Just last week on the This American Life podcast (OK, more like a month ago because my queue is backed up that far) they had a similar story, about a guy who just goes mental over climate change and basically abuses his young kids over it, then divorce and they won't have contact with him any more now that they're grown up (college age). https://www.thisamericanlife.org/748/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it

So...I don't have a lot of appetite for the linked article. One story like that was enough.

I'm a biologist so it's not like I'm unaware of the projections for climate change and its effects (though for disruptions of human events I have to just follow what reliable-seeming others say about displacement and refugees). It doesn't make me particularly cheerful to think about it, but it's not world-ending stuff in my mind. The destruction of habitats I know well for one more tract of housing, the general loss of nature and of humans experiencing nature as part of their every day lives feels equally concerning. There are places, biologically, where I think the threats are overblown. One positive way to look at it: 1) the wet tropics and coral reefs are the most biodiverse places on earth. 2. climate change will expand the area that can support tropical ecosystems and coral reefs. 3. Profit!

I can see climate change as a major planet wide disruption into the unknown, but a gentle slide. "This world will be a 110 hellscape unfit for human life" motivates the guy in the story, I guess, but doesn't ring true.

climate change will expand the area that can support tropical ecosystems and coral reefs

At least in the case of coral, can that possibly be true? With ocean pH falling?

a gentle slide

I don't want to be the guy in the article and hope lurid would tell me if I was, but that phrasing shocks me a bit. Nothing about this feels gentle.

This guy seems like a counterproductive loon, but I do sympathize with the feeling that everyone, including me, is underreacting. But especially Congress.

I'm a little bemused though -- how much does a composting toilet reduce your carbon footprint over use of a sewer leading to a wastewater treatment plant? I wouldn't have thought of the latter as profligate.

Folks seem to think that a 1.5C degree increase would make living in the tropics pretty rough for humans.

And if I understand correctly, any reasonable projection means an increase of 1.5C is baked in, so to speak.

It doesn't make me particularly cheerful to think about it, but it's not world-ending stuff in my mind.

As you point out, it's going to be a "gentle" increase. The people who make decisions will understand that, well, yes, there are millions of climate refugees, but they don't vote; there's nothing we can do about that any more anyway; and further increases are only going to happen a bit at a time. So it's not really something that's productive to worry about.

And in the long run, as the wise man said, we're all dead. Who cares what the world will be like in the year 2100?

Wasn't this a character in The Good Place?

Residents of New York City do much more to combat climate change than this guy simply by living in dense housing and, frequently, not owning cars. Were I a resident of New York City there would be no end to my self-righteousness about how my lifestyle is the best for the planet.

Ooof, that's an uncomfortable read -- for some people. He's so over-the-top that it doesn't trigger my own fears about climate, but I do feel resonance for both the questions of, "if you feel like there are vast social problems, how can one engage with them in one's own life?" and, "gosh the interactions between emotions and the intellect get complicated." He's smart enough to realize that he's being absurd and also smart enough to (a) rationally justify his own emotional responses and (b) trust his own judgement in the face of, "I am making different choices than most other people would,"

I was looking for the article about climate justice and intersectionality that I had read and shared a few years ago, and upon rereading I learned that a) it's not that great and b) it ran on Popula, a short-lived Ethereum-backed publication, which seemed like too stupid an irony for me even to mock. But this is the rhetoric that had lodged itself in my brain:

The system explicitly rewards these men for visualizing the future as a parallel system that leaves the patriarchal, capitalist pyramid intact. It's all they know how to imagine, and all the rest of us are permitted to imagine: a future in which the right politicians, coupled with the right scientists and corporate executives, will turn climate change into an opportunity, not a crisis, with jobs and profits for all!

It's an epic saga in which they are the heroes, an apocalyptic sci-fi video game or movie in which a few good men will just get rid of the bad guys in the third act. No need to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy, envision a different and better way of living, re-think economic and societal structures, or remove power over the fate of humanity from the hands of a self-interested few.

