Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a duly elected Democratic member. Presumably this is partly his pure contempt for democracy, but there is also critical information to keep buried:

Adelita Grijalva made history last week, becoming the first Latina womanelected to represent Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. She won a special election for the seat previously occupied by her father, Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March after serving over two decades in office. 

Despite a blowout, uncontested victory — and a precedent of swearing in the winners of special elections almost immediately after their elections — Grijalva still has no idea when she might become an official member of the House. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has yet to set a date for Grijalva’s swearing in ceremony, and the delay is raising eyebrows. Grijalva has indicated she will sign a discharge petition that would force a floor vote to release government documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case as soon as she’s sworn in. Her signature would put the petition over the 218-vote threshold needed to override Republican leadership’s attempts to kill any vote to release the Epstein files. 

To delay her swearing in would further delay the advancement of the petition, and give Republican leadership addition time to apply pressure to the Republican representatives — Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Co.), and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — who support it. 

“I can’t see another reason,” Grijalva tells Rolling Stone. “It doesn’t change the majority, Democrats are still in the minority. That seems to be the only outstanding issue that I can see. It feels a little personal.” 

I think we can estimate the chances that there isn’t material that is extremely damaging to Trump in the Epstein files at 0% at this point.

The post This looks like men with nothing to hide appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Previously in Internet Book Club:

• Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

• Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll

I started reading The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes almost a month ago, but the first time I picked it up I got 20 pages in and then got distracted by the internet.

It was a deeply ironic and deeply appropriate way to kick off reading a book about attention in the modern technological world. I didn’t pick the book back up until last week when I took a low-internet vacation to rural Switzerland (that’s why you haven’t seen anything from the blog for the last ten days or so!). I spent last week in the Swiss Alps staring at mountains, mostly ignoring the internet and my phone, reading voraciously and contemplating Hayes’s book on the nature of human attention.

I originally picked this book up intending to write a fairly straightforward book review post, like the ones above that you’ve seen before. But this post changed in the writing of it, and it’s turned into a mixture of book review, vacation diary, personal reflection and life advice.1

The Sirens’ Call has a very simple premise. We live in a world of infinite information. The average person reading this post has access to, without exaggeration, something like 99% of all human knowledge, at any time they want it, instantly, for free. You can look up literally any fact, get a free AI chatbot to summarize any topic, watch any person do any kind of deranged thing. Need tips on antique toy restoration? Want to check out some pictures of wolves with watermelons? Have a kink specifically for women with their legs painted yellow? The internet has anything and everything, all of the time.

We underrate how insane this is. Nothing even remotely like our current situation has existed in human history. Our brains were not built for it. And this raises an important question - if information is infinite, what’s the actual constraint that stops us from knowing everything? Chris Hayes’ answer is attention. Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon predicted this would come to pass in 1971:

In an information rich-world, the wealth of information means the dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that attention consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

For most of history, people lived in states of boredom pretty much all the time.2 We had a scarcity of relevant information or stimulus and a surplus of attention and time. Information used to be costly, but now that it’s costless and infinite, the limiting factor comes from your attention. It’s not an accident that you pay attention. You are spending a finite resource when you choose to give something your awareness. Society has gotten immeasurably richer over the last few hundred years, and we’ve generated immeasurably more information, but we’re still stuck with the same amount of attention as medieval peasants.

Hayes then takes us through the types of attention. There’s the voluntary, focused attention that you typically think of when it comes to attention - leaning in to concentrate on hearing someone at a crowded party, or focusing intensely on a game of chess. That first kind of attention can be interrupted by involuntary attention, like hearing a glass break or a gunshot. And finally there’s social attention. We don’t just pay attention to the world, we’re also very concerned with the idea that people should pay attention to us.

Hayes, as a television host, knows a bit about trying to get and hold people’s attention. The getting is the easy part. There’s a relatively simple list of tricks TV uses to grab your focus, like big faces with big emotions, high volume, colorful graphics and constantly changing visuals. These tricks are well studied, they’re reliable, and they take advantage of that second type of attention, the involuntary reactions we have to new stimuli we’ve just come across. It’s much harder to hold viewer attention. Once you’ve got them to stay on your channel, how do you keep a viewer for the full hour’s length of your show? Television executives are much less certain about this. The first type of deep, focused attention is the more valuable type and there aren’t many shortcuts to getting it other than putting out a high quality product.

