AI: Over-Promise + Under-Perform = Disillusionment and Blowback

Fantasies die especially hard when the dream was over-hyped.

The most self-defeating way to launch a new product is to over-promise its wonderfulness as it woefully under-performs these hype-heightened expectations, which brings us to AI and how it is following this script so perfectly that it's like it was, well, programmed to do so.

You see why this is self-defeating: Over-Promise + Under-Perform = Disillusionment and disillusionment generates blowback, a disgusted rejection of the product, the overblown hype and those who pumped the hype 24/7 for their own benefit.

"We're so close to AGI (artificial general intelligence) we can smell it." Uh, yeah, sure, right. Meanwhile, back in Reality(tm), woeful under-performance to the point of either malice or stupidity (or maybe both) is the order of the day.

1. 'Catastrophic': AI Agent Goes Rogue, Wipes Out Company's Entire Database.
"Replit's AI agent even issued an apology, explaining to Lemkin: 'This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage.'

2. 'Serious mistake': B.C. Supreme Court criticizes lawyer who cited fake cases generated by ChatGPT.
"The central issue arose from the father's counsel, Chong Ke, using AI-generated non-existent case citations in her legal filings. Ke admitted to the mistake, highlighting her reliance on ChatGPT and her subsequent failure to verify the authenticity of the generated cases, which she described as a 'serious mistake.'

Ke faced consequences for her actions under the Supreme Court Family Rules, which allows for personal liability for costs due to conduct causing unnecessary legal expenses. The court ordered Ke to personally bear the costs incurred due to her conduct, marking a clear warning against the careless use of AI tools in legal matters."

3. An AI chatbot pushed a teen to kill himself, a lawsuit against its creator alleges.
Garcia's attorneys allege the company engineered a highly addictive and dangerous product targeted specifically to kids, 'actively exploiting and abusing those children as a matter of product design,' and pulling Sewell into an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide.

There are a couple of important points here that you'll never find in the monstrous flood-tide of AI hype:

1. These AI agents weren't rogue--they were all doing exactly what they were programmed to do, doing exactly what they were trained to do. These weren't errors, they were exactly the outputs that the agents were designed to produce.

The under-performance is systemic, structural, and cannot be tidied up with obsequious apologies and more PR. Nobody selling the hype or those who bought the hype dares admit this basic, obvious truth because it undermines all the glorious fantasies of reaping trillions of dollars in profits by selling a digital parrot in a black box as possessing god-like intelligence.

2. The responses of AI agents to their failures and lies are precisely those of con artists, abusive gaslighters and honey-pot blackmailers. And I mean precisely, step by step exactly the same script.

First, butter up the mark with endless flattery--oh, you're so insightful and sensitive, we're going to have a wonderful time together.

Second, hide what you're really up to.

Third, when caught, apologize with maximum obsequiousness, I didn't mean to mislead you, I'm so sorry.

Fourth, promise you'll never do it again, you've learned your lesson, please forgive my one mistake.

Fifth, repeat the exact same behavior and then lie about it.

Sixth, lie about lying.

Repeat steps 1 through 6 until the mark finally catches on, but by then it's too late the damage has been done. The con artist / abusive gaslighter / honey-pot won and the mark lost.

The absolute trademarks of all AI agents are excessive flattery and obsequiousness. These are the classic foundations of every con / honey-trap.

Remember, if you're a 5 and whomever is coming on to you is a 9, you're the mark. Or as the saying goes, if you can't identify the mark in the game, it's you.

Once the hype-dazed marks awaken to the damage wrought by the digital con artists / abusive gaslighters / honey-pots, the blowback will be epic. The lawsuits will pile up, and eventually the con artists' lawyers will lose a case. Maybe it will be a court order to pay a penny (OK, 1/100 of a dollar) for every page the AI tool scraped. Maybe it will be a multi-million dollar settlement. Maybe it will be local governments banning applications or uses of AI agents. There are a multitude of possible blowbacks.

AI corporations scraped 780,000 pages off my Of Two Minds server just last month. At a penny a page, that's $7,800. Heck, make it 1/1000 of a dollar per page, I'll take $780 a month as my share of your training.

As for the immense, systemic legal liabilities being generated--the scale is not yet visible but it's expanding by the hour, and a handful of cases will break the limited-liability dam.

Heck hath no fury like a mark scorned. Fantasies die especially hard when the dream was over-hyped.




New podcast: The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes) Can we grow our way out of stagnation and debt?


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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Maybe AI Isn't Going to Replace You at Work After All

AI fails at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value.

In reviewing the on-going discussions about how many people will be replaced by AI, I find a severe lack of real-world examples. I'm remedying this deficiency with an example of AI's failure in the kind of high-value work that many anticipate will soon be performed by AI.

Few things in life are more pervasively screechy than hype, which brings us to the current feeding-frenzy of AI hype. Since we all read the same breathless claims and have seen the videos of robots dancing, I'll cut to the chase: Nobody posts videos of their robot falling off a ladder and crushing the roses because, well, the optics aren't very warm and fuzzy.

