A Taste of Victory

            One of the most bitter and contentious presidential elections in U.S. history is finally behind us.  It seemed that American democracy itself was under threat, and left voters on both sides of the political spectrum feeling jaded and demoralized.  There were certain features of this election that made it particularly unsavory – not the least of which was an incumbent president who was unwilling or unable to accept the outcome, and the cronies and lackeys of his who supported him in his delusion – and will probably result in its being remembered as one of America’s darker moments.  For me, it brought to mind the fictional election portrayed in the classic American western, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance.  In that movie, a young attorney from the east, named Ranse Stoddard, played by James Stewart, moves into an unnamed western territory and leads a movement to turn that territory into a state.  He almost immediately runs afoul of a local bully named Liberty Valance, well-portrayed by Lee Marvin, who is at the head of a faction of cattle barons opposed to statehood.  When Stoddard is elected as a delegate to the statehood convention, along with the local newspaper editor, who has published a story about some of Valance’s crimes, Valance beats the editor nearly to death, burns down the newspaper building, and challenges the attorney to a gunfight.  When Stoddard reluctantly faces off against him in a showdown, Valance is shot to death, much to the surprise of the local townsfolk, not to mention Stoddard himself.  Stoddard and his allies ultimately succeed in their drive for statehood, and he becomes a U.S. senator representing that state.

 

But aside from the ugly controversies surrounding it, the election did bring some longstanding criticisms about the voting process to light.  The Electoral College, in particular, in which each state is given a number of votes equivalent to the sum of its senators and representatives in Congress, came under renewed scrutiny.  A perennial complaint about the Electoral College is that it gives disproportionate power to the less populous states.  According to the 2010 Census, for example, California gets one electoral vote for each 700,000 persons in the state, while Wyoming gets one electoral vote for each 200,000 persons in the state.  There have been four elections in U.S. history when a president who won the Electoral College vote actually would have lost by popular vote, and two of these have occurred in the last twenty years (Al Gore vs. George W. Bush in 2000, and Hilary Clinton vs. Donald Trump in 2016).  Ironically, however, it can be proven mathematically that, under the Electoral College voting system, a single voter in a more populous state has a higher statistical probability of affecting the outcome of the election than a voter in a less populous state.  But in any case, the fact that this method potentially produces outcomes that differ from those which would occur with a simple count of the popular vote is very galling to many.

 

There are even more serious issues that arise, however, when there are more than two candidates running in an election, that even makes the outcome of a simple popular vote open to criticism.  These third-party candidates, if they are sufficiently popular, potentially become “spoilers” in the election, drawing away votes from one of the two majority party candidates with whom their views are most closely aligned.  Many Democrats worried that just such a thing might have happened in the most recent presidential election if Bernie Sanders had decided to run on a third party ticket.  While there have been many popular third-party candidates in American presidential races over the past century, (George Wallace in 1968, John Anderson in 1980, and Ralph Nader in 2000, 2004, and 2008), the one who is generally remembered as possibly having changed the outcome of an election is Ross Perot, who ran as a third-party candidate against incumbent George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992.   Perot’s moderately conservative views were generally considered to be more aligned with Bush’s than Clinton’s, and therefore his strong showing (he received 19% of the popular vote) was thought by many to be responsible for President Bush’s failure to be re-elected.  While this conclusion has been debated (in spite of his strong showing in the popular vote, Perot received no votes in the Electoral College), Perot’s performance demonstrated the impact that a strong third-party candidate could have in elections where the winner is determined by a simple majority of votes.

            Some countries have tried to address the problem of selecting among multiple candidates by adopting more sophisticated voting methods, for example by allowing voters to rank candidates from most preferred to least preferred.  In a three-person contest for example, a voter’s first choice could be given 2 points, the second choice 1 point, and the third choice no points, and then the points would be totaled among all voters to determine the winner.  But even this method, as logical as it sounds, has been demonstrated to sometimes produce strange outcomes that seem to contradict the general will of the majority.  Consider, as a simple example, an election with three candidates, A, B, and C, and five voters.  Suppose that three of the voters, a majority of them, rank the candidates as follows (in descending order): C-A-B.  The other two voters rank the candidates: A-B-C.  Assigning 2 points to each of the first place votes, 1 point to each of the second place votes, no points for third place votes, and totaling, Candidate A gets 3 points for being the second choice of three voters (3×1), and 4 (2×2) points for being the first choice of two voters, for a total of 7 points.  Candidate B gets a total of 2 points (0 points from three voters and 1 point from two voters), and Candidate C gets a total of 6 points (2 points from three voters and 0 points from two voters), making Candidate A the winner, with the highest total of 7 points.  But three of the voters, a majority, had preferred Candidate C to Candidate A, which casts doubt on the reasonableness of selecting A as the winner.  Such paradoxes are not uncommon using this method, and in fact Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow proved that rank-ordering voting methods of this sort can never be devised to prevent these strange outcomes from occurring.

