What an amusement park can teach us about central banks

Tim Harford in The FT

To Tivoli Gardens in the heart of Copenhagen, one of the world’s oldest amusement parks. It was founded 180 years ago, and its creator George Carstensen secured the land by petitioning King Christian VIII, arguing, “When the people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics.” 

In Tivoli, I don’t think about politics either. But during the wait to ride the Demon and the Star Flyer, I can’t help but think about economics. Specifically, I think about Robert Lucas’s charming speech, “What Economists Do”. It was delivered as a commencement address in 1988, seven years before the hugely influential macroeconomist was awarded the Nobel memorial prize. 

I revisited the speech when news reached me of Robert Lucas’s recent death at the age of 85. “We are basically storytellers,” wrote Lucas, “creators of make-believe economic systems.” 

To illustrate his point, he told a story about a depression in an amusement park. In Lucas’s imaginary park, people buy a wad of tickets at the entry kiosk and spend them on anything from rollercoaster rides to hotdogs. Each attraction is run as an independent business, while the ticket desk serves as a central bank. 

On a slow day, the ride owners will send their workers home. Both employment (hours worked) and the number of tickets bought (call that GDP if you wish) will vary depending on school holidays, the weather and chance. 

Should we call a slow Monday in March a depression? No, said Lucas. “By an economic depression, we mean something that ought not to happen, something pathological.” 

So then imagine that the central bank — sorry, the ticket kiosk — decides to crack down on fun by squeezing the money supply. Instead of issuing 100 tickets for DKr100, the kiosk charges DKr100 for 80 tickets. Importantly, it doesn’t tell the businesses in the park that it has decided to make this change. Without their consent or knowledge, it has effectively raised all their prices. What happens? 

Some customers grit their teeth and spend a bit more to ensure they get all the tickets they would have expected anyway. Others buy fewer tickets. Some walk away without buying any. 

Inside the park, tumbleweed. There are fewer customers, and they bring sandwiches rather than buying hotdogs. They spend less on the rides and take more time to enjoy freebies such as walking around the lake. Operators who had been planning to expand in the face of long queues will now not be so sure. Other operators who had worried that their ride was going out of style see gloomy confirmation and may close permanently to cut their losses. The amusement park as a whole will lose its mojo, with physical capacity, output and employment shrinking to match a misunderstood fall in demand. 

As Lucas explained, this slump “is indeed a kind of pathology. Customers are arriving, eager to spend . . . Concessionaires are ready and waiting to service them.” All the pieces are in place, but they don’t fit together because of a monetary policy mistake. 

Eventually, the park should recover its equilibrium. The ride owners can ask for fewer tickets per ride; the customers will come to realise that 80 tickets will buy as much as 100 tickets did before the price change. The amusement park will be lively again. But all this will take time, and permanent harm may have been done. 

Flip the story around: what if the central bank — sorry, the ticket kiosk — gets excited and hands out too many tickets instead? In effect, the kiosk has slashed all the prices without telling the concession-holders. Expecting bargains, people cram into the park. The hotdog stand runs out of hotdogs; the mustard and ketchup run dry. Park-goers spend most of their time queueing rather than rollercoasting. The businesses inside may call up extra staff, even borrow money to expand. Yet eventually they will realise the double-handfuls of tickets they’ve taken in aren’t worth as much as they expected. 

These stories tell us how a central bank might engineer a recession — or cause shortages and inflation. I find them a delightful window into how economies work. 

True, there are other types of recession. In my book The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, I told a true story about a recession in a prisoner-of-war camp in the 1940s, as described by one of the POWs, the economist R­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­A Radford. 

The camp, like the amusement park, had a simple economy. It was fuelled by the supply of packages from the Red Cross, the contents of which were then traded: the Sikh prisoners didn’t want razor blades or beef, the French were desperate for coffee, the English craved tea. 

The prison-camp recession occurred, not because the money supply was constricted, but because the Red Cross parcels stopped arriving — what an economist might call an “exogenous shock”. (For a real-world example, imagine a war interrupting the supply of oil, natural gas and food. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to do that.) 

These little stories teach us that sometimes an economy can be dragged down by a simple mistake in monetary policy, while sometimes a recession occurs because the economy has hit an implacable obstacle. One job of a good central bank is to make sure that it perceives the difference, something central bankers are puzzling over right now. 

The disadvantage with such stories, admitted Lucas, “is that we are not really interested in understanding and preventing depressions in hypothetical amusement parks . . . the analogy that one person finds persuasive, his neighbour may well find ridiculous.” 

