“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more.

What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, the United States was the “indispensable nation”. Whatever the rights and wrong of this claim, it has become obvious that, whether we like it or not, the rest of the world will now have to dispense with the US as a defender of democracy, guarantor of global order, or even (as in Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev) a state we can do business with.

Anyone whose experience of the US began in the last eleven days would have no trouble recognising an archetypal kleptocracy, like Putin’s Russia or Mobutu’s Zaire (with a touch of Mao madness). The boss rakes off billions in tribute while his cronies scramble to please him, put each other down and collect their share of the loot. Regime supporters commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, while opponents are subject to both legal victimisation and threats of extra-legal terror against which they can expect no protection.

In dealing with such a regime, the only strategy is to buy off the boss, or a powerful underling, and hope that they stay bought long enough to deliver on their side of the bargain This approach is politely described as “transactional”, but without the implication that the transaction will necessarily be honoured. Dealing with kleptocrats can be highly profitable, as long as you get in and out quickly enough, but there’s no possibility of “doing business”, either commercial or political, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The problem is that for nearly everyone who matters, the last eleven days seem like an aberration. For decades, the US has been seen as the central pillar of a “rules-based order”, on which assumptions about the world were largely based. That’as true even for critics who pointed out that the rules were drawn up to favor the US, and that the US often breached them without any real consequences. And it’s true even though you can point to precedents for everything Trump had done.

But all that is over, and can’t be restored.

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(Hi all, wonderful to become part of this great blog! But now, directly on to some content!)

Imagine that you have a toothache, and a visit at the dentist reveals that a major operation is needed. You phone your health insurance. You listen to the voice of the chatbot, press the buttons to go through the menu. And then you hear: “We have evaluated your profile based on the data you have agreed to share with us. Your dental health behavior scores 6 out of 10. The suggested treatment plan therefore requires a co-payment of [insert some large sum of money here].”

This may sound like science fiction. But many other insurances, e.g. car insurances, already build on automated data being shared with them. If they were allowed, health insurers would certainly like to access our data as well – not only those from smart toothbrushes, but also credit card data, behavioral data (e.g. from step counting apps), or genetic data. If they were allowed to use them, they could move towards segmented insurance plans for specific target groups. As two commentators, on whose research I come back below, recently wrote about health insurance: “Today, public plans and nondiscrimination clauses, not lack of information, are what stands between integration and segmentation.”

If, like me, you’re interested in the relation between knowledge and institutional design, insurance is a fascinating topic. The basic idea of insurance is centuries old – here is a brief summary (skip a few paragraphs if you know this stuff). Because we cannot know what might happen to us in the future, but we can know that on an aggregate level, things will happen to people, it can make sense to enter an insurance contract, creating a pool that a group jointly contributes to. Those for whom the risks in question materialize get support from the pool. Those for whom it does not materialize may go through life without receiving any money, but they still know that they could get support if something happened to them. As such, insurance combines solidarity within a group with individual pre-caution.

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Politics has returned to Europe’s wealthy protectorates, which, after the phone-call on Jan. 20, 2025, between the then-President-elect and the Danish prime minister, suddenly find themselves faced with an open-ended era of shakedowns by its guardians and an unreliable big neighbor to the East. Neither its political class nor its aging, nostalgic population is prepared for this.

Qua democratic politician, it’s one thing to have skill at facilitating distributional bargaining among competing and shifting interest groups; it’s quite another to do so while simultaneously having to think through geopolitical alliances while relying on undermanned and underfunded militaries. Interestingly enough, with a shift toward new populist leaders Europe’s political class is also quite inexperienced in politics. It seems all but certain that during next month’s federal election, the most important European country and the only one that can provide political leadership, Germany, is itself facing a massive shift toward a political class inexperienced playing intra-European and global political chess at the same time.*

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Europeans have been behaving in defiance of Machiavellian classical social theory, which teaches that “The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.” (The Prince, Ch. 12) More bluntly (and more unpopular): a regime oriented toward protecting human rights presuppose good arms, too. The Europeans assumed that in an age of soft-power, a giant internal market, and win-win international/trade rules, they didn’t need good arms and could perfect their laws—even extend those through intra-European/EU expansion.

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Crooked Timber has survived more than 20 years by continuously refreshing our group. Members have left because they have said what they want to say, or just because life happens, and others have joined to add to the conversation. Today, we are welcoming Hannah Forsyth and Lisa Herzog.

Hannah is an Australian historian of capitalism, work and education. Her Substack newsletter, F*cking Capitalism covers these topics and more. She describes herself as a recovering work ethic junkie, but that hasn’t stopped her signing up to join the crew here at Crooked Timber.

Lisa is a German philosopher who works as a professor in political philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of Groningen University. She writes in particular on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and economic thought. Her most recent book is Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy. She has previously been on the team of the Justice-Everywhere blog, and is interested in all things related to workplace democracy and economic democracy.

We are all looking forward to the new perspectives Hannah and Lisa will bring.