 

But two economists, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, in their 2007 book, Majority Judgment, make a compelling case for why a slight variant of the rank-order method actually can produce consistently valid outcomes.  Rather than using vote totals based on a preference ranking, the authors contend that a better method is to have each voter evaluate the total slate of candidates, with specific evaluations ranging from positive (approve) to negative (disapprove).  Evaluations for each candidate are then stacked from most favorable to least favorable, and the median (middle) evaluation is assigned as a rating to that candidate.  The candidate with the highest rating wins.  Consider the same example above, with Candidates A, B, and C, and that a top-choice ranking from voters is equivalent to an evaluation of “approve”, a bottom-choice ranking is equivalent to an evaluation of “disapprove”, and a second-choice ranking is considered “neutral” (i.e., neither “approve” nor “disapprove”).  Candidate A then received 3 “neutral” votes and 2 “approves”, giving it a median rating of “neutral”, since if we stacked these votes from most favorable to least favorable, then the evaluation in the middle of the stack would be one of the “neutrals”.  Similarly, Candidate B’s 3 votes of “disapprove” and 2 votes of neutral gives it a median rating of “disapprove”, and Candidate C’s 3 votes of “approve” and 2 votes of “disapprove”, gives it a median rating of “approve”.  Candidate C, then, has the highest rating among voters, with a median of “approve”, followed by Candidate A with “neutral” and Candidate B with “disapprove”.  The selection of Candidate C seems a more logical outcome in this election, since the majority of voters preferred Candidate C over both Candidate A and Candidate B. 

A Three-Way Election Outcome Using Majority Judgment Method

It is interesting to consider what would have happened if this method had been used in the most recent presidential election.  Suppose that the method proposed by the authors of Majority Judgment was used with the following five ratings available to voters (from best to worst): “strongly approve”, “approve”, “neutral”, “disapprove”, and “strongly disapprove”.  Given the extreme divisiveness that characterized this election, with voters for one of the candidates generally strongly detesting the other, it is not unlikely that the voters who selected Biden would have given him a “strongly approve” rating, while giving Trump a “strongly disapprove” rating, and Trump voters would have done the reverse: giving Trump a “strongly approve” rating and Biden a “strongly disapprove” rating.  Since Biden was preferred by a majority of the voters, he would have had more “strongly approve” ratings than “strongly disapprove” ratings, and his median rating would therefore be “strongly approve”, while, for the same reason, Trump’s median rating would be “strongly disapprove”.  These results, then, would have mirrored what actually happened in the Electoral College and the popular vote. 

 

But now suppose that Bernie Sanders had decided to run as a third-party candidate.  Under either the Electoral College system or the simple popular vote, the entry of Bernie Sanders into the race would have almost certainly siphoned off a significant number of votes from Joe Biden, and could very likely have resulted in the election victory going over to the incumbent President Trump.  However, the median rating approach would produce a distinctly different result.  Suppose that those who supported Biden over Bernie Sanders gave Biden a “strongly approve” rating and Sanders an “approve rating” while those who supported Sanders over Biden did the reverse.  Assume that both, however, still gave Trump a “strongly disapprove” rating.  Since Trump’s median rating would still then be “strongly disapprove”, he would again be the clear loser of the election.  The ultimate contest, then, would be between Biden and Sanders.  (Both of these candidates would probably now have a median rating of “approve”, suggesting a tie, but the authors of Majority Judgment provide a simple and elegant method for breaking ties.  In this case, the method would have selected as winner the more popular of these two candidates, Biden and Sanders.)

 

The voting method advocated in Majority Judgment is effective and suitable not only for elections, but for competitive activities that involve multiple judges, including sporting events such as the Olympics, and wine-tastings.  And it is to one of these that I would now like to turn, because as with our recent U.S. presidential election, the outcome was controversial, but unlike the election, it is remembered as a great moment in American history.  It was the famous “Judgment of Paris” wine competition of 1976, in which American wines were pitted against French wines in a blind tasting.

 

A little background is necessary in order to highlight the significance of this competition.  Before 1976, French wines were generally regarded as the best in the world.  And more than this, they were considered virtually unrivalled in their quality.  While some other European nations could lay claim to particular wines of excellence (Spain had its sherry, Portugal its port, Italy its Chianti, and Germany its sweet white wines, for example), the idea that any country beyond Europe could produce wine of any type that could even compare to France’s was unthinkable, even heretical, and this was especially true of wines produced in America – particularly in California, where many wines using grape varietals identical to France’s were produced.  And wine producers in California at the time even seemed to believe this themselves, as they often resorted to naming their white wines “Chablis”, red wines “Bordeaux”, and sparkling wines “Champagne”, which are all regions in France.  The French eventually raised a successful protest against this practice, as it was clearly a case of false advertising: what we might today even call “identity theft”.  The practice really did seem to be a tacit acknowledgement on the part of California wine-makers that their products were inferior imitations of the French bona fides.

The 1976 "Judgment of Paris"

A British wine merchant named Steve Spurrier decided to put this belief about the inferiority of California wines to the test.  (He was himself a believer, as he only sold French wines in his own shop.)  He arranged for a blind tasting in Paris involving several acclaimed judges which would include a red wine competition (four French Bordeaux wines against six California Cabernet Sauvignons) and a white wine competition (four French Burgundy and six California Chardonnays).  The tasting occurred on May 24, 1976.  There were eleven judges in all, including eight French, one Swiss, one American, and Spurrier himself.  When the tastings were completed, and the outcomes of the competitions were determined, it was revealed – much to the shock (if not horror) of the French judges – that a California wine had won first prize in both the red and white wine categories.  (The event is entertainingly portrayed in the 2008 movie Bottle Shock.)

