in?

Mostly it seems to be the work of a king to me. The king doesn't work hard. But the king is the final authority, he makes decisions between war or peace, he deals with the Papacy, he arbitrates between feuding nobles, he directs that royal funds be spent on bridges or cathedrals, he creates institutions... All 'work smart' stuff rather than 'work hard' stuff. Nobody has the power to make him work hard because normally things are going well and he's the boss.

They; at least, appear to work hard. I'm not sure how much value they produce; but, they try to look like they are producing value. They spend the effort on the appearance of the thing. I won't debate the actual product, because how could anyone without info into the goings on of the business make any real verdict except the one given by the stock price.

agree. a small business CEO is busting his or her ass off, probably way more so than the McDonald's ceo who is assured a fat pay package regardless of what happens

Fortune 500 CEOs aren't working bone crushing hours the way a small biz CEO might. (More on that second part later).

But, being an F500 CEO is incredibly hard.

I had the opportunity to meet and interact with one at the F500 I worked for in my mid 20s. This was a non-trivial interaction that occurred because a series of events led me to being on this big strategic thrust planning team that the CEO was half-personally overseeing. Another series of events led to a bunch of us being at the HQ on a Saturday. Right before lunch, the CEO walks into the main "war room" and literally rolls up his sleeves to help out. He was there all day. In that setting, everyone was talking with everyone at some point or another and the various "ranks" that usually created some deferential distance were not as palpable. It was easy to talk to the Big Guns, so I just sat down and started talking with the CEO.

The conversation can pretty much be summed up like this:

TollBooth: "So .... what do you actually do?"

F500 CEO: Chuckling, "I make about four decisions per year and, the rest of the time, am on call to answer questions that the board and wall street investors have. That's the easy part. I'm basically a financial psychotherapist. The first part is way harder."

TollBooth: "Why?"

F500 CEO: "Because those four decisions dictate the 16 - 20 decisions I can possibly make for the next 4 to 5 years. If I make the wrong ones this year, we, as a company, have fundamentally worse options in the out years."

TollBooth: "So, just make good decisions this year"

F500 CEO: "Well, yeah, that's the goal. But these 4 or so decisions I make rely on, without exception, massively incomplete information that I then have to use as part of a decision making model that incorporates what I think our competitors are going to do, what the market will support, and what won't cost us customers. All of those things are interdependent and you can't really say which one comes "first" in the decision making chain. It's like hitting a half dozen moving targets that are all moving in random directions - if you time it right, you can blast three of them at once, and that's a really great year. If you don't, you miss everything and it looks to outsiders like you were shooting randomly."

TollBooth: "Why are we doing this strategic thrust thingy right now?"

F500 CEO: "Because I screwed up one decision two years ago and I think I can salvage it with this. If I can't, I probably am gone 2 years from now."

I'd add one personal/emotional level consideration to this; you have to live with the uncertainty and lack of control leading up to and following making these four big decisions each year. One thing I learned in my first technical sales engineering team was that a sales process might be long, but you can sort of see it developing day to day and week to week. So, you can reduce your overall anxiety by just doing the next obvious thing in the process, even if that thing is banal (scheduling a follow up meeting, asking for a how-to guide review, whatever). A good analogy is training for a sports meet. You put in the work day in and day out, and then, all of a sudden, it's the big payoff day / week and you go out and get it (or don't). All your nervous energy along the way, however, you can divert into the training (or the development of a sales cycle in this case).

The CEO can't do that. There's no training cycle that builds up to something. It's literally four decisions made on four different days across a year. I think he could, and did, think about the decisions a lot before he made them. And I also think he probably had a team of smart people digging through a mountain of data and projections. But, like he said / I wrote above, these decisions had really incomplete information - you can't brute force your way through them even with a million spreadsheet runs. And, there isn't really a way to test and the iterate - you're calling out a new direction for the Battleship and you have to live with it until you hit the iceberg or don't. (Sorry for throwing in another unrelated metaphor)

I think the personality type that ends up as an F500 CEO definitely isn't "work like a dog 16 hours a day" but is, instead, "Be comfortable with weeks and months of utterly not knowing. Then pull the trigger." Is that hard work? You tell me.

Returning to small/medium CEOs working crazy hours. In my experience, that's 90% of the time a failure mode of a founder type CEO who can't give up micro levels of control and build the durable systems you need to scale. I've been in tech startups where the founder was very much the engineering genius type but then there came a time where the best answer was to "hire the MBAs." Everyone's life got better. Everyone made more money. The founder saw their big dream flourishing, albeit without direct control.

Very interesting commentary. I personally think it's 'work smart' stuff but the meaning of what you say does extend beyond anything a two-word platitude can cover.

Reminds me a little of my experience in crypto, few decisions, lots of stress, lots of waiting on events. Easy things that are difficult to do. Of course, much less money at stake.

Great write-up, thank you. I knew a CEO of a big bank, and I think the biggest barriers to making good decisions were:

  • lack of time: he would have regular lunch with other C-levels, but then there were regular skip-level 1:1s with department heads, meetings with key customers, meetings with directors, public relations, government relations, various steering committees
  • lack of data: there's a reason why all these "visual analytics" software packages blew up in popularity, most of the information comes in the form of carefully curated reports. If you let yourself be walked through one, you'll never see what your C-level exec or department head is not saying.
  • lack of levers: yes, this sounds strange, but these four big decisions each year are usually so big you don't really have a way to course-correct later. Yes, you can sometimes be a Jeff Bezos and write a memo that everyone has to use document APIs for integration or be fired, but usually you can only be a Jeff Bezos, read Chris Pinkham's memo, give him a whole lot of money and see what happens.

For example, there's a shareholder meeting and one of the directors tells you "Bank X used to be #5 retail bank in the country 4 years ago and now it's #8, while Bank Y, your closest competitor, grew from #6 to #3". This basically means you are already on your way out, so let's rewind the time.

There's a board meeting and your trusty advisory office has prepared a memo for you that shows that you'll soon lose your #5 spot in the ranking of retail banks. Your chief retail officer of course has a slide deck that explains that this is a temporary setback mostly driven by a big drop in car sales this year. What do you do?

  1. tell her that you want the bank to become #3? She comes back with an investment proposal of ten billion dollars that should break even in eight years. What do you do then?
  2. tell her to stop the backsliding? Next year you're solidly #6, but that's because there was another black swan that hurt you more than the competitors. What do you do?
  3. fire her and look for a better chief retail officer? What do you tell the new one?

Second is that people always have the wrong idea about just how much work their betters actually do. I’ve seen this when people talk about the CEO. They assume that their work is easy, that they do slacker work and go play golf. Or they assume that it doesn’t take any more intellectual capacity than they themselves have.

I think these is some truth to this though. I agree with 'the left' that many CEOs and managers are way overpaid relative to the value they create and compared to effort or skill. Look at the horrible performance of Cathie Wood's funds or Chamath SPACs. These people are worth billions or hundreds of millions of dollars, yet for piss-poor performance and bested by buy and hold of index funds or 60/40-bond mix to show for it. These people are not often "better's" --they just had maybe better networking, better school, better luck etc. Except for maybe the CEO of tech companies, they are not necessarily that much smarter. They just took more risks, which paid off, ignoring survivorship bias.

OTOH, extremely high CEO pay is not so much about doing more work, but as an incentive to encourage others to work hard in the hope of becoming promoted.

The quality of tech CEOs is pretty mixed too. I’ve known glorified conmen whose only skill is getting people to put money into obviously unworkable startups, sages with astounding achievements (from 30 years ago) who don’t have a clue about the area they’re trying to break into, and consultants who just sit there and brainstorm new slogans while the whole edifice degrades.

Tangential nitpick because this always really grinds my gears when I see it...

The index funds versus hedge funds comparison is insanely dishonest. Warren Buffett started it decades ago and it's an argumentative sleight-of-hand.

Broad market index funds (anywhere from 100% equity allocation to the 60/40-bond mix) pretty much track "the economy" as a whole. You're betting on all of the horses. Across cap size, across sectors. If you're including bonds, then you're covering the two largest asset classes on earth. If you can stay in the market long enough and tolerate bouts of down years, you're going to do just fine because the "oh shit" scenario is literally a 20-40 year sustained depression for the United States and very probably the rest of the world. Which, if it happens, fucks everyone including hedge funds and techBros. For generations.

Hedge funds are always much more narrowly constrained in what they invest in, and they often target very specific return profiles. "We long/short large cap non-financial equities and forecast capturing 80% of broad market upside in outperformance years while avoiding draw downs of over 20% in down years, with high annual liquidity but low turnover." That's contraint-on-constraint-on-constraint that index funds don't have to deal with at all. And hedge funds call their shots in that they predict a return profile within a given timeframe and aren't allowed to take excessive risk or leverage to get there. They actually can't "bet it all on black" again and again. Simply allocating to a portfolio with too elevated risk metrics constitutes something close to a breach of contract.

Why do hedge funds do this? Because most of them are trying to appeal to institutional investors (retirement funds, university endowments, etc.) that have really specific needs for performance, risk management, and cash disbursements for every single year. If you're CALPERS and you need to - every single year - push out $10 billion of retirement cash to your members to avoid a massive class action lawsuit, you need to find a hedge fund that has a reasonable chance of delivering part of that return profile. And they have to (try to) guarantee (part) of that return no matter what the rest of the market does. If there's a bad year, neither the hedge fund nor CALPERS can say, "Hey, sorry, we'll just wait a couple years to get back even." Nope, those retirees want their cash on the first of the month no matter what - and they probably have the legal language to back it up.

Why only part of the total return? Because no large institutional investor is allowed to give all of its money to a single fund / general partner. Diversification is always (nowadays) written into their charters. So, maybe the first chunk of money goes to the hypothetical fund above. That means that anybody else who's doing long/short in large cap non-fin equities is automatically off the list to receive another chunk of the institution's money - there's too much correlated risk. Pretty soon, you're investing in ARK Innovation because it's the only fund left who can take $100m - $1bn [:1] of capital that doesn't look like it's correlated to the rest of your portfolio.

Hedge funds are providing a very precise service at scale to a clientele that needs that precision within a time bound box. Index funds are providing general returns that track an economy over large cycles. It's pretty close to the difference between looking for a general practitioner doctor for health advice ("diet, exercise") and looking for a brain surgeon with tumor removal expertise that can also guarantee your blood pressure won't spike and your body temp won't fall too low during the surgery. Yep, that second guy probably has more dead patients on him, but that first guy has mustard on his shirt and likes to watch Mad Money in the afternoons.

[:1] Another thing people like to point to is that smaller funds often outperform their larger peers. That's because you have way more flexibility as a smaller fund and it's easier to deploy smaller amounts of capital. Big funds are a special monster because there are only so many things you can plow $1bn into and NOT move the market on your own.