That’s what is so insidious about the infinite scroll of social media. Vertical video feeds hacked that very difficult question - How can we get viewers to focus deeply on our content for a long period of time? - and realized they can bypass the first kind of attention entirely. It turns out that pure distraction is the answer. Rather than allowing us to focus, apps like TikTok hold us for hours by presenting a new “Hey look at THIS” endlessly. It’s a glass shattering, every ten seconds, forever.

The social machine is also very good at hacking the third kind of attention, social attention. What if someone is saying your name somewhere? What if your post could be the one that goes viral? What if everyone was paying attention to you? Human beings crave social recognition on a deep, instinctual level and when deprived of socialization will do almost anything to get it.

Hayes thinks most of us will agree with him that the first kind of attention is the most valuable, that modern social media is undermining our ability to use it in favor of the other two kinds of attention, and that this is bad for everyone involved except the advertisers. He contrasts the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates with modern political rhetoric as a way to make this point. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were running for the same Senate seat, and engaged in a speaking tour across Illinois to debate the national question of slavery. These events were three hours long, and were structured to include an hour-long opening statement from the first speaker, a 1.5 hour rebuttal from the second speaker, and a half-hour conclusion from the first speaker. The debates were a sensation - every debate was in front a packed audience and they were reported on in news outlets around the country and were the subject of national conversation. Three straight hours of nothing but concentrated lectures on one subject, often using incredibly dense and sophisticated arguments, and people loved it.

It’s impossible to imagine our current political moment sustaining anything like that. The ‘debates’ we have feature people speaking for a few minutes at most on a wide variety of subjects, and they’re mostly trying to make sure they hit all the focus-group-tested slogans and phrases they memorized before hand. The speakers can’t go 15 seconds without interrupting one another. The quintessential form of political communication has changed from long-form debate to a 30-second TV ad.3

Hayes wants you to agree with him that this has terrible, terrible effects on society writ large. The first and most valuable kind of attention is akin to a flow state. It allows us to focus intensely on something, to subsume ourselves, to concentrate deeply and uniquely with your whole being. It’s the kind of focus the audience gave Lincoln and Douglas. It’s the kind of focus you give to the climax of a TV show you’re engrossed in. It’s the kind of attention you pay when deeply analyzing a chess position in a game of chess, or in trying to figure out the right order of operations in a tricky math problem. It’s how masters operate in art or athletics - by allowing all distraction to fall aside and completely engulfing themselves in a single state of flow. It’s a whole self experience, and today it’s what many of us are searching for and not finding. Instead we’ve got the infinite scroll, which gives us endless distraction and tantalizes us with parasocial relationships but robs us of the ability to do anything deeper.

The Sirens’ Call is a very strong book on its own merits. I enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in the subject I’d recommend you buy it and read it. But I read it in a fairly unusual way - sitting in an isolated village in rural Switzerland, parked on the literal side of a mountain, deliberately ignoring social media for most of a week so I could read books and stare at the magnificent scenery around me.

Something about this experience was especially meaningful, because for the first time in a long while I spent most of my days taking in the world around me without digital interruption. I’m normally extremely online, and that doesn’t bother me. For the most part being online doesn’t drain me, it energizes me. It’s part of who I am.

But this trip was well timed, because in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and subsequent discourse, I was feeling pretty drained. The state of country didn’t seem great. The subjects people kept talking about online were exhausting and dispiriting. Having opinions about Charlie Kirk online was an invitation for abuse, and I had the opinions and got the abuse. Getting offline last week was a blessing, and it allowed me time to ponder. I was able to read, to connect ideas, and really think about what I wanted to think about. And the most important connection I made in Mürren, staring at a mountain so big it seemed to swallow the sky, is the importance of choice.