 

While news of this competition and its outcome was downplayed in Europe, and particularly in France, the impact of the event was momentous.  By winning first prize, California winemakers had demonstrated that they could produce quality wines on a par with the vaunted French wines that were supposedly incomparable in their excellence.  The event virtually opened the floodgates to a vibrant international wine industry, as not just wineries in California, but others in both North and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, not to mention Europe itself, felt emboldened to challenge France’s winemaking dominance, in terms of popularity, or quality, or both.  It seemed that just knowing that such a thing was possible – a non-French wine winning first prize in a blind tasting – had a palpable impact on the industry.  In that first competition, most of the American red wines that had been part of the tasting actually did end up on the bottom of the ranking.  But when the Wine Spectator magazine hosted a France vs. U.S.A. tasting competition just ten years later, five of the six American red wines entered in the contest occupied the top five positions in the rankings.  It is a testament to the power of belief, and reminiscent of the famous story of Roger Bannister, who was the first person in history to run the mile in less than four minutes, in 1954, something which until then had been thought to be humanly impossible.  Within a year of his winning the record, 37 other runners also ran the mile in less than four minutes, and 300 runners within a year after that.  By just demonstrating that the feat could be accomplished, he made it far more achievable for others.  The 1976 “Judgment of Paris” and its outcome was truly legendary, and its legacy can be seen today in just about any store that sells wines, where there are aisles devoted to individual regions, with California Cabernet Sauvignons, Sauvignon Blancs, and Chardonnays proudly displayed, along with similarly-esteemed Argentinian Malbecs and red blends, German Rieslings, and the now globally popular Australian brand with the kangaroo on the label, featuring various varietals at a very affordable price.  French wines are still respected of course, and still popular, but no winery outside of France, in any region of the world, now feels compelled to try to pass off any of its products as a “Bordeaux”, or “Chablis”, or “Champagne” in order to gain respectability, or even popularity.

 

But here is where the story takes a bit of a left turn.  Did a California wine really win 1^st Prize in the 1976 Judgment of Paris?  I have to return here to the authors of Majority Judgment, who had demonstrated that their method of determining election outcomes, and outcomes of competitions involving several judges, was superior to traditional methods, and devoid of all of the shortcomings attributed to them.  (Even Kenneth Arrow, the economist who had demonstrated that all traditional methods of rank-ordering candidates were flawed, endorsed the authors’ approach.)  In their book, they turn their attention to the Judgment of Paris, and in particular the red wine competition, and note that the outcome was determined by taking a simple average of each of the judges’ scores.  But by using their method, the authors contend that the American wine which supposedly won 1^st prize, the 1973 vintage Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon, actually should have taken second place in the competition, with the real winner being the 1970 vintage French wine Chateau Mouton Rothschild, which had been given 2^nd prize in the official ranking.  (Both the official ranking and the authors’ ranking concur that four of the six American wines entered in the competition occupied the four lowest positions, and that the remaining one came in 5^th place.) 

 

The "Official" Outcome of the Judgment of Paris Red Wine Competition

This is a jarring conclusion, and leads to a profoundly different outcome for this 1976 event.  In fact, had this been the outcome that was officially observed at the time, it might have diminished or even eliminated the event’s historical significance.  After all, in the red wine category, five of the six American contestants ranked very poorly, or mediocre at best.  Hence, a 2^nd place showing for Stag’s Leap might have been considered just an anomaly of no particular consequence.  For Americans, at least, this might make the authors’ voting methodology appear much less attractive.  (Some who dislike this outcome, and who are familiar with the book Majority Judgment, might even be tempted to observe that both of its authors were employed at a French university at the time when their book was published.)  But are the authors correct, nonetheless?

 

I have always been fascinated myself with the problem of how to properly rank order candidates or contestants based on a voting methodology, and have actively explored various approaches to this problem.  Several years ago, I came upon an insight which led to the development of my own methodology.  The insight was this:  In a competition that involves several judges, there are actually two types of information that are revealed in the judges’ scores.  The first, of course, is information about the things being judged, but the second is information about the caliber of the judges themselves.  If the particular scores of an individual judge tend to correlate highly with the average scores of the other judges, for example, then this is probably a good indication that the judge knows what he or she is doing.  For example, suppose three things are being evaluated – call them A, B, and C – by several judges, and Judge #1 determines that C is the best among the three, followed by B, followed by A.  If the collective ratings of the other judges, based on an average of their point scores, also puts C at the top, followed by B, and followed by A, then this suggests that Judge #1 has made a competent evaluation.  But if the collective ratings of the other judges does the reverse, putting A over B over C, then this suggests that Judge #1 either lacks the ability to discriminate effectively between the contestants, or has an aesthetic taste that runs counter to the population as a whole, or both.  It is also possible, of course, that Judge #1 is uniquely and exceptionally qualified to perform this role, and it is the rest of the judges that are incompetent rubes, but the former interpretation is far more likely, particularly if several judges are involved.  Hence, a judge whose individual scores are highly and positively correlated with the average scores of the other judges should get a higher weighting in the competition that is being evaluated, while any judge whose individual scores are either uncorrelated with the average of the others, or, worse, negatively correlated with the average, should be given a lower weighting, or perhaps should be disqualified entirely.  I have tested my method, using a technique involving multiple simulations called Monte Carlo analysis, and have found encouraging evidence that mine is superior to both the conventional method of simply averaging judges' scores and that which is proposed by the authors of Majority Judgment.

And when looking at how each of the individual judges’ ratings compared with the others at the Paris competition, one can make some interesting observations.  For example, one of the French judges, Pierre Tari, actually did exhibit a negative correlation between his wine ratings and those of the rest of the judges, meaning that he tended to rate highly those wines that the other judges were unimpressed with, and vice versa.  In his case, then, it really does appear that in spite of the fact that he actually owned a winery himself, as a wine connoisseur he was apparently in the wrong profession. 

 

(This may sound rather harsh, but I must confess that my own experience as a wine connoisseur parallels Monsieur Tari’s.  Many years ago I took a wine course, and it was customary to end each class with a blind tasting of the wines that had been featured that day.  I discovered that I invariably rated highly those wines that were disliked by the rest of the class, while panning the wines that were popular with everyone else.  It was very humbling at the time, but there was a consolation for me.  Because the wines that I preferred also tended to be the less expensive ones, I have been able to enjoy my favorite wines in the years since without it ever being a serious drain on my budget.)