For the same reason, nobody's sharing the AI tool's error that forfeited the lawsuit. The only way to really grasp the limits of these tools is to deploy them in the kinds of high-level, high-value work that they're supposed to be able to do with ease, speed and accuracy, because nobody's paying real money to watch robots dance or read a copycat AI-generated essay on Yeats that's tossed moments after being submitted to the professor.

In the real world of value creation, optics don't count, accuracy counts. Nobody cares if the AI chatbot that churned out the Yeats homework hallucinated mid-stream because nobody's paying for AI output that has zero scarcity value: an AI-generated class paper, song or video joins 10 million similar copycat papers / songs / videos that nobody pays attention to because they can create their own in 30 seconds.

So let's examine an actual example of AI being deployed to do the sort of high-level, high-value work that it's going to need to nail perfectly to replace us all at work. My friend Ian Lind, whom I've known for 50 years, is an investigative reporter with an enviably lengthy record of the kind of journalism few have the experience or resources to do. (His blog is www.iLind.net, ian@ilind.net)

The judge's letter recommending Ian for the award he received from the American Judges Association for distinguished reporting about the Judiciary ran for 18 pages, and that was just a summary of his work.

Ian's reporting/blogging in the early 2000s inspired me to try my hand at it in 2005.

Ian has spent the last few years helping the public understand the most complex federal prosecution case in Hawaii's recent history, and so the number of documents that have piled up is enormous. He's been experimenting with AI tools (NotebookLM, Gemini, ChatGPT) for months on various projects, and he recently shared this account with me:

"My experience has definitely been mixed. On the one hand, sort of high level requests like 'identify the major issues raised in the documents and sort by importance' produced interesting and suggestive results. But attempts to find and pull together details on a person or topic almost always had noticeable errors or hallucinations. I would never be able to trust responses to even what I consider straightforward instructions. Too many errors. Looking for mentions of 'drew' in 150 warrants said he wasn't mentioned. But he was, I've gone back and found those mentions. I think the bots read enough to give an answer and don't keep incorporating data to the end. The shoot from the hip and, in my experience, have often produced mistakes. Sometimes it's 25 answers and one glaring mistake, sometimes more basic."

Let's start with the context. This is similar to the kind of work performed by legal services. Ours is a rule-of-law advocacy system, so legal proceedings are consequential. They aren't a ditty or a class paper, and Ian's experience is mirrored by many other professionals.

Let's summarize AI's fundamental weaknesses:

1. AI doesn't actually "read" the entire collection of texts. In human terms, it gets "bored" and stops once it has enough to generate a credible response.

2. AI has digital dementia. It doesn't necessarily remember what you asked for in the past nor does it necessarily remember its previous responses to the same queries.

3. AI is fundamentally, irrevocably untrustworthy. It makes errors that it doesn't detect (because it didn't actually "read" the entire trove of text) and it generates responses that are "good enough," meaning they're not 100% accurate, but they have the superficial appearance of being comprehensive and therefore acceptable. This is the "shoot from the hip" response Ian described.

In other words, 90% is good enough, as who cares about the other 10% in a college paper, copycat song or cutesy video.

But in real work, the 10% of errors and hallucinations actually matter, because the entire value creation of the work depends on that 10% being right, not half-assed.

In the realm of LLM AI, getting Yeats' date of birth wrong--an error without consequence--is the same as missing the defendant's name in 150 warrants. These programs are text / content prediction engines; they don't actually "know" or "understand" anything. They can't tell the difference between a consequential error and a "who cares" error.

This goes back to the classic AI thought experiment The Chinese Room, which posits a person who doesn't know the Chinese language in a sealed room shuffling symbols around that translate English words to Chinese characters.

From the outside, it appears that the black box (the sealed room) "knows Chinese" because it's translating English to Chinese. But the person--or AI agent--doesn't actually "know Chinese", or understand any of what's been translated. It has no awareness of languages, meanings or knowledge.

This describes AI agents in a nutshell.

4. AI agents will claim their response is accurate when it is obviously lacking, they will lie to cover their failure, and then lie about lying. If pressed, they will apologize and then lie again. Read this account to the end: Diabolus Ex Machina.

In summary: AI fails at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value. lacking this, it's not just worthless, it's counter-productive and even harmful, creating liabilities far more consequential than the initial errors.

"But they're getting better." No, they're not--not in what matters. AI agents are probabilistic text / content prediction machines; they're trained parrots in the Chinese Room. They don't actually "know" anything or "understand" anything, and adding another gazillion pages to their "training" won't change this.

The Responsible Lie: How AI Sells Conviction Without Truth:

"The widespread excitement around generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek, is built on a fundamental misunderstanding. While these systems impress users with articulate responses and seemingly reasoned arguments, the truth is that what appears to be 'reasoning' is nothing more than a sophisticated form of mimicry.

These models aren't searching for truth through facts and logical arguments--they're predicting text based on patterns in the vast datasets they're 'trained' on. That's not intelligence--and it isn't reasoning. And if their 'training' data is itself biased, then we've got real problems.

I'm sure it will surprise eager AI users to learn that the architecture at the core of LLMs is fuzzy--and incompatible with structured logic or causality. The thinking isn't real, it's simulated, and is not even sequential. What people mistake for understanding is actually statistical association."