Hayes mentions ‘The Entertainment’ from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest at points throughout the book. The Entertainment, in the novel, is a film that is so unbelievably captivating that everyone who watches it loses interest in any other aspect of life. They simply watch the film over and over, not eating or sleeping or doing anything else at all until they die. The feds keep sending people to try to research what’s on the damn thing, but give up after their fifth researcher dies watching the tape. The connection to modern social media is obvious, and Wallace was well ahead of his time in worrying about how we’d all end up addicted to mindless screen entertainment.

It’s a great inclusion, but sitting in Switzerland and thinking about attention I found myself drawn to a different David Foster Wallace work. In 2005 at Kenyon College, Wallace gave what is almost certainly the greatest graduation speech of all time, This is Water. I’d strongly recommend reading it if you never have, and I’m going to quote it extensively here because I doubt I can communicate the core ideas better than Wallace can.

Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Wallace then launches into the core of every graduation speech, trying to find the larger purpose of a college degree and a liberal arts education. He bypasses the typical answer “It teaches you how to think” as wrong - isn’t that a little insulting? How did you get into college in the first place if you didn’t already know how to think?

Instead, he lands on an answer related to attention and choice:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”…

I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Our lives are filled with information, and they’re filled with choices. Upvote or downvote? Like, Subscribe, or both? Leave an angry comment or remain silent? Keep scrolling or watch Netflix? Should I order that side table on Amazon? Should I get fries with that?

But so many of the choices we make aren’t really choices when you examine them closely. They’re the result of sleepwalking through existence without realizing that you have the choice of what to pay attention to. Have you ever been on a long stretch of road and spaced out? I’ve done it, and realized after almost an hour of driving I couldn’t remember a damn thing about the last hour. It’s disconcerting, it’s a bit scary, and I think that accurately describes not just monotonous drives but much of our daily lives - going through the default motions with barely a thought as to what we’re doing, why we’re there, or what’s worth paying attention to. You can choose an side table, but why are you living in this apartment in the first place? You can choose the regular portion or the Grande Meal, but what led you to this restaurant? You can comment or not comment on that post, but why are you reading it to begin with instead of doing literally anything else?

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I’m heavily cribbing from DFW here, for which I can only offer the justification that so is every cultural commentator for the last couple of decades. And I know it’s a cliche to write a post about how you discovered some profound life advice while doing tourist stuff. But please but hang with me here. Remember that one of the lessons of This is Water is that the most banal, obvious things are often the hardest to really understand. What the hell is water? Sometimes we need to be reminded.

The economist John Maynard Keynes accurately foresaw that over time, compound growth would mean that his grandchildren’s generation would be immensely richer than his own. He thought one of the central challenges in future society would be the search for meaning. In his words, “man will be faced with his real, permanent problem - how to use his freedom… how to occupy the leisure… for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”. If you’re like me, you live in one of the richest societies in the richest time in human history. You have access to material things your forefathers could only dream of. Your challenge is whether or not you can master yourself.

I would argue this is the single most important part of being human. You get to actively choose what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what you value, and act on that decision. You, like everyone else on this planet, have a finite amount of attention to spend. You get to choose where to spend it. And I’m begging you to stop, really stop, and consider whether you’re making that choice consciously or unconsciously.

What you give your time and attention to is the most important decision you’ll ever make. In some sense it’s the only choice you really get to make.

We live in an era where platforms want to monopolize your attention, and The Sirens’ Call is a great book about that topic. Attention is a valuable resource, and social media giants want to grab it so they can effectively monetize it. But it’s possible to imagine attentional regimes geared towards different purposes. Physical newspapers are often designed to draw your eye towards stories you might not normally read, but that the editors have decided are worth promoting nonetheless. Museums are meant to capture your attention, but in a slower and more contemplative way that encourages reflection. University classrooms are often structured around lively debate, disagreement, and deep understanding.

The platform I’m on right now, Substack, is part of this trend. When you read Infinite Scroll, I don’t want to colonize every last second of your time. I don’t want my salary to depend on slapping some ads for BroTein XXL Power Powder and then trying to maximize the amount of time your eyeballs are here. Instead, I bypass the algorithmic feed and the New-New-New-New dopamine rush tactics, and rely on paid subscribers who get these posts directly to their email. I think it’s a healthier way to operate, one that encourages the first kind of deep, voluntary attention.

