Book review: Proust and the Squid

This book, “Proust and the Squid,” was published in 2007 by Maryanne Wolf. She is a professor of child development at Tufts University where she is also director of the Center for Reading and Language Research.

The title is rather misleading in the respect that although the author provided an interesting analysis of Proust’s writing, she said very little about squids. But it does provide a wonderful history of the invention of writing and of the teaching of both reading and writing. It explains that the human brain has no natural structures that are explicitly designed for reading and that therefore the brain must employ more generic structures to accomplish the amazing feats of both writing and reading.

The history of writing is one of the most fascinating developments in history. The two locales where writing was first invented are ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt. Sumerian writing began as a pictographic system in which written signs represented physical objects such as a house, the sun, or a sheep. But it quickly morphed into what is known as a logographic system in which characters can also represent abstract concepts such as love, anger, or hope.

The Sumerian writing system at first did not represent sounds– but later it evolved to include the sounds of some syllables. In this form it was what is known as a logosyllabary– a writing system that incorporates both logographic images and syllabic sounds. It must have been a very difficult system to master.

The Sumerians also developed a process for teaching the young how to learn this very important tool. We have clear evidence that shows that the Sumerians taught reading with lists of words that were memorized. This was a significant advance in the respect that the Sumerians realized that only the young can carry the knowledge of how to read and write into the future.

This book was written in 2007, and at that time a debate was raging as to whether the Sumerians or the Egyptians were the first to develop a complete writing system. Ms. Wolf presents evidence for the priority of Egypt as follows:

New linguistic evidence, however, suggests that an entirely independent invention of writing in Egypt took place either around 3100 BCE; or, on the basis of still controversial evidence from German Egyptologists in Abydos, as early as 3400 BCE– earlier than the Sumerian script. If this finding proves correct, hieroglyphs would be the first major adaptation in the evolution of the reading brain.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 43

Ms. Wolf devotes an entire chapter to the objections Socrates raised about the propagation of writing. His chief concern was that a written body of text, however erudite, cannot engage in a conversation with its reader. His entire style of teaching– the eponymous technique known as the Socratic method– involved engaging the student in a dialogue, an exchange of ideas, a debate. Written words, Socrates objected, cannot engage the reader in debate and that reading allows citizens to arrive at the wrong conclusions from what they read:

Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without the guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge. Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 77

That observation rings especially true today. The entire QAnon movement was launched by people who found evidence of dark conspiracies lurking behind otherwise ordinary events: a cabal of pedophiles who secretly control the entire world economy from the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.; space satellites operated by Jews who use them to start forest fires in California; a vast conspiracy of Chinese spies who have infiltrated the deep state and are working tirelessly to turn the entire United States into a Communist gulag. So yes, we have seen and experienced the ill effects of the mass availability of raw data unencumbered by interpretive guidance.

The core of the book is about the actual process of reading. How does the brain actually read anything? Again, the brain doesn’t have any structures that are specifically dedicated to reading. There is no evolutionary reason why humans in hunter-gathering societies would have benefited from reading– and so our genes don’t encode for either reading or writing. Rather, the brain has more abstract pattern matching capabilities– and these have been adapted to the purposes of writing and reading. Ms. Wolf does a wonderful job of relating the latest scientific research (as of 2007) on the subject of the neurobiology of reading. And the astounding fact is that a typical expert reader is able to identify and properly interpret a word in half a second or less. The entire process is one that requires several separate components of the brain– components that work in coordination, some working in parallel– to arrive at an understanding of the thought or story being conveyed by the symbols on the page.

Ms. Wolf also explores cases in which the skill of reading is never fully mastered. What is it that goes wrong? Her answer is that because the process of reading is so complex, and because it involves so many separate brain structures, there are in fact many ways it can go wrong. She provides many interesting examples, along with the wise and compassionate observation that persons with reading disabilities generally have differences in the structures of their brains. They’re not lazy or bored– they’re just different.

I’ll relate an experience of my own. Many years ago I taught high school mathematics classes from pre-algebra through second year calculus. For my geometry classes, I required my students to write a paper– the kind of paper one would write for an English class– but on a topic of mathematics. One year I had a student who was a 9th grader in my Geometry class, putting her roughly one year ahead of where she “should” have been. She was a very good student and was earning an “A” in my class. But when I saw her written paper I was shocked. I couldn’t believe the number and the kinds of spelling errors in her paper! She was the first example of a student with true dyslexia that I had ever encountered. She was decidedly NOT lazy– she just couldn’t spell. I found out that she was working with a special dyslexia tutor. I talked to the tutor and learned that she used a spelling test to determine which students were most likely to benefit from her tutelage.

Ms. Wolf presents a completely different method for diagnosing dyslexia– a speed test. Dyslexic readers are much slower at identifying characters and/or words. I’ll let Ms. Wolf describe her encounter with one such child:

Typically, children who qualify for our study are struggling readers who have been recommended by their teachers, and who have then passed a battery of strenuous tests. Not Luke. He basically recommended himself for our reading intervention. When asked why, he solemnly responded, “I have to read my arias. I can’t memorize them anymore!” Luke, it turned out, sang in the Boston Children’s Opera. He was a gifted singer, but he could no longer keep up with children who could read their lyrics.
Proust and the Squid, pg. 134-135

The book presents a provocative and wonderfully documented analysis of how reading can go wrong– and what can be done about it. And the heartwarming message of this analysis is that the majority of readers with dyslexia can be helped– if they are given the right training.

This is a terrific book. If you don’t believe in dyslexia, if you have dyslexic friends or family members, if you want to understand how the marvelously complex process of reading actually works, or if you want to know something about the history of writing and reading– this book is for you. It is beautifully written and it is chock full of scientific findings– and with hope for the future of treating reading failures.

Book Review: Tyranny of the Minority

Earlier I reviewed How Democracies Die, published in 2018 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Tyranny of the Minority was published in 2023 by the same two authors, both of them professors of Government at Harvard University.

This book isn’t a sequel to their earlier book. How Democracies Die is a sweeping study of democracies around the world. Tyranny is focused chiefly on the United States, though it burgeons with the lessons of democracies around the world.

Much of the book is a history lesson of how the United States evolved from being at the very forefront of the global experiment in democracy as a method of government to lagging far behind other democracies. Certainly the US Constitution is a marvel of political innovation. The three branches of government, each serving to check and balance the others; the bicameral legislature; a president elected (indirectly) by the people; the Bill of Rights; the power to amend the Constitution itself through a regular process– each of these was a major innovation. The US Constitution served as a model for the constitutions of many other countries, many of which are strong, healthy democracies today.