So then what to do? “Keep trying to tell better and better stories . . . it is fun and interesting and, really, there is no practical alternative.”

Jordan Peterson's Guide to Speaking

 

How to be a Great Public Speaker

 

The Shape of Stories

 Kurt Vonnegut

The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument

Hidebound views on subjects such as the climate crisis and Brexit are the norm – but the appliance of science may sway stubborn opinions writes David Robson in The Guardian 

 

Illustration: Getty Images/Observer Design


“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s,” wrote Mark Twain.

Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable – to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events – but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.

Consider the “illusion of explanatory depth”. When asked about government policies and their consequences, most people believe that they could explain their workings in great detail. If put to the test, however, their explanations are vague and incoherent. The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.

Besides being less substantial than we think, our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others. When it comes to understanding the EU, for instance, Brexiters will know the overall costs of membership, while remainers will cite its numerous advantages. Although the overall level of knowledge is equal on both sides, there is little overlap in the details.

Simply asking why people support or oppose a policy is pointless. You need to ask how something works to have an effect

Politics can also scramble our critical thinking skills. Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint; if they are shown contrary evidence, however, they will be far more critical of the tiniest hole in the argument. This phenomenon is known as “motivated reasoning”.

A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws. Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject: although they remember the general content, they have forgotten the details. “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,” Prof Matthew Fisher of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says. That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.

Little wonder that discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.

Ask ‘how’ rather than ‘why’
Thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, many political arguments will be based on false premises, spoken with great confidence but with a minimal understanding of the issues at hand. For this reason, a simple but powerful way of deflating someone’s argument is to ask for more detail. “You need to get the ‘other side’ focusing on how something would play itself out, in a step by step fashion”, says Prof Dan Johnson at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. By revealing the shallowness of their existing knowledge, this prompts a more moderate and humble attitude.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray and a pro-Brexit protester face off outside parliament earlier this year. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

In 2013, Prof Philip Fernbach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues asked participants in cap-and-trade schemes – designed to limit companies’ carbon emissions – to describe in depth how they worked. Subjects initially took strongly polarised views but after the limits of their knowledge were exposed, their attitudes became more moderate and less biased.

It’s important to note that simply asking why people supported or opposed the policy – without requiring them to explain how it works – had no effect, since those reasons could be shallower (“It helps the environment”) with little detail. You need to ask how something works to get the effect.

If you are debating the merits of a no-deal Brexit, you might ask someone to describe exactly how the UK’s international trade would change under WTO terms. If you are challenging a climate emergency denier, you might ask them to describe exactly how their alternative theories can explain the recent rise in temperatures. It’s a strategy that the broadcaster James O’Brien employs on his LBC talk show – to powerful effect.

Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story
If you are trying to debunk a particular falsehood – like a conspiracy theory or fake news – you should make sure that your explanation offers a convincing, coherent narrative that fills all the gaps left in the other person’s understanding.

Consider the following experiment by Prof Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan and Prof Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Subjects read stories about a fictional senator allegedly under investigation for bribery who had subsequently resigned from his post. Written evidence – a letter from prosecutors confirming his innocence – did little to change the participants’ suspicions of his guilt. But when offered an alternative explanation for his resignation – to take on another role – participants changed their minds. The same can be seen in murder trials: people are more likely to accept someone’s innocence if another suspect has also been accused, since that fills the biggest gap in the story: whodunnit.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid and Rory Stewart taking part in a BBC TV debate earlier this month. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

The persuasive power of well-constructed narratives means that it’s often useful to discuss the sources of misinformation, so that the person can understand why they were being misled in the first place. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, may believe a medical conspiracy to cover up the supposed dangers of vaccines. You are more likely to change minds if you replace that narrative with an equally cohesive and convincing story – such as Andrew Wakefield’s scientific fraud, and the fact that he was set to profit from his paper linking autism to MMR vaccines. Just stating the scientific evidence will not be as persuasive.

Reframe the issue
Each of our beliefs is deeply rooted in a much broader and more complex political ideology. Climate crisis denial, for instance, is now inextricably linked to beliefs in free trade, capitalism and the dangers of environmental regulation.

Attacking one issue may therefore threaten to unravel someone’s whole worldview – a feeling that triggers emotionally charged motivated reasoning. It is for this reason that highly educated Republicans in the US deny the overwhelming evidence.