Broad market index funds (anywhere from 100% equity allocation to the 60/40-bond mix) pretty much track "the economy" as a whole. You're betting on all of the horses.

The idea of the bond allocation is that bonds tend to do well relative to stocks when the economy is not doing so well, like in 2008 or 2001-2002. The problem is this failed massively in 2022.

And hedge funds call their shots in that they predict a return profile within a given timeframe and aren't allowed to take excessive risk or leverage to get there. They actually can't "bet it all on black" again and again. Simply allocating to a portfolio with too elevated risk metrics constitutes something close to a breach of contract.

Hmm but there have been many notable hedge fund failures of supposedly safe strategies, notably the collapse of LTCM.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." That's LTCM in a nutshell.

There's no such thing as an omni-safe investment. What you have in the strategies employed by firms like LTCM are situations that, when identified, have a very high if not perfect chance of doing exactly one thing eventually.

LTCM modeled spread convergences. You can look up the mechanics on your own. The problem is that in order to take advantage of this strategy, LTCM had to pay what amounted to insurance payments until the spread did, in fact, converge. The longer that doesn't happen, the more you pay. And if you're liquid capital dries up, sucks to be you - even if you turn out to be right! Additionally, LTCM eventually succumbed to the attraction of using leverage when the spreads themselves started too narrow. Leverage amplifes both returns and losses so if the spreads stopped narrowing and widened, even just a bit, LTCM would potentially be blown up - which is what happened during the 90s Russian debt crisis.

All of this is to say that even the risk-free rate of return (most often 10yr or longer Treasury Bonds) isn't static and isn't actually risk free if you layer it with leverage, derivatives, etc.

In terms of hedge funds "calling their shots" - I didn't mean to imply hedge funds sell "safe" strategies or that they always hit their anticipated performance. This is actually one of the brutal realities of the industry - if you're a senior analyst or a portfolio manager and you miss your targets even for one year, there's a really, really good chance you will get fired and, at best, only be able to find a new job a step down from where you were. While hedge fund compensation is pretty insane, it's a lot like professional sports in that you might only make it for 3,5,10 years before being close to unemployable. A lot of blowout types tumble down to financial consulting or fair valuation opinions or just market analysis and equity research. Still (mid to high) six figure jobs, but a far cry from some of the 7/8/9 (it happens) figure payouts people see in single years.

Plain old supply and demand drives CEO pay, for the most part, not value-over-replacement.

Even sub-replacement-level CEOs require an extremely unusual skill set. Large companies are like Game of Fucking Thrones. Running one is like herding cats where one of every three animals is actually a serial killer, a thief, or a company-destroying liability risk and three out of four would sell you for a sandwich, must less a shot at your job. On top of that, you're steering (at best) half-blind in a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tornado at the same time (macro-economically speaking).

There are certainly problems, like back-scratching boards determining compensation, but I don't see obviously superior alternatives.

I do think simultaneously that being a CEO is hugely demanding in terms of mental ability and time consumption, but also there's a ton of Fisher Kingness attributed to whoever happens to have the top job and they're largely fairly interchangeable.

Second is that people always have the wrong idea about just how much work their betters actually do

Given that the first half of the OP is defending landlords, this isn't really relevant. There is an active component to landlording (finding tenants, arranging repairs, etc.) but in the UK market most landlords hire agents to do this for them (and in fact most lenders insist on some degree of professional management of rental property). Collecting land rents is the closest thing to zero-effort moneymaking there is. When most capital was agricultural land, there really was a leisure class that worked less and spent more than the rest of us - see Jane Austen. In the future when most capital is residential land, the same will probably be true - see Thomas Piketty.

Actual capitalists who invest in productive assets have to do a lot of work creating those assets and ensuring they retain their value (and hiring someone to do it for you will cost you 2-and-20 if they know what you are doing, which doesn't leave much for you). But landlording is basically having a piece of paper saying "I, Charles III, by Grace of God and by virtue of my ancestor William the Conqueror having stolen this land in 1066, will cut the head off anyone who deigns to use the land without paying you off first". You need to collect the toll, but the work that makes the land valuable (including the violence incidental to making the promise meaningful, which can get very expensive indeed) is done by Charles's government and the community that support it.

Not really, because landlords assume all of the cleanup and maintenance and repair for every unit and the common areas as well. He’s the one finding a guy to fix the leaky roof, fixing the wiring, maintaining the building, providing security, working out the landscaping, fixing the parking lot, and making sure the garbage is collected and the utilities are paid. All of the things that go into ownership is on him for however many units he owns.

This isn't actually true, at least not in the country where I live.

Not really, because landlords assume all of the cleanup and maintenance and repair for every unit

Incorrect, when I was renting I was liable for damage to the property. I had to threaten taking the affair to the rental tribunal when they tried to charge me for a problem I reported when I moved in.

He’s the one finding a guy to fix the leaky roof, fixing the wiring, maintaining the building, providing security, working out the landscaping, fixing the parking lot, and making sure the garbage is collected and the utilities are paid.

They did not find a guy to do any of those things, the utilities were still paid by me the renter and the garbage collection is done by the local council (technically the landlord paid rates - however this cost is passed onto the renter so it doesn't actually matter).

Uneducated, low IQ people don’t understand economics. This isn’t news. Nor is it news that they’re disproportionately likely to be poor(and in fact, the few very successful individuals who are poorly educated and low IQ are notorious for the same thought patterns). Down on their luck people tend to be more interested in looking for solutions to their problems than people who are making it(a factory maintenance supervisor in Iowa does not care about housing costs or technological dividends no matter how little he understands economics- he simply has too high of a purchasing power to give much of a damn). These solutions are often stupid, because they don’t understand economics. They would probably work better if everyone knew everyone else, true, but it’s not quite dunbars number that makes the difference, it’s trust. Ultra-Orthodox Jews manage to evade the issue with exceeding dunbars number just fine(and no, they don’t understand economics either, 115 average IQ or no- it has to be studied and they don’t).

I dunno if it's so much about being low IQ but rather laziness. Many people don't research the issues that well. They default to superficial or easy narratives as a heuristic to save time. Its like 'Paul Krugman is smart and has a Nobel Prize ,so he must be right. Ill take his word for it instead of doing further research', for example.

The IQ threshold for doing your own research, especially as a layman, is very high. There is a reason ‘do your own research’ is mostly associated with conspiracy theorists- if you aren’t 130 IQ, then researching as a layman leads you to trying to figure out which crank is lying to you less.

if you aren’t 130 IQ, then researching as a layman leads you to trying to figure out which crank is lying to you less.

I mean in a lot of cases this is true, but I think that's actually a step up from simply accepting that Ibram Kendi is an authority on history and should be respected and listened to, or believing that historical Britain was a diverse and multicultural society with the demographics of modern day New York. Figuring out which crank is lying to you less is a step up from just accepting the lies of the more popular and socially acceptable cranks. Even when you start getting out of obvious horseshit like grievance studies, there are enough "studies" produced by people with commercial, social or political incentives motivating their reasoning that the various cranks actually start looking pretty reasonable.

To add a bit of a Jungian lense, I would say the problem is that the vast majority of people aren't very capable of rational abstraction, and instead understand the world through stories. I include myself and many other 'wordcels' in this category as well. To truly grasp large numbers we're working with is the province of autists, savants and mathematicians.

Unfortunately there simply hasn't been enough time for stories of large societies to reach archetypal status. With focus, dedication, a propensity for rationality and a high starting point of intellect one can bootstrap oneself into a sort of hodge-podged understanding of what is required at these large societal levels. But the idea that the everyday person could get to even a basic understanding is ridiculous.

The terrifying truth of the modern world, which most don't dare to speak out loud, is that there are only a handful of humans on Earth who can even glimpse the full complexity of human society. Not to mention the world itself. It's the old Redditism, "even adults don't know what they're doing, lol!" writ large, and without the ironic and detached humor.

I'd agree that modern communications technology makes this problem far, far worse as well.

many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking?

For the same reason humans have most of our cognitive blind spots: humans brains spent 99%+ evolving in Dubar-sized environment. Dub Dunbar level thinking is the cognitive status quo. What is amazing is that we have built systems and institutions that - far more often than not - don't employ disastrous rent control policies.

One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.

This is seen in regard to blaming the FDA and peer review for impeding progress of new ideas and treatments. The FDA does not impede progress and peer review does not stop news ideas. Treatments that fail the FDA are not denied because of bureaucracy, but because they simply do not work, not because there is some conspiracy by rich people, drug companies, or governments to deny treatments. That is what a clinical trial does. But very few experimental drugs yield a successful treatment, especially for cancer. it does not even make business sense for a drug company to 'horde' treatments given that the government is paying for it anyway under Medicare or Medicaid. Regarding peer review, the process is not to block new ideas but block things which are unscientific to begin with, poor fit for the journal, or not written in a logically coherent way.

This would be a better argument if we didn't have plenty of evidence of peer review being used to sabotage new ideas for all manner of reasons from moneyed interests to petty university politics.

Besides, the idea that the current publishing process' point is to root out unscientific publications is both ahistorical (this is not how it came about) and practically risible (it has not in fact succeeded in doing so, and has produced more unreplicated garbage than ever).

There is no general rule. Institutions aren't inherently trustworthy or untrustworthy. The men that make them are probably much more important than the stories they tell about themselves.

you'd have to consider the counterfactual of no peer review though... lots more papers disproving Einstein, proving/disproving the Riemann hypothesis, etc. based on demonstrably wrong arguments . Peer review, as imperfect as it is, is better than the alternative. One can argue "let the community decide" in which case the communtiy is flooded with a deluge of unscientific junk and only a finite amount of time to process it.

The thing is, we do have the counterfactual, which is what happened before the reification of scientific publishing and what still happens in novel disciplines: it was a free for all with all manner of cranks and yet the quality of scholarship people actually cared about wasn't worse, on the contrary. Nor indeed was it any harder to parse than what journals have now become where most of what is published is garbage and even the most prestigious ones are not what they used to be.

I hint at it in my previous post but the point of journals and peer review was never originally to credential knowledge production (which is actually anathema to the scientific method) but to solve a logistical problem for institutions that had to rely on paper and its very narrow and expensive bandwidth. A problem that no longer actually exists in any meaningful sense.

If you snapped your fingers and took all of Elsevier out of existence tomorrow, I'd wager the lives of scientists would actually become easier by a large margin. And I submit as evidence the fact that most scientists in most disciplines actively circumvent copyright laws on the daily.

I also submit to you that it is in fact the credentialist approach that produces the greater incentive for fraud as the rewards of State funding are much easier to game when they are behind a list of bureaucratic checkboxes than behind a genuine need or the true esteem of one's peers.

I hint at it in my previous post but the point of journals and peer review was never originally to credential knowledge production (which is actually anathema to the scientific method) but to solve a logistical problem for institutions that had to rely on paper and its very narrow and expensive bandwidth. A problem that no longer actually exists in any meaningful sense.

time is a finite resource. so is manpower. people who read journals do not want to have to sift through piles of crud. peer review is not just about saving space but about curation.