I hope that I provide you some value a couple of times per week, that you enjoy these posts and get something out of them. I hope the blog hits a happy middle ground that lets you understand and keep up with internet culture without having to fully drown yourself in it. And I hope that you remember you have a choice. To say something detrimental to my own bottom line, if you don’t think the blog is providing you value, you should walk away, unsubscribe. Don’t sleepwalk through life spending time on things without realizing why you’re doing it.

…That is the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

You get to choose what you believe is important. You get to choose what you give meaning to and what you pay your attention to. It’s the most important choice you make, and you have the privilege and the burden of making it over and over, every day. Don’t take the water for granted.

Honestly mostly the image of rioters surrounding hotels full of asylum seekers, who are in the hotels as a result of... well... exactly those concessions.

Immigration is already a strict, byzantine nightmare full of little humiliations made to make the native population feel more secure.

Trans rights is the same; they are as threatened now as they have ever been, and instead of calming people down, it has only spurred them to new hysteria, partly because actual trans people are not willing to quietly acquiesce.

I guess the other thing is that Obama tried it, and he was quite good at it.

Remember the Beer summit? I remember the Beer summit. Nobody telling me about how the Democrats need to compromise to calm people down remembers it.

Like, the argument is, "If the Democrats had run a candidate like Obama, the Republicans would never have turned to Trump" and you know... History has already proven that wrong.

The first Derangement Syndrome - the first to receive the name, at least - was Clinton Derangement Syndrome. As in, Bill Clinton. (Every president since has gotten one.) The previous iteration of the Mad Right was conjured into existence under Bill Clinton. Being the most centrist hippie-punching folksy middle-American-vibe politician in the history of politics obviously isn't enough to insulate you from a large sector of the right going mad.

...but: "If the Democrats had run a candidate like Obama in 2016, Trump would have gotten stomped flat" seems like a very reasonable argument to me.

Hey folks, Fireside this week! Next week we should be back to start looking at the other half of labor in the peasant household, everything that isn’t agriculture. Also, here are some cats:

For this week’s musing, I want to address something that comes up frequently in the comments, particularly any time we discuss agriculture: the ‘Mathusian trap.’ Now of course to a degree the irony of addressing it here is that it will still come up in the comments because future folks raising the point won’t see this first, but at least it’ll be written somewhere that I can refer to.

To begin, in brief, the idea of a Malthusian trap derives from the work of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) and his work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In essence the argument goes as follows (in a greatly simplified form): if it is the case that the primary resources to sustain a population grow only linearly, but population grows exponentially, then it must be the case that population will, relatively swiftly, approach the limits of resources, leading to general poverty and immiseration, which in turn provide the check that limits population growth.

As an exercise in logic Malthus’ point is inescapable: if you accept his premises and run the experiment long enough you must reach his conclusion. In short, given an exponentially growing population and given resources that only grow linearly and given an infinite amount of time, you have to reach the Malthusian ‘trap’ of general poverty and population checked only by misery. So far as that goes, fine.

The problem is assuming any of those premises were generally correct in any given point in history.

I find this comes up whenever I point out that certain social and political structures – the Roman Empire most notably – seem to have produced better economic conditions for the broad population or that other structures – Sparta, say – produced worse ones: someone rolls in to insist that because the Malthusian trap is inevitable the set of structures doesn’t matter, as a better society will just produce an equally miserable outcome shortly thereafter with a larger population. And then I response that Malthus is not actually always very useful for understanding these interactions, which prompts disbelief because – look just above – his logic is airtight given his premises and his premises are at least intuitive.

Because here’s the thing: Malthus was very definitely and obviously wrong. Malthus was writing as Britain (where he wrote) was beginning to experience the initial phases of the demographic transition, which begins with a period of very rapid population growth as mortality declines but birth rates remain mostly constant. Malthus generalizes those trends, but of course those trends do not generalize; to date they have happened exactly once in every society where they have occurred. Instead of running out of primary resources, world population is expected to peak later this century around 10.5 billion and we already can grow enough food for 10.5 billion people. The next key primary resource is energy and progress on renewable energy sources is remarkable; at this point it seems very likely that we will have more power-per-person available at that 10.5 billion person peak than we do today. Living standards won’t fall, they’ll continue to rise, assuming we avoid doing something remarkably foolish like a nuclear war. Even climate change – which is a very real problem – will only slow the rate of improvement under most projections, rather than result in an actual decline.