(Please do not send the author ETH.) I honestly don't spend that much time obsessing about my climate footprint, although I try to do reasonable things. I obsess more about the social action that is so effortlessly botched in that podcast chill mentions: what should my role be, with whom should I work, how much time, what targets, etc. Unfortunately our current society seems to have produced a lot of socially dysfunctional people, particularly in the white U.S. middle classes, and even among people of good will it's just absurdly difficult to mobilize. It's totally understandable for people to get angry about that; I think it's also sad.

I am also skeptical about the coral reef renaissance.

6: It's actually weird feeling, because I'm not giving anything up by living here, I would want to live here if it was worse for the environment rather than better. So I feel like I can't expect people to give up the lifestyle they like, given that I haven't given anything up. I can proselytize for the urban lifestyle being nice, but I can't be an example of self-sacrifice.

I would happily commute by train or subway to work, as long as I wasn't hoofing it too far on the work side of things.

I will probably go back to taking the bus after the covid thing settles down.

10: It seems like the lack of self-sacrifice is what makes it a good message. 'Solve climate change with this one (or two) weird trick.' Of course not everyone wants to live densely but there are more people who do than are able to because we don't build enough dense housing to make it a reasonably affordable option.

Drive so poorly that you make those around you want to give up on commuting by car but not so poorly that they worry you'll hit them while walking.

Which is my lifestyle already.

Yeah, it seems like it should be an easy sell and yet there is nothing more contentious.

In a vaguely related digression, do you know what's a great city if you want a single-family house in a dense urban area? Toronto is composed of a even mixture of fifteen story glass apartment buildings and adorable Victorian brick single-family-houses densely packed on walkable streets. It's awesome.

I read that story when it came out and my thoughts were these:

1. That climate change is at least in part a hard physical reality that we can't ideologize away. You consider, eg, famines, and there's nearly always actually enough food, it's just being stolen or sold elsewhere for high profits or maldistributed. And up to a point, the climate crisis is like that - there are things we could do but won't that would prevent lots of people from suffering and dying, the poorest and most marginal will suffer the worst, everyone else experiencing a gradient of awful that tracks with their privilege. But quite a lot of it is just - real. Massive fires and floods are going to destroy a lot of things that rich people would be quite willing to pay to preserve if that would work.

So we're pretty trapped; it's like death, you can't think it away, you can't solve it, you can't reverse it.

2. This hits some people harder than others for individual reasons. Some people are more emotionally fragile than others, some people can handle immediate crisis well but can't handle the slow grind of a doom that impends sometime between about 2030 and 2050. People collapse into neurosis, which is what this guy does. I find that extremely relatable.

3. Men get a lot more space to collapse into neurosis and take their families with them than women do. This guy is the more relatable, less monstrous version of the men who have a setback and decide to murder their families and kill themselves rather than slog on through.

4. I find the neurosis and the collapse very sympathetic but the will to inflict it on the family personally baffling.

David Shor had some tweets that were basically "no one is going to take major action to solve climate change, it's coming, the US will not take in climate refugees and even if we did it would tip us over into fascism so fuck them kids, liberals should stop caring about this."

And you know what? Those are monstrous things to say, but they are prophecy. It's going to be the official position of the Democratic party in ten years, and everyone is going to turn a blind eye when they're machine-gunning climate refugees, whether that's at the US border or at the Vermont border because once people really recognize that the average citizen can do nothing, nothing to fix the climate, people will shut down intellectually and emotionally so they can keep going.

In fact, that's what is up with these goofy neurotic guys - by temperament and because they are men, they are people who can't shut down intellectually and emotionally and therefore they can't keep going. This does not have that much of a moral valence; it's just a symptom of how things are going. Some people can hack it, some people have to hack it, some people can't and don't have to so they don't.

Oooh, there sure is something more contentious. Suggesting not-having or reducing your number of children is more contentious. I got called Hitler in the comments here for suggesting offering free family planning for environmental reasons.

Not trying to re-awaken that conversation.