But most of the other countries that adopted some form of the US Constitution as their original template have radically revised their own constitutions to make them more suitable to contemporary social purposes and needs. The authors explain that many countries had some form of indirect voting for their legislatures or for their presidents, as was originally implemented in the US Constitution. (Article I Section 3 says that the members of the Senate would be elected by the state legislatures; the 17th Amendment changed that to support direct election by the people of each state. And the people elect electors to the Electoral College, which in turn elects the president.) But most of them got rid of it. Here’s what the authors have to say about it:

By the late nineteenth century, France and the Netherlands had eliminated the powerful local councils that had previously selected members of parliament; Norway, Prussia, and Sweden did the same in the early twentieth century. France experimented with an electoral college for a single presidential election in the late 1950s but then dropped it. Electoral colleges gradually disappeared across Latin America. Columbia eliminated its electoral college in 1964 under military rule but replaced it with direct presidential elections in 1988. Argentina, the last country in Latin America with indirect presidential elections, dropped its electoral college in 1994.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 205

Here in the US, there have been many proposals to eliminate the Electoral College– and they have all failed, usually in the Senate.

The US Constitution is encumbered with many counter-majoritarian components, several of which prevent the majority of the American people from getting what they want from their government. The counter-majoritarian elements are enumerated in Tyranny as follows:

The Bill of Rights
A Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and the power to declare legislation passed by Congress incompatible with the Constitution
Federalism, which grants many powers to the states
A bicameral legislature, requiring majorities in two different houses for the passage of any legislation
A radically skewed representation in the Senate
The filibuster, which requires a 60% majority in the Senate to end debate (and which can now be enacted with nothing more than an email)
The Electoral College
Radically restrictive rules for implementing constitutional change: 2/3 vote of each house in Congress and 3/4 ratification by the states

(Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 147 – 148)

The Bill of Rights grants many privileges to citizens that we certainly want to protect and defend, so that component is actually protective of democracy. Similarly we want the courts to ensure that our laws are consistent with our principles– so granting the Supreme Court the power of judicial review is reasonable, and potentially protective of democracy. But lifetime tenure on the court can serve as an obstruction to change and for that reason it is more likely to contribute to stagnation.

(I would have added the Apportionment Act of 1929 to the above list, as that legislation capped the number of members of the House at 435. That, coupled with the constraint that each state must get at least one representative, has resulted in a massive over-representation of low population states. For example, the state of California has about 26% less representation in the House than it should have on the basis of population alone.)

The authors show that the many counter-majoritarian elements of the US Constitution have produced the result that the US is a true laggard among modern democracies. Here is how the authors express it:

America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.”

America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber that is severely malapportioned due to the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.

America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities.

America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.

Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change, for it requires supermajorities in two legislative chambers plus the approval of three-quarters of the states.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 217

Americans tend to think of the US Constitution as an ideal of completed perfection. It is not; and in fact the very extensive evidence the authors present shows that the US Constitution is greatly in need of reform. The US has become stagnant, relative to other democracies throughout the world, and it is time that the American people were alerted to that fact.

This book and its predecessor are absolutely essential to anyone who wants to understand the place of democracy in the world and in our country. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how best to preserve and extend our democracy.

Book review: The Lost Bank

The Lost Bank: The Story of WASHINGTON MUTUAL, The Biggest Bank Failure in American History, by Kirsten Grind, was published in 2012. It’s written very much like a novel, with lots of in depth insight into the thinking and attitudes of many of the people involved in what was without question an unmitigated disaster.

I had followed the demise of WaMu casually at the time. I read the multi-part story of the collapse in the Seattle Times, and of course I was aware of the broader collapse of the real estate market across the country. But this book made me aware of dimensions of the WaMu story that I hadn’t previously understood.

For one thing, Washington Mutual was led in the 1980s by Lou Pepper, who fostered a code of behavior that was based on ethics, respect, teamwork, innovation, and excellence. The bank’s tag line was that it was a “friend of the family.” Lou Pepper believed in selling a good product at an honest price. Tell your customers the truth, be honest and forthright, and you’ll make lots of money. Pepper circulated through the company, talking to people in all levels of the business. Here’s how Ms. Grind put it:

He encouraged executives to dress up on Halloween, bringing candy to the branches. He regularly ate in the cafeteria on the second floor with everyone else. He sat with the building’s maintenance men so frequently that they presented him with his own work jacket. To employees, he really seemed like one of them.
The Lost Bank, pg. 20-21

The culture that Pepper built at Washington Mutual resonated with the company’s employees. They genuinely felt part of something, and they felt good about working for a company that was serving its customers honestly.

Pepper chose Kerry Killinger to replace him. Although Killinger was sharp and insightful, he was also distant and aloof. He could elicit details from a report that others might miss, but he found it difficult to make eye contact, or to initiate conversation, or to confront anyone about issues affecting the bank’s profitability. He tended to stay in his office, rather than to mingle. It just wasn’t his thing.

Troubles began to surface in 2003 when Fay Chapman, WMs chief legal officer, became aware of the underwriting guidelines of Long Beach Mortgage, a subprime lending subsidiary that had been purchased four years earlier. She learned of 270 loans sampled from those that had been sold by Long Beach, 40% were unacceptable because they contained a “critical error.” She demanded to do a more thorough review of Long Beach, and ultimately Killinger allowed her to take a team of about 100 people down to California to do an intensive review of Long Beach’s records. Here’s how Ms. Grind summarized Chapman’s findings:

By the end of three long months, Chapman’s team had reviewed 4,000 mortgages from Long Beach. Of those, only 950 were deemed good enough to be sold to outside investors. The rest were basically garbage. Even more troubling, several hundred loans had so much paperwork missing that Long Beach wouldn’t have been able to foreclose on a borrower in default. It wasn’t even clear who owned the mortgages anymore.
The Lost Bank, pg. 77

Thanks to Ms. Chapman’s efforts WM put a stop to the haphazard practices that had resulted in such a high percentage of garbage loans at Long Beach.

Under Killinger’s leadership, WM went on a buying spree. The bank purchased other banks at a frenetic pace, expanding Washington Mutual to become the largest savings and loan in the country. By 2007 Washington Mutual was sitting on assets of more than $300 billion.