 

Michel Dovaz and Pierre Tari

And three of the judges had ratings which, while positively correlated with those of the other judges, were only slightly so, suggesting that much of their ratings were not much better than assigning random scores.  In their case, this would be evidence of a palate that was not very discriminating.  One of these judges was the only American who participated, Patricia Gallagher, another was the British wine merchant who had proposed the contest, Steven Spurrier, and the third was Swiss wine instructor and author of books on wine, Michel Dovaz.  (Spurrier and Gallagher actually recused themselves from the competition and did not include their scores in the final tally, not because they felt that they were less than competent to judge, but because both had played an instrumental role in organizing the event.)

 

                    Aubert de Villaine and Jean-Claude Vrinat

But there were four judges, all French, that were standouts in a positive way, in that each of their ratings correlated strongly with the averages of the other judges, strongly suggesting that they had both a discriminating palate and a genuine cultivated taste for fine wines.  These were Claude Dubois-Millot, a restaurant sales director who was actually substituting for an absentee judge, economist and winery owner Aubert de Villaine,  restaurant owner Jean-Claude Vrinat, and Pierre Brejoux, Inspector General of the Appellation d'Origine Controlee Board, which oversees the production of the finest French wines.  Of these four judges, two put the California Stag’s Leap wine in a tie for second place, and two put it in a tie for third place.  Hence, while all of these judges agreed that Stag’s Leap was among the top four of the wines in the competition, they also were unanimous in determining that it was not the best of the contestants.  (By the way, Patricia Gallagher, the only American judge, rated Stag’s Leap even lower, putting it in a four-way tie for fourth place.)

 

(From left) Patricia Gallagher, Steven Spurrier, and Odette Kahn

The remaining three French judges exhibited positive correlations between their individual scores and those of the rest of the judges, but which were not very strong, indicating that while they had a general ability to discriminate between good wines and mediocre ones, it would perhaps be too flattering to refer to them as “connoisseurs”.  One of these, Odette Kahn, upon discovering to her horror that she had assigned first place to the American Stag’s Leap wine, demanded, unsuccessfully, to have her ballot returned.

 

When I use my own method of weighting the judges’ scores, I find that much depends on exactly how these scores are weighted.  With some weighting methods, my results support the contention that Stag’s Leap was the genuine winner, but with others, the 2^nd place showing which the authors of Majority Judgment claims it actually deserved is supported.  In any case, the fact that the four apparently most competent judges were in agreement that Stag’s Leap was not the best wine in the competition casts serious doubt on the official outcome of the contest.

 

So the actual outcome of the famous “Judgment of Paris” may very well have been different than what is recorded in the history books.  It reminds me, again, of that movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the fateful gunfight in which the greenhorn, idealistic lawyer from the East Coast brought down a much more skilled opponent.  The showdown is remembered as a great, seminal moment in the history of the fledgling state, but during the movie (and, as a film critic would say at this point to those who haven’t seen the movie, “Spoiler Alert!”) it is revealed to a reporter many years later that it was not Ranse Stoddard’s bullet that actually killed Liberty Valance.

 

If you ever have a chance to come out to Washington, D.C., I recommend that you visit the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which is located on Constitution Avenue, NW, between 12^th and 14^th Streets.  In a permanent exhibition located on the first floor of the East Wing entitled “Food: Transforming the American Table”, you might still have an opportunity to see proudly on display an actual bottle of the Judgment of Paris “winner”, 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon, which was donated to the museum by the winery’s owner, William Winiarski.   I sometimes imagine myself standing there, admiring the exhibit, while some group is standing next to me, listening to someone describe the historic David vs. Goliath contest that allowed Stag’s Leap to bring respectability to American wines, and usher in a new era for wine in the entire world.  If that ever happens, I will simply smile silently, and nod in agreement, while remembering the most famous line in that movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, uttered by the reporter when he learns the truth about what actually happened during the climactic showdown between Stoddard and Valance:

 

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 

I know that in these days of real and imagined incursions and accusations of “fake news”, this attitude of mine might be controversial, but I do believe that there will always be a place for myth in history, if the myth heals, unites, and inspires, rather than injures, divides, and enervates.  And so, in these divisive times, I offer a toast to the American ideal of unity in diversity, accomplishment in spite of adversity, and hope that in this ideal, “legend” will always become “fact”, and vice versa.  Or as the French would say, so simply and elegantly:

 

Je lève mon verre à la liberté! 

Okay, Boomer!

On September 23, 2019, those attending the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City watched as a 16-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, angrily denounced their generation for passively allowing the world to move to the brink of environmental catastrophe.  Here are some of the most memorable of her remarks:

My message is that we'll be watching you.

This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

. . . . You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

. . . . You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Greta Thunberg had already drawn international attention by the time of this speech:  In early 2018 she had begun organizing climate strikes at her school and, shortly after starting the ninth grade, stopped attending classes for three weeks so that she could stage a daily protest outside the Swedish parliament, demanding that her government abide by its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement of 2016.  Her activism soon drew worldwide attention, and she was invited in 2018 to speak at the United Nations Climate Change conference.  In early 2019 she participated in various student protests throughout Europe, and in August of that year sailed to the United States from Plymouth, England in a solar-powered boat.  Later that month, she attended a hearing hosted by the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and gave her fiery speech at the U.N. in New York the following month.  Her reputation, and her following, has continued to grow since then, as she has become something of a living symbol of her generation’s exasperation over their elders’ responsibility for the global environmental crisis, and relative inactivity in addressing it.