The thing is, we do have the counterfactual, which is what happened before the reification of scientific publishing and what still happens in novel disciplines: it was a free for all with all manner of cranks and yet the quality of scholarship people actually cared about wasn't worse, on the contrary. Nor indeed was it any harder to parse than what journals have now become where most of what is published is garbage and even the most prestigious ones are not what they used to be.

The crank ideas fell out of favor because of peer review. Otherwise we'd still be seeing papers about luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, and perpetual motion machines. It's not so much as a 'free for all' , but that competing ideas can coexist and then one wins out as being correct and the other is discarded.

This entire line of argument is a post-hoc rationalization. Again this isn't actually how peer review came about, this is the excuse to keep it going, but regardless of the merits of peer review, that excuse is nonsense, because the process has proven quite unable to filter out garbage science.

What it does do is prevent heterodox publication, which is completely different

It's not so much as a 'free for all' , but that competing ideas can coexist and then one wins out as being correct and the other is discarded

What's you're describing here is paradigmatization as conceptualized by Kuhn, the process in which a discipline becomes more structured and predictable by producing more incremental work based on an assumed theory or framework until it becomes so untenable that some crank show it all to be wrong and the process begins anew.

Now if you want to say that this process is necessary for science to move along, that's fine, and I'll agree. But if you want to say that increasing the level of control on publication to exclude the bad stuff is how you get new discoveries then that's just plainly wrong. It's quite the opposite actually. Scientific revolutions come from the margins.

And in that light, it makes attempts at sorting out the cranks from the serious people by establishing some bureaucratic authority and process quite futile.

Otherwise we'd still be seeing papers about luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, and perpetual motion machines.

Yeah, maybe if we'd tightened it a little more we would even not have to see papers about semiconductors, aerodynes, and other such discredited impossible things. What a great win for humanity that would have been.

Again, to bring this back to my main point, peer review , contrary to popular belief here, does not suppress new or fringe ideas. The only criteria is the ideas must follow some guidelines, like be mathematically or logically consistent. For example, Alcubierre Miguel's 1994 paper about warp drives, which is speculative even by the standards of theoretical physics, was published in a peer reviewed journal, and the idea has now gained mainstream attention from that original publication. Same for ADs-CFT, in 1997. or theories in which Newtonian physics is modified.

Speculative and heterodox are different concepts.

But I mean, you're not going to convince me something I have witnessed first hand doesn't exist.

The FDA does not impede progress

I feel like you could have chosen literally any other example and had a more compelling argument, particularly given our history here. Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs, Did A Melatonin Patent Inspire Current Dose Confusion?, etc, etc, etc. Sometimes high costs are because it takes billions of dollars to sift through millions of candidate chemicals and determine their effects on a noisy sample of thousands of people. Sometimes the high costs are because "Epipen" is easier to write than "Epinephrine Autoinjector".

Gleevec was approved to treat acute leukemia and was a major breakthrough. I would say that was progress. The vast majority of trials yield no improvement or even make the patient worse. yeah, regulation imposes a cost, but so does actually developing the drugs. There needs to be some firewall against useless or harmless treatments. A generic EpiPen was approved in 2018 https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-generic-version-epipen

Gleevec was approved to treat acute leukemia and was a major breakthrough

Okay? The FDA does not perfectly impede progress isn't a contentious claim. How about bromantane from my last link (An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology):

My guess is the reason we can’t prescribe bromantane is the same reason we can’t prescribe melatonin and we can’t prescribe fish oil without the charade of calling it LOVAZA™®©. The FDA won’t approve a treatment unless some drug company has invested a billion dollars in doing a lot of studies about it. It doesn’t count if some foreign scientists already did a bunch of studies. It doesn’t count if millions of Russians have been using the drug for decades and are by and large still alive.

Does that count as impeding progress?

A generic EpiPen was approved in 2018 https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-generic-version-epipen

It only took them nine years! Congratulations to Teva Pharmaceuticals on their achievement.

I suppose it also comes down to the baseline we're discussing. Does the FDA impede progress relative to what, and by how much?

I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator, and the difference is enough to make a material impact on a decent fraction of people.

The denial of a drug isn’t the problem. The problem is the decades long process of very expensive, repetitive testing that can often add billions of dollars in research costs and delay the deployment of the drug. There’s also the issue of the drugs that don’t get released because the expected costs of bringing them to market isn’t that much less than the profit they can get for the drug, either because the disease is too rare to profitability treat, or because the disease is mild enough that patients won’t buy the drug if it costs too much.

If the disease is rare then the drug becomes absurdly expensive and covered by Medicaid .

If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland)

You seem to be assuming your conclusion here. If what you state above is true, the rest of your argument may follow, but it seems to be a classic case of applying economic theory and then assuming that everyone is a moron for not going along with your conclusions, rather than disagreeing with your analysis.

From where I’m standing, houses have some fairly unique attributes: the supply is zero-sum in the UK as you note, everyone needs one (or a part of one, I’m including flats and things), realistically nobody needs more than one.

It is not obvious to me that making it very difficult to be a landlord would make it harder to obtain shelter. A plausible consequence of increased tax would be for landlords to sell up and the available housing stock to rise, thus lowering house prices.

As it is, we have a situation where it is entirely viable (though becoming less so) to get somebody else to pay your mortgage for you, and property serves as a useful asset for native or foreign oligarchs to store wealth. I’m not sure that this is innately desirable.

This isn’t an ‘eat the rich’ argument, or an argument for rent control. I’m just dubious about facilitating the treatment of shelter as an asset class and would like to hear your reasoning on the matter.

A plausible consequence of increased tax would be for landlords to sell up and the available housing stock to rise, thus lowering house prices.

This is explicitly what the OP said was happening several times during their post, except according to them it makes the shortage worse because the former renters buy more rooms than they were previously renting.

This may lower housing prices, but it seems like it would, paradoxically, raise rental prices for those that can't buy for some reason (don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation, need to move frequently, etc).

This may lower housing prices, but it seems like it would, paradoxically, raise rental prices for those that can't buy for some reason (don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation, need to move frequently, etc).

Maybe England is different but I would expect people having more rooms to result in individual rooms for rent, which trades off against demand for two bedroom and studio apartments.

But each person who buys a house is taken out of the pool of would-be renters, so how is the shortage worse? The number of houses is the same, the number of people living in them is the same.

don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation

How are these people better off renting rather than paying off a mortgage? If they don’t have money or documents they’re screwed anyway. A certain number of people are not going to be able to manage in either system and will either be homeless or in government housing. I don’t see how that varies between our two scenarios.

The final about needing to move house regularly is a concern for me too. I speculate that a bigger market with more buyers and sellers might make things easier in this regard but I can’t know for sure. And at least these people would be able to get a property when they settle down rather than have spent a lifetime subsidising other people’s.

But each person who buys a house is taken out of the pool of would-be renters, so how is the shortage worse?

This argument presented is these people are buying formerly rented units, so those units are now forever denied to future renters. And also people occupy more square feet per person when buying than renting. And NIMBYism prevents significant amounts of new units, so we aren't going to build to make up for the loss.

Things just get a bit worse for renters. They get to fight over fewer rented square feet of living space.

people occupy more square feet per person when buying than renting

Thanks, that’s an interesting nuance that I missed. It seems to me like an unfortunate consequence of large mortgages and housing-as-assets in that people usually buy houses as a conscious investment now and take out large amounts of money to do so, thus they get as much as they think they can get away with. Houses for sale also tend to be built differently from rentals because people assume that owner occupiers are starting a family.

A larger, more flexible market with less borrowed money might reduce this problem. However, I concede that’s a self-serving assertion and I can’t back it up.

these people are buying formerly rented units, so those units are now forever denied to future renters

This argument only works if the majority of people are renters by choice, ie that the pool of buyers and the pool of renters are inherently separate. I don’t think they are. They appear to be because of financial pressure on house buying. If you assume that would be buyers and would be renters are mostly the same people, a house being bought by someone is no different from a house that is being rented by someone. It’s removed from the pot either way. If anything, it’s an argument for punishing people who buy too much, which is the underlying logic behind most anti-landlord resentment.

it seems to be a classic case of applying economic theory and then assuming that everyone is a moron for not going along with your conclusions, rather than disagreeing with your analysis.

The whole point of the post is discussing why people disagree with one of the most agreed upon concepts (rent control is bad) in economics...

Perhaps I phrased it too harshly with respect to the OP, I didn’t mean to. My hypothesis is that disagreement is not down to Dunbar’s number but down to a widespread suspicion that most economic theory is bunk. Modern monetary theory does actually lead to inflation, outsourcing your manufacturing to China is not a free win and immigration reduces wages. So when economics say ‘slaving to pay off somebody else’s mortgage is actually good for you’ the response is not supine acceptance but suspicion.

I’m also interested in discussing the case for taxing landlords on its merits, since I have a stake in both sides of the divide and the topic interests me.

My hypothesis is that disagreement is not down to Dunbar’s number but down to a widespread suspicion that most economic theory is bunk.

Which stems from? That would be an actual response to OP's post.

Modern monetary theory does actually lead to inflation, outsourcing your manufacturing to China is not a free win and immigration reduces wages.

To give three examples where economists sagely assured us that the obvious conclusions were wrong and then events (global inflation, hollowing out of American manufacturing, the big rise in worker bargaining power when immigrants couldn’t be brought over during Covid) made it clear that they were wrong. I’m not saying that all economic theory is wrong, any more than all psychology is wrong, but I don’t see how you can look at the history of failed predictions and see it as anything more than a very flawed science.

MMT does not fit with the other two, because it was explicitly arguing against the economic consensus, and the economic consensus ended up being correct.

I don't think either of your examples work. The problem of sub-Dunbar thinking certainly exists, but when the stakes are as high as they are in housing or healthcare, actually-existing democracies make better decisions than pure monkey politics would suggest. In both cases, I am happy to defend the policies we are seeing as sane way of pursuing the goals of the median voter (which I do not share in the case of housing). This is an effortpost on the pathologies of UK housing policy that I am structuring as a fisking of your post in order to make it quicker to write rather than because I think your post is bad - I suspect we agree on all the substantive issues and the double crux is about the motivations of our political opponents.

UK housing policy is a simple problem (policy-induced scarcity) with a simple solution (build more houses) that is politically difficult to implement. The various deckchair-rearranging policies to "fix" the housing market while retaining an artificial scarcity of housing are mostly supported by people who know exactly what they are doing, and are likely to succeed at their stated goals within the limits of what is possible by rearranging deckchairs.

The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.