I'm naturally inclined to a low climate-impact lifestyle and now even I am resentful of inconvenience. Fuck it. I did that for decades and it didn't matter and nothing will ever matter and I am sorry about your fiery doom, my sweet baby son. But I don't see any good outcomes.

Oooh, there sure is something more contentious. Suggesting not-having or reducing your number of children is more contentious. I got called Hitler in the comments here for suggesting offering free family planning for environmental reasons.

Not trying to re-awaken that conversation.

I'm naturally inclined to a low climate-impact lifestyle and now even I am resentful of inconvenience. Fuck it. I did that for decades and it didn't matter and nothing will ever matter and I am sorry about your fiery doom, my sweet baby son. But I don't see any good outcomes.

"WE NEVER EVEN TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE! DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?" he said.

At that point, I thought maybe she should kill him, so that he can truly be the martyr to climate change that he aspires to be.

I wrote 19/20 without seeing 18.

Oh. 19/20 and 22 were me, Megan.

I don't know. Climate change is real and has had and will have horrible consequences, but I think there is another aspect of this -- people love an apocalypse, because it makes them feel important.

Thank you, peep. That is extremely apt.

I don't actually think much of the "reduce the number of children you have for the environment" argument. I'm sure that is not at all self-serving.

21 definitely sounds right.

There was a time when one could think the story could end with Ivanka Trump demanding the guy's head on a platter, but that moment has passed.

It is all pretty fucked up, though: I was in Glacier a month or so ago, and the loss of snow, glaciers was really stark.

Maybe it was 2 weeks ago? In the apocalypse no one can keep track of time.

Any way, are people enjoying the ALCS?

Yeah, I mean, the bad stuff people have been predicting for years is already happening and has been for a while. It's getting worse and will continue to, but it's not like there's a big clima(c)tic catastrophe that we're building up to that will either happen or not based on what we do now. We have some control over how much worse it gets but asserting that control is a difficult collective action problem. That's not very dramatic or emotionally satisfying and I get why people get frustrated and go off in weird directions with this.

So no one wants to know what my mom told me on Sunday afternoon?!

What did your mom tell you on Sunday afternoon, heebie?

I think I've shut down emotionally with respect to climate change because it just seems so hopeless: we can't get people to take a free vaccine or wear masks, and locally we (and I'm guessing CA) refer to 'fire season' as if it's just an expected thing to drown in smoke three months of the year and that's just within the past two years. Now it's just fire season, you know, in between the spring and the dry winter.

It doesn't seem fair to say that community based solutions weren't worth his time. It seems like he tried years of community activism without finding success. I've been searching for any possible activist leverage and not finding much either.

I'm getting so tired of "my" issues never coming to the fore. I totally get that politicians have a focus and it won't all get done at once. But I'm hearing that Newsom is good on early childhood stuff and even doing good work at CalTrans and I'm just bummed that it isn't our turn for that.

Yeah, we've already internalized smoke season. (That one kinda interests me because there's a good case that we should have had smoke season all along, in the process of having 5M acres of low intensity burns/year.)

Anyway, yeah. I'm deep in the despair over climate change. I tried.

Sorry. 34 was me.

My dad is really worried and scared about climate change and that makes me extremely angry. Who are these fuckers who have led us into climate apocalypse right when my father needs to try to have some peace as he grieves for my mother?

What we need is less climate justice, since that seems impossible, and more climate revenge.

On that theme is a pretty good IMO science fiction story by one of my favorite SFF writers, Vajra Chandrasekera, The Translator, At Low Tide.

2 and 9 are right, coral is going away, too. Ocean acidification is climate-adjacent but not climate in the narrow sense. Most of 1 was saying that my environmental angst contains multitudes and climate change doesn't stand out dramatically from all the other things caused by too-many-humans, including ocean acidification.

36.1: I'm sorry about your mother.

Oh, heebie, I assumed your mom told you about Manchin's stupid grandstanding, but was it something else?

I've been searching for any possible activist leverage and not finding much either.