A new phrase among the younger generation rose in popularity around the same time that Greta Thunberg and her angry denunciation of previous generations was gaining international attention: “Okay, Boomer”.  It bitterly challenges the wisdom of any remarks made by the “Baby Boomer” generation (those born between the years 1946 and 1964), given the dismal legacy they have bequeathed to those born after them, both in environmental and economic terms.

And who can disagree with them?  We are living in a world with CO₂ levels at the highest they have been in at least three million years, and about 50% higher than what they were during the millennium preceding the onset of the Industrial Revolution.  Concurrent with this high concentration of greenhouse gas emissions has been a precipitous rise in global temperatures, with six of the hottest years in recorded history having occurred since 2014.  This ecological crisis, of course, is only the most discussed, but there are many others that rival it in severity.  Eighteen million acres of forest are destroyed each year, and presently tropical forests, which once covered 15% of the planet’s surface, now cover only 6-7%.  And then there is the growing pollution of the world’s oceans with sewage sludge, oil, toxic chemicals, and plastics, and if the general endangerment of the ocean ecosystem from pollution isn’t bad enough, there is the decline of marine life due to overfishing, with an estimated one-third of the world’s fish stocks now at risk.  Add to these problems the precipitous growth in endangered species, with more than 900 plant and animal species at imminent risk of extinction, and hundreds of others threatened, and it is clear that we (the present generation of adults and those that preceded it) have done a pretty thorough job of putting the earth’s ecosystem on a trajectory to catastrophe.

But we have also left the younger generations with a huge financial burden, as we’ve sustained our own present standards of living (and provided for our future protection with unfunded social security and medical assistance programs) by relying upon unprecedented levels of borrowing.  In the U.S., private (non-government) debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (a measure of the total goods and services produced in the country) is higher than what it was in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and public (government) debt has grown to more than 100% of GDP this year: a level not seen since the aftermath of World War II, in the 1940s.  The public debts of many other nations are not far behind, with countries like England, Canada, Spain, France all having levels exceeding 80%, while the levels in Italy, Greece, and Japan surpass even those of the U.S.  (The public debt of Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home country, is comparatively less egregious, at 37% of GDP.)  As if this weren’t bad enough for America’s youth, students graduating from college these days find themselves saddled with huge burdens of personal debt as a result of skyrocketing education costs: something that most of their parents never had to face.

Our collective attitude towards this disaster of a legacy (or legacy of a disaster) tends to be at least as despicable.  Most of us would rather just not think about these problems, let alone discuss them, and the more militantly obtuse go so far as to deny that the problems exist in the first place.  Looming environmental and ecological crises are labeled as “hoaxes” promoted by agents of a left-leaning, nefarious, political elite, or as the naïve, misguided exaggerations of over-emotional and scientifically-challenged “tree huggers”.  Even the more obvious economic problems associated with spiraling, out-of-control, debt tend to be given short-shrift, even by prominent economists, as it has apparently become unfashionable to suggest that the debt even needs to be reduced.  I remember attending a panel presentation in Washington, D.C. a few years ago that featured a well-known and highly regarded economist.  Because I had heard him make reference in one of his earlier public statements to the huge level of debt that presently exists in this country, I naively assumed that he regarded this as a problem that needed to be urgently addressed, and so I asked him, during the question-and-answer session after the presentation, how he felt the problem should best be handled.  He angrily retorted that he never said the level of debt was an issue that was in urgent need of addressing, adding that this was just the sort of idea that his critics have often tried to associate with him.

The bitter denunciation of their elders by today’s younger generations interestingly echoes a similar epoch in American history: the 1960s generation, when youths on college campuses and elsewhere collectively rose up in protest against the sins of their fathers and mothers.  Ironically, the youths who made up that protest were Baby Boomers – the very same generation that is being ridiculed and denounced now.  And while those who participated in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s shared with today’s angry youth many of the same negative views of their elders – that they are insular, short-sighted, and selfish – the protesters of the Sixties went even further:  With their catchphrase “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”, they were implying that those of the older generation were evil as well – a charge which Greta Thunberg, at least, has been reluctant to include among her invectives against us.

Those who participated in the protest movements of the 1960s left an enduring positive legacy: making monumental strides in the advancement of civil rights, turning the tide of popular opinion against the mandatory conscription of young men to participate in pointless overseas wars, and in breaking down a general cultural tendency toward stifling social conformity.  Environmentalism also rose in the national consciousness as well, as exemplified by the annual global observance of Earth Day on April 22, which had originally been proposed in 1969 by John McConnell, a peace activist, and which culminated in new regulations and legislation all over the world that addressed conservation and ecological issues.

Clearly, however, whatever positive legacy that came out of the turbulent 1960s was not enough to prevent the crises – ecological, social, and economic – that face our world now.  Was the social activism that Baby Boomers engaged in during their youth a failure, then?  Or was it undone in the decades that followed?

I know that it is convenient to think in terms of a “backlash”, particularly if this would allow the transference of blame to some other, younger, generation.  It is all too easy to point out the election and popularity of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as evidence of this.  A popular situation comedy in that decade, Family Ties, about a set of idealistic parents who had been part of the Sixties counterculture movement, now dealing with a son who admires Reagan, reads the Wall Street Journal, and aspires to be a successful corporate capitalist, exemplified this idea.  But this explanation is much too facile, and doesn’t bear up to closer scrutiny.

First, it is naïve to paint any generation with a broad brush and assume that all, or even most, of the members of that generation conformed to some particular political view or held certain attitudes in common.  The hippies, student protesters, and other youthful activists, while more visible than their peers, particularly in the media, represented only one extreme of a spectrum of social and political attitudes among them.  (Richard Nixon was not off the mark when he spoke of a “silent majority”, which even existed among the young at that time.)  And it is likely that the actions of many back then – particularly in the music industry – were motivated more by self-aggrandizement then by a genuine desire for positive social change.  Unfortunately, the same can probably be said of Greta Thunberg’s fellow millennials – many if not most of whom exhibit the same apathy, self-involvement, and lack of engagement as the older generations that she decries.