The problem is MUCH less bad in Berlin than in London - the whining is worse in Berlin because Berliners got used to low rents in prime central neighborhoods during the period when the city was recovering from the Cold-War era partition, but rents in Berlin are about half London and incomes at a comparable skill level are higher. There was a short period when the legal market didn't clear due to rent controls (a quick Google suggests that people willing to pay illegal key money had no trouble finding flats) but they were struck down by the German federal courts.

Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down

These rules were brought in by the Conservative government, and the stated purpose was to encourage homeownership at the margin by forcing amateur landlords to sell out to first-time buyers, not to make life easier for marginal tenants. You can say that encouraging homeownership at this margin is a bad idea because homeowners are more likely to under-occupy (FWIW, I disagree with you), but the consequences of this change were thoroughly intended, and popular (partly because the marginal tenants losing out are disproportionately likely to be non-voting immigrants).

This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.

The UK does not have rent control. If the market isn't clearing, then rents need to rise further until it does. The fact that oversubscribed tenancies are allocated by sealed bids (rather than paperwork races) suggests this is happening.

If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit

Then you would be wrong, as you yourself acknowledge in the next sentence.

(the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland)

CORRECT. I guessed you were basically sound. If we don't allow developers to build the homes that there is demand for (and that could be built profitably), then millions of prospective Londoners, who have a reasonable want to live in London, will have to go away. Once you let the NIMBYs win, that becomes a matter of arithmetic and not a policy choice. Neither the free market nor the welfare state can alleviate the pain, because at the relevant margin the pain needs to be bad enough to make people leave. Even Gavin Newsome has started to get this - the fact that the UK in general and Sadiq Khan in particular don't is scary for people who have to live here.

Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name.

That passive investment in land is a form of social parasitism is Econ 101, going back to David Ricardo. We tolerate it because (1) it is too hard to distinguish passive investors in land from passive investors in the structures built on the land, who are socially valuable in the same way as other capitalists, and (2) a lot of them are homeowning boomers, who are ludicrously entitled and vote. In England this is explicit - page 1 of every English Land Law text says that English Land Law is based on the doctrine of tenure and the doctrine of estates. The doctrine of tenure is that William the Conqueror stole all the land in England in 1066, King Charles still owns it as William's heir, and whatever rights you may have in your "own" land are based on stolen property.

and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.

Apart from the Corbynite usual suspects, I am not seeing a powerful faction in the UK calling for Berlin-style rent controls, largely because there is no powerful faction in British politics who wants a world where people with a long-term stable address rent from private sector landlords. We don't want the landlords to suffer - we want them to stop landlording and invest in new assets rather than bidding up the price of existing ones. The anti-landlord faction of the Conservatives thinks that people with long-term stable addresses should be homeowners and wants to tax landlords until they are forced to sell out to first-time buyers. The dominant faction of the Labour party thinks that poor people with long-term stable addresses should live in social housing, but that allowing an overpriced spot market to exist for the niche of people who need it is, on balance, a good thing (Sadiq Khan did call for rent controls in a vague non-committal way, but he was slapped down by Keir Starmer. The underlying politics of this is that the post-WW2 housing policy was built around social housing for the working class and homeownership for the middle class, to the point where even after the Thatcher-era selloffs the UK has an unusually high percentage of social housing (see p2 of this OECD report), so the political machines running off long-term low-income tenant voters are focussed on social housing and not rent control.

And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.

Without the bold word, this is obviously correct. But the supply issue is the supply of housing, not rental housing. Given the way the UK housing market works (and in particular the lack of dedicated rental buildings where a single private landlord owns the whole multifamily building), there is a single market for housing services in which private renting and mortgaged ownership are effectively different financing options. Because of undersupply, the market for housing is a brutal zero-sum competition which someone has to lose. If policy favours mortgaged ownership as the way of financing the purchase of housing, then the competition is rigged in favour of people with stable jobs, good credit scores and parents able to put down deposits for them. If policy favours private renting, then the competition is rigged in favour of people able and willing to live with multiple employed adults per bedroom in order to cover the rent. Which of these groups of people you prefer is a far stronger motivator for which housing policy you support than whether you hate bankers or landlords more (FWIW, the sub-Dunbar idiotarian left seem to hate developers more than either).

Is pope Francis attempting to bring in gay marriage by the back door?

Kind of a long story, so bear with me for the background(https://www.ncregister.com/news/cardinals-send-dubia-to-pope-ahead-of-synod-on-synodality):

Dubia are formal questions brought before the pope and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) aimed at eliciting a “Yes” or “No” response, without theological argumentation. The word dubia is the plural form of dubium, which means “doubt” in Latin. They are typically raised by cardinals or other high-ranking members of the Church and are meant to seek clarification on matters of doctrine or Church teaching.

The dubia were signed by German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, 94, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences; American Cardinal Raymond Burke, 75, prefect emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura; Chinese Cardinal Zen Ze-Kiun, 90, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong; Mexican Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, 90, archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara; and Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, 78, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Submitting dubia is not a particularly uncommon occurrence and does not have a strong partisan(for lack of a better term) valence. The summary of these particular dubia later on in the same article is fairly accurate, but you can read them in their entirety, along with Cardinal Burke's statement on resubmitting them, here: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/10/full-text-of-new-dubia-sent-to-francis.html

What is unusual is resubmitting dubia after being dissatisfied with the response received, which is what happened here:

The same group of senior prelates say they submitted a previous version of the dubia on these topics on July 10 and received a reply from Pope Francis the following day.

But they said that the pope responded in full answers rather than in the customary form of “Yes” and “No” replies, which made it necessary to submit a revised request for clarification.

Pope Francis’ responses “have not resolved the doubts we had raised, but have, if anything, deepened them,” they said in a statement to the National Catholic Register, CNA’s partner news outlet. They therefore sent the reformulated dubia on Aug. 21, rephrasing them partly so they would elicit “Yes” or “No” replies.

The cardinals declined the Register’s requests to review the pope’s July 11 response, as they say the response was addressed only to them and so not meant for the public.

Interestingly, the pope's(in reality Cardinal Fernandez's[head of the DDF, the Vatican's doctrine branch, occupying the position that in recent pontificates has been a de facto #2 spot]) responses were leaked anyways, by the Vatican(https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255539/read-pope-francis-response-to-the-dubia-presented-to-him-by-5-cardinals). As that link demonstrates, the responses are indeed not the customary yes or no replies. I'm not quoting the whole thing, because they're lengthy word salad, but the most interesting, and controversial, part, is below, the response to the second dubia:

a) The Church has a very clear conception of marriage: an exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the begetting of children. It calls this union “marriage.” Other forms of union only realize it “in a partial and analogous way” (Amoris Laetitia, 292), and so they cannot be strictly called “marriage.”

b) It is not a mere question of names, but the reality that we call marriage has a unique essential constitution that demands an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities. It is undoubtedly much more than a mere “ideal.“

c) For this reason the Church avoids any kind of rite or sacramental that could contradict this conviction and give the impression that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

d) In dealing with people, however, we must not lose the pastoral charity that must permeate all our decisions and attitudes. The defense of objective truth is not the only expression of this charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness, and encouragement. Therefore, we cannot become judges who only deny, reject, exclude.

e) For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage. For when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea for a better life, a trust in a Father who can help us to live better.

f) On the other hand, although there are situations that from an objective point of view are not morally acceptable, pastoral charity itself demands that we do not simply treat as “sinners“ other people whose guilt or responsibility may be due to their own fault or responsibility attenuated by various factors that influence subjective imputability (cf. St. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17).

g) Decisions which, in certain circumstances, can form part of pastoral prudence, should not necessarily become a norm. That is to say, it is not appropriate for a diocese, an episcopal conference or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and officially authorize procedures or rites for all kinds of matters, since everything “what is part of a practical discernment in particular circumstances cannot be elevated to the level of a rule,“ because this “would lead to an intolerable casuistry“ (Amoris Laetitia, 304). Canon law should not and cannot cover everything, nor should the episcopal conferences claim to do so with their various documents and protocols, because the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to the normative ones.

That's a lot of words to come full circle, but the middle part- about blessing same sex non-weddings- is what has hair on fire. If you take the position that any of those paragraphs are not meaningless argle-bargle, paragraph g about the need to ensure blessings of same sex couples doesn't become a norm would not be among them. Again from the first article:

On the topic of blessing same-sex unions, which have been pushed for in places like Germany, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, weighed in on the matter in 2021, clarifying that “the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex.” However, some have speculated that, in spite of the DDF text referencing his approval, Pope Francis was displeased by the document. Relatedly, Antwerp’s Bishop Johan Bonny claimed in March that the pope did not disapprove of the Flemish-speaking Belgian bishops plan to introduce a related blessing, although this claim has not been substantiated and it is not clear that the Flemish blessing is, in fact, the kind explicitly disapproved by the DDF guidance.

Regarding the DDF text, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin cited it in his criticism of the German Synodal Way’s decision to move forward with attempted blessings of same-sex unions, but he also added that the topic would require further discussion at the upcoming universal synod. More significantly, new DDF prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández, a close confidant of Pope Francis, stated in July that while he was opposed to any blessing that would confuse same-sex unions with marriage, the 2021 DDF guidance “lacked the smell of Francisco” and could be revisited during his tenure.

I am inclined to believe Cardinal Fernandez here, because A) responsa ad dubium are normally approved by the pope himself, so the middle paragraphs about blessing same sex non-weddings were approved by pope Francis B) firing Cardinal Fernandez over a previous screw up and disowning his comments would be trivially easy due to his atrocious record on handling sex abuse cases, yet he was appointed personally by Pope Francis rather than as a compromise(as Ladaria, the previous occupant of the office- and the issuer of the 2021 clarification against blessing same sex unions which it is rumored played a part in Francis' decision not to appoint him to a second term) or a holdover from Benedict XVI(as was Muller, the predecessor to Ladaria) and C) breaking with precedent in this manner is so highly unusual for a cabinet-level Vatican position that there's something there, and dragging your boss under the bus is not recommended.

What would it mean if the synod on synodality(which starts wednesday, and kicked off the whole brouhaha with this particular round of dubia) does in fact create significant wiggle room for bishops to authorize same sex non-weddings? Well, back to Cardinal Muller, who has previously pointed to this as a possible red line for some kind of ill-defined drastic action(https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/cardinal-muller-warns-same-sex-blessings-are-blasphemy-as-synod-on-synodality-looms/):

“A fictitious ‘blessing’ of same-sex couples,” he expounded, “is not only a blasphemy against the Creator of the world and man, but also a grave sin against the salvation of the people concerned, who are led to believe that sexual activity outside of marriage is pleasing to God, which is described in the revealed Word of God as a grave sin against the sixth commandment (Rom 1:26f; 1 Cor 9:-11).”

And:

Here, Cardinal Müller raises the question of the status in the Church of those who wish to change the Church’s teachings, by quoting St. Irenaeus: “With apostolic succession, bishops have received the reliable charism of truth (charisma vertitatis certum), as it pleased God. But all others who do not want to know about this succession, which goes back to the origin, and who gather arbitrarily anywhere, are suspected of being either heretics with evil in mind, or schismatics…. All these people forsake the truth.” (Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV 26, 2).