At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, lots of leisure time and paid holidays, universal healthcare generous maternity provision, inclusion for people with disabilities, free education and universal childcare, freedom to form a relationship and maybe a family with the person of your choice (straight or gay), a woman’s right to choose, tolerance of everyone regardless of faith or race, political freedom and democratic elections under fair conditions, concern for the natural environment and so on. A vision of prosperity for all, even if some degree of inequality might be tolerated to provide incentives and so forth. This wasn’t particularly an ideal limited to the left (in fact parts of the left would have rejected it for something more robustly socialist) but could have been embraced, in its rough outlines, by everyone from the centre-left to people on the centre right such as, for example, Simone Veil.

Some parts of this radiant future even got built, to varying degrees, across parts of Europe other than Scandinavia, in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand. A realistic utopia, in fact.

But

Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.¹

Nobody currently thinks our future looks like Universal Scandinavia – and even in places where social democratic parties are in power, such as the UK – nobody thinks that they will advance even the tiniest step towards it. Rather, the likelihood is that even they will retreat. "Nice idea, but unaffordable."

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The Australian parliament has legislated what’s commonly described as as “social media ban” for people under 16. More precisely, it will require selected social media platforms to implement (unspecified) age verification technology for people wishing to create accounts. This measure was rushed through at the end of last year, at the expense of proposed legislation to limit advertising for online gambling.

I wrote a series of posts on my Substack blog looking at various aspects of the “ban” (TL;DR I don’t like it).

There’s too much for a CT post, so I’ll link to the posts instead
Part 1 dealt with the feasibility of a ban
Part 2 dealt with the evidence for and against
Part 3 pointed out the ban will do little or nothing to fix most of the harms attributed to social media
Part 4 suggested better responses to the problems young people are facing
Part 5 offered broader responses to the harm being done by platforms like X and Facebook

Feel free to comment here or there.

Recently I learned that at Yale University a “Report of the Committee on Institutional Voice” was published a few months ago. The committee was chaired by professors “Della Rocca & Rodríguez” and so hereafter, I refer to the report as “Della Rocca & Rodríguez.” According to an accompanying editorial by these two lead authors in the Yale News, The report is a response to “disagreement within the Yale community about whether, when and how leaders should speak — on behalf of the University or units within the University, on issues of public significance — particularly when strong differences of opinion on an issue exist.” As they note Yale is not alone in that respect.

As a non-trivial aside, the character of institutional voice matters to all universities. But is worth noting that the turmoil on various campuses of the past year has not resulted in a focus on institutional voice at all universities. For example, in my home country, the Netherlands, university committees are exploring now the existing policies on international, institutional collaborations. (This is a thinly veiled strategy to avoid focus exclusively on a boycott of Israeli institutions.) That North American universities are primarily focusing on institutional voice has much to do with the disastrous Congressional Testimony of the former Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and Columbia a year ago. Even in empire, the same politics is oddly local.

Since “Della Rocca & Rodríguez” is rather brief, I will not summarize the report (here). (Some of the key issues will be clear from what follows.) The formal focus of Della Rocca & Rodriquez is rather narrow: it’s concerned with institutional voice. In the report this is characterized as “whether and when university leaders should issue statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” Included in university leaders are not just “university leadership (the President, Provost, other central administrators, and deans),” but also “leaders speaking on behalf of other units of the university, including academic departments and programs.” As the report recognizes, institutional voice matters on campus (which is the committee’s main focus) and to wider, outside communities.

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I’ve already said all I plan to (for now) about what’s happening in the US. But if others want to discuss it, here’s an open thread.

Inspired by Chris’s recent photo-blogging post, I thought I’d share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck).

Incidentally, it’s also the church where Dante Alighieri’s funeral was celebrated (he was exiled in Ravenna).

There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline. {long and somewhat wonkish response follows}
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Those of us who live in Europe have reason to be very pessimistic about the next four years. The state that Europeans have relied upon as their security guarantee is now in the hands of the nationalist extreme right and the information space is saturated by the output of tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk who are either aligned with or beholden to that nationalist right and who openly fantasize about replacing elected European governments. These pressures come on top of military aggression from Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, austerity in public services, increased energy costs, stagnant living standards, a difficult green transition, demographic decline, and anxiety about immigration and cultural diversity. Most of these pressures are likely to be deliberately worsened by the incoming Trump regime in the hope of having its ideological allies come to power in European countries. In fact the very same figures who vaunted the importance of national sovereignty are salivating at the prospect of a great power interfering to their benefit in domesic affairs: so much for patriotism!

Resistance will be hampered on several fronts. First, the left and the labour movement, a popular bastion against fascism during earlier waves of ultra-nationalism, is weak and divided with its institutions such as parties and trade unions shells of what they once were as the result of changes in the class structure. Second, liberal and democratic values, tolerance and human rights, that might form some kind of principled rallying point have been badly compromised by mainstream parties’ desire to accomodate the so-called “legitimate concerns” of voters around migration and security, Widespread discrimination against minorities and growing toleration of mass death among irregular migrants as well as deals with dictatorships at Europe’s margins to contain would-be migrants exacerbate the abandonment of any pretence at humanitarian univeralism. European governments have been reluctant (or worse) to resist Israel’s actions in Palestine and the wider Middle East, again making a joke of Europe’s claimed values. Third, European leaders will be prevented from mounting any kind of principled resistance to US attack by the fact that, in the face of Russian aggression, they will feel the need to carry on pretending that the American enemy is in fact their friend and ally. The parallels with a toxic relationship with an abuser are obvious.
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