Killinger was far more interested in growing the business than in staying true to the values and principles that had prevailed during Pepper’s tenure. He pushed the bank away from its old roots of just being a friend of the family to being far more sales oriented. He even said that everyone in the company was in sales. But in the course focusing chiefly on sales and less on company culture, the bank allowed poorly documented mortgages to take an ever increasing proportion of its portfolio.

WM had been selling ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) since the 1970s. In the early 2000s Option ARMs became a major part of the business. These were loans that gave the borrower the option of choosing the payment they preferred. A minimum payment was listed on the customer’s bill, but that minimum only covered interest, not the premium. Many of the banks that WM had purchased sold Option ARMs, so this type of loan became part of WM’s DNA.

Kevin Jenne, a WM manager in market research, conducted a number of focus groups of Option ARM borrowers. He quickly learned that borrowers didn’t understand what was adjustable about an ARM loan, or how it was adjusted, or when it was adjusted. Customers simply didn’t understand the terms of the loans they had purchased.

Jenne also found that many of the agents who were selling Option ARMs didn’t fully understand them either– and they therefore weren’t communicating to borrowers the full extent of their indebtedness.

Once the real estate market began to collapse, the logic behind the Option ARM collapsed as well. As long as real estate values were climbing, anyone with an Option ARM load could simply refinance based on the new, higher value of their property. Some borrowers were refinancing every six months! But once real estate values started to fall, that approach no longer made sense. The long term picture for WM, as for many of the other lenders in the country, was that the bank held an ever increasing percentage of mortgages that were almost certain to go into default.

Rumors began to spread that WM didn’t have the resources to cover the cost of loans that were almost certain to go sour as the market turned down. The government downgraded WM’s rating. There was a massive run on the bank between September 9th and September 25th 2007 during which time customers pulled over $16 billion out of their accounts. In the previous 9 months WM had also lost over $6 billion on bad loans.

Killinger was fired by the Board of Directors on September 4th, 2007. A new CEO was hired on Monday September 8th– Alan Fishman. He immediately dove into searching for a buyer for the company. But after a three week frantic search he was unable to find any buyers.

Behind the scenes the FDIC was talking to many of the same potential buyers that Fishman had approached. The FDIC put WM up for bid in a secret auction that was predicated on the idea that the FDIC would shut the company down, but would assume none of the debt carried by the bank. JPMorgan was the only bidder.

WaMu was shut down by the FDIC on September 25, 2007 and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for $1.888 billion. At that time WaMu had about $310 billion in assets. WaMu’s holding company, Washington Mutual Inc., filed for bankruptcy. That wiped out $7 billion in share value, $2 billion in preferred shares, and another $20 billion for bondholders.

The government and WM had different figures for the bank’s financial status at the time of its closing. The government said that WM had $20.8 billion in available liquid assets, but WM said the real number was $29 billion. Both numbers were above 5% of total assets, the normal point at which the government would force a bank to close. What is the source of the discrepancy? Here’s what Ms. Grind has to say about it:

WaMu’s liquidity figure on the day of its failure is unresolved, as is the difference between these assessments.
The Lost Bank, pg. 300

The end of the whole fiasco is extremely unsatisfying. As far as WM goes, most of the blame would properly fall on Killinger. He was warned several times of the danger that Option ARMs could pose to the long term health of the company– and he did nothing whatsoever to stop it. By contrast, Jaime Dimon of JPMorgan anticipated the devastation that Option ARMs could wreak– and he pulled JPMorgan out of that market.

Killinger was given a severance package of about $22 million. The FDIC sued him and two other WM executives for $900 million. The case was settled in 2011 for $64 million. But the damages assessed were paid from WM’s insurance policies, not by the defendants themselves.

The Lost Bank is a story of hubris on a massive scale. Although the book is focused on Washington Mutual, the much broader picture of what was happening in the national real estate market inevitably intrudes. Loan officers who acted more like salespeople than sage consultants. Banks that packaged up hundreds of bad loans as investment instruments without disclosing the very real risks of default. Wall Street investors who eagerly bought those instruments without awareness of their inherent unreliability. And borrowers who were often bamboozled by the terminology, but who nonetheless were eager to own a piece of the American dream. It was in one sense the ultimate financial craze that necessarily resulted in its own demise.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why Washington Mutual collapsed. And because Ms. Grind does such a good job of describing the broader market conditions that prevailed the reader will also have a good understanding of why and how the entire real estate market turned sour in the early 2000s.

Book Review: Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford was published in 2004. It’s the story of the rise and demise of the largest empire in world history– the Mongol Empire. Here’s how the author describes the astonishing accomplishments of the Mongols:

In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more land and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. Genghis Khan, together with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any other man in history.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Weatherford, pg. xviii

I had known something about the Mongol Empire before I read the book, but it really helped me understand what the Empire really was and how it worked. During the Cold War the Soviets suppressed all research into Genghis Khan. The region of his homeland in Mongolia was strictly off limits and much of the surrounding area was used for artillery practice. Scholars who probed the history of the Mongols were censored, and publication of works about Genghis Khan were forbidden.

The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that scholars could begin to research the history of the Empire, but there was another problem– the Mongols were very secretive about the inner workings of their society. A set of documents known as The Secret History of the Mongols supposedly narrated the history of the Empire from the perspective of an insider– an actual eyewitness to the events that subjected more than 3 billion people to Mongol rule. But the Secret History had long since been lost.

In the early 20th century a copy of the Secret History was found in Beijing, written in Chinese characters. But the document made to sense to readers of the time because it preserved Mongolian sounds in a code written in Chinese characters. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Mongolian and English translations first appeared in print– the product of decades of slow but steady scholarship. But even then the Secret History was mostly incomprehensible to modern readers because it assumed a deep understanding of common cultural practices and beliefs of Mongolian society, and of the geography of Mongolia.

By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union scholars from around the world had pieced together a fair picture of how the Secret History should be read. Weatherford had absorbed much of this research and in 1998 he traveled to Mongolia to get some background information on the region and the people. He expected that it would take him a short time to put together the finishing touches on the book he had been writing– but he ultimately spent another five years there. He learned how to ride horses as the Mongolians rode them. He learned how to shoot a bow and arrow the way that Mongolian soldiers did. And he learned about the many Mongolian traditions on which their society was based. His book represents the culmination of a century of scholarly research and his own five years of in depth immersion in Mongolian society.