For Cardinal Müller, the truth of Christ is what matters at the synod: “I hope that the truth of Christ will determine the direction of the Synod and not a group dynamic process will lead the participants in the direction of an anti-Christian anthropology that questions the two-gendered nature of man created by God. This blatant contradiction to the divine and Catholic faith is gladly veiled with an alleged pastoral care for persons with any ‘erotic preferences.’”

That is to say, Cardinal Müller will not go along with such an attempted change of Church teaching at the upcoming synod in Rome.

Cardinal Muller, for those who are unfamiliar, is powerful enough within the church oligarchy to have previously vetoed a candidate for Cardinal Fernandez's current spot(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html), so him saying something like this is a very big deal, albeit poorly defined what it would actually look like.

On one hand, it'd be absolutely hilarious if this ends up with a long screed nailed to a Catholic Church's front door.

On the other hand, it... at best had complicated results last time, and the pragmatic differences between now and 1517 make me a good deal more worried.

On the gripping hand, I still don't really grok Catholics, and the few I keep an eye on in twitter-space think it's more generic weasel-wording than going to actually go anywhere.

it already entered. It's two decades too late. gay marriages is here to stay . similar to American conservativism, the church is liberalism but with a lag.

Is pope Francis attempting to bring in gay marriage by the back door?

Welcome to absolute power unaccountable and unanswerable to anyone (on Earth at least).

The pope can do whatever he wants, and no one can do anything about it. There is no recall, no vote of no confidence, no impeachment. The pope can make any rules he wants or freely disregard his own rules with impunity, and you can just watch helplessly. Or leave and start your own church.

Well, legally at least, the popes were in the past replaced by extra legal means, but this couldn't happen in our modern age.

And yet, any form of democratic rule, or even decentralization, ended up accelerating "progress" exponentially, and was a disaster if the goal was preserving tradition.

Counterpoint: history is largely a one-way conversation of destroying traditions in favor of such progress. Preserving tradition is a balancing act for the more necessary goal of maintaining the the systems and institutions which beget the traditions. Its 60% compromise.

I don't think the Catholic Church is at a point where blessing gay unions is necessary to optimize the institution, but it's clearly now in their Overton window.

I don't see how that's a counter.

  • OP said "looks like the Pope is legalizing gay marriage?"
  • Eatan said: "haha, silly Catholics, maybe you shouldn't have put all your eggs in the Papal Infallibility basket?"
  • I said: "that didn't seem to be a bad choice given how more democratic strains of the religion have faired"

... and you seem to be saying "it's not necessarily bad to destroy traditions, we have always done it". Even if, that seems to be neither here nor there.

But to address your point - not only do I not see how it would "optimize" the Church, I am yet to see one of these "we must make a fundamental change to [institution] to appeal to more prograssive audiences, and grow our membership" scenarios play out in a non-destructive way,

The Church has changed traditions over time in order to maintain itself, increase its robustness, promote antifragility, etc. As an institution, the Catholic Church probably isn't amenable to rapid, radical change. (hence the slow move away from a Latin mass, the gradual lack of condemnation for charging interest on loans (Islam has created a bizarre, less efficient workaround which probably cost them economically), and the explicit condemnation of slavery being late to the party). Dozens more I think, but I know very little about the history of religion.

At some point, it may be optimal for the continuance of the Church to bless gay unions. In a few decades to a few hundred years. But also maybe it will never be optimal. However, imagine a contemporary Church that continued to argue, as I think Acquanias did (and I'm not sure if he was Catholic, but just as an example), that owning people as slaves was fine so long as you treated them well. That would be bad for the institution today. I'm not chiding the Church for being "late to the party". It's the kind of institution that should change slowly, cautiously, and with much debate.

Why its relevant: As I said, I'm pretty ignorant of the history of religion (its by far my worst Jeopardy! category). Therefore, I don't know how democratic religious have fared compared to more top-down structures, and I can't analyze the causal factors in a religions outcomes as institutions (for example, Buddhism and Hinduism are about twice as old as Christianity, but I don't know their institutional structures).

"we must make a fundamental change to [institution] to appeal to more progressive audiences, and grow our membership" scenarios play out in a non-destructive way,

My view is that this debate is the long arc of history: how much progress, and how fast? A balance must be stuck according the function of the institution. The US got rid of slavery, let women vote, allowed for constitutional review by SCOTUS, etc. Perhaps its not as robust as everyone would like, but it has worked out pretty well by historical standards. Companies can change faster than governmental bodies, which can change faster than spiritual institutions. Change too fast, you blow it up. Change too slowly, society moves on.

The Church has changed traditions over time in order to maintain itself, increase its robustness, promote antifragility, etc.

But that doesn't imply anything and everything should be subject to change as long as it promotes it's robustness, or you'll reach "make killing legal to solve murder" territory.

Therefore, I don't know how democratic religious have fared compared to more top-down structures

Well, just as a quick sanity check, which sects of Christianity are flying the rainbow flag right now?

My view is that this debate is the long arc of history: how much progress, and how fast?

My view is that this leaves out the important question of "progress towards what?". Not all changes are good just because they're changes, and while making some changes in order to increase your chances for survival might be fine, a fundamental enough change is indistinguishable from death. Should Christianity endorse Satan worship, if it increased it's chances for survival? Should progressives endorse white supremacy?

Everything is on the table for change, but its not equally wise or good to change any aspect. The US nearly wrecked itself to get rid of slavery. Legal slavery in perpetuity probably wasn't a stable solution, and the US paid dearly to change a fundamental aspect of its operation, deleting the 3/5 compromise and adding new lines to its "code". The Catholic Church moved away from Latin mass because that was probably a sub-optimal configuration. If, in the year 2300, society has determined that being anti gay is as bad as being pro slavery, I'd bet that the Catholic church will bless gay unions, or something similar (its unlikely, but possible). Solutions like "making killing legal to solve murder" are generally unstable solutions to law and order institutions.

Well, just as a quick sanity check, which sects of Christianity are flying the rainbow flag right now?

Oh, I have no idea. I wasn't raised with a religion, and haven't really chosen one.

"progress towards what?"

Kurt Vonnegut would sarcastically argue its to make more plastic. Ellul would argue 'technique' is progressing to separate us from nature for its own ends. Dawkins would argue for the successful propagation of replicators. Steven Pinker would argue its a move towards less violence and loger, healthier lifespans. I'm closest to the latter arguments.

Not all changes are good just because they're changes

Agreed! Chesterton is a very wise part of the conversation. The pride-flying sects are either blowing themselves up, or evolving to a more stable structure. I think the latter, but who knows. The ACLU is blowing itself up imo, but FIRE is filling the void. The reactionary and unwise BLM movement is blowing up racial progress imo, but they seem to be cashing out. There may or may not be some wise findings in the debris (for example, I'm in favor of skepticism to police power, training standards, and attitudes, and I hope these change at the institutional level).

Should Christianity endorse Satan worship, if it increased it's chances for survival? Should progressives endorse white supremacy?

This sounds like should X become not X to survive. Not sure it fits. But say in the rubble of WW3 might progressives become totalitarian to put society back together. Yeah, but they won't claim to be progressives anymore. Have to run, getting increasingly less thoughtful.

Everything is on the table for change

I disagree, and I think you do too, since later you say:

This sounds like should X become not X to survive. Not sure it fits.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm driving at. Whether or not it fits is another question, but I think this does show "Everything is on the table for change, the long arc of history, how much progress, and how fast" does not cover everything.

Yeah, but they won't claim to be progressives anymore.

But what if they do though? What if in some years, without any WW3 mediated collapse of society, someone says "You know what would be really progressive? A literal racial caste system with white people on top!"? What exactly could be said to dismiss their idea?

But to address your point - not only do I not see how it would "optimize" the Church, I am yet to see one of these "we must make a fundamental change to [institution] to appeal to more prograssive audiences, and grow our membership" scenarios play out in a non-destructive way,

Except that LGBTQ+ doesn't seem to grow membership.

In formerly most Catholic part of the world one fifth of Catholics left the Church at historically unprecedented speed. Not left as stopped attending Catholic churches, but left as started attending evangelical churches.

And not rainbow flag adorned LGBTQ+ affirming churches, but bible believing (and full of Israeli flags) churches.

This is one of world's important trends that is rarely grasped outside the region, popular image of Latin America is still of traditional 99,9% Catholic continent.

If Catholic Church was about saving souls, it would drive it into panic, it would desperately try to do something to stop this hemorrhage.

The Church seems unperturbed. As if the power and influence of the Church came from property and real estate worth trillions all over the world and possession of world's preeminent money laundering machine, not from masses of peons in the pews, and as if keeping this power required staying in good grace of world's elite human capital.

Weren't a lot of centralized Communist regimes just straight-up atheist?

Democratization and social progressivism are two global trends that happened at sort of the same time, but I doubt the causal story is that simple.

Weren't a lot of centralized Communist regimes just straight-up atheist?

Yes?

Democratization and social progressivism are two global trends that happened at sort of the same time, but I doubt the causal story is that simple.

Right, just like the story behind the pope's decision is not as simple as "he's a central authority, of course it would happen"?

Right, just like the story behind the pope's decision is not as simple as "he's a central authority, of course it would happen"?

No, the story is: if you give one man unlimited and unaccountable power, do not be surprised and do not complain when he uses it against you and things you like.

And yet, any form of democratic rule, or even decentralization, ended up accelerating "progress" exponentially, and was a disaster if the goal was preserving tradition.

Not true. The most successful attempt to preserve tradition in modern world is explicitly decentralized one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnung

Because the Amish have no central church government, each assembly is autonomous and is its own governing authority. Thus, every local church maintains an individual set of rules, adhering to its own Ordnung, which may vary from district to district as each community administers its own guidelines. These rules are largely unwritten, yet they define the very essence of Amish identity.

It probably seems confusing to outsiders, but the question, "Maybe there is some sort of blessing we can give to a same sex couple who asks for one?" is not the same thing as, "A same sex couple can contract a sacramental marriage." A blessing is not the same thing as a sacrament.

I think this line is the most significant in the response to the dubia: "For when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea for a better life, a trust in a Father who can help us to live better." The emphasis on a gay couple asking God to help them "live better" does not bring to mind Rainbow flags and Pride. If anything, reading this makes me think the Pope will encourage some sort of "help us live chastely" blessing for any gay couples asking for their relationship to be blessed.

Edit: I'm wondering if people know what I'm saying here, based on the responses. A couple definitions and elaborations:

Blessing: happens all the time, in private. Happens during the mass as well. Throats are blessed during flu season. Water, salt, and candles are blessed to take home. Mothers are blessed on Mother's day, sick people are blessed, anxious people are blessed, anyone can be blessed for pretty much any reason.