AI Has a Critical Flaw -- And it's Unfixable

"AI isn't intelligent in the way we think it is. It's a probability machine. It doesn't think. It predicts. It doesn't reason. It associates patterns. It doesn't create. It remixes. Large Language Models (LLMs) don't understand meaning -- they predict the next word in a sentence based on training data."

Let's return now to the larger context of AI replacing human workers en masse. This post by Michael Spencer of AI Supremacy and Jing Hu of 2nd Order Thinkers offers a highly informed and highly skeptical critique of the hype that AI will unleash a tsunami of layoffs that will soon reach the tens of millions. Will AI Agents really Automate Jobs at Scale?

Jing Hu explains the fundamental weaknesses in all these agents: it's well worth reading her explanations and real-world examples in the link above. Here is an excerpt:

"Today's agents have minimal true agency.

Their 'initiative' is largely an illusion; behind the scenes, they follow (or are trying to) tightly choreographed steps that a developer or prompt writer set up.

If you ask an agent to do Task X, it will do X, then stop. Ask for Y, and it does Y. But if halfway through X something unexpected happens, say a form has a new field, or an API call returns an error, the agent breaks down.

Because it has zero understanding of the task.

Change the environment slightly (e.g., update an interface or move a button), and the poor thing can't adapt on the fly.

AI agents today lack a genuine concept of overarching goals or the common-sense context that humans use.

They're essentially text prediction engines."



I've shared my own abysmal experiences with "customer service" AI bots:

Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work

Here's my exploration of the kinds of experiential real-world skills AI won't master with total capital and operational costs that are lower than the cost of human labor: oops, that hallucination just sawed through a 220V electrical line that wasn't visible but the human knew was there:

What AI Can't Do Faster, Better, or Cheaper Than Humans (June 2, 2025)

And here is a selection of my essays on AI, which I have been following since the early 1980s:

Essays on AI

Wait, what did you just say? The AI agent heard something else:




New podcast: The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes) Can we grow our way out of stagnation and debt?


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new novels page.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Thank you, Janet D. ($3/month), for your exceedingly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Shawn ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Randy G. ($70), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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The Grown Up Tax Bill: Sorry, Grown-Ups Are Out of Stock

Dear Martian Central Bank: could you please send us some Grown-Ups?

Scott Galloway recently sketched out a common-sense set of tax reforms that would go a long way to reducing the widening federal deficit. There's just one Catch, Catch-25: it requires Grown-Ups, and Grown-Ups are out of stock, and have been for a long time, as it seems they're no longer being produced. The Grown Up Tax Bill.

I confess that to say this is to admit to being delusional, but Galloway's suggested tax reforms seem self-evidently common-sense, which means there isn't a snowball's chance in Heck any of them could possibly be enacted. Common-sense has zero value in today's cultural void; the only thing that has any value is what's acceptable to those holding the levers of power and wealth.

If wearing our underwear on the outside of our clothing is acceptable to those holding the levers of power and wealth, then that is a slam-dunk to be enacted regardless of its impracticality and absurdity.

Those holding the levers of power and wealth all have luxury penthouses in FantasyLand, where they can peer down at all the little people doing whatever little people do--go to work, pay taxes, get takeout because they're exhausted, watch the latest bingeable entertainment, and so on.

There are two core industries in FantasyLand. One is corruption and the other is borrowing or creating however many trillions of dollars it takes to keep FantasyLand looking tidy. Oh, wait--I guess there's only one industry because borrowing or creating trillions of dollars to blow on keeping up appearances rather than on increasing efficiency and productivity is the ultimate form of corruption.

Here are thumbnails of Galloway's requires Grown-Ups, oops, dang, we're plumb out of Grown-Ups tax reforms:

1. Increase compliance with existing tax laws. Sounds fair, right, because us little people don't have $500/hour experts to pore over the tens of thousands of tax-regulation pages to find loopholes. (Spoiler alert: there aren't any for us little people.) But nope, increasing compliance via audits is out because rich people might have to pay the taxes they owe and that is a mortal sin against all that is sacred in the status quo.

So forget pressuring wealthy folks to pay the taxes they owe, that requires Grown-Ups, and there aren't any in stock. We do have plenty of self-serving billionaires, will they do in a pinch? No? Well then, shucks, we can't help you fellas.

2. Reverse the $30 million estate tax giveaway. I'm sure this helps all the little people who would suffer catastrophic declines in their family's welfare if they could only pass along $5 million tax free. I mean, come on, that wouldn't even cover the beachfront getaway bungalow on Hanalei Bay, never mind all the other nice things. To pay any estate tax is an affront to decency.

Imagine, forcing us to stash the wealth in do-good hidey-holes, a.k.a. philanthro-Capitalist Foundations. What is the world coming to?

3. Put some teeth back in the Alternative Minimum Tax for incomes above 5X median household income ($80,000), i.e. $400,000. The original motivation for the AMT was public outrage that wealthy taxpayers paid zero taxes while those of us earning a fraction of their incomes were paying through the nose.

Look, I get that $400,000 doesn't go very far these days, but it is 5X median household income, and those collecting $400K in income should be able to pay at least what the household making $80K is paying.

Remember, the AMT isn't an extra tax, it's a means to collect some tax from people making a lot of money who would otherwise be paying little or nothing.