You are not going to alter someone’s whole political ideology in one discussion, so a better strategy is to disentangle the issue at hand from their broader beliefs, or to explain how the facts can still be accommodated into their worldview. A free-market capitalist who denies global warming might be far more receptive to the evidence if you explain that the development of renewable energies could lead to technological breakthroughs and generate economic growth.

Appeal to an alternative identity
If the attempt to reframe the issue fails, you might have more success by appealing to another part of the person’s identity entirely.

Someone’s political affiliation will never completely define them, after all. Besides being a conservative or a socialist, a Brexiter or a remainer, we associate ourselves with other traits and values – things like our profession, or our role as a parent. We might see ourselves as a particularly honest person, or someone who is especially creative. “All people have multiple identities,” says Prof Jay Van Bavel at New York University, who studies the neuroscience of the “partisan brain”. “These identities can become active at any given time, depending on the circumstances.”

You are more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly. You will also come across better to onlookers

It’s natural that when talking about politics, the salient identity will be our support for a particular party or movement. But when people are asked to first reflect on their other, nonpolitical values, they tend to become more objective in discussion on highly partisan issues, as they stop viewing facts through their ideological lens.

You could try to use this to your advantage during a heated conversation, with subtle flattery that appeals to another identity and its set of values; if you are talking to a science teacher, you might try to emphasise their capacity to appraise evidence even-handedly. The aim is to help them recognise that they can change their mind on certain issues while staying true to other important elements of their personality.

Persuade them to take an outside perspective
Another simple strategy to encourage a more detached and rational mindset is to ask your conversation partner to imagine the argument from the viewpoint of someone from another country. How, for example, would someone in Australia or Iceland view Boris Johnson as our new prime minister?

Prof Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, and Prof Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have shown that this strategy increases “psychological distance” from the issue at hand and cools emotionally charged reasoning so that you can see things more objectively. During the US presidential elections, for instance, their participants were asked to consider how someone in Iceland would view the candidates. They were subsequently more willing to accept the limits of their knowledge and to listen to alternative viewpoints; after the experiment, they were even more likely to join a bipartisan discussion group.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The front pages of two New York newspapers on Friday 2 June 2017, as Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. Photograph: Richard B Levine/Alamy

This is only one way to increase someone’s psychological distance, and there are many others. If you are considering policies with potentially long-term consequences, you could ask them to imagine viewing the situation through the eyes of someone in the future. However you do it, encouraging this shift in perspective should make your friend or relative more receptive to the facts you are presenting, rather than simply reacting with knee-jerk dismissals.

Be kind
Here’s a lesson that certain polemicists in the media might do well to remember – people are generally much more rational in their arguments, and more willing to own up to the limits of their knowledge and understanding, if they are treated with respect and compassion. Aggression, by contrast, leads them to feel that their identity is threatened, which in turn can make them closed-minded.

Assuming that the purpose of your argument is to change minds, rather than to signal your own superiority, you are much more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly rather than belligerently, and affirming your respect for the person, even if you are telling them some hard truths. As a bonus, you will also come across better to onlookers. “There’s a lot of work showing that third-party observers always attribute high levels of competence when the person is conducting themselves with more civility,” says Dr Joe Vitriol, a psychologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it in the 18th century: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”

Our job as scientists is to find the truth. But we must also be storytellers

Nick Enfield in The Guardian

Scientists often struggle to communicate the findings of research. Our subject matter can be technical and not easily digested by a general audience. And our discoveries – from a new type of tessellating pentagon to the presence of gravitational waves in space – have no meaning until that meaning can be defined and agreed upon. To address this, we are often advised to use the tools of narrative.

This advice is now found everywhere from training sessions to blogs to the most prominent scientific journals. An article in Nature magazine advises scientists to relate data to the world by using “the age-old custom of telling a story.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences cites the “increased comprehension, interest, and engagement” that narrative offers. And another study shows that writing in a narrative style increases uptake of scientific results.

What is a story? Here is screenwriting guru John Truby’s definition: “A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.” This is every Hollywood film. At the centre is a person with a well-defined goal. They pursue that goal, against the odds, and after various twists and turns the story comes to a satisfying end. Most importantly, as writer John Collee explains, a good story will have a meaning, a relatable moral with universal resonance for audiences.