Taking the response as a whole, it sounds like the Pope is saying, if a couple comes up to a priest after mass and asks for a blessing to live chastely because it is something they are really struggling with, they can get a blessing to help them live a less sinful life.

Chaste: Only having sex or any other sort of sexual activity in the context of a marriage between a man and a woman, where all sexual activity is open to creating life. Gay sex is by definition not chaste in a Catholic context.

It's kind of funny to me that the Church has reinvented the concept of civil unions a full quarter of a century after it failed as a stopgap in conservative states.

Makes me wonder if it will have the same level of success and trajectory in church that it had in secular politics.

I guess, if civil unions are celibate unions? There were recognized “Rites of Entering into Spiritual Brotherhood” in various parts of the Church that could be adapted. Or you mean Marriage-In-Everything-But-Name? I don't think the response to the Dubia alone makes such a thing more likely.

Which will inevitably be advertised as a wedding, be received by lesbians in wedding dresses/gay men in tuxedos, featuring flowers, organs, a reception, etc. IIRC the Episcopalians had that for a bit before moving to full on gay weddings.

Pope Francis already answered a Dubia in a more standard way in 2021:

TO THE QUESTION PROPOSED: Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?

RESPONSE: Negative.

Today's response to the Dubia says:

c) For this reason, the Church avoids any type of rite or sacramental that might contradict this conviction and suggest that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

Today's Dubia Response is a total nothingburger, but everyone is reading into it what they want to read.

You’ll notice I cited in the OP a discussion of trying to overturn that Dubia with the explanation of cardinal Ladaria having gone rogue. Do I think it’s likely to happen? Probably not officially. I think it’ll simply be ignored.

The prior response to the dubia lacked the Pope's inability to get to the point, but presumably it has the same level of authoritativeness as the current leaked dubia (Unless the Pope wants to go on record and declare the first dubia response was not approved by him.)

Pope Francis doesn't want to be mean and make wide sweeping declarations (except when it comes to liturgy, for some reason.) The very thing that keeps him from giving a straight answer to a dubia is the very thing that will keep him from actually changing anything in the Church. He wants to meet each person face to face, to discuss a situation in all its intricacies, but never act as a judge or king.

The 2021 letter was approved by the pope, but technically it was from the CDF. The 2023 letter was from Pope Francis personally, even if it was literally written by Cardinal Fernandez.

The ambiguity is the message. He could have just reiterated the clear "no" instead of speaking about pastoral discretion and avoiding "suggestions" that a not-marriage is a marriage.

He's been unambiguous when speaking against traditionalists.

How can I avoid drawing conclusions that he's being strategically ambiguous so as to allow priests to practice his real preference where those preferences happen to align?

Compare the short and straightforward 2021 dubia:

Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?

With the Cardnial Burke et.al. dubia -

According to the Divine Revelation, attested in Sacred Scripture, which the Church teaches, “listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit" (Dei Verbum, 10), "In the beginning," God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them, and blessed them to be fruitful (cf. Genesis 1:27-28) and hence, the Apostle Paul teaches that denying sexual difference is the consequence of denying the Creator (Romans 1:24-32). We ask: can the Church deviate from this "principle," considering it, in contrast to what was taught in Veritatis splendor, 103, as a mere ideal, and accept as a "possible good" objectively sinful situations, such as unions with persons of the same sex, without departing from the revealed doctrine?

If you ask a long,nuanced question, you get a long, nuanced response.

But aren't, under Catholic doctrine, homosexual couples inherently sinful? I'm no Catholic so I can't say I understand the minutia but surely it's not acceptable to bless sin?

Only if they engage in sexual acts with one another, as all sex outside of marriage is sinful. Living together as, essentially, best friends, is not sinful. Living together and lusting after one another, even while not acting on that lust, would still be sinful, though. I think some would say that this living arrangement would qualify as Near Occasion of Sin and therefore ought to be avoided.

St. Paul wrote that celibacy was preferential to marriage, but that those who lack the temperament to remain celibate should marry.

Fair enough, that's how the clergy exists in the first place after all, but that's not quite what we're talking about is it? People of the same sex that have deep platonic love for one another aren't "homosexual couples" or I've been in a lot more of these than I thought over the years.

Generally the Church will use the phrase "people struggling with same-sex attraction" to refer to people who have same-sex attraction but are trying their best not to actually acting on it and engage in homosexual activity. Such people are welcome in the church, welcome to take communion, and if they screw up and engage in same sex activity they just need to confess and try do better in the future, they aren't excommunicated for sinning. However, if they take "pride" in homosexuality activity, that is an open rejection of doctrine and living scandalously, so that is not welcome in the church.

In the broader culture, "homosexual" basically means "same-sex attracted and unapologetically acting on it." However there are some liberal Catholics who will equivocate/motte-and-bailey on this, saying things like, "the Church should welcome homosexuals" which to the public makes it seem like they want to the Church to change doctrine, but then when pressed on it by conservative Catholics they will fall back and say, "well homosexual just means same-sex attracted, it does not mean they are actually sinning."

I don't think anyone understands what I'm saying here. If a couple came up to a priest and asked for a blessing to help them "live better", i.e. stop having homosexual sex, then that sort of blessing could be given. That is the plain reading of what Pope Francis wrote.

I see, that makes more sense.

I think your original post would have benefited from saying it that explicitly, because I don't think I would have guessed that's what you meant.

the Pope will encourage some sort of "help us live chastely" blessing for any gay couples asking for their relationship to be blessed.

I thought this was spelling it out explicitly, but I don't know what the word "chaste" means to the average Mottizen now.

It probably seems confusing to outsiders, but the question, "Maybe there is some sort of blessing we can give to a same sex couple who asks for one?" is not the same thing as, "A same sex couple can contract a sacramental marriage." A blessing is not the same thing as a sacrament.

There are liberal Catholics who have suggested this, but the rebuttal is convincing to me. A "gay marriage" is inherently scandalous. We all know that it means these the couple are engaged in an amorous/erotic relationship with each other, not a fraternal/brotherly/sisterly/friendship relationship. If two men said to a priest, "we have committed to be lifelong friends/bondsmen/blood brothers/partners, can you bless our vows of permanent friendship to each other" obvious there would be no issues. No, we all know "LGB" means same-sex eroticism. Since that is the common understanding, blessing a "gay marriage" is blessing sin and blessing scandal and that is something that a Catholic priest should not do. Now the liberal Catholics have also suggested, "Well they shouldn't bless the relationship itself, but the good in it." To me, this is just sophistry and ridiculous hair-splitting. The fact remains the priest is giving the impression of blessing sin. But it is perhaps the viewpoint Francis takes.

What I think Francis's statements amount to is that he is not going to change Church teaching, or formally create a policy of blessing gay marriages, but he is also not going to police and discipline priests who are bending doctrine and somehow claiming to be blessing elements of good in same-sex relationships.

So the obvious response here is 'God of the margins' stuff (What the church believes/does now is nothing like what it believed/did 1000 years ago, it has always moved with the times to reflect popular understanding and preferences), real politik stuff (The church's #1 job is to keep member roles and coffers high, which means giving the audience what they want), etc. I think that's all relevant but also pretty played out as a topic of discussion for anyone who was online in the last few decades.

The more interesting question I want to ask of anyone who knows anything about how church theology works - which I don't really - is whether empirical evidence ever plays a role in determining the will of God in cases like this, and when/how it does so.

Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.

Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so... does that weigh against those people's predictions on how God feels on the matter? Is that evidence that this was mostly people misinterpreting Him, and He's not too worried about this, since otherwise we'd expect to see some type of mortal consequence?

I feel like in practice this must be how the church works... whether it's accepting the heliocentric model or admitting that it's ok for laymen to read the bible directly, religious beliefs do eventually bow to evidence and social norms. I'm just wondering if there's a principled model for how empirical evidence like that is weighed in those cases, or if it's just real politik without rationalization.

You don't think that legalizing gay marriage flowing directly into elective mastectomies for teenage girls and castration for teenage boys, in less than ten years since Obergefell, counts as punishment from God for our sins?

And out-of-wedlock births are continually setting record highs, at the same time that overall fertility is at record lows. I don't think you need a literal pillar of salt to conclude that it's not actually working well.

counts as punishment from God for our sins?

If God exists and that's His punishment then I can only assume He doesn't mind that much really. He has (we are told) previously flooded the earth, destroyed entire cities, cast people out of paradise, given crippling labor pains to all women for all time, incinerated people alive and entombed whole families in the earth, sent explicit plagues and death for tens of thousands, so allowing people to do perhaps unwise things to themselves is not exactly on the same level of Godly punishments we are told He previously indulged in.

It's so underwhelming as to suggest it probably isn't actually a punishment from God at all. Either because God doesn't care, or doesn't act on the mortal plane in that way anymore, or more likely because God doesn't actually exist.

I don't really see how these are of a different level of involvement. Or even of degree.

We're talking about pretty fucking metaphysical types of horrors here. I'd like you to acknowledge that, transhumanism in both this specific and the general sense is as consequential as getting thrown out of heaven. We're talking about changes to the nature of man, sex and identity here. This is no picnic.

God, properly understood, is the name for the intentional nature of reality. So it seems to me that consequences of hubris tautologically fall under the category of punishment.

I'd like you to acknowledge that, transhumanism in both this specific and the general sense is as consequential as getting thrown out of heaven. We're talking about changes to the nature of man, sex and identity here.

I shall acknowledge no such thing, as I don't think they ARE comparable. Making changes to yourself and your own identity is something everyone should be free to do. I would in fact say that is the core aspect of being human. That whole pesky free will thing. It might turn out to be a bad decision, perhaps they will hate what they become. But that is their choice. Far from being a horror, being constrained from that free will would be the horror.

There is also a difference between a punishment and a consequence. A punishment requires intentionality on behalf of the punisher. A consequence does not. The outcome for a trans person may well be bad, but I highly doubt it is bad because God is punishing them directly. Reality has no intentionality in my view. God doesn't punish you for not looking where you are going and getting hit by a lump of metal going 60 mph. Reality does that without any such divine interventions required. So it is with transhumanism. And that is the true black pill. God is not responsible for our outcomes, only the vast uncaring universe is. There is no intention, there is no design. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

You are missing the point.

What you're saying in both of these paragraphs reduces to the same two things.

Either we accept Abrahamic metaphysical axioms and your statements are obvious contradictions (God created the universe with intention, consequences and all, therefore arguing there is no intent behind it doesn't make sense on the face of it).

Or this is a statement of rejection of such metaphysical principles and the assertion of a different metaphysic that simply does not apply at all to this discussion. You can be a nihilist all you want, it doesn't really enter into Catholicism.

And if you want to say that it does because nihilism is true then you have to prove that it is, which is something no metaphysical doctrine, including yours, can ever do. Inherently.