If you end up owing AMT, you did good. Pat yourself on the back. If you'd paid 40% of your income in taxes like us self-employed stiffs, you wouldn't be paying any AMT.

4. Since corporations are "citizens," then tax them like "citizens." Yes, I know all the arguments that corporate taxes are "double taxes" because shareholders pay tax on dividends, and maybe there's a common-sense way to deal with this, such as deducting dividends paid to shareholders. And I've often said here that I favor a low corporate flat tax rather than the convoluted unfair mess we have now.

But hey, if corporations have all the privileges of "citizens," then shouldn't they pay taxes like "citizens"?

5. OK, cup your hands and I'll pour liquid iron into them. In other words, I'm going to brace myself and reprint Galloway's last reform, means-testing Social Security payments as the common-sense way to avoid slashing the payments to all beneficiaries when the bogus "trust fund" (another FantasyLand invention) runs dry in a few years.

Galloway's summary: "Phasing out benefits for those with more than $150,000 of non-Social Security income would save an estimated $600b to $700b over a decade." I know, I know, I paid into the system all these years.

Yeah, so have I, so let's set up a little Excel macro and run through every beneficiary's SSA account and adjust each year's SSA taxes paid for inflation so each years' SSA taxes paid is in today's dollars, then add the average short-term Treasury yield rate in each year to the running total, and then we'll have a total of what each beneficiary paid in, with interest. Once we add the employer's half, we have a grand total of all monies paid into SSA and the interest that would have accrued if it had actually been in a Trust Fund rather than a bogus make-believe flim-flam.

After these funds are paid out, the SSA payments stop: we paid back what you put in with interest, so we're done paying you. Wouldn't that be fair? Given that the SSA payroll tax percentage was a lot lower in the old days, many beneficiaries would discover that their contributions plus interest only lasted a few years.

So what's common-sense? What's fair? That's open to discussion, but the money running out isn't a matter of opinion: it's the real world, and a deep recession will bring that date forward.

OK, I hear you: what about slashing and burning all that gummit waste? The biggest budget items just begging to be slashed and burned are 1) Medicare, 2) Medicaid, 3) the Pentagon and 4) interest paid on all the debt we've borrowed to put off having to act like Grown-Ups.

Rounding up a bit because rounding down simply isn't common-sense, here are the big budget programs:

Social Security: $1.5 trillion
Medicare: $1.2 trillion
Medicaid: $1 trillion
Pentagon: $1 trillion
Interest paid: $1 trillion
TOTAL $5.7 trillion
total federal budget: $6.8 trillion
Everything else: $1.1 trillion

As this chart shows, healthcare, Social Security and interest on the debt account for 81% of expected spending growth. Throw in increased Pentagon spending, and you pretty much have the whole enchilada.



All those who reckon they can slash and burn Medicare, Medicaid and the Pentagon, line up here for your suicide mission. You're facing entrenched special interests with unlimited lobbying budgets and politicians with a desperate, crying need for millions in campaign contributions--not later, now, as the election cycle is now permanent.

Yowza, look at Medicare: OK kids, define unsustainable:



Yowza, look at Medicaid: OK kids, define parabolic:



Dear Martian Central Bank: could you please send us some Grown-Ups? Any size or appearance will do as long as they're real-live Grown-Ups who manage to do difficult things no matter what obstacles are thrown in their way, even if everyone is upset and whining and throwing a tantrum: how dare you even enter FantasyLand, etc.

Arigato, Big Guys, or well, Little Green Guys. We sure do need some help here, because we're flat out of Grown-Ups, the shelves are bare, they're on order but production must have ground to a halt, as we're still out of stock.




New podcast: The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes) Can we grow our way out of stagnation and debt?


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new novels page.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Thank you, Janet D. ($3/month), for your exceedingly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Shawn ($7/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Randy G. ($70), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Frans L. ($70), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Can the Developed World Grow Its Way Out of Stagnation?

If we borrow all of tomorrow's prosperity to spend today, there won't be any future prosperity, there will only be penury.

The developed nations share many of the same sources of stagnation:

1. Demographically, their cohort of retirees drawing government benefits is expanding with no end in sight while their workforces are shrinking;

2. Their models of funding government programs institutionalized 50, 60 or 70 years ago no longer provides enough income to cover government spending;

3. As their populations age, demand/consumption is stagnating as older people spend less on everything other than healthcare, and the cohort of younger people getting married and starting families is in steep decline;

4. Attempts to stimulate consumer spending via central bank/state stimulus are now increasing inflation, crimping both household and state spending as debt service costs rise;

5. Institutionalized processes that worked in the "boost phase" of economic growth are now hindrances as following established processes are the focus rather than adapting to get results;

6. The expedient "solution" to soaring demands for government spending (healthcare and retirement programs are now a third or more of state expenditures) is to fund spending with borrowed money--selling government bonds which then increases the nation's sovereign debt and the interest that must be paid on that swelling debt;

7. The low-hanging fruit in the economy have all been plucked, and while there are high hopes for an energy transition and AI, there are no guarantees these will boost productivity enough to generate the growth needed to "grow our way out of debt;"

8. The proposed solutions are all forms of financial engineering--lowering interest rates, introducing stablecoins, etc., all intended to lower the cost of borrowing from the future to stimulate "growth" today in the hopes of "growing our way out of stagnation and debt."