The Mongols were tremendous warriors. They developed a large repertoire of innovative tactics, many of which changed warfare forever. For example, in ancient times it was traditional to conduct war in the spring, summer, and fall. Winter was a time to consolidate one’s forces, to rebuild supply lines, and to tend to the wounded. But the Mongols often launched their attacks in winter, rather than the spring– thereby turning the traditions of warfare inside-out. As people of the steppe, the Mongols were perfectly adapted to conducting war in ice and snow. Their conquest of northern China gave them access to gunpowder– used by the Chinese for fireworks. The Mongols changed the formula for making gunpowder to make it burn instantly rather than to glow slowly as it had been used by the Chinese– and they quickly adapted it for use in weapons. As a result the Mongols forever changing the mechanics of the siege. And they were absolute masters of using deception to mask their real objectives and intent in battle. It was a type of tactic that had long been employed by their ancestors on the steppe, and one that they adapted for use on the grand stage of Asia to devastating effect.

The Mongols built only one major city– Karakorum, the Mongol capitol in the heart of Mongolia. They created no monuments, no sculptures, no art. From ancient times the residents of the steppe had lived as nomads– and Mongolian soldiers were as much at home in a saddle as in a tent. They simply didn’t see a need to stay rooted at a single location. The Empire was driven by Mongolian societal traditions that expected a tribal leader to distribute wealth to the other members of his tribe. And that tradition demanded that the Mongols had always to obtain new riches, necessarily acquired through new conquests. Their relentless drive took them from the far reaches of east Asia to the Mediterranean Sea. It wasn’t until the Mongol army was defeated by the Mamluks at the small town of Ayn al-Jalut that the Empire’s expansion was brought to an end.

When the Mongols arrived at a city that they intended to conquer they announced to the city leaders that they could either surrender– or die. It was no idle threat. The Mongols had perfected the art of the siege, and inevitably a city under siege would fall. Once the Mongols had control they assassinated the wealthy oligarchs, appropriated their riches, and demanded absolute loyalty from those who were appointed to rule. The city would then be plundered and riches taken from it would be returned to Mongolia to be redistributed to Mongol society generally.

But the Mongols weren’t just rapacious plunderers. They instituted many innovations across the broad expanse of their Empire, including a postal system and tax incentives that were friendly to business enterprises. They allowed all religions to flourish, so long as religious leaders did not challenge the Mongol right to rule. As the book’s title suggests, the Mongols were to a large extent responsible for ripping the medieval world out of its parochial slumber into a new age of cosmopolitan awareness, international trade, and religious toleration.

This book is very well written, thoroughly researched, and a delight to read. It fills in many gaps I had in my understanding of the Mongols’ place in history. I therefore heartily recommend it to anyone who wishes to know more about one of the most transformational periods of history.

Book Review: How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, was published in 2018. It’s a broad overview of how democracies have died in countries around the world. The authors are professors of government at Harvard University.

The purpose of the book is to answer the question of whether the United States is in danger of losing its democracy. To that end, in Chapter One the authors list four indicators of authoritarian behavior. These are:

Rejection of democratic rules of the game
Denial of the legitimacy of one’s political opponents
Toleration of, or encouragement of, violence
Readiness to curtail the political liberties of opponents and of the media

They provide many specific examples of these behaviors from the historical record of democracies that died in Europe and in South America, including those of Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Poland, and Russia.

Some democracies have died in a palace coup, but over the last several decades the chief method of destroying a democracy has been to weaken in from within, as Hitler did. First, win power through normal democratic means: get elected to office. Then, weaken democratic institutions by:

Capturing referees: Buy off, threaten, or exile judges, internal investigators, monitors– anyone in a position to follow behind-the-scenes machinations, expose them to the public, or bring them to an end.

Sidelining key players: Bring anyone with economic power or political capital to heel, through any means available. Allow business interests to thrive– so long as they don’t interfere with politics. Demand loyalty from popular cultural figures and punish those who fail to comply. Pack the courts and government positions with loyalists to ensure that no one contradicts the goals of leadership.

Changing the rules: If the law limits a leader’s term of office, change the law. If appointments to cabinet positions require the consent of Congress, dissolve Congress. If the Constitution limits the power of the Executive, suspend the Constitution.

These stratagems have succeeded in many countries around the world. They together constitute a standard playbook for wannabe dictators the world over. Be patient and follow these simple rules over the course of several years and your victory is assured.

Is America under threat of losing its democracy? The authors show by example from the public record that Donald Trump exhibited all four of the autocratic behaviors they listed in Chapter One while he was running for office in 2016! The warning signs were available then, and they are even more evident now. If Trump were to return to office he has said that he will be a dictator on Day One– but only on Day One. Sorry, but that’s just not how true dictators roll. Toward the end of his first term of office he entertained Michael Flynn’s idea of declaring Martial Law and of seizing voting machines from around the country. He said that he wanted the US military to shoot protesters, and he wanted the Custom Border Patrol to shoot anyone who approaches the southern border. He even talked openly of suspending the Constitution. And of course ever since November 2020 he has yelled that the election was stolen from him. Trump very definitely exhibits all of the characteristics of a dictator. So YES, America could lose its democracy.

In fact there are many powerful interest groups that have openly declared their opposition to democracy. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is an agenda which they and their alliance of more than 80 conservative organizations expect that the next Republican president will enact. Chief among its objectives is the replacement of the “Deep State” with party loyalists. That is the very essence of the authoritarian principle of “Sidelining key players” described above.

The authors of How Democracies Die have released a book titled Tyranny of the Minority in September of 2023. When I’ve had a chance to read it I’ll post a separate review here.

Trusting Democracy

On many of the major issues of the day the American people can’t get what they actually want from the federal government. Here are some examples:

65% of Americans support keeping abortion legal in all or most cases

(https://www.prri.org/research/abortion-attitudes-in-a-post-roe-world-findings-from-the-50-state-2022-american-values-atlas/?cid=eml_firstread_20230224)

61% of Americans support a ban on sales of assault weapons

77% support a 30 day waiting period

80% support allowing police officers to take weapons away from those deemed to be a danger to themselves or others

80% support mental health background checks for gun purchases

81% support increasing the age for gun ownership to 21

81% support improving enforcement of existing gun laws

87% support requiring criminal background checks on all gun purchases

(https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/gun-policy-republicans-ignore-americans-consensus-views-rcna82220)

65% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on education

63% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on health care

62% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on social security

58% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on medicare

53% of Americans believe the government is spending too little on border security

(https://apnews.com/article/spending-budget-poll-biden-cd55f1c3859b62a861cdbdc0cd23bd79)

And yet getting changes to public policy at the national level on any of the above issues is nearly impossible. The federal government just isn’t listening to what Americans actually want.