Yeah, the stuff I imagine, but don't do, is mostly focused on resilience and revenge, and afaik you're pretty engaged on the resilience end, as are a few other people here.

Echoing 38 on preview. Sorry, Frowner.

I wish I didn't feel like a bad person for clinging to vestiges of techno-optimism -- fantasies about millions of renewable-energy-powered plants pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it somehow. It's the sort of thing that's not necessarily impossible, but I understand that it isn't going to happen.

I had a shattering conversation with Newt (a college junior these days), where he mentioned that he was expecting to die fairly young for climate reasons. He's generally not a depressive kid. I think he is probably overestimating the degree of personal danger he's in, but I couldn't swear he's wrong.

I should say that my mother died several years ago but mourning a whole mother is a long, long process. My parents were married for almost fifty years but my mother was ill for twelve of them and required a lot of care for about seven.

Considering both the Pro Publica and the This American Life story: They're both about moral injury and how it screws people up.

So we know that we live in a society where we control very, very little and where even trivial participation is helping hurl us toward climate disaster. We can't fix it. The elephants and salmon and so on, they're mostly going to die. All the beautiful things that humans have made are going to be cast into utter, utter irrelevance. We know that there are people who could stop the climate crisis - the Thiels and Manchins and Bezoses of the world do in fact have enough power over an incredibly consolidated global economic system that if they really wanted they could in fact get together and turn the Titanic. Many of us act in various ways to try to change things and it does absolutely nothing.

Living like that is to be in an ongoing state of moral injury, and that's what fucks people up. You can go off the deep end, you can hide your head in the sand, you can shut down emotionally, you can abuse your family until they won't have anything to do with you, you can slog on trying to reconcile all the contradictions of your life. But you can't actually opt out, either from the future or from the system, and you can't change it, and yet it's so obviously horrible that you can't simply be neutral either.

41.4 is as true as it is depressing, and it's going to be the story of the rest of all of our lives (which, pace Newt, are still statistically likely to be pretty long).

My mom was saying how she heard some expert saying that the Amazon has passed some critical tipping point due to Bolsonaro's allowing all the slashing/burning, and is now past the point of recovery in a newly frightening way.

26: You can't solve a collective action problem with individual action, pretty much by definition. This, of course, is the thing that the protagonist in the linked story doesn't get.

At that point, I thought maybe she should kill him

Yeah, I'm not entirely clear on whether that woman is a saint or an abuse victim.

¿Porque no los dos?

To 32, my thinking has also shifted in the wake of the pandemic and its response -- there is such mass moral exhaustion and despair, but I keep typing and deleting and not doing a good job of describing the full picture. (That might be for the best because it's really fucking dark.)

I think possibly the single most upsetting article I've read on this subject* was the one about the palm oil debacle in Indonesia, and how it had somehow begun as a well-meaning piece of legislation to increase biofuel utilization. This put a big flaming stake through the heart of any techno-utopianism I might have, much less any faith that our existing plutocrats could turn the Titanic around through force of will. This disaster is going to spin out of the control of the world economic system in spectacular ways.

On having children, a friend shared this creepy video with me a while ago, after being quite rattled watching the show during their first child's gestation. (Infancy? Not sure.) It's creepy for a bunch of overlapping reasons, really.

Okay! Who needs cheering up?

* other than the perhaps less-than-credible piece about microplastics from a few days ago that I couldn't even finish reading because the catastrophic stage was projected so soon.

41 is smart.

On this part:

But you can't actually opt out, either from the future or from the system, and you can't change it, and yet it's so obviously horrible that you can't simply be neutral either.

One thing that I think about sometimes is how giant a portion of humanity has been trapped in equally hellish situations (and certainly more hellish than my privileged "It will get terrible but at least it's still okay right now" experience). Decaying or abusive empires, tribes and cultures being exterminated, being enslaved, being abused by right of society, etc etc etc. It doesn't exactly help, but it does give a sense of camaraderie with vast numbers of people historically who knew they'd never change the situation they were trapped in.

less climate justice, since that seems impossible, and more climate revenge

Back when I was researching forgiveness, I saw revenge described as something the powerless want to regain control. So we're back on-theme.