How can scientists be expected to use storytelling when we are not trained in the craft? True, we are not professional screenwriters. But like everyone we are nevertheless well-practiced storytellers. When you tell someone about a frightening incident that happened on the bus to work, your narrative may be ordinary but it has the core elements of story: situation, complication, resolution, and most importantly, meaning. You are not just telling me what happened, you are telling me what it means to you, how you feel about it. And you are inviting me to feel the same. In this way, stories are one of our most important social bonding mechanisms.

So, what could be wrong with urging scientists to take advantage of our natural storytelling skills? In an article titled “Against storytelling of scientific results”, Yarden Katz explains that certain defining features of narrative – someone pursing a goal; a satisfying resolution that resolves this; a meaning that draws people in – are antithetical to key ideals and practices of scientific work.


Human beings, scientists included, have brains that are not evolved for dispassionate thinking

One objection is that, according to the scientific norm known as disinterestedness, scientists should not aim for any particular result. Our job is to find the truth. So, we should first establish the facts, and then use those facts to decide what our conclusions are. But too often, people have it the wrong way around. We start with our pre-established beliefs, and then look for evidence to support them. Another objection is that because science is a permanently unfinished line of business, there can be no satisfying endings.

Further, the scientist’s job is to inform, not persuade. Advice in Nature from authors Martin Krzywinski and Alberto Cairo seems to challenge this norm: “Maintain focus of your presentation by leaving out detail that does not advance the plot”; “inviting readers to draw their own conclusions is risky.” Most scientists would agree that this is going too far.

Katz’s concerns are well taken. But what should be done? Can we be truly dispassionate about what we are doing in science? There are reasons to think that even when we are operating in the rarefied atmosphere of scientific endeavor, we are never not wrapping our lives in stories.

Human beings, scientists included, have brains that are not evolved for dispassionate thinking. Bugs in our reasoning from the confirmation bias to the gambler’s fallacy make our natural thought processes deeply subjective and partial. And these are precisely the kinds of cognitive propensities that make storytelling stick so well. Even if an exemplary scientist has trained herself to be utterly objective, her audience will always bring their biased, story-gobbling minds.

This is why we have little choice but to apply the philosophy of judo to the problem of communicating scientific work and findings. Rather than struggle against cognitive biases, we need to work with them if we are going to keep them in check. Facts can be collected but they need to be interpreted. To interpret a fact is to give it meaning. And this is nothing other than storytelling. Only with a story can the facts be communicated, and only then can they become part of the received knowledge that drives the very possibility of scientific progress.

Scientists do not have the luxury of forgoing storytelling. We need not fear that storytelling will compromise our objectivity. If we believe that we have the right story, then we should tell it. Only then can it be evaluated. Because science is a collective enterprise, our stories will succeed when they are validated by broad agreement in our community.

It is our responsibility to become at least literate, if not masterly, in storytelling about our work. Our audiences need stories. So we must tell the right stories about our findings, if we are going to treat those findings with the respect they need.

When Your Capitalist Economy Fails, Blame the Foreigners!

Guftagoo with Boman Irani

Thinking in Stories

The so-called post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply

Tabish Khair in The Hindu

Say the word ‘thinking’, and the image evoked is that of abstract ideas, facts, numbers and data. But what if I say that this is our first and most common error about the nature of thinking? As religions have always known, human thinking is conducted primarily in stories, not facts or numbers.

Human beings might be the only living animals that can think in stories. Facts and information of some sort exist for a deer and a wolf too, but fiction, and thinking in fiction?

Now, stories are celebrated for many things: as repositories of folk knowledge or accumulated wisdom, as relief from the human condition, as entertainment, as enabling some cognitivist processes, even as the best way to get yourself and your children to fall asleep! But all this misses the main point about stories: they are the most common, most pervasive, and probably the oldest way for humans to think. 

Problem of a fundamentalist reading

Having missed this point, we then proceed to reduce stories — and their most complex enunciation, literature — to much less than what they are or should be. For instance, a good story is not just a narrative. It does not simply take us from point A to point Z, with perhaps an easy moral appended. Religious fundamentalists who see stories only in those terms end up destroying the essence of their religions.

Let us take one example: the Book of Job. The fundamentalist reading of the Book of Job stresses Job’s faith. In this version, the story is simple: Job is a prosperous, God-fearing man, and God is very proud of him. Satan, however, argues that Job is such a good man only because God has been kind to him. Give him adversity and you will see his faith waver, says Satan. God allows Satan to test Job, by depriving him of prosperity, family, health. But Job’s faith does not waver, and finally all is restored to him. The fundamentalist reading — which reduces the story to a narrative — is simple: this is a parable about true faith.