So while Malthus’ logic is ironclad and his premises are intuitive, as a matter of fact and reality he was wrong. Usefully wrong, but wrong. The question becomes why he was wrong. And the answer is that basically all of his premises are at least a little wrong.

The first, as we’ve noted, is that Malthus is extrapolating out a rate of population growth based on an unusual period: the beginning of rapid growth in the second stage of the demographic transition – and then he is extrapolating that pattern out infinitely in time in every direction. And that is a mistake, albeit an easy one to make: to assume that the question of population under agrarian production is an effectively infinite running simulation which has already (or very soon will) reach stability.

Here’s the thing (this is a very rough chronology): human beings (Homo sapiens) appeared about 300,000 years ago. We started leaving the cradle of Africa around 130,000 years ago, more or less and only filled out all of the major continents about 15,000 years ago. The earliest beginnings of agriculture are perhaps 20,000 years old or so, but agriculture reached most places in the form Malthus would recognize it much later. Farming got to Britain about 6,500 years ago. Complex states with large urban populations are 5,000 or so years old. Large sections of the American Great Plains and the Eurasian Steppe were grazing land until the last 150 years.

In short, it is easy to assume, because human lives are so short, that the way we have been living – agrarian societies – are already effectively ‘infinitely’ old. But we’re not! Assuming we do not nuke ourselves or cook the planet, in the long view pre-industrial agriculture will look like a very brief period of comparatively rapid development between hundreds of thousands of years of living as hunter-gathers and whatever comes after now. To Malthus, whose history could stretch no further back than the Romans and no further forward than the year in which he wrote, his kind of society seemed to have existed forever. It seemed that way to the Romans too. But we’re in a position to see both before agrarian economies and also after them; we’re not smarter, we just have the luck of a modestly better vantage.⁵

In short, while we might assume that given infinite time, exponential population growth will outpace any gains made to production but you shouldn’t assume infinite time because we are actually dealing with a very finite amount of time. Farmers, whose demographics concern us here, appear around 20,000 years ago and begin filling up the Earth, spreading out to bring new farmland under the plow (displacing, often violently, lower population density societies as they did so) and that process was arguably nearing completion but not yet complete when the second agricultural and first industrial revolutions fundamentally changed the basis of production. As we’ve discussed, estimates of global population in the deep past are deeply fraught, but there is general agreement that population globally has increased more or less continuously since the advent of farming; it never stalled out at any point. In short, the Malthusian long run is so long that it almost doesn’t matter.

But if we limit our view to a specific region or society, that changes things. We certainly do see, if not Malthusian traps, what we might term ‘Malthusian interactions’ apparent in history. Rising population density and trade connectivity help spread disease, which lead to major downward corrections in population like the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and the diseases of the Columbian Exchange. Notably though, these sudden downward corrections are at best only somewhat connected to population growth and resource scarcity: lower nutrition may play a role, but travel, trade lanes, high density cities and exposure to novel pathogens seems to play a larger role. It’s not clear that something like the Black Death would have been dramatically less lethal if the European population were 10 or 15% less; it seems quite clear the diseases of the Columbian exchange cared very little for how well fed the populations they devastated were. Still, we see the outline of what Malthus might expect: downward pressure on wages before the population discontinuity and often upward pressure afterwards (most clearly visible with the Black Death in Europe).

So does Malthus rule the ‘small print’ as it were? Perhaps, but not always. For one, it is possible, even in the pre-modern world, to realize meaningful per capita gains in productivity due to new production methods like new farming techniques. It is also possible for greater connectivity through trade to enable greater production by comparative advantage. It is also possible for capital accumulation in things like mills or draft animals to generate meaningful increases in production. And of course some political and economic regimes may be more or less onerous for the peasantry. Any of these things moving in the right direction can effectively create some ‘headroom’ in production and resources. Some of that ‘headroom’ is going to get extracted by the tiny number of elites at the top of these societies, but potentially not all of it.