Now aside from that, I still think it's completely ridiculous to deny that making oneself and one's own identity isn't an important and grandiose topic and in the same breath admitting that it has large consequence. If your only argument is that it doesn't matter because nothing matters, I question both your understanding of importance as a concept and the relevance of nihilist perspectives to any discussion.

Even constraining our situation to one where the Christian God exists however my point is that His punishments are clear and direct. He doesn't give you mildly bad outcomes as a punishment. He smites your city. He floods the world. He lets you see the promised land then exiles you from it. He forces you to choose to kill 70,000 of your followers.

KMC's point was that the bad outcomes WERE God's punishment. But this is not consistent with this version of God. It could be consistent with YOUR version* of the universe's intentionality as God, but that isn't the God we were discussing. And since Jesus died for our sins, even those direct punishments ceased, with the idea that anyone can be forgiven and find God, through Jesus Christ. Trans people could be punished after death if their actions are sinful, but God's punishments are no longer during life. And even when they were, they were very direct.

*It could also be consistent with no God, a blind watchmaker style God and so on of course.

Setting aside for a moment the mechanics of punishment and that particular theological argument, surely we must agree that most Christians in the sense we mean here (and Catholics in particular) do, in fact, believe in divine intervention and miracles to this day.

As for punishment, quoting official catholic catechism should help us clarify things here:

The punishments of sin

1472 To understand this doctrine and practice of the Church, it is necessary to understand that sin has a double consequence. Grave sin deprives us of communion with God and therefore makes us incapable of eternal life, the privation of which is called the "eternal punishment" of sin. On the other hand every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the "temporal punishment" of sin. These two punishments must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin. A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.

So no, I'm afraid the nature of sin still makes the punishment we're talking about extant in this life, Christ's forgiveness doesn't remand all judgement to one's death.

More comments

It's not true that in the Jewish and Christian traditions the consequences of sin only take the form of massive spectacles, even if we look only to the Bible.

Cain killed his brother and was cursed to wander the earth and have bad crops.

King David raped the wife of one his most loyal men and then had that man killed to keep it covered up. His punishment was that the child produced by that rape would die.

Abraham violated his marriage by laying with Hagar, and the consequence was strife between Hagar and Sarah that eventually led to Abraham being separated from his and Hagar's son.

Jonah was reticent to convey God's prophecy and was punished by a storm at sea and a short stay in a whale.

Judas Iscariot betrayed God and committed suicide.

I'm an atheist, obviously I don't believe anything is punishment from God.

That said, trans rights, fuck the haters, etc. etc. As long as we're all just referencing the topic with slogans for now.

Anyway, I'm getting a lot of responses that are just 'bad things exist in the world, they happened after gay marriage, post hoc ergo propter hoc'.

I'll just here that 1. I like half those things or think they're being misrepresented 2. I don't see a necessary connection between gay marriage and the other things, someone has to actually draw that line and 3. I was asking for knowledge about how the Vatican does religious scholarship, not trying to get into an argument about whether bad things exist in the modern world.

I can point out the connection actually: it resides in the activist network designed to make the former happen and its ideological justification for existing which is based on gnostic individualist morality.

Such an apparatus would never be dissolved without defeat and would always eventually lead to ever greater perceived liberation of the mind from the body, and it had already allied itself with then transsexualism among other things.

Victory for gay rights leading to mastectomies was, in retrospect, entirely predictable. Even as I refused to believe it at the time.

Now if we want to argue about the possibility of a gay rights movement that doesn't lead here that's another thing entirely, but I'm unfortunately pessimist about the possibility thereof given history.

Seems to me homosexuality is best treated with the benign indifference of a minor vice or oddity. Other paths don't look like they lead to good places for any of the parties. Pride most of all.

Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so... does that weigh against those people's predictions on how God feels on the matter? Is that evidence that this was mostly people misinterpreting Him, and He's not too worried about this, since otherwise we'd expect to see some type of mortal consequence?

It seems that you're arguing against the Pat Robertsons of the world who say things like Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for homosexuality.

Does anyone on the Motte actually believe things like that? No, I don't think so.

A more common Motte argument is that gay marriage is part of a word view that has led to many negative changes including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness including, especially, the trans epidemic.

Can we have societal acceptance of gays without all the other stuff? Maybe. I don't know. It's never been tried before. But we don't need any belief in the supernatural to see that gay marriage is deeply knit into other, mostly negative, societal changes.

Can we have societal acceptance of gays without all the other stuff? Maybe. I don't know. It's never been tried before. But we don't need any belief in the supernatural to see that gay marriage is deeply knit into other, mostly negative, societal changes.

Wrong order. The argument against gay marriage failed because it was being made by people who had already accepted most of the other stuff. The schwerpunkt of the culture wars was no-fault divorce, something which most conservative evangelicals in the US ended up supporting (Dalrock has the receipts) and which the US Catholic hierarchy de facto tolerated by running an annulment mill. Francis went squishy on that in Amoris Laetitia.

declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness

Declining religious belief does not seem like a negative to me.

Increased alienation of the individual is compensated for by the fact that humans are now more free from having their lives dominated by the small communities in which they grew up.

I am not sure that mental illness actually has increased, especially if you classify at least some forms of religiosity as forms of mental illness. Stuff like the Children's Crusade and the Salem Witch Trials do not seem to me like signs of a mentally healthy culture. Pre-Enlightenment Europe had horrific things like the 30 Years War happening, it was not some bastion of mental health.

Declining fertility might actually be a real problem going forward, I do agree with that, but it seems to me that most current cultures that have high levels of fertility have their own very real problems.

For the most part, the churchy types are healthier specimens

They might be happier in some ways. However, these are people who believe, because a few texts say so and there is a community around it, that a man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead. That does not seem mentally healthy to me. To be clear, I do not think it is impossible that Christianity is true. I just think that to be convinced that it is true is a sign of mental disorder.

If you define their religiousness as, by definition, not a mental disorder, then it is of course much easier to describe them as healthy than it would otherwise be.

Bringing up shit that happened in 1212, 1692, and 1618 is just disingenuous.

It would be if I made the argument in bad faith, but I did not. jeroboam mentions the argument that gay marriage is part of a worldview that has led to increased mental illness compared to earlier times. Hence I think it makes sense for me to talk directly about those earlier times and to try to compare them to today.

Freedom from social censure by people who know us intimately was our compensation for losing close-knit communities?

Yes, close-knit communities have very real downsides when you have little freedom to leave them. Reputation culture, gossip, capture by a dominant ideology/cult... Wider modern society has all those problems too but at least now it is easier than it was in the past to leave a subset of that large society which you dislike and move to one that you like more.

Regarding the graph, well, I am curious about how "Deaths of Despair" are defined. I am a bit suspicious of that big spike in the last 20 years.

But even if the data corresponds to reality, I think that maybe much of it can be explained by economic changes which have hurt the blue collar middle class. No matter how strong a community's social cohesiveness might be, unless it goes Amish level it is hard for it to endure an economy which makes its town close to useless as anything other than a place where people pull over to get gas while traveling elsewhere.

I am curious about how "Deaths of Despair" are defined.

Alcohol, drug, and suicide deaths. The only "researcher degree of freedom" I can see is that "alcohol deaths" might or might not be restricted to only alcoholism-based liver disease vs. e.g. DUIs.

I am a bit suspicious of that big spike in the last 20 years.

It's real; these are pretty easy numbers to measure. And all three components are increasing, so it might make sense to hypothesize a single psychological root cause influencing them all ... but the one factor which is going way up, exponentially, is overdoses of synthetic opioids. There's "despair", but there's also "fentanyl is a hundred times more potent than morphine, carfentanyl is ten thousand times more". Those drugs are vastly eager to smuggle, easier to "cut" other drugs with, and easier to accidentally get a lethal dose of.

I think that maybe much of it can be explained by economic changes which have hurt the blue collar middle class.

That wouldn't contradict the data. Despite some complications about changing selection effects, it still seems clear that the spike is all coming from people without college degrees.

I think you misunderstand the Christian faith, as if people stumbled upon the complete Bible and decided to form a religion around it. I guess that's forgivable since sola scriptura is so dominant in America, but it's at best an incomplete understanding.

The religion precedes the book, as do the first-hand accounts of the martyred apostles, many of which spread their accounts with the foreknowledge that it would be the cause of their own gruesome deaths.

No, I get that. That is why I wrote "a few texts" rather than "the Bible".

He might misunderstand Christianity, but he's right about modern society - we are trying to pathologise religiosity.

Increased alienation of the individual is compensated for by the fact that humans are now more free from having their lives dominated by the small communities in which they grew up.

That's small comfort when that dominance was just replaced with being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine.

There are tradeoffs. Being dominated by a feudal lord or emperor 1000 years ago would have sucked if you happened to have a nasty kind of feudal lord or emperor rather than a nice one. Sure, there was Christianity and certain notions of social propriety in common between the peasants and the aristocrats, but there were also numerous brutally suppressed peasant revolts.

I don't think religious belief necessarily implies feudalism, or that lack of religious belief implies non-feudalism. I also thought you meant having to socially conform to your local community, not literal serfdom.

To be fair, I'm kind of an extreme case in how much I hate having to conform to any community.

But yes, of course just having to socially conform to a community is much less bad than literal serfdom. But by the same token, isn't you saying "being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine" also a pretty strong exaggeration of what modernity is actually like? The reality, it seems to me, is that the average social conservative of today probably shares like 80% of values in common with the average elite of today. It's just that we focus on the differences.

To be fair, I'm kind of an extreme case in how much I hate having to conform to any community

I'm not much of social conformist either, in fact my distaste for modernity stems directly from that. The issue is that it seems the only choice is who to conform to, and in hindsight conforming to your family and community seems strictly superior.

But by the same token, isn't you saying "being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine" also a pretty strong exaggeration of what modernity is actually like?

Not really. My point was that it's comparable in it's intensity to the pressure your local community would put on you. I don't think that's an exaggeration.

The reality, it seems to me, is that the average social conservative of today probably shares like 80% of values in common with the average elite of today. It's just that we focus on the differences.

Now this is where I hold some extreme views.

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"being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine" also a pretty strong exaggeration of what modernity is actually like?

Honestly it seems like an understatement. Rather it's being dominated by people who actively hate one's culture and openly boast about being the best at exterminating it.

I'm no Religious man, but I certainly feel more free to live a normal human life in an Islamic theocracy than in the modern managerial state. And I say this having experienced the downsides of both. At least with the theocrats the rules are not constantly changing and there is a defined limiting principle you can invoke to keep the peace.

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Is our society actually less religious? Or has religious energy been shunted toward more destructive political religions?

I think that conservation of religiosity is a thing, and I'd rather have people believe in something with a track record of success than.. what we have now.