To leave the Book of Job there is to stop thinking about it. Because the narrative of Job is secondary to its problematic. One can even argue that the narrative is misleading: in the restoration of Job’s children, health and wealth, we have a resolution that fails in our terms. We do not expect such miracles in real life. Hence, it is not the narrative of Job that is significant.

What is significant and useful are the problems of the story. For instance, when the righteous, believing Job is afflicted with death and suffering, such questions are raised (in the story and by Job’s friends): Who is to be blamed? Is God unjust or uncaring? Has Job sinned in hiding (or ignorance) and is therefore being punished? Does it all make any sense?

Job adopts a difficult position throughout the story: among other things, he neither blames God, nor does he blame himself, but he demands an answer. When one thinks of this, one comes to the kernel of the thought of this story: how does one live best in a world where undeserved suffering sometimes befalls the good? It is not the unbelievable narrative which makes this a significant story; it is the way Job’s reactions, his friends’ prescriptions and the problematic of the entire story make us think. Moreover, as God’s incomplete ‘answers’ to Job indicate, stories can make us think in very complex ways.

Religions have always known that human beings think best and most easily in stories. That is why religions consciously think through stories: the ‘facts’ and ‘details’ of these stories change with changing human circumstances, but what does not change is the bid and ability to make us contemplate, imagine, reason, induce, examine — in other words, think.

Strangely, politicians have also known this. All major political movements have depended on the power of stories. In the decades when the Left was on the ascendency, it had a powerful story to tell — of human exploitation, human resistance and eventually human achievement in the shape of a ‘classless’ society. In recent years, the Right has managed to tell us stories that, for various reasons, seem more convincing to many: inevitable state-aided neo-liberalism, for instance. Narendra Modi’s victory in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey, and Donald Trump’s in the U.S. — all three are driven by powerful narratives that explain the ‘past’ and promise a ‘future.’

Failure of academics

Unfortunately, the one area where thinking in stories was taken seriously — and not just reduced to mechanistic explanations — has lost confidence in itself. The Humanities have been too busy trying to justify stories in all possible terms — entertainment, discourse, narratology, cognitivist structures, reader response, etc. — instead of working on how to best think in stories. The total failure of academics, publishers and editors to talk of literature as literature — not just what sells, or a set of ‘reader responses’, or a soporific, or passing politics, or ageless ‘Darwinism,’ etc. — is an index of this failure.

The so-called post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply. Just as there are ways in which facts can be used positively or negatively, there are ways in which stories can be read — to make us think or to prevent us from thinking. Literature — even in the days when it was written with a capital ‘L’ — was the one area of the Humanities where this was a serious endeavour. This has changed at great cost to human civilisation.

Humans still think primarily in stories. But the failure of standards in education and literary criticism has combined with the rise of fundamentalism (which is not piety or religious thought), scientism (which is not science) and numerical neo-liberalism (which is not even capitalism) to deprive more and more people of the ability to think critically, deeply and sensitively in stories. This explains many of our current political and economic woes.

How To Begin Your Presentation

 Simon Sinek

The Left should learn about plain speaking from George Galloway

OWEN JONES in The Independent

Sunday 17 February 2013

The Right is better at communicating because it uses stories so much

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No politician is as demonised or as despised by the political and media establishment as George Galloway.

No politician is as demonised or as despised by the political and media establishment as George Galloway. It is only partly because he is afflicted with the disease of charismatic British left-wing political figures, which is to provide ample self-destructive material to feed his many enemies. He was mocked for a largely disastrous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. He has made unacceptable comments about rape – “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion” – that repulsed virtually everybody. He has made apparently sympathetic remarks about brutal dictators (although, unlike some of his detractors, he hasn’t sold them arms, funded them or even been paid by them).

A few weeks ago, he stood in Parliament to demand David Cameron explain why Britain was apparently intervening to save Mali from Islamist thugs, when it was supporting very similar groups in Syria. “Wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world,” the Prime Minister spat back, “he will have the support of [Galloway].” All sides of the House roared their approval: and so the political elite closed ranks against a man sent by the people of Bradford to express their disgust with the Westminster club.