Why is that? First let’s consider the House of Representatives. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of members of the House at 435 (with some very limited exceptions). The Constitution states (in Article I Section 2) that every state must have at least 1 representative. Those two constraints together have resulted in a situation in which states of low population are vastly overrepresented. It has gotten so bad that as of the 2020 Census the state of California has about 28% less representation in the House than it should on the basis of population alone. That is grossly unfair to the people of California, but the same problem affects the voters of every state with more than the average state population.

Then there’s the Senate. As of the 2020 Census there are 9 states that between them have more than 50% of total U.S. population. The residents of those 9 states therefore have only 18% representation in the Senate. The remaining 82% of the power in the Senate is held by states that together contain less than 50% of total population. That, too, is grossly unfair to the voters of the most populous states.

And finally we must discuss the Electoral College. The sole reason why the 2020 election devolved into strident claims of voter fraud is because of the existence of the Electoral College. Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes. And yet Trump had only to flip 5,900 votes in Georgia, 10,400 votes in Wisconsin, and 5,300 votes in Arizona to produce an Electoral College tie, and that would have thrown the final decision into the House of Representatives where the Republican Party had a solid majority. Despite his 7 million vote majority in the popular vote Biden was less than 22,000 votes from losing the entire election to Donald Trump. That represents about 0.3% of Biden’s 7 million vote margin.

These disparities are the product of bad governmental design. Our Constitution is not serving us well and it is long past time for drastic reform. And what should that reform look like? I propose that we trust democracy– and the people. The only way to make the federal government more responsive to the needs and desires of the people is to make it more democratic, not less. In pursuit of that end I propose the following principles:

1. The President should be elected solely on the basis of the popular vote. The Electoral College must be abolished.

2. The House should represent all people across the nation equally in proportion to the national population.

3. The Senate should also represent the people, not states. The states have been guaranteed all the rights they require in Article IV of the Constitution. There is no need for states to have separate representation at the federal level.

4. The House and the Senate should have separate responsibilities, and therefore different characters and processes.

5. Both the Senate and House should be capped at a fixed number of members, regardless of the number of states in the union or the size of the nation’s population. This will ensure that neither body grows without bound as the nation grows.

6. The size of each body should be based on the optimal size for a body that must efficiently conduct the affairs of each as defined under Principle # 4 above.

7. The Senate and the House should represent different aspects of the national character, not the character of local within-state regions. This implies that different methods of selection should be used for the members of the two bodies.

8. The methods of selection employed in satisfaction of Principle #7 should be designed to correlate strongly with the separate characters of the two bodies as defined in Principle #4.

Only Principle #4 above is currently guaranteed in the Constitution. All of the remaining principles would require significant changes to the Constitution itself. And should you wonder if it is possible for any system to comply with Principles 1 through 8 above, I can assure you that the answer is Yes. I have a specific proposal for that, but I would be happy to consider any system that fully comports with all of these principles. Let me hear yours.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times thus far. The overall trend over the history of the country has been to expand suffrage to ever greater numbers of people, and to expand the rights of individuals to guarantee and protect their freedoms. If anything the above Principles would strengthen our nation by extending the democratic elements of our government and by turning more power over to the people themselves. Trust the people!

Get Woke!

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has declared war on “woke.” “Florida,” he said, “is the place where woke goes to die.” The DeSantis administration has defined woke as:

…the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.
DeSantis administration

So are there systemic injustices in America? Yes, absolutely there are. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer highlighted the fact that police officers have far too often been able to get away with reckless brutality and murder of persons in their custody. The murder of Ahmaud Arbery brought the injustice of a Civil War era law in the state of Georgia under such public scrutiny that the state legislature was forced to change the law and to implement Georgia’s first ever hate crimes law. On January 12th 2023 the Justice Department ordered City National Bank to pay $31 million for its refusal to underwrite mortgages in predominantly Black and Latino districts– a behavior that was outlawed in 1968. All of these examples show that there are indeed deep and pervasive injustices in American society. Perhaps those who use the term “woke” derisively just don’t think that any such injustices warrant a solution.

Why do such injustices persist in a nation that is supposed to stand for “liberty and justice for all”? At a national level it’s chiefly because we live under minority rule. Let’s begin with the House of Representatives. The U.S. Constitution (in Article I Section 2) says that every state must get at least one representative in the House. And the Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the total number of representatives at 435. Those two constraints together have conspired to over-represent states of low population. California, for example, has about 27% less representation in the House than it should have on the basis of population alone.

The Senate is designed to represent states, not the people, since each state gets two senators irrespective of population. There are 9 states that together have about 51% of total U.S. population. That gives those 9 states only 18% representation in the Senate. That means that less than half the people in the United States have control of 82% of the votes in the Senate. That is, the Senate massively over-represents states with low population. Do you want to know why the Senate is the place where legislation goes to die? That’s why.

And of course there is the Electoral College. In the first 23 years of this century we have already had two presidents who won their elections with a minority of the popular vote– because of the rules governing the Electoral College. And those rules give favor to states of low population.

So the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are all under the control of a minority faction of the American public– a faction that predominantly favors rural perspectives. Rural America has been steadily diminishing over the past 233 years. In 1790 about 5% of total U.S. population was located in urban centers. Now the number is over 89%. The U.S. Constitution as currently amended over-represents a diminishing portion of American society. And that is an injustice that most definitely needs to be addressed.

The Perils of Artificial Intelligence

The Good

In 1942 Alan Turing designed a machine known as “The Bombe” that enabled the British to break the German Enigma code.

Dendral, a computer program developed in the 1960s, is considered the world’s first expert system– a program that employs domain knowledge to solve a specific real world problem. The purpose of Dendral was to help organic chemists identify the most likely shapes of molecules based on their mass spectrometer data.

In 1976 two mathematicians at the University of Illinois announced that a computer program they had written had proved the validity of the Four Color Map theorem. That was the first time that a major mathematical theorem was first proved by a computer program, rather than by a person.