Well, I have no interest in any of the organized religions because I disagree with too many of their claims about reality. And I am also not a fan of any of the various political dogmas that I have encountered, such as is progressivism, communism, fascism, "free market will solve everything" libertarianism, etc. So I am simply not satisfied with either of those two and I would rather have some kind of third option.

So I am simply not satisfied with either of those two and I would rather have some kind of third option.

Well unfortunately one of the main points of a religion is that to be successful, it has to be broadly appealing, both to the masses and to the more intellectual class. So you're not going to be able to have your third option that ticks all of your boxes unless the rest of the populace suddenly starts having a deep rationalist understanding of the world, or whatever you care about.

It seems that you're arguing against the Pat Robertsons of the world who say things like Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for homosexuality.

Does anyone on the Motte actually believe things like that? No, I don't think so.

Someone in the same comment thread does: https://www.themotte.org/post/695/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/144411?context=8#context

That's more the "slippery slope" argument than "Katrina was god's punishment".

including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness

All of these problems exist, and in fact are even worse, in countries like South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.

This seems a case of categories being too vague to properly describe what is happening. It seems very weird to characterize what is happening in Japan and the US under the same term when they're opposite ends of the spectrum described by Durkheim with Japan and fatalism on one side and the US and anomie on the other.

Japanese alienation expresses itself with very rigid social institutions with no way to chose one's path in life which crushes individual will. American alienation looks more like loose to nonexistent social institutions that provide no life path at all which renders individual will meaningless.

These are both bad and have bad consequences, but they are very much not the same phenomenon.

"Social alienation" is harder to pin down and define, but crashing fertility and growing irreligiosity are a lot more clear-cut. But in any case, the Japanese "loneliness epidemic" seems comparable to the similar decline in community in the west.

South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.

Malarkey. All of these countries are extremely feminist by historical American standards, and by some metrics are more feminist than contemporary America. For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index, which is far higher than where America ranked. I wrote a long effort post on this last year and part 2 and part 3

Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now. What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe? Quick googling shows lower female representation in parliament, significantly lower representation in corporate boardrooms and leadership, about equivalent divorce, labor force participation, and college education rates (ROK's are a little lower for all). Abortion was illegal until two years ago.

Your post where you propose to cherry-pick a counter-narrative which makes ROK out to be a feminist hellhole is sourced entirely from reddit comments.

For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index

Also ranked below multiple western European countries, none of which have any of these problems in nearly the same degree as ROK does.

In any case, the OP is about gay marriage, not feminism. Homosexuality remains much less socially accepted in ROK than in the west, and there is no gay marriage.

Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.

Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now.

No, because of range restriction. Height matters for basketball, but if you do a correlation between NBA statistical success and height, there is no correlation. That is because everyone has already been selected based on height. Every country today is hyper-feminist, the actual differences between them in amount of feminism is small, so when comparing metrics like fertility rate or mental illness, other factors will matter more.

What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe

Compared to the US, the UN Gender Inequality Index and ROK has actually had a woman president and the US has not. Compared to Western Europe, I suspect that ROK women, particularly single women, work far more hours in the office than American women. I suspect ROK has more of a princess culture, but I don't know how I would prove this to your satisfaction, it's not something that anyone reputable tracks and quantifies. There are many forms of feminism, "princess culture" is one form, Russian style gold-digging is another, girl-boss, strong bad-ass woman type is another. Countries are feminist in different ways.

Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.

He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything. Russia went full communist in 1918, and had 70 years during which it was way to the left on religious and feminist issues than the USA. It never actually recovered from that.

If there's no correlation between outcomes and degrees of feminism today on the international scale, then there's no reason anyone should take seriously the argument that feminism is responsible for worsening social conditions, because you won't admit to any control. The only control is the world 100+ years ago, and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.

Countries are feminist in different ways.

What is your definition of feminism?

He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything.

This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe. But since there appears to be no correlation between communist policy and improved outcomes, there's no reason to believe that. Same here.

because you won't admit to any control

Yes, that is what I said very clearly my original post that I linked to. There is no control group.

and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.

1950s America was massively less feminist than any white or east asian country today, and was a pretty nice place to live, a better place by many metrics. And to the extent things are better in 2023, it is mostly because of technological development, but the pace of technological development was greater in the 1950s, the nice things we have in 2023 are built on the groundwork of things discovered in earlier times, I do not think you can give feminism any credit for the nicer technological things we have in 2023 than we had in 1950.

This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe.

AFACIT, Putin did not substantially change policy at all. Did he enact something like the Hayes code for all TV and movies in Russia? Did he restrict women from going to college? Did he ban no fault divorce? Did he restrict single women from living alone? Did he add "honor and obey" to all legal marriage vows? How much money did he actually allocate toward pro-traditional Christian values media? Did he make being a member of a church in good standing a prerequisite for elite positions? Did he ban abortion? Did he ban birth control? These are things that were the norm in America 70-120 years ago, such policy changes are what it would actually mean to roll-back feminism.

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They’re progressive, but many don’t have legal gay marriage, which is the point.

I’ll note that Japan and Russia have above-average for their regions fertility rates. Japan in particular has like a 25% higher TFR than its neighbors while being a lot more conservative and traditional.

That argument is called ‘by their fruits you shall know them’ and it has some, albeit limited, amount of play.

Thanks, I will look into it

Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so

They were absolutely right it was a slippery slope. Maybe they didn't hit the nail on the head with their predictions, but in fairness "we will start sending male rapists to female prisons" and "top academics won't even be able to tell what a woman is" would have seemed like too much of a non-sequitur compared to "they'll legalize polygamy or bestiality next".

Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.

Marriage has been hit by a quadruple whammy over the last 150+ years:

  1. Replacement of asymmetric vows/obligations (the woman vows to obey) with asexual vows. Ending of the legal privileges of father/husband.
  2. No-fault divorce
  3. Normalization and even encouragement of sex-outside of marriage by high production value media
  4. Gay marriage

All of these things happened gradually and culture often lagged legal changes, so it is difficult to correlate the damage done with the change in policy. However, overall marriage has been completely hollowed out, and as a result we have seen a dramatic rise in broken families and mental illness. "Gay marriage" was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow.

The biggest thing I've noticed about the post-Obergefell world is that it now seems political incorrect/taboo to say that "man-woman" marriage is better or the norm. Children are not born knowing that man-woman marriage is better than other arrangements, they must be taught that. But the post-Obergefell world, or official institutions like schools or children's TV programming cannot teach man-woman as the norm. And we see in surveys things like 50% of young women identifying as non-straight, or under 40% of young people responding in surveys that marriage and kids are important life goals, and we also see very high rates of mental illness among young liberal women. We have lost our ability in as a society to model what a default good life should be, and kids are making poor choices and ending up with mental health problems. And yes, the absysmally low (and highly dysgenic) fertility rates will result in an end of civilization if nothing changes.

It was literally the standard common book of prayer up until 1928. And "wife has a duty to obey" was the standard Christian, Hewbrew, and Roman teaching, so that is a span from 700BC to AD 1928. So which viewpoint is bizarre? OK, but we have cool modern technology now! We have indoor toilets now! Why should we take the norms of the past seriously? On the other hand ... technology was progressing from 700BC to AD 1928. Are things progressing now? At the same rate? The same second derivative?

Is there actually a large contingent of men and women who want this?

With the caveat that you probably do not understand what the vow means or implies, yes. If you have questions, ask away.

Were I that dude in the black sweater The Truman Show guy, not Steve Jobs, I would want to create a double-blind study of 1,200 babies, half raised in a world where man-woman marriage is the unquestioned norm and half raised in a world where guy-guy stuff has social capital: then come back 50 years later and see which one had better outcomes. Because clearly being raised in world that's conflicted about it is worse than either one of those.

Do we have the compute to run an experiment like that on AI babies?

Are we in a simulation hypothesis computer as a control group for an experiment like that?

Will becoming aware of that be an error that whatever is running the experiment writes "tainted - discard from study" on the universe and throws it in a biohazard bag?

deep crumple sound of something just 1/4th inch wider than the universe being skooshed

Everyone freaking out about same sex blessings is burying the lead. Look at what Pope Francis says about scripture in the dubium on divine revelation (emphasis mine):

”f) On the other hand, it is true that the magisterium is not superior to the word of God, but it is also true that both the texts of Scripture and the testimonies of tradition need an interpretation that allows us to distinguish their perennial substance from cultural conditioning. It is evident, for example, in biblical texts (such as Ex 21:20-21) and in some magisterial interventions that tolerated slavery (cf. Nicholas V, Bull Oum Diversas, 1452). This is not a minor issue given its intimate connection with the perennial truth of the inalienable dignity of the human person. These texts are in need of interpretation. The same is true for some New Testament considerations on women (1 Cor 11:3-10; 1 Tim 2:11-14) and for other texts of Scripture and testimonies of tradition that cannot be repeated literally today.

When people like Bishop Strickland accuse Francis of undermining the deposit of faith, this is what they mean. The pope just cited multiple New Testament passages which give specific instructions for how women should behave in church as something which “cannot be repeated literally today.”

If you want a real laugh, look at his response to the dubium on women priests. For context, in 1994 Pope John Paul II issued ORDINATIO SACERDOTALIS, which declared:

”Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.”

Now let’s read Pope Francis’s interpretation:

”c) On the other hand, to be rigorous, let us recognize that a clear and authoritative doctrine has not yet been exhaustively developed about the exact nature of a “definitive statement.“ It is not a dogmatic definition, and yet it must be observed by all. No one can publicly contradict it and yet it can be the object of study, as is the case with the validity of ordinations in the Anglican Communion.”

”A clear and authoritative doctrine has not yet been exhaustively developed about the exact nature of a ‘definitive statement.’” This is an absolute disaster. I don’t see how the church comes back from this.

It's lede, not lead.

lede [lēd] NOUN US ENGLISH the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story:

As to the matter at hand: of course Francis is trying to turn the Catholic Church into another bastion of globohomo. The Church was not left alone by the Allies and Operation Gladio in the wake of WW2, and since then the influence of Langley has been pretty clear: always more liberal, always destroying traditions, always elevating women and gays as much as possible.

This kind of low-effort, low-evidence, low-value snarling is something you've been warned about before. In fact you've been warned and banned repeatedly and you seem to be one of those people who is only here to post edgy snarls at your outgroup. Banned for another week; next time will probably be two weeks to permanent.

I don’t see how the church comes back from this.

The near future path is to fire cardinal Fernandez and claim he went rogue. But pope Francis won’t do that. So a future pope would have to issue a correction, claiming that Fernandez had gone rogue and that pope Francis was senile.

Look, the church came back from honorius I, from the Avignon situation, from the Byzantine captivity, the cadaver synod, Benedict XI, the pornocracy, the borgias, etc, etc. 2000 year old institutions where the fresh blood is conservative are not permanent subjects of the globohomo.

I don't understand this objection. Are you a textual literalist? Or even just for the new testament? Do you think all Catholics should be literalists about the new testament?


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