Surprising, then, to see the response he attracted on last week’s Question Time. Yes, when he first appeared on the nation’s TV screens, a debate raged on Twitter about whether he looked more like Dr No or Ming the Merciless. And yet he was met with repeated, resounding applause from the audience. The answer is clear. Labour’s representative on the panel, Mary Creagh, spoke the language of the political elite – technocratic, stripped of passion, with too much jargon and management speak, with phrases like “direction of travel”. But Galloway offered direct, clear answers; he spoke eloquently, and with language that resonated with non-politicos; he had enthusiasm, conviction and – to borrow a Tony Benn phrase – said what he meant and meant what he said.

A lesson for Labour, then. Even a figure with a long-haul flight’s worth of baggage can be cheered if they use populist language that connects with people and their experiences. But as New Labour remorselessly helped to professionalise politics, it bred a generation of “on-message” politicians with focus group-approved lines. Verbless sentences – “new challenges, new ideas”; macho cliches – “taking the tough decisions”; platitudes like “fairness”. A new breed of political Kreminologists were assembled to decipher insufferably dull speeches and articles by politicians.

In truth, the Right is better at communicating because it uses stories so much; the Left often rely on cold facts and statistics. But people connect better with stories. The classic right-wing story of our time is to compare the national deficit to a household budget. Any serious economist will tell you this is gibberish – which house has a money printing press, and will mum get sacked if young Dan stops spending his pocket money? – but it resonates with people. “Of course – if I’m in debt, why would I borrow even more money to get out of it?” voters think, even as the Government is forced to do exactly that because of the failures of austerity. The same goes with relentless examples of scroungers in mansions full of feral children and plasma TVs. A tiny unrepresentative minority are portrayed as the tip of an iceberg, scrubbing away the reality of unemployed and disabled people; but because it taps into a very small element of truth, it resonates.

Not that I’m saying the Left should indulge in casual dishonesty or inaccurate generalisations. But policies can seem pretty abstract until they relate to human beings. Take the poisoned welfare debate: the scrounger caricature needs to be smashed with stories of low-paid workers struggling to make ends meet; unemployed people desperately looking for work; disabled people having their state support removed – all of whom are having their benefits slashed.

“Facts and figures, when used, should create a moral point in a memorable way,” explains US political linguist George Lakoff. His point is that “framing” is key: that is having, an over-arching narrative, or story. When you start using the language of your opponent, you have lost. This is exactly what several senior Labour politicians have a habit of doing. The “debate” on the welfare state is a classic example. Management-consultants-turned-politicians like Liam Byrne accept political goalposts set by the Right, de facto accepting the “scrounger” or “skiver” caricatures, leaving them playing on territory where the Tories will always win.

New Labour ideologues always feared policies that sounded too left-wing, but the truth is most voters do not think in terms of “left” and “right”, they think in terms of issues that have to be addressed, with policies that are coherent, convincing and make sense with their own experiences. The Right have a habit of using moderate language to sell radical ideas; the Left would do well to learn from them. It needs to drop clinical terms: use the price of bread or vegetables or surging energy prices rather than “inflation”, for example. The Right often use hooks in the news – like the horrific cases of Karen Matthewsor Baby P – to make a wider point, as though they reveal an otherwise ignored truth about “the other Britain”. The Left certainly should not go to such crass or tasteless lengths, but the principle remains.

The Right have turned having outriders into an artform. Take the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a big business-funded hard-right lobby group posturing  as the voice of people who pay taxes. They float radical right-wing ideas impossible for a mainstream Conservative politician to propose. In doing so, they shift the goalposts of debate to the Right. “I wouldn’t go quite as far as that, however...” a Tory MP can say, making a previously radical idea seem moderate.

The appetite for left-wing populism is greater than it has been for a generation. Much of the Establishment – from banks to the media – have been discredited by scandal. Free-market capitalism is a wreck. But the Left is a long way from learning how to put its case. Gorgeous George is one of the most charismatic politicians of our time, but also one of the most divisive, and still manages to win over the audience. You don’t have to like him; but, if you want to change the world, you do have to learn from him.    

On the 12th day of Christmas ... your gift will just be junk

Every year we splurge on pointless, planet-trashing products, most of which are not wanted. Why not just bake them a cake?

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 10 December 2012 20.30 GMT

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

 

There's nothing they need, nothing they don't own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly-button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub-holder; a "hilarious" inflatable Zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World Map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they're in landfill. For 30 seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that, of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold on to are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (wearing out or breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine T-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped iPhone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog. No one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smartphone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make "personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets". Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and by the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot. No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food, or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It's grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask, "spending on what?" When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. "I always knit my gifts," says a woman in a TV ad for an electronics outlet. "Well you shouldn't," replies the narrator. An ad for a Google tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7's special features. The best things in life are free, but we've found a way of selling them to you.