In 2002 the floor cleaning robot Roomba was released to market, enabling families the world over to delegate the unpleasant tasks of vacuuming and mopping to an automated tool.

In 2014 Amazon introduced Alexa, an automated DJ, news and information provider, and general conversationalist.

In July 2022 the company DeepMind announced that its artificially intelligent program AlphaFold had found the solution to folding 200 million proteins.

These are all manifestly good things. Artificial Intelligence may soon be able to help humans solve problems that humans have been unable to solve. That could lead to innumerable benefits to human society: new products that improve health; methods for reducing pollution; improved safety for transportation, medical treatments, and building design. For each of these problems we should welcome the efforts of computer scientists to extend our knowledge and bring more real world problems into the domain of the solvable. Artificial Intelligence is a tool, one of extraordinary power and flexibility. We should use it, just as our forebears chose to use steamshovels to replace human labor.

The Bad

But there is a dark side to Artificial Intelligence. For one thing, it has the potential to replace whole classes of workers whose jobs were not previously threatened. When steamshovels replaced human labor in coal mining operations, the cost of coal production was lowered. The end result was that the cost of energy was greatly reduced, enabling a broad range of consumers to spend money on other goods and services. The mining workers who were displaced would probably have left mining altogether– but with increased consumer spending throughout the economy, new jobs would materialize in a broad range of alternative industries.

That would be less true of, say, gold mining operations. Gold is a luxury good and a global security blanket. A dramatic lowering of the price of gold isn’t going to result in massive changes to consumer buying habits, and hence it would result in far less job creation.

Human welders were replaced on many assembly lines by automated welding machines– particularly in the automobile industry. That resulted in better welds, fewer industrial accidents, and lower costs. But it also resulted in the relatively high paying union jobs of the automotive industry being replaced with jobs in the “service” industry. And what are services? Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and architects all provide services. But so do waiters and waitresses, retail clerks, and sales representatives. Overall the trend in the United States has been that higher paying jobs in manufacturing were replaced with lower paying jobs in services– particularly in retail and hospitality.

In the present day world AI has the potential to eliminate jobs across a much broader swath of businesses. Consider, for example, Accounts Receivable (AR). Those customers who owe money to a company for services previously rendered are tracked in AR. The AR clerk’s responsibility is to resolve invoicing disputes, and to help the company reduce outstanding indebtedness to the company by contacting debtors to demand payment. Conceivably AI could replace an AR clerk’s responsibilities with an effectiveness comparable to that of a human. Doing so would reduce the company’s costs, but what kinds of jobs would replace that of the AR clerk? If the experience in manufacturing is any guide, the AR clerk will likely wind up waiting tables. And if all clerks in Payroll, Human Resources, Accounts Receivable, and Accounts Payable have been replaced with AI, the manager of the entire accounting department will eventually be out of a job as well. Is that truly a benefit to society?

What other types of jobs could AI replace? Well, potentially any job that requires expert knowledge could be replaced by computer software. Business analysis, medical diagnosis, engineering design, legal consulting– all such specialized skills could be susceptible to enhancement or replacement by Artificial Intelligence. In fact it is even conceivable that software engineering itself could be done better and more efficiently by… AI.

Whose jobs are truly safe from automation? Can a chef be replaced? Only if someone invents a robot that can chop vegetables, roll out dough, and grill steak as well as a Cordon Bleu chef. But given the advances that have been made in robotics in the past 50 years, it just might happen in the next 50.

Nobody really knows how many jobs will ultimately be lost to AI. One could imagine a world in which almost all jobs have been automated. It is therefore not too early to think about such an eventuality.

The Ugly

And we can be certain that Artificial Intelligence will be used by charlatans to produce fake essays, fake documentation, and fake personal profiles. Nefarious actors will use it to scam unsuspecting people out of their life savings. It will be used by fraudsters to deceive the public and subvert the rule of law. It will be used as a weapon by those who have no love for their fellow human beings and who seek only their own personal enrichment and aggrandizement.

Constraints

We want a future in which people feel content and rewarded for their contributions to society. A world in which the vast majority of people are working in low wage service sector jobs doesn’t sound like the kind of society we want. So let us now define some constraints under which AI must operate to ensure that we don’t lose ourselves to an overly automated future. Here are some suggested constraints:

The use of Artificial Intelligence for fraudulent or deceitful purposes must be made a criminal offense. No one should be allowed to hide behind the defense that it was the machine that broke the law, not the person who employed Artificial Intelligence to illegal purposes.
Artificial Intelligence should be made available to law enforcement at low or no cost to help with the detection of fraud– particularly that perpetrated by the use of Artificial Intelligence.
The use of Artificial Intelligence must not result in massive increase of the working poor who have no hope of affording higher education for their children, of saving for retirement, or of tending to loved ones who need personal care.
The use of Artificial Intelligence must not significantly increase the numbers of indolent ignoramuses. We want people to be engaged in society and to feel that their contributions are valued. If all of the difficult and complex tasks in the world have been tackled by Artificial Intelligence, what challenges will be left to humans?
Artificial Intelligence may be used to recommend options for social and governmental policy, but all final policy decisions must remain securely in the hands of human beings.
Similarly, Artificial Intelligence may be used to identify criminal suspects, but it must never be used to determine guilt or innocence. That must always remain within the purview of human beings, however fallible they might be.
Above all, Artificial Intelligence should be regarded as a tool to improve human life and society and must always be subservient to human needs.

Problems

The world has made tremendous strides in reducing slavery and poverty and unemployment. But slavery still exists, abject poverty still exists, and more than a billion people in the world do not have gainful employment. Artificial Intelligence may very well be able to help address such problems. Consequently we should now demand that Artificial Intelligence be directed to helping solve society’s most intransigent problems. Let us put Artificial Intelligence to use by giving it problems to solve that will actually benefit all of us and lead us jointly to the type of future in which we all want to live. Here are some examples of the types of problems that AI should address:

How can we best increase employment, health, and welfare across the entire planet?
How can we reduce or eliminate the risk that climate change will degrade or destroy human civilization?
How can we redesign social media systems so that they reward collegiality and problem resolution, rather than fear and rage?
How can we build a society that minimizes alienation, addiction, and isolation while encouraging engagement and positive contributions?
How can we best protect Earth from the hazard of cosmic collision by asteroids or comets?
How can we minimize violent crime and terrorism around the planet?
How can we improve our legal systems to make them harmonious across local, state, and federal boundaries?
How can we improve our health care systems to increase longevity and to improve the overall quality of life across all echelons of society?
How can we improve education so that everyone on the planet has the ability to reach their maximum potential?