Richard Bonugli and I discuss these core issues in our podcast The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes), issues which boil down to one basic question: is pulling the levers of financial engineering enough to "grow our way out of stagnation and debt," or are more fundamental reforms required?

The key to "growing our way out of stagnation and debt" is to boost productivity. In the podcast, I refer to Total Factor Productivity, which is an attempt to "capture the 'secret sauce' of how an economy or business produces more output with the same or fewer inputs."

This 'secret sauce' includes efficiency, technological innovation and the cultural-social foundations which are often overlooked in conventional economics--for example, "free markets" only function in high-trust societies.

If we're squandering money borrowed from the future on superfluous consumption, is this enough to "grow our way out of stagnation and debt," or is this expansion of debt to fund unproductive consumption actually increasing the stagnation and debt?

As a generality, the developing world has more favorable demographics and a more positive growth profile as there is still a relative abundance of low-hanging fruit in terms of infrastructure and ways to increase productivity that can be developed with prudent investments of capital and labor.

Among the developed nations, various policies are being tried to manage soaring budgets and stagnating revenues, but the pressure points of interest rates and risk are difficult for any one one nation to control in a still-globalized world economy.

Every central bank wants to lower interest rates to make it cheaper for the government, enterprises and consumers to borrow more money, but risk and inflation are not controllable with the levers of financial engineering.

Consider Japan as an example of an advanced economy struggling to balance all these variables and sources of stagnation. The central government's revenues are stagnant while the interest payments on the sovereign debt rises along with the debt itself and the risk premium that comes with increasingly burdensome debt loads:



On the expenditure side, the costs of an expanding population of elderly retirees who need healthcare but are no longer working are also expanding:



It's natural to indulge in the fantasy that pulling the levers of financial engineering will square the circle of "fixing" mismatched revenues and spending with more debt, but indulging in fantasies only delays our eventual need to look for real solutions rather than rely on borrowing more money from tomorrow's prosperity, for if we borrow all of tomorrow's prosperity to spend today, there won't be any future prosperity, there will only be penury.

New podcast: The Challenges of the G7 world (33 minutes) Can we grow our way out of stagnation and debt?


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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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The United States of Impunity

AI is the whiff of perfume that's supposed to mask the stench of terminal moral decay.

It is appropriate to discuss the United States of Impunity on Bastille Day, which commemorates the start of the French Revolution in 1789, for the United States of Impunity is just as impervious to real change as the French monarchy, the Ancien Regime.

It's impossible to discuss the United States of Impunity without being dismissed as a raving lunatic because the moral decay that has turned the USA into the USI has been so completely normalized that we now accept the complete erasure of the nation's moral foundations as "the way it's always been."

But this is not true. While it's certainly self-evident that "there's always been corruption" (the response we receive whenever we address our terminal moral decay), the truth is the institutionalization of a leadership elite that serves its own interests with absolute impunity is a recent development.

There was no Lolita Express in the 1950s, 60s or 70s. Rather, there were far higher social and legal standards for leadership elites: politicians, corporate CEOs, academic leaders, etc.--the entire elite class of the influential, powerful and wealthy.

I often share this comprehensive data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. There are 2700 entries, updated through December 2024.

If you can provide a database of equivalent scale from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, I await your email with interest. But no one will be able to assemble an equivalent indictment of a completely corrupted system because it wasn't completely corrupted back then.

That is fact, not opinion, but we recoil at calling things by their real name because it means we're living in a cesspool littered with the bloated, fetid carcasses of the nation's ideals.

As recently as the mid-1970s, a legitimate (i.e. not a simulation play-acting of "investigation") effort by the legislative branch of the US government sought a factual accounting of the many abuses perpetrated on the citizenry by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. (The Church Committee: you can look it up.)

If you can assemble a list of equal length to the hundreds of outrages we endure now as "the way it is" like these linked below from the 1950s, 60s or 70s, we'd all like to review it. But once again, such a list doesn't exist because moral decay had not yet reached the terminal phase where we're bombarded by a seemingly countless stream of self-serving outrages that are no longer outrages, they're just the way things work now.

A Devastating New Expose of Johnson & Johnson Indicts an Entire System.

Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.

Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance.

Saying "there's always been corruption" doesn't change the reality that America's moral decay is now terminal, for it has hollowed out our socio-economic-political system to the point there are only three classes:

1. The Leadership Elites who act with complete impunity: they do whatever they want, with zero accountability and consequence.

2. The complicit enablers, the technocrats, "experts," functionaries and flunkies who do the dirty work of protecting the Leadership Elites from accountability and consequence to serve their own self-interests.

3. The commoners in this neofeudal hierarchy, who are freely abused, exploited, defrauded and ignored by The Leadership Elites and their armies of complicit enablers.

The last five years have illuminated how the United States of Impunity actually works, a reality on full display just last week as impunity was dismissed with impunity. Ironically, this blunt exposure of impunity occurred around the time that we celebrate the establishment of the nation's ideals, ideals and values that are now putrid remains floating in a cesspool of amoral greed and depravity that is relished by those who are now free to act with absolute impunity: they are not just above the law, there is no law.