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010, a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population. The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this Earth are diminished.

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week's edition of Radio 4's The Moral Maze, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it somehow with authoritarianism. When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for God's sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don't.

Ian Stewart's top 10 popular mathematics books

Ian Stewart is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has written over 80 books, mainly popular mathematics, and has won three gold medals for his work on the public understanding of science. In collaboration with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen he wrote the Science of Discworld series. His new book, 17 Equations That Changed the World, is published by Profile.

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"'Popular mathematics' may sound like a contradiction in terms. That's what makes the genre so important: we have to change that perception. Mathematics is the Cinderella science: undervalued, underestimated, and misunderstood. Yet it has been one of the main driving forces behind human society for at least three millennia, it powers all of today's technology, and it underpins almost every aspect of our daily lives.
"It's not really surprising that few outside the subject appreciate it, though. School mathematics is so focused on getting the right answer and passing the exam that there is seldom an opportunity to find out what it's all for. The hard core of real mathematics is extremely difficult, and it takes six or seven years to train a research mathematician after they leave school. Popular mathematics provides an entry route for non-specialists. It allows them to appreciate where mathematics came from, who created it, what it's good for, and where it's going, without getting tangled up in the technicalities. It's like listening to music instead of composing it.
"There are many ways to make real mathematics accessible. Its history reveals the subject as a human activity and gives a feel for the broad flow of ideas over the centuries. Biographies of great mathematicians tell us what it's like to work at the frontiers of human knowledge. The great problems, the ones that hit the news media when they are finally solved after centuries of effort, are always fascinating. So are the unsolved ones and the latest hot research areas. The myriad applications of mathematics, from medicine to the iPad, are an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration."

1. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel

The self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan had a flair for strange and beautiful formulas, so unusual that mathematicians are still coming to grips with their true meaning. He was born into a poor Brahmin family in 1887 and was pursuing original research in his teens. In 1912, he was brought to work at Cambridge. He died of malnutrition and other unknown causes in 1920, leaving a rich legacy that is still not fully understood. There has never been another mathematical life story like it: absolutely riveting.

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

One of the great cult books, a very original take on the logical paradoxes associated with self-reference, such as "this statement is false". Hofstadter combines the mathematical logic of Kurt Gödel, who proved that some questions in arithmetic can never be answered, with the etchings of Maurits Escher and the music of Bach. Frequent dramatic dialogues between Lewis Carroll's characters Achilles and the Tortoise motivate key topics in a highly original manner, along with their friend Crab who invents the tortoise-chomping record player. DNA and computers get extensive treatment too.

3. The Colossal Book of Mathematics by Martin Gardner

In his long-running Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, Gardner – a journalist with no mathematical training – created the field of recreational mathematics. On the surface his columns were about puzzles and games, but they all concealed mathematical principles, some simple, some surprisingly deep. He combined a playful and clear approach to his subject with a well-developed taste for what was mathematically significant. The book consists of numerous selections from his columns, classified according to the mathematical area involved. Learn how to make a hexaflexagon and why playing Brussels sprouts is a waste of time.

4. Euclid in the Rainforest by Joseph Mazur

A thoroughly readable account of the meaning of truth in mathematics, presented through a series of quirky adventures in the Greek Islands, the jungles around the Orinoco River, and elsewhere. Examines tricky concepts like infinity, topology, and probability through tall tales and anecdotes. Three different kinds of truth are examined: formal classical logic, the role of the infinite, and inference by plausible reasoning. The story of the student who believed nothing except his calculator is an object lesson for everyone who thinks mathematics is just 'sums'.

5. Four Colours Suffice by Robin Wilson

In 1852 Francis Guthrie, a young South African mathematician, was attempting to colour the counties in a map of England. Guthrie discovered that he needed only four different colours to ensure that any two adjacent counties had different colours. After some experimentation he convinced himself that the same goes for any map whatsoever. This is the remarkable story of how mathematicians eventually proved he was right, but only with the aid of computers, bringing into question the meaning of "proof". It contains enough detail to be satisfying, but remains accessible and informative throughout.