The major providers of Artificial Intelligence services should be required to devote a significant portion of their time and resources to addressing these and other such problems. Society cannot afford to allow such a powerful tool to be applied only to those problems that are most likely to provide the greatest short term return on investment. The above problems are all very long term problems whose solutions would undoubtedly return immense rewards to society, but they are also problems that do not lend themselves to a short term profit driven business model.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence is a dramatic new technology that will undoubtedly change society and the future of our planet. Whether it becomes a net benefit to society, or instead brings about the degradation of human civilization will depend entirely on how it is used. We must decide how and for what it will be used. Now is the time to set boundaries, to define long term goals, and to demand that the power of this new technology be used to address the problems of greatest urgency to us all. Programs that can beat the best human chess players, or go players, or Jeopardy champions have their interest. But the problems facing world society and civilization are much more pressing. We need to ensure that Artificial Intelligence will make a positive contribution, and won’t be used exclusively to enrich business investors.

Questions for physicists

Dark Matter

If dark matter is a type of particle that is subject to gravitation but not to electricity and magnetism, as some physicists have speculated, then such particles should accumulate in the cores of stars. That would mean that a star can achieve the density necessary to kick off nuclear fusion with only about 1/6 the amount of normal matter previously assumed to be necessary, the remaining 5/6 of the star’s total mass being non-interacting dark matter. That would further mean that a star should live no more than about 1/6 as long as would a star of the same total mass comprised of normal matter only. If dark matter does indeed congregate in the cores of stars and if it is truly incapable of participating in nuclear interactions, then it shouldn’t impede the nuclear interactions of normal matter. Additionally, dark matter of this type should not take up much volume. In a neutron star, the neutrons are packed very closely together since the volume of a collection of matter particles is based on electricity & magnetism, particle spin, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle– and neutrons are unaffected by electricity and magnetism. And yet the neutrons still can’t collapse into one another because neutrons have a spin of 1/2 and they are therefore subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle. In any case stars that consist predominantly of dark matter particles should be much smaller in volume than stars comprised solely of normal matter of the same mass.

The only possible escape I can think of for the above reasoning is the possibility that dark matter particles have no mass. But my assumption has always been that a particle can only exert a gravitational force on other particles if it has mass. If that is not true, then everything that I thought I knew about gravitation goes out the window.

The presence of dark matter in the ratio of 5:1 would have an enormous impact on the composition of the universe. The theory of stellar evolution says that high mass stars burn progressively hotter as they age, and they burn successively higher atomic number atoms, in the following order:

Hydrogen (atomic number 1)
Helium (atomic number 2)
Carbon (atomic number 6)
Oxygen (atomic number 8)
Neon (atomic number 10)
Silicon (atomic number 14)

The burning of silicon results in iron (atomic number 26), and the burning of iron results in a net energy loss to the star– thereby allowing the force of gravitation to overwhelm the outward pressure of radiation, inevitably resulting in the collapse of the star.

If the core of a high mass star is comprised of 83% inert matter, then the result will be a far lower percentage of high atomic number atoms throughout the universe. And that would produce a universe with fewer rocky planets.

Billions of dollars and euros have been spent trying to find dark matter particles. So far all such attempts have failed. Maybe they have failed because dark matter isn’t a type of particle.

We should test the hypothesis that dark matter accumulates in the cores of stars. That wouldn’t necessarily tell us whether dark matter is a type of particle, but it would impose a severe constraint on the type of particle it might be. Unfortunately I don’t know that there’s a way to test for the presence of a lower-than-expected percentage of atoms with an atomic number greater than 2. It seems that would require a survey of the total mass of rocky planets throughout the universe as compared to the mass of the atoms which were present immediately after the period of recombination. That distribution is approximately as follows:

Element	Percent
Hydrogen (H)	~ 75%
⁴Helium (He)	~ 25%
Deuterium (²H)	~ 0.01%
³Helium (He)	Trace
⁷Lithium (Li)	Trace

Relative percentages of atoms immediately after the epoch of recombination

(A Universe From Nothing, Lawrence M. Krauss, pg. 111)

Such a survey, so far as I am aware, is beyond our present technology.

Raisin Bread

An analogy often invoked by physicists to explain the expansion of the universe is that of a loaf of raisin bread baking in the oven. As the bread bakes, it rises– and the raisins in the bread move farther apart from each other. Similarly, the matter of the universe, clumped as it is into galaxies, moves apart as the universe expands not because there was a massive explosion that blew matter out in all directions, but because space itself is expanding and the matter of the universe is simply being dragged apart with it as it expands. The raisins represent galaxies, or clusters of galaxies, and all of them are moving away from each other. So from the perspective of an observer in any one galaxy, all other galaxies are moving away.

This analogy raises several questions. First question: What it is that space is expanding into? The space/time of General Relativity has 3 physical and 1 temporal dimensions. If this space/time is expanding into a dimensionless void– a void that has no intrinsic structure of any kind– how is it that our familiar world of space/time gets imposed on that unstructured void? It would seem that there must be some mechanism that enables the creation of the structure of space/time itself.

Exactly what types of structure are able to be imposed on an unstructured void? Would it be possible to have a universe of 47 physical and 17 temporal dimensions? What about fractional dimensions? Or negative dimensions? Could a universe have physical dimensions only and no temporal dimensions?

If instead there are only a very few options for the numbers and types of dimensions in the resulting universe, that would seem to impose a significant constraint on the concept of an unstructured void. And one would have to ask: If an unstructured void has such significant constraints, is it really unstructured?

Second question: Alternatively, if the structure of space/time is expanding into a void that already has the same space/time structure as General Relativity, then what exactly is expanding? Clearly it is not the 3 physical / 1 temporal structure of space/time. Is it simply the outer boundary of our universe? If so, why would the expansion of an outer boundary pull all of the matter of the universe along with it?
Einstein famously added the Cosmological Constant to the equations of General Relativity because he wanted a steady state universe– one that was neither expanding nor contracting. Now that we know that the rate of expansion is increasing, some cosmologists have taken to considering the Cosmological Constant as the source of what is termed “Dark Energy.” But Einstein’s original concept of the Cosmological Constant wasn’t about expanding or contracting the boundary of the universe itself. Rather his thought was that the Cosmological Constant acts as a kind of anti-gravity that pushes the physical masses of the universe apart– within the boundaries of the universe.