And second, I think that what happened after the Sixties was more of a dissipation of active social engagement rather than a reaction to it.  I remember well the decade that followed, as this was the one in which I entered my own teen years.  There was a general feeling that something remarkable had happened in those preceding turbulent years, and that perhaps it represented the birth of a new age, which would continue to unfold.  Among the more idealistic of those Americans who were coming of age in the 1970s (and these were still members of the Baby Boom generation, but born in the later years), there was a sense of obligation to somehow carry on the legacy of the Sixties, into a new phase of social reform and evolution.  But with the Viet Nam War ended, and the resignation of a president who had come to be seen as antithetical to everything that the Sixties had stood for, there were no focal points of public protest – nothing that could sustain the fury and enthusiasm which had motivated the youth during the previous decade.  By the end of the 1970s, what emerged, as a consequence of this, was a growing sense that the next phase should involve a turning inward, and a focus on personal enlightenment which, as it expanded to include more and more people, would reach a sort of critical mass that would naturally lead to a better world: with greater harmony among persons and between the human race and the environment.  This new ideal was eloquently expressed in Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy.  In its opening chapter she writes:

A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States.  Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may have even broken continuity with history.

This network is the Aquarian Conspiracy.  It is a conspiracy without a political doctrine.  Without a manifesto.  With conspirators who seek power only to disperse it, and whose strategies are pragmatic, even scientific, but whose perspective sounds so mystical that they hesitate to discuss it.  Activists asking different kinds of questions, challenging the establishment from within.

Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history.  The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system.  It is a new mind – the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought.

It has been decades since I read Marilyn Ferguson’s book (with much enthusiasm, if I recall), and so I can’t speak to the elements of her particular program, but I do remember the general features that tended to characterize many if not most of the “Aquarian” movements that stressed personal change and transformation as a vehicle for general social reform.  They tended to draw from a grab bag of Eastern religions and mysticism, pop psychology, drugs (psychedelics for enlightenment, pharmaceuticals for the treatment of conventional psychological impediments like depression and anxiety), nutrition, exercise, occultic beliefs and practices, self-hypnosis and auto-conditioning, and novel scientific theories – of varying degrees of legitimacy – incorporated into new world views.

Some might find it ironic that – instead of being remembered as the decade in which an Aquarian-style mass personal transformation occurred – the 1980s is now best remembered for being the age of the “Yuppie” (young, upwardly-mobile professional), when, in the 1987 movie Wall Street, for example, Gordon Gecko boldly declares that “Greed is good”.  But I’ve always seen a certain logic in this, rather than an irony.  After all, if the road to general social improvement is by maximizing one’s human potential, then how better to achieve this objective than by maximizing one’s personal standard of living, first?

It seems that all that has survived from that idealistic program of self-transformation are certain relics, such as the self-help, “pulling your own strings” gurus who still appear from time to time on public television subscription drives, and whose books grace the stands of airport bookstores; the quasi-religious, quasi mystical audio and video series that promise practical enlightenment; and the occultic books and artifacts sold in the “New Age” section of bookstores and retail websites.  And of course a cornucopia of pharmaceutical drugs have evolved over the past half century to correct any mental impediments to personal happiness – real or imaginary.

Perhaps a fraternity of genuinely enlightened “Aquarian conspiracists” did emerge from the 1970s and 1980s, but if so, they apparently never reached that critical mass which would produce general, positive social transformation, or have yet to do so.  And if the fraternity does exist, I certainly must have failed to make the grade, because I never received an invitation to join.  It must be very well concealed, in fact, because I am not aware of any of its members among my friends, relatives, or even casual acquaintances.

And I’ve become cynical, over the years, about how effective personal enlightenment would be as a vehicle for saving the world.  I don’t think that I am the first to feel such cynicism.  In his 1934 book A Search in Secret India, British author Paul Brunton described his quest to find genuine spiritually enlightened sages among the Hindu yogis, Moslem fakirs, mystics, and other holy men in India.  But while he did encounter men and women who exhibited remarkable insights and abilities, suggesting that they had indeed tapped into some profound higher spiritual power, he was generally exasperated by the fact that these sages tended to spend most of the hours of any day sitting in blissed-out trances, seemingly oblivious to the world around them.  If they did find genuine enlightenment, it seemed to be of a very self-indulgent sort.  With few exceptions, these sages seemed markedly unconcerned about how to improve the general condition of political and economic life in India, and when Paul Brunton pressed them for practical advice to take back to Europe, which had descended into chaos after World War I, they merely urged him to know himself.

But this idea that some sort of self-transformation is necessary to fix civilization, and ultimately fix the world, is really a carry-over of an older belief that we have all been somehow corrupted or degraded by civilization itself.  There is a tendency to believe that there was once a Golden Age, when we lived in harmony with nature, and with each other, but that something happened during the course of civilization that fundamentally changed us in a pernicious way, making us more greedy, belligerent, and exploitative, setting us against each other, and against nature itself.   The idea dates at least as far back as the Enlightenment, when Jean Jacques Rousseau declared that “Man is naturally good, and it is by his institutions alone that men become evil.”  In his essay “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts”, written in 1750, Rousseau argued that the progress of civilization led to the corruption of morals.  Of course, there were earlier incarnations of this idea, with romanticized conceptions of the “noble savage” in less civilized regions of the world, and the Judeo-Christian belief in a fall from grace in the idyllic Garden of Eden.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Most of Rousseau’s fellow Enlightenment thinkers did not share this view, and Voltaire, in particular, was especially hostile to it.  When Rousseau published a subsequent essay titled “Discourse on Inequality” in 1755, in which he argued that the commercial society of his day was fundamentally immoral, Voltaire wrote to him:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it.… No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours. However, as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it…