This is what I often refer to as a society moving between equilibria (a phrasing not original to me), from a state condition of lower production (a low equilibrium) to a stable condition of higher production (a high equilibrium).

Now in the long run when just thinking about food production, the Malthusian interaction ought to catch up with us in the long run. The population increases, but the available land supply cannot keep pace – new lands brought under the plow are more marginal than old lands and so on – and so the surplus food per person steadily declines as the population grows until we’re back where we started. Except there are two problems here.

The first is that can take a long time even in a single society, region or state because even under ideal nutrition standards, these societies increase in population slowly compared to the rapid sort of exponential growth Malthus was beginning to see in the 1700s. It can take so long that exogenous shocks – invasion, plague, or new technology enabling a new burst of ‘headroom’ – arrive before the ceiling is reached and growth stops. Indeed, given the trajectory of pre-modern global population, that last factor must have happened quite a lot, since even the population of long-settled areas never quite stabilizes in the long term.

All of which is to say, in the time frame that matters – the time scale of states, regimes, economic systems and so on, measured in centuries not millennia – some amount of new ‘headroom’ might be durable and indeed we know it ended up being so, lasting long enough for us to get deep enough into the demographic transition that we could put Malthus away almost entirely.

The second thing to note is that not all material comforts are immediately related to survival and birth rates. To take our same society where some innovation has enabled increased production: the population rises, but no new land enters cultivation. That creates a segment of the population who can be fed, but who need not be farmers: they can do other things. Of course in actual pre-modern societies, it is most the elite who decide what other things these fellows do and many of those things (warfare, monumental construction, providing elite extravagance) do very little for the common folks.

But not always. Sometimes that new urban population is going to make stuff, stuff which might flow to consumers outside of the elite. We certainly seem to see this with sites of large-scale production of things like Roman coarseware pottery. Or, to take something from my own areas, it is hard not to notice that the amount of worked metal we imagine to be available for regular people for things like tools seems to rise as a function of time. Late medieval peasants do seem to have more stuff than early medieval or Roman peasants in a lot of cases. Wages – either measured in silver or as a ‘grain wage’ – may not be going up, but it sure seems like some things end up getting more affordable because there are more people making them.

And of course some of that elite investment might also be generally useful. Of course as a Roman historian, the examples of things like public baths and aqueducts, which provided services available not merely to the wealthy but also the urban poor, spring immediately to mind. And so even if the amount of grain available per person has stayed the same, the number of non-farmers as a percentage of the society has increased, making non-grain amenities easier for a society to supply. And naturally, social organization is going to play a huge role in the degree to which that added production does or does not get converted into amenities for non-elites.

In short it is possible for improvements to provide quality of life improvements even if a new Malthusian ceiling is reached. It is the difference between getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-plaster building with a terracotta roof, a good collection of coarseware pottery and clean water from an aqueduct versus getting 3,000 calories in a wood-and-mud hut with a thatched roof, no pottery at all and having to pump water at the local well. In a basic Malthusian analysis, these societies are the same, but the lived experience is going to be meaningfully different.

Notionally, of course, you might argue that if population continued to rise we’d eventually reach the end of those fixed resources too: we’d run out of clay and metal ores and fresh water sources and so on, except that of course there are 8.2 billion of us and we haven’t yet managed to run out – or even be seriously constrained – by any of those things. We haven’t even managed to run out of oil or coal and again, at the rate at which renewable energy technology is advancing, it looks like we may never run out of oil, so much as it just won’t be worth anyone’s time pulling the stuff out of the ground.⁶

None of which is to say that Malthus is useless. Malthusian interactions do occur historically. But they do not always occur because the sweep of history is not infinitely wrong and developments which produce significant carrying capacity ‘headroom’ actually happen, on balance, somewhat faster than societies manage to reach the limit of that capacity.