47: One thing that I've found helpful, though not exactly encouraging, is reading about the history of imperial China. There's a recurring pattern where, during a period of relatively stability and prosperity, some bureaucrats come with various sorts of innovative reforms, some of which get implemented and sometimes sort of work for a while. Then the peasants revolt or the Mongols invade, the dynasty falls, and everything falls apart with it. After a period of chaos a new dynasty restores stability and the cycle repeats. This goes on every couple hundred years for millennia.

There's a long arc of history there but it doesn't bend in any particular direction. It's a very different way of thinking about history and civilization than the meta-narrative of progress that tends to be implicit in European/Euro-American history.

lurid: wow, that video really is a punch in the gut, isn't it? I had to stop watching at the key moment, and then could only skip fast thru the rest. And I'm childless! The punchline is pretty brutal, too. Well worth the watch, though yeah, keep finger hovered over pause-button. Oy.

I feel like there's an answer to his position, but that's neither here nor there. Boy howdy, the clip is a keeper.

46, 50: I didn't like the second season nearly as much, but the first season of the Channel 4 Utopia (not the American remake) is just incredible television. Sadly, the conspiracy that drives the plot is, uh, awfully similar to people screaming about how Bill Gates is going to give us all 5G, so I'm not sure I could bear to watch it again, but it's wonderfully well-produced. (Neil Maskell, maybe best known for Kill List, is a heavy in it and is terrifying.)

We just finished S4 of Goliath, and can recommend.

The idea of climate revenge appeals to me more than it probably should.

But, but how are we to pay for extremely limited mitigation measures? Will no one think of the old white people and there net worth spreadsheets from hell? Also Solyndra.

After the last two years, I think techno-optimism is the most likely outcome. It will play out exactly like coronavirus. We will fail to take simple steps stave off disaster, and then after millions of people die unnecessarily technology will show up to ameliorate the worst outcomes.

I think 41.3 gets the politics of climate change wrong. There isn't an oligarchy that secretly runs the world. I used to basically believe that, bu tthe Trump era demonstrated otherwise. Plutocrats clearly on average didn't like Trump, but that didn't stop Trump from becoming President. Thiel is a fascist who's thrown around a bunch of money to turn the country fascist, and the only thing he's really managed to accomplish is to destroy Gawker after they made it easy for him. The country took a step towards fascism wiith Trump, but given that much bigger and more powerful plutocrats (Bezos, Bloomberg) opposed Trump it seems likely that Thiel wasn't the decisive factor. Bezos himself stood up to Trump and Saudi Arabia, and for his troubles he got his phone hacked, and a blackmail attempt that broke up his marriage. Like Gawker, he made it easy for his enemies, but it doesn't exactly scream absolute power. Manchin is the exception. He obviously has decisive power in this situation, mostly because of the broken nature of American politics, and should be near the top of any climate revenge list, along with various oil company executives.

I think the real reason that climate change is insoluble by politics is that people will do anything to combat climate change, as long as it doesn't cost them any money. (For the more idealistic, they will do anything to combat climate change, as long as it doesn't cost favored groups money.) This makes a legislative solution impossible. In Norway, beloved holy social democratic Norway, the Green party was briefly doing well in the polls, until they announced that Norway should decarbonize by 2030 and their support collapsed. Instead they'll buy Teslas and paper straws, and call it a day.

They didn't like Trump, but they didn't not-like him enough to do much, because Trump was not fundamentally threatening their balance sheets. The conflicts among the very rich are not conflicts over "should we have capitalism-as-it-exists or should we move to a TBD radically different and more egalitarian system"; they are at best fairly trivial conflicts over trade policy and Should We Be So Fascist That It Is Difficult To Hire Talented Gay CEOs. They hang together (or at least they will if we get climate vengeance!) because underneath their preferences for trade policies to make them even richer, they're all figuring that they will live in the luxury domed city in the last habitable place once things get really bad.