Voltaire had written, nearly twenty years earlier, a satirical poem, “The Worldling” that mocked both the secular and the religious views of the fall from grace.  In it, he writes:

Do you our ancestors admire,
Because they wore no rich attire?
Ease was like wealth to them unknown,
Was’t virtue? ignorance alone.
Would any fool, had he a bed,
On the bare ground have laid his head?
My fruit-eating first father, say,
In Eden how rolled time away?
Did you work for the human race,
And clasp dame Eve with close embrace!
Own that your nails you could not pare,
And that you wore disordered hair,
That you were swarthy in complexion,
And that your amorous affection
Had very little better in’t
Than downright animal instinct.
Both weary of the marriage yoke
You supped each night beneath an oak
On millet, water, and on mast,
And having finished your repast,
On the ground you were forced to lie,
Exposed to the inclement sky:
Such in the state of simple nature
Is man, a helpless, wretched creature.
Would you know in this cursed age,
Against which zealots so much rage,
To what men blessed with taste attend
In cities, how their time they spend?
The arts that charm the human mind
All at his house a welcome find;
In building it, the architect
No grace passed over with neglect.

But if civilization is not to blame – if we are no less moral than our earliest ancestors – then what is responsible for the ecological crisis that Greta Thunberg decries: what brought it about? 

The answer is actually a very simple one:  There are too many of us – too many human beings – on this planet.  It has been estimated that there is a total of 15.77 billion acres of habitable land on the earth.  Given that there are presently about 7.8 billion persons alive today, this works out to nearly exactly two acres of habitable land per person.  It sounds like a generous endowment, but if one remembers that within this two acres per person, provision must be given for producing food, shelter, and the other necessities – not to mention the amenities – of life, the space seems a little more parsimonious.  And then, when one also remembers that somehow these allotments of space must be used to accommodate the better part of a distribution of 8000 species of birds, 4000 species of mammals, 900,000 species of insects, and about 300,000 species of flowering plants, mosses, and trees, it is obvious that things will get a little crowded, to say the least.

            Global overpopulation is a serious, serious problem, but it has not arisen due to any general moral failing.  The very definition of what it means to be a living thing – the essence of life itself –is to compete for resources, consume them, grow, thrive, and reproduce.  Hence, rather than being some monstrous abortion that has poisoned and critically wounded Gaia, mother Earth, humanity has merely played out its intended role in the web of life.  Its sin – if sin it can be called – is that it played the game of life more faithfully and more successfully than any other species on the planet.

And so – remarkable human being that she is – if there had been a million Greta Thunbergs living amongst us Baby Boomers in the 1960s and 1970s – in Europe, America, Asia, and even in the developing countries – I doubt that they would have fundamentally altered the trajectory that led to the current state of the world.  Perhaps some additional enlightened environmental policies would have been adopted, like the Montreal Protocol of 1987 that limited global production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which had been depleting Earth’s protective ozone layer, but these would have addressed the secondary effects of overpopulation, and not the root cause itself.

I can think of only six ways that might cause a reversal of global overpopulation, and most of them are unsavory.  The first is as the result of ecological or environmental catastrophes on a large scale, such as famine, water shortages, global warming and its consequences, or global pandemics.  Closely aligned with the first is human-induced catastrophes provoked directly by overpopulation, or indirectly by one or more of the natural disasters outlined above.  These could include widespread civil unrest, mass destabilizing migrations, acts of extreme terrorism, and large-scale wars.  Third, governments could take draconian measures to keep their populations under control, ranging from compulsory birth control, to forced sterilizations, to forced abortions, and finally, in the most extreme case, to the elimination of living members of the citizenry.  These all sound monstrous, of course, and beyond contemplation, yet how many of us, if we’re completely honest with ourselves, can deny that in our darkest moments, at least, we’ve wondered if the world might be better off if it was rid of certain elements of the population, such as violent and unrepentant criminals, persons prolifically producing children that they are unable or unwilling to care for, and persons who, although able-bodied and able-minded, seem content to live on the dole, as social parasites, supported by friends, relatives, or government support obtained under fraudulent circumstances.  But the definition of “Unproductives” or “Undesirables” would have to become extremely broad – not to mention increasingly arbitrary and subjective – before such a policy would make any appreciable impact on reducing population, and in the process, we would all inevitably be shocked and horrified to discover the names of persons we care for appearing on that list, and possibly eventually the appearance of our own names as well.  (As a recent retiree, I would have to worry about that as a real possibility.)  And while totalitarian governments have proved themselves to be brutally efficient in reducing populations, they have generally not done so on the basis of “objective” criteria, but, as in the case of the Nazis, based upon things like ethnicity, religious affiliation, and sexual preference, or in the case of the Stalinist Soviet Union and other Communist nations, as the result of indiscriminate mass starvation and the execution of political enemies.

A fourth means of reducing overpopulation would be to engineer a mass exodus from planet Earth, with the goal of colonizing other worlds.  But in spite of the enthusiasm for extraterrestrial colonization by wealthy entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, this option will remain confined within the realm of science fiction well into the future.  A fifth means would be the result of the introduction of an apex predatory species that could cull the human herd down to ecologically sustainable levels, as has actually been done to contain ecological imbalances involving other animals, but again this puts us well into the realm of science fiction and fantasy.  (Science fiction, of course, has taken some even darker paths in speculating about how humanity might deal with the population crisis, but I will leave those to the authors of that genre.)