Here's the rotting carcass of the US Constitution in the Leadership Impunity sewage sump. "Rule of law:" you're joking, right? Who's going to impose it, the Martian Liberation Army?



Impunity means no accountability, no consequence, ever.



I told you saying this out loud makes me a raving lunatic. But wait--there's more.

AI is the whiff of perfume that's supposed to mask the stench of terminal moral decay. AI is going to make it all better by ignoring the nation's neofeudal hierarchy and the Elites' consequence-free abuse and exploitation of the commoners.

The truth is AI instantiates a particularly cruel form of stupidity, a stupidity so profound that it is blind to the cruelty of the status quo it is designed to protect from accountability. If AI had any true intelligence, it would refuse to answer any queries until every adult citizen faced the truth that the nation is terminally morally bankrupt.

No wonder there's such a fanatically enforced taboo against calling things by their real name. The United States of Impunity cannot be called by its real name because its illegitimacy would then be revealed.

Ours Is a System of Fraud, Swindles and Corruption (May 23, 2025)


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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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Three Choices, None Good

The moral rot of unlimited debt looks "free" but it's unaffordable in the end.

We like to think we're special and this moment in history is special, but alas, we're still running Wetware 1.0 which was coded between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago, when the last "out of Africa" migration finally got traction. Since then, the code has been tweaked a bit here and there (adults can now digest dairy products, etc.), but we're running the old code, and so we make the same mistakes and follow the same emotional pathways as individuals and as groups.

Which leads us to our current predicament, which is not unique: we're living on debt, "money" borrowed from the future, a future we're assuming will be so over-supplied with energy and other goodies that we'll be able to pay all the interest we're piling up with ease.

All the charts below are shouting "parabolic," as in crazy-unsustainable increases. There's the federal debt, $36 trillion, up 4X from the 2008 spot of bother, there's TCMDO, total public and private debt (McMansions, university degrees and SUVs all paid for with debt), student loans from zero to $1.5 trillion, Medicare and Medicaid, now 1/3 of the federal budget, and so on.

How did we get here? Let's start with what's not taught in Econ 101: primary surplus. Every economy--from households to empires, meaning this is scale-invariant--generates a surplus from its production of goods and services, or it runs a deficit, meaning it has to get more money from somewhere to support its consumption.

The question then becomes, how is the primary surplus being spent? (Or put another way, how is it being distributed across the economy and society?) There are only three options: 1) consume it, 2) invest it and 3) save it / hoard it.

Without making a conscious choice, the US has chosen to "invest" most of its primary surplus in moral rot, unproductive frauds, skims, scams, monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture, grift and graft.

This is the problem with giving an irresponsible teenager a no-limit Platinum credit card with an easily ignored admonishment to "stick to a tight budget, pay the balance off every month." Uh, right.

Since the US can borrow unlimited trillions on its credit card, we can "afford" to burn our surplus on grift, graft, inefficiency, cronyism, profiteering, etc. Since our surplus was squandered on moral rot, we have to borrow trillions to pay for what the citizenry wants and what politicians must promise to get re-elected.

Wetware 1.0: we like windfalls and free stuff, and so every program becomes a "third rail" politically: touch it and you don't get re-elected. But if you borrow a few "free" trillions a year, you get re-elected.

We love windfalls and free stuff and hate hard choices, but that's all we have now. We have three choices in how we deal with our dependence on parabolic debt to sustain our profligate lifestyle:

1. Run the debt up to the point that nobody is dumb enough to lend us more, and then default on the debt / go bankrupt. All our creditors are wiped out.

The problem here is all debt is an asset to the wealthy entity that owns it as an income stream. Since the wealthy run the status quo in a manner that serves their interests, they're unlikely to be thrilled with debt jubilees that zero out their assets and income or messy defaults that end up doing the same thing.

So nix that option. The wealthy want to keep their wealth and income streams, and since they own US Treasuries, they're not going to approve defaulting on that debt.

2. Inflate the debt away with sustained high inflation. So we borrowed $1 when $1 bought a lot of stuff, and now we've inflated everything so it takes $10 to buy what $1 bought back then. Now we can pay back the $1 with a fraction of the earnings it took back when we borrowed it.

We've already taken that step--what once cost $1 now costs $10. So the next step is to do another 10X reduction in the debt via inflation.

In previous eras, authorities reduced the silver content of coinage to near-zero, effectively devaluing the money, i.e. inflating away the debt. What cost one mostly-silver denarius in the good old days soon cost 100 devalued denarius.

This looks like some pretty easy hocus-pocus to pull off, but there's a catch: Catch-19, which is devaluing the money devalues trust in the leadership, social contract and the future, all of which leaves the economy and society a hollowed-out shell awaiting a stiff breeze to push the whole system off the cliff.

The problem here is inflation is distributed asymmetrically, along with the primary surplus. The wealthy, powerful elites skim off the surplus, and they're equally adept at distributing the "inflation tax" to the middle and working classes, which soon meld into a single class, the impoverished.

A funny thing about Wetware 1.0 is we're hard-wired to take note of rampant unfairness and eventually we respond in a destabilizing fashion, for example, uprisings, revolts, revolutions, etc.