I think they did all they could do short of funding their own paramilitary. Bezos' activities cost him half of his ownership of Amazon, which has got to be worth like 100 billion dollars by now. The limitations on billionaire power was one of the more surprising lessons of the Trump era to me.

The politics of climate change isn't much better in other countries. France passed some minor efforts, and it led to the yellow jacket movement. Germany shut down its nuclear power plants, which probably set them back a decade in efforts to combat global warming, and it was the single most popular action of Merkel's entire career. A while ago, Australia passed a carbon tax, and it was so unpopular that it was repealed not long after.

57: Dissenting billionaires get screwed in Russia, too -- much worse than Bezos. Oligarchs lack power to challenge the oligarchy. Otherwise, they do just fine.

And when you talk about what "people" are willing to do, well, the will of the people only matters in a democracy. We would have the process of dealing with climate change well underway in the US if these decisions were made democratically.

Didn't billionaires just come off a fantastic increase in their wealth?

Oligarchs lack power to challenge the oligarchy.

If that's the case is it strictly an oligarchy? I get the sense Russia is effectively more of an autocracy, as any oligarchs that threaten Putin are removed.

Last time I was at the doctor, I checked in about maybe having depression. I didn't think I had depression; I'm getting my usual sleep and have energy and can initiate tasks and stuff. But I keep thinking "nothing matters and nothing will work and trying is futile and nothing will ever matter and fuck this pretend recycling bullshit I'm just gonna throw 5s and 6s in the goddamn trashcan since it all ends up in the landfill anyway." And that kinda sounds like depression so I thought I'd run it by the doctor.

He said, 'nope, not depressed. That's just an accurate assessment of where we are.' What was more interesting was that he said he's hearing this two or three times per week from his patients. The despair is widespread.

I sometimes think that just because we're sane in an insane world doesn't mean that getting a little doping would hurt, necessarily.

Megan: "fuck this pretend recycling bullshit I'm just gonna throw 5s and 6s in the goddamn trashcan since it all ends up in the landfill anyway"

Huh. Slowly I've come around to believing that this is the right thing for us to do. Better in a landfill in America, than the middle of the Pacific. After all, in our country the one thing we have a lot of is empty land.

61: This reminds me of the intake form at my yearly check-up that had the usual 'are you feeling stressed?' questionnaire. Summer of 2020. Wrote on the bottom in block letters: "ANXIETY IS A COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED REACTION TO 2020."

But yes, meds.

Combining 63.2 and the electoral maps I've seen makes me think your plan will have our garbage voting against us in the future.

Just like now.

If that's the case is it strictly an oligarchy?

A fair question and I'll accept your modification. I'll add that I find these discussions of ideological definitions ("But is it really fascism ...") to be exhausting.

I wish I didn't feel like a bad person for clinging to vestiges of techno-optimism -- fantasies about millions of renewable-energy-powered plants pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it somehow. It's the sort of thing that's not necessarily impossible, but I understand that it isn't going to happen.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Saiselgy (I'm a non-paying subscriber to his Substack), with an essay, "The Case for More Energy".

Instead, we should raise our clean energy production ambitions. We don't want to replace 100% of our current dirty energy -- we want to generate vastly more energy than we are currently using and make it zero carbon.

My reaction to this was something like, "How did Saiselgy become this stupid?"

But maybe hope is a good thing. Maybe we shouldn't feel bad for "clinging to vestiges of techno-optimism" Absolute despair isn't actually helping anyone, is it?

Why do you hate me?

68: In keeping with an emerging Twitter viewpoint (partly borrowing from such luminaries as Olof Palme, IIRC) that one of the problems with currently-constituted capitalism is underproduction of market goods - especially housing, but lots of other stuff - and that if we had more of a functional social state, one of its functions should be to increase private production to levels appropriate to what people actually need/want, which would also provide more jobs.