The sixth – and most effective – means for population control is, ironically, the most benign, and that is to raise the general standard of living.  Adam Smith (another Enlightenment critic of Rousseau) was one of the earliest champions of commerce as a means of improving the general welfare, and economists of later generations observed the link between economic development and falling fertility rates.  Today, in fact, nearly half of the global population is living in developed nations (including Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, and nearly all of the countries in Europe) where the fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level.  But this leads to the further irony that among these nations the low fertility rates have created an economic challenge, as the declining numbers of younger workers create an increasing burden upon them to support their aging elders.  As a consequence, countries are relying increasingly upon deficit spending policies to provide for the welfare of their older citizens, leading to the second of the twin evils – national debt – which I described at the beginning of this blog.  And in spite of this, the world’s population continues to grow, with the total projected to reach 11 billion by the end of this century (bringing that per person land allotment down to 1.4 acres).  This growth, of course, is going to occur in the poorer regions of the globe, creating even more instability and migration pressures.

When I am faced with facts and statistics like these, my immediate reaction is one of despair, and futility.  What could we in my generation have done differently?  And, more importantly, what can all of us do, now?  I sometimes try to console myself with the thought that if consciousness – and human consciousness in particular – is not just some accident of physics – if it is evidence of a Divine agency at work in the universe – then surely, in spite of the succession of crises and tragedies that have made up our collective history, the story of humanity will ultimately have a happy ending.  But both of these attitudes – pessimism and desperate optimism – lead to a dangerous posture of passivity – even apathy.  Why change, or try to effect change, if the ultimate outcome is out of my – out of our – hands?

And, too, blaming all of our social and ecological problems on overpopulation may be too simplistic.  After all, it is the developed nations and advanced economies of the planet that are responsible for the majority of toxic emissions and other pollutants that are poisoning the ecosystem.  China, the United States, and the European Union together currently produce more than half of all production- and consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions, and the high and upper middle income regions of the world produce about two-thirds of global solid waste.  Even if Rousseau was wrong in declaring that civilization and commercial society has made us evil, can we at least concede that it’s made those of us living in the more affluent nations a little more selfish, careless, and lazy, not to mention wasteful?  Our food chain in the U.S. and other nations is dependent upon factory farms, where the animals – which are generally no less intelligent than our family pets – are subject to horrific conditions that, if we saw a neighbor’s pet treated that way, would prompt us to report them to the local humane society, and perhaps even to the police.  To say that these are a necessary evil in order to provide for our food requirements is a hollow argument, particularly in the U.S., where obesity is a national epidemic, and where per capita meat consumption is the highest in the world and more than twice the global average.  These troubling facts have often caused me to consider going vegetarian, but I just can’t resist having that next cheeseburger, or piece of fried chicken, or slice of sausage pizza.  It reminds me of that story about St. Augustine, when he was beginning to feel the stirrings of a religious calling, but still reaping the benefits of a lustful life.  “Lord make me chaste,” he prayed, “. . . but not yet!”

We who live in the more advanced nations of the world have tended to fall back upon another rationale for inaction, which is that the same economic forces that have contributed to our affluence have also protected us from any of its negative consequences, at least environmentally speaking.  We can produce, and consume, and consume some more, to our hearts’ content, and never have to worry about the garbage not disappearing.  We are smugly reminded that dire predictions of environmental or ecological catastrophes made over the past several decades never came to pass, and some of these were spectacularly wrong.  The forces of free market economics, aligned with technological development, it is argued, will continue to make any alarmist predictions about future disasters nothing more than foolish fables.  But physicist Geoffrey West, in his 2017 book Scale, makes a compelling case for why these forces are finally reaching the limits of their capability for pulling us back from the brink.  Observing that innovation has saved us only because the pace of innovation has been accelerating, he concludes:

. . . The concept of business and economic cycles, and of implied cycles of innovation, has been around for a long time and is now standard rhetoric in economics and the business community, even though it is primarily based on broad phenomenological deductions with little fundamental theory or mechanistic understanding. It is implicitly taken for granted, and often taken as unquestioned dogma, that as long as human beings remain inventive we will stay ahead of any impending threat by continuous and ever more ingenious innovations.

Unfortunately, however, it’s not quite as simple as that. There’s yet another major catch, and it’s a big one. The theory dictates that to sustain continuous growth the time between successive innovations has to get shorter and shorter. Thus paradigm-shifting discoveries, adaptations, and innovations must occur at an increasingly accelerated pace. Not only does the general pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must innovate at a faster and faster rate!

We will soon reach a point where we simply cannot innovate fast enough to protect us from the adverse consequences of our own growth.

Geoffrey West

Returning to Greta Thunberg and her angry denunciation of the generations that came before hers, I can only say that while I sympathize with her and understand why she and her contemporaries are both extremely outraged and deeply concerned, I honestly don’t know what those in my generation could have done – when we were her age – to fundamentally change the course of events as they unfolded over the past several decades.  And of much greater concern to me personally is that I don’t know what I should do now.  If collective social action cannot be sustained, and profound, personal enlightenment is a fool’s errand, if not an outright sham, then how should we – how can we – change to save the world?

When I began this blog, more than seven years ago, its general theme was based on the questions: “What lessons can our civilization impart to some distant future civilization, long after ours has ceased to exist?  What truths can we pass on, about what we did right, but, perhaps more importantly, what we should have done differently?”  The second question now looms particularly large, as it seems that the existence of our civilization is genuinely in jeopardy.  And I am ashamed and embarrassed to say that it has left me completely stumped.

You have my deepest and most profound admiration, Greta, and I still desperately hope that your generation and mine can work together to come up with an answer to that question, before it’s too late.