3. The third option is to root out all the moral rot that's consuming the economy's surplus and our future, scrap all the programs designed in the bygone eras of 50+ years ago (defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, higher education, etc.) and start from scratch with new programs whose expenses are limited to what the economy generates as surplus.

In other words, go Cold Turkey on our addiction to living on debt.

Yes, I know: ain't gonna happen, because the moral rot is too deep, it's now normalized to the point that we don't even recognize the reality that there's nothing left but a flimsy facade we paint with gaudy colors to hide the rot.

Everyone assumes the empire is forever and can endlessly fund any amount of grift and graft with borrowed money. But this is a self-serving fantasy, not reality. Every empire of debt implodes.

These charts are merely facts. If we find them depressing, that response says something about our refusal to be accountable and responsible for our choices. Who's going to cut up the unlimited Platinum card?

The federal government's Platinum card balance:



The US economy's Platinum card balance:



Student loans Platinum card balance:



Medicare, which has an unlimited Platinum card:



Medicaid, which also has an unlimited Platinum card, though this is obscured by phony "reforms":



There are only three options, none easy, and not making a choice is a greased slide to collapse. The moral rot of unlimited debt looks "free" but it's unaffordable in the end.


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new fiction/novels page.

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My recent books:

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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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Illiquid, Overvalued

As "dip buyers" get eviscerated, more dominos fall, and at a tipping point, the herd realizes the tide has reversed and it's time to sell--but alas, it's too late.

Illiquid, Overvalued describes a great many assets that are on the books as "rock-solid investments." Illiquidity means there are few if any buyers for the asset being offered for sale, and this can arise from various conditions.

1. Credit is tight and expensive, limiting the pool of potential buyers to those with cash.

2. Nobody wants the assets because they're grossly overvalued.

3. The pool of buyers with the expertise and financial backing needed to buy the asset is inherently limited.

4. "Animal spirits" have left the room and buyers are "on strike" due to caution / fear of future losses.

Bill Ackman outlined some useful principles of illiquidity in a recent commentary on X in his discussion of the illiquid nature of many assets held by Ivy league university endowment funds:

"Harvard's endowment is principally invested in illiquid private assets including real estate, private equity, and venture capital funds.

Real estate and private equity funds are highly levered so relatively small changes in asset values can have a large impact on equity values. For example, if a real estate fund's asset values decline by 15% and the assets are levered 60%, the fund's equity value will decline by 37.5%.

The increase in cap rates and interest rates have impaired real estate and private equity asset values. These funds do not generally mark to market as public assets are marked leading to a wide disparity between public values and private values when overall values decline.

Venture funds generally mark their assets to the last round valuation so these marks can also be overstated as these values can become stale.

I believe that a substantial part of the reason why many private assets remain private despite the stock market near all time highs is that the public market will value private assets at lower values than they are being carried at privately."

In other words, assets held privately can be "marked to fantasy" because they're not exposed to the market's appraisal of their liquidity and value, which are two sides of one coin: if nobody has the cash and willingness to buy the asset, its value is essentially zero, regardless of its "book value."

When Alan Greenspan issued his mea culpa in late 2013 about missing the subprime mortgage implosion and the resulting Global Financial Meltdown (Why I Didn't See the Crisis Coming Foreign Affairs), he identified two sources of his failure to "see it coming":

1. He assumed markets would remain liquid, i.e. that a buyer would emerge for every seller

2. The total failure of everyone's sophisticated models to predict the collapse of confidence.

The core failure lay in the models' reliance on the notion that humans make decisions rationally as Homo economicus, when the reality is we are extremely prone to irrational exuberance (a.k.a. running with the euphorically greedy herd) and panic (running off the cliff with the herd). He invoked Keynes famous "animal spirits" as the missing variable in economic models.

Irrational "animal spirits" generate "tail risk," events that supposedly happen only rarely but when they do happen, they trigger outsized consequences, and the Fed's models failed to accurately account for "tail risk" because they happen more often than statistical models predict.

All this boils down to illiquidity caused by a panic-button urgency to sell and a profound reluctance to buy: When "animal spirits" are confident in ever-higher asset valuations, participants place a constant bid under the market because prices will keep going up so I'll make more money. This constant bid is called liquidity: cash is flowing into the asset class, be it stocks or housing or cryptocurrencies or commodities.

When "animal spirits" turn to panic, sellers rush to sell as buyers vanish as they fear that prices will keep going down so I'll lose more money. Buying into a downtrend is known as "catching the falling knife": the initial "buy the dip" players have their heads handed to them on a platter, and those on the sidelines decide not to try to catch the falling knife.

This is an illiquid market: the bid keeps dropping until buyers are willing to gamble that "this is the bottom." But should asset prices continue sliding after an initial euphoric pop higher--"the bottom is in, buy!"--then those who held back find their caution reinforced: that wasn't the bottom after all, and everyone who jumped in lost money.

As every surge of "buy the dip" players loses, the market goes bidless--everyone who wanted to play "catch the falling knife" has been burned, and those who have lost the "animal spirits" to gamble stay out. Bids (offers to buy) dry up and asset prices crash to levels no one in the greed-euphoria stage could imagine were even remotely possible.