On to Recommendations:

First off, the public classics project Peopling the Past has turned five! Congratulations to them. Peopling the Part runs both a blog and a podcast both highlighting the ways that scholars, especially early career scholars, study people in the (relatively deep) past, with an emphasis on highlighting interesting work and the methods it uses. It’s a great project to follow if you want a sense of how we know things about the past and the sort of work we continue to do to understand more, with an especially strong focus on archaeology.

Meanwhile over on YouTube and coinciding a bit with our discussion of Malthus, Angela Collier has a video on why “dyson spheres are a joke,“⁷ in the sense that they were quite literally proposed by Freeman J. Dyson as a joke, a deliberate ‘send up’ of the work of some of his colleagues he found silly, rather than ever being a serious suggestion for science fiction super-structures.

Where this cuts across our topic is that Dyson, writing in 1960, explicitly cites “Malthusian pressures” as what would force the construction of such a structure and it serves as a useful reminder that until well into the 1980s and 1990s, there were quite a lot of ‘overpopulation’ concerns and it was common to imagine the future as involving extreme overpopulation and resource scarcity. I wouldn’t accuse Dyson of this view (he is, as noted, writing a paper as satire), but I think it is notable that these panics continued substantially on the basis of assumptions that the demographic transition – which was already pretty clearly causing population growth in Europe to begin to slow significantly by the 1950s and 1960s – was, in effect, a ‘white people only’ phenomenon, fueling often very racially inflected fears about non-white overpopulation. You can see this sort of racist-alarmist-panic pretty clearly in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), appropriately skewered in the If Books Could Kill episode on it.

Of course as noted is that what actually happened is that it turns out the demographic transition does not care about race or racists and happens to basically all societies as they grow wealthier and more educated – indeed, it has often happened faster in countries arriving to affluence late – with the result that it now appears that the ‘population bomb’ will never happen.

For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to recommend Rebecca F. Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy and Max L. Goldman, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (2013). Students often ask questions like ‘what did the Greeks and Romans think about race?’ and the complicated answer is they thought a lot of things. That can come as a surprise to moderns, as we’re really used to the cultural hegemony of ‘scientific racism’ and the reactions against it. But it is in fact somewhat unusual that a single theory of race – as unfounded in actual reality as all of the others – is so dominant globally as an ideology that people either hold or push against. Until the modern period, you were far more likely to find a confusing melange of conflicting theories (advanced with varying degrees of knowledge or ignorance of distant peoples) all presented more or less equally. Consequently, the Greeks and Romans didn’t think one thing about race, but had many conflicting ideas about where different peoples fit and why.

That makes an anthology of sources in translation an ideal way to present the topic and that is what Kennedy, Roy and Goldman have done here. This is very much what it says ‘on the tin’ – a collection of translated primary sources; the editorial commentary is kept quite minimal and the sources do largely speak for themselves. The authors set out roughly 200 different passages – some quite short, some fairly long – from ancient Greek and Roman writers that touch on the topic of race or ethnicity. Those passages are split in two ways: the book is divided into two sections, the first covering theories and the second covering regions. In the first section, the reader is given examples of some of the dominant strains of how Greeks and Romans thought about different peoples and what made them different – genealogical theories, environmental theories (people become different because they are molded by different places), cultural models and so on. The approach is a brilliant way to hammer home to the reader the lack of any single hegemonic model of ‘otherness’ in this period, while also exposing them to the most frequent motifs with which the ancients thought about different peoples.

Then the back two-thirds of the book proceed in a series of chapters covering specific regions. Presenting, say, almost 20 passages on the peoples of ‘barbarian’ Europe (Gaul, Germany, Britain) together also helps the reader get a real sense of both the range of ways specific regions were imagined but also common tropes, motifs and stereotypes that were common among ancient authors.

The translations in the volume are invariably top-rate, easy to read while being faithful to the original text. The editorial notes are brief but can help put passages in the context of the larger works they come from. The book also features reprints of a series of maps showing the world as described by the Greeks and Romans, a useful way to remember how approximate their understanding of distant places and their geographic relations could be. Overall, the volume is useful as a reference text – when you really need to find the right passage to demonstrate a particular motif, stereotype or theory of difference – but is going to be most valuable to the student of antiquity who wants to begin to really get a handle on the varied ways the Greeks and Romans understood ethnic and cultural difference.