Perhaps the solution is to re-imagine the Cosmological Constant as a force that propagates the structure of space/time into an undifferentiated void. But wouldn’t that be something different from a force that propels galaxies away from each other? Besides, there is nothing in General Relativity that specifically ties the Cosmological Constant to the propagation of space/time alone.

Third question: If we are explaining the expansion of the universe by an expansion of space/time itself, then wouldn’t that expansion extend all the way down to the atomic and subatomic levels? If so, then the expansion of the universe would be ripping apart every atom– and indeed every composite particle. That type of expansion would have enormous consequences for the evolution of the universe. A star born in the early stages of the universe would live for a much shorter time than a star of the same composition and size created today. That’s because the particles in the core of the star would be much closer together and therefore chemical and nuclear reactions would happen at a much faster rate.

The simplest answer to questions 1 and 2 above is that the 3 physical / 1 temporal structure of the space/time of General Relativity was already imprinted on the void into which the universe expanded at the time of the Big Bang. Of course we have no guarantee that the simplest explanation is the one that is correct, but if true that would mean that the raisin bread metaphor is very misleading. In the raisin bread metaphor, the bread itself (without the raisins) represents the structure of space/time. As the bread expands, space/time expands. But if the void into which the bread is expanding already has the same space/time structure, then it is only the material substance contained within space/time that is expanding, not space/time itself. And if the void already contained the space/time structure of our universe at the time of the Big Bang, then the void should have no boundary at all.

The only test I can think of that would give us a definitive answer to questions 1 and 2 is to actually find a universe with something other than a 3 physical / 1 temporal structure– or to somehow show that no other such structure is possible. But I’m pretty sure that no one has come up with a way to produce either such result.

As for question 3, it seems to me at least possible that it could be submitted to a test. The higher rate expected for nuclear and chemical reactions should show up as higher temperatures for first generation stars. Higher temperature means higher luminosity, and higher luminosity means shorter wavelength. Therefore the spectra of stars from the first generation should be much bluer if indeed space/time itself is what is expanding. Of course these bluer spectra would be red-shifted. So we should be looking for a population of stars with very high red shifts– meaning much older– that have spectra which are unexpectedly bluer than expected. Is such a survey possible? I’m not qualified to answer that question, but my guess is that if it is possible, it would be very hard to do.

Anonymity and social discord

Hyperbole has long been the political agitator’s weapon of choice. It costs nothing, and for those of the audience who are susceptible to fear it can be very effective. Now technology has given such antagonists an even greater reason to employ exaggeration. The tools of email, text messaging, and social media allow users to adopt aliases by which to disguise their true identities. This possibility means that the cost for employing hyperbole as a weapon is even lower. Whatever is said anonymously cannot be traced back to a person, so the author suffers no penalty for vile and deceitful rhetoric. The result to society has been a ratcheting up of exaggeration and lies. The shield of an alias makes it easier to use coarse language, to insult and demean those with whom one disagrees, and to cast even relatively small issues as evidence of our inexorable slide into the abyss.

There are certainly good reasons for social media platforms to support anonymity. Whistle blowers, for example, should be protected from retaliation, and the best way to allow them to present their evidence without fear is to give them a way to submit their testimonials anonymously. Witnesses to criminal behavior may need the shield of anonymity while those being charged are tried.

But anonymity is not necessary for most discourse. Anonymity is not likely to improve discussion of, say, public transportation policy. In fact, knowing the true identities of all parties to such a discussion is far more likely to result in respectful dialogue and an exchange of gainful ideas.

Spammers and scammers use fake identities to conceal their true purposes– fake names, fake email addresses, fake phone numbers from your own area code. Why do we allow this? What is the value to society to allowing people to use a fake phone number whose only purpose is to trick the person receiving the call into believing that the caller is someone nearby, someone he may know? I can think of no reason why a caller from Mumbai should be allowed to use a phone number that appears to have originated from your own neighborhood. But telecom companies no doubt make a lot of money by offering such “services.”

As for IP addresses, we could demand that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) disallow anonymous connections, that they ensure that every IP address points back to a real person at a real physical address, and that their directories of IP addresses and person names are available to the general public. That would enable any user of the ISP’s services to convert a user’s IP address to a real name, face, and physical address.

The problem with this option is that there are perfectly valid uses for anonymous connections. Users who work from home may need anonymous connections to defend against man-in-the-middle attacks. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides anonymous connections, and it ensures that the entire exchange of information between user and host is fully encrypted, end-to-end. VPN appliances are in common use by private citizens, corporations, and government for all of the reasons cited. So even though a VPN can enable the user to connect to servers in other countries to further disguise the true origin of the connection, it’s far too late to claw back those devices now.

Most ISPs provide some variation of a spam blocker, and a way to report spammers. That is certainly a good start, but each ISP has a different method for reporting spammers, and a different URL. Google, for example, has a special form for reporting spam. The Google form is available here: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse. This form forces the user to parse the offending email into separate components: Source email address, Subject, Body, and Headers. But Comcast simply asks the user to forward suspect messages to abuse@comcast.net. These different methods are confusing to the user, and there is little evidence that they are coordinated. If you receive an email at your personal AOL email account that originated from a Hotmail user account, should you report it to AOL, or to Hotmail? In the present state of the market you should report it to Hotmail, since only Hotmail can remove that user from their subscriber database. But if the user forwards the message to AOL rather than Hotmail, will AOL in turn forward it to Hotmail? Answer: probably not.

It would be far easier for users of email clients if they could simply report all spam to one URL, and leave it up to the ISPs to monitor that URL, parse the suspect messages, and assign them to the correct responsible parties. Email clients should make it easy for users to block and report suspect messages, to flag specific email addresses as suspicious, and to whitelist addresses that the user knows are trustworthy. The email clients that are on the market today are by no means uniform in their handling of these use cases.

What about the problem of anonymity? As mentioned above there will always be a need for anonymous connections. But I would suggest that there is also a need for a system that allows users to consciously accept or block anonymous and fake users. When you log into such a system the default would be to block all anonymous and fake users, but you would have the ability to accept such users on a case by case basis. Such a system would put the user in control of the type of information he or she receives. And that is something that is sorely missing in the present market.