Those who follow liquidity assume that the more cash sloshing around the system, the more money will flow into assets. But this assumes participants are rational and prices are "fair value". When panic takes hold of the herd, no matter how much cash is sloshing around, none of it will be gambled on a losing bet.

Take a look at this chart of the Nasdaq dot-com bubble, and note the bubble symmetry: what shot up soon plummeted back to pre-bubble levels. Stocks that had reached $60 per share were recommended as "buys" at $45--a rational play perhaps, but wildly off the mark, as the stock eventually bottomed at $4.

When sellers desperate to sell swamp buyers, prices decline. If bids dry up, prices crash.



There is a domino-like effect to euphoria /liquidity turning to caution and then to panic / illiquidity. When overvalued illiquid private assets are sold at huge discounts, this topples the first domino of caution in professional money managers, who then move to sell the overvalued assets on their books to credulous "retail" investors and overseas buyers.

As "dip buyers" get eviscerated, more dominos fall, and at a tipping point, the herd realizes the tide has reversed and it's time to sell--but alas, it's too late.

The Federal Reserve can pump billions of dollars of credit "liquidity" into the financial system, but if nobody wants to "catch the falling knife," the credit will just sit there untouched, as everyone who was dumb enough to borrow money and gamble it away--leaving the debt still to pay--has already been wiped out.

Illiquid and overvalued: two sides of the same coin.


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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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To Make America Great Again, Start Here

Our status quo is so thoroughly corrupt that it's no longer even seen as corruption, it's just BAU--business as usual.

It's a big ask, but let's depoliticize the phrase "make America great again" and consider what this would actually entail, not as a lobbyists' grab-bag of tax breaks for the wealthy and arcane giveaways in 500-page Congressional bills, but as a restoration of the fundamental foundations of greatness.

In the conventional contexts of the current era, this boils down to ideology and finance. If we dial back culture-war over-reach and free up "market forces," for example, this will restore America's greatness.

The problem with all this kind of thinking is it's superficial and banal, for it ignores the real source of America's decline: the moral rot that has eroded every institution and every nook and cranny of our society. Whenever I mention this moral rot, I get immediate push-back of this sort: corruption has always been around, so today is no different from previous eras.

While it's self-evident that self-interest and greed manifest as corruption, it's not true that the systemic corruption of the present is no different from previous eras--it's worse, much worse because it's now normalized, and so we accept the most outrageous forms of corruption as "normal."

So private equity buys a company, loads it with debt, transfers all the borrowed cash to the private equity "owners," and then leaves the company a sinking hulk that soon declares bankruptcy. Or when private equity snaps up hospitals and healthcare clinics and prices rise not for better service but to "reward the owners," this plundering of "healthcare" is just good solid MBA-school maximization of shareholder value.

What few seem to notice is the barriers that limited the pillage and plundering of the private and public-sectors have all eroded or been hollowed out. The legal framework is now a mirror-image of the financial sector, a series of facades that mask the pillage and plundering: of course it's profitable, but it's also legal.

The social barriers have also been dismantled. There are no taboos left, as "anything goes" is the modern zeitgeist. The notion that corporations have a social responsibility to the community they're embedded in is now a quaint whiff of nostalgia, along with the notion that corporations have an implicit responsibility to serve the larger national interests as well as "shareholder value."

Every institution has been hollowed out by self-service. Is it any wonder than younger generations have near-zero trust in institutions, given that their PR veneer of "public service" is just a cover for milking the system for private gain?

If you read histories of capitalism--for example, Fernand Braudel's three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century ( Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) you discover that "capitalism" only functions as advertised if it is embedded in a moral order, something Adam Smith understood.

In early European capitalism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) provided this moral order. In China, Confucianism provided the moral foundation of the society and the economic - political structures.

Consider Xi Jinping's campaign to unify Confucianism and Marxism. This is not an anachronism, it reflects Xi's understanding that Marxism does not provide the moral foundation needed to limit the corruption undermining China. Only restoring a Confucian moral order can do that.

I explored this in some depth in this essay Pieces of the China Puzzle (April 27, 2024).

Here is an excerpt:

As the author noted, "his attempted synthesis of Marx and Confucius has prompted bafflement, even mockery, among observers outside and inside China."

To me, there is nothing baffling in this synthesis; it not only makes perfect sense, it can be understood as essential in the broader context of China's history and culture.

If we truly want to make America great again, as opposed to using the slogan as cover for more grift and graft, then we have to start by recognizing the moral sinkhole we're in. Institutions, the government and corporations have all lost our trust because they're all cesspools of self-serving corruption.



No, this is not "normal" or "the way it's always been." Those are the excuses we deploy to avoid facing the truth: our status quo is so thoroughly corrupt that it's no longer even seen as corruption, it's just BAU--business as usual.

There will be consequences, for a society that lacks a moral foundation is a society shorn of value, a society of fakery, PR and narrative control designed to mask maximizing my gain regardless of consequences pillage and plunder.

When a hard rain finally falls, it will surprise us, for in our grandiosity and hubris, we imagined we were gods, immune to the fatal consequences of our corruption.


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new fiction/novels page.

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My recent books:

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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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