Still seems weird to me to apply that viewpoint to energy.

Well, energy underlies everything else. I think Yglesias is basically right about this (though I haven't read his specific piece). Solar is finally coming down enough in price that we can realistically think about a zero-carbon grid with more generation.

71: I'm not thinking more zero carbon energy is bad. It just seemed to me like saying, "It's not enough to be against sadness. Everyone should be happy and fullfilled!"

Me too.

Sure, but, I mean, that's not wrong.

61-64: Yeah, it's been tough to evaluate my mood or how I'm doing when someone asks, because it's pretty weird that I can say I'm having the same problems as almost literally everyone.

We say the elements of man are misery and happiness, as though he had an equal proportion of both, and the days of man vicissitudinary, as though he had as many good days as ill, and that he lived under a perpetual equinoctial, night and day equal, good and ill fortune in the same measure. But it is far from that; he drinks misery, and he tastes happiness; he mows misery, and he gleans happiness; he journeys in misery, he does but walk in happiness; and, which is worst, his misery is positive and dogmatical, his happiness is but disputable and problematical: all men call misery misery, but happiness changes the name by the taste of man.

64: Everything is electronic here with no room for free text, so you don't even get the stress relief of writing that out.

I think it's odd to blame "the market" for housing, since it's governments that have made it impossible to solve the housing crisis. The only problems with housing are problems that the government caused. (Unlike healthcare, say, where there are problems that only the government can fix.)

Housing is similar to climate change in that it's not hard to assemble a political coalition to prevent real change. Even if people agree it's a real problem (and I don't think they do -- if you could hold a referendum in the Bay Area on the question "Should we make all the newcomers go away?" I'm pretty sure it would win), you can't form a winning coalition to support deregulating the housing market, and you can't form a winning coalition to support having the government build housing directly. So nothing much will ever be done.

"Didn't billionaires just come off a fantastic increase in their wealth?"

Incredibly dishonest people were arguing this by measuring from the exact bottom of the March 2020 slump.

The slump wasn't that big. Maybe it was only a massive increase?

Profits were down, and are now up. Interest rates are down, and the Fed bought up a big chunk of government debt, which forced investors out of bonds and into stock (which drives up the price of stock). Savings rates were also up, which also drove the demand for savings instruments (like stocks), which also drove up the price.

So at this moment right now, if you are rich and you liquidate your entire portfolio, and you could do it without causing panic selling (i.e. you are not Bezos or Musk), you could buy your own Bond-villain island with robot assassins. But the whole thing could come crashing down tomorrow, especially since the Fed is now under a lot of pressure to reverse course. Inflation is up, and it is only a matter of time before inflation hysteria grabs the chattering classes.

Incredibly dishonest people were arguing this by measuring from the exact bottom of the March 2020 slump.

Here is the US Federal Reserve's take on that. There are probably presentations of this data that are better suited to this conversation, and you have to play with buttons and sliders and tabs to get the data.

But (for example) the wealth share of the top 1% in the US has gone from 30.8% in 4Q 2019 to 32.3% in 2Q 2021. That strikes me as a pretty impressive increase.

But that's only the share -- the one percent's piece of the pie has grown, but has the pie grown? Turns out the wealth of the 1 percent has grown from $33.85 trillion to $43.27 trillion -- so a 28% increase from pre-pandemic levels. (I'm not sure what the Fed is doing with inflation here, but maybe you'll want to discount the current figure a bit to account for inflation.)

This speaks to the 1 percent, but not to Moby's billionaires. I suspect a paltry $20 million will get you easily into the top 1%.

Here's how Forbes counts the billionaires in the relevant period.

Total American billionaire wealth stands at $4.6 trillion as of the stock market close on April 28, by our count. That's up 35% from $3.4 trillion when markets opened on January 1, 2020, just as Covid-19 was beginning to take the world by storm.

That's big but not "fantastic."

"Fantastic" starts at 42%.

Right. I believe the official cutoff for "pretty sweet" is 24%.