6. What is Mathematics Really? by Reuben Hersh

The classic text What is Mathematics? by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins focused on the subject's nuts and bolts. It answered its title question by example. Hersh takes a more philosophical view, based on his experience as a professional mathematician. The common working philosophy of most mathematicians is a kind of vague Platonism: mathematical concepts have some sort of independent existence in some ideal world. Although this is what it feels like to insiders, Hersh argues that mathematics is a collective human construct – like money or the Supreme Court. However, it is a construct constrained by its own internal logic; it's not arbitrary. You choose the concepts that interest you, but you don't get to choose how they behave.

7. Magical Mathematics by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham

Both authors are top-rank mathematicians with years of stage performances behind them, and their speciality is mathematical magic. They show how mathematics relates to juggling and reveal the secrets behind some amazing card tricks. Here's one. The magician mails a pack of cards to anyone, asking them to shuffle it and choose a card. Then he shuffles the cards again, and mails half of them to the magician—not saying whether the chosen card is included. By return mail, the magician names the selected card. No trickery: it all depends on the mathematics of shuffles.

8. Games of Life by Karl Sigmund

Biologists' understanding of many vital features of the living world, such as sex and survival, depends on the theory of evolution. One of the basic theoretical tools here is the mathematics of game theory, in which several players compete by choosing from a list of possible strategies. The children's game of rock-paper-scissors is a good example. The book illuminates such questions as how genes spread through a population and the evolution of cooperation, by finding the best strategies for games such as cat and mouse, the battle of the sexes, and the prisoner's dilemma. On the borderline between popular science and an academic text, but eminently readable without specialist knowledge.

9. Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder edited by Rudy Rucker

A collection of 23 science fiction short stories, each of which centres on mathematics. Two are by Martin Gardner, and many of the great writers of SF are represented: Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl. The high point is Norman Kagan's utterly hilarious "The Mathenauts", in which only mathematicians can travel through space, because space is mathematical – and, conversely, anything mathematical can be reality. An isomorphomechanism is essential equipment. Between them, these tales cover most of the undergraduate mathematics syllabus, though not in examinable form.

10. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton

There ought to be a great classic in this top 10, and there is none greater. I've put it last because it's not popularisation in the strict sense. However, it slips in because it communicated to the world one of the very greatest ideas of all time: Nature has laws, and they can be expressed in the language of mathematics. Using nothing more complicated than Euclid's geometry, Newton developed his laws of motion and gravity, applying them to the motion of the planets and strange wobbles in the position of the Moon. He famously said that he "stood on the shoulders of giants", and so he did, but this book set the scientific world alight. As John Maynard Keyes wrote, Newton was a transitional figure of immense stature: "the last of the magicians … the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage." No mathematical book has had more impact.

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Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room

The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler

(The essay below appears as a preface to my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). [1]

Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.

The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. [2] For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.

But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.

Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.

Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern political theory, which is based on the principle of rational self-interest. At the threshold of extinction, the political scientists' clever models break down. We "do not negotiate with terrorists". But a bank robber holding hostages is a terrorist of sorts, and the police negotiate with such miscreants as a matter of course. And what if the bank robber knows he will die of an incurable disease in a matter of weeks? That changes the negotiation. The simple truth - call it Spengler's Universal Law #1 - A man, or a nation, at the brink of death does not have a "rational self-interest".

Conventional geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such as territory, natural resources, and command of technology, does not address how peoples will behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to resemble the real world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the willingness or unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring a new generation into the world.

Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.
Analysis of national interests cannot explain why some nations go to war without hope of winning, or why other nations will not fight even to defend their vital interests. It cannot explain the historical fact that peoples fight harder, accepting a higher level of sacrifice in blood and treasure, when all hope of victory is past. Conventional geopolitical analysis cannot explain the causes of population collapse either, any more than its consequences - for example, under what circumstances strategic reverses (notably the two world wars of the past century) may crush the aspirations of the losers and result in apathy and demographic death.

Why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of self-destruction? Part of the problem lies in our definition of rationality. Under normal circumstances we think it irrational for a middle-aged man to cash in his insurance policy and spend money as fast as possible. But if the person in question has a terminal illness and no heirs, we think it quite reasonable to spend it all quickly, like Otto Kringelein in Grand Hotel or his updated equivalent, Queen Latifah's character in The Last Holiday. And if we know that we shall presently die of rabies, what is to prevent us from biting everyone we dislike? Countries sometimes suffer the equivalent of terminal illness. What seems suicidal to Americans may appear rational to an existentially challenged people confronting its imminent mortality.

Self-immolation of endangered peoples is sadly common. Stone-age cultures often disintegrate upon contact with the outside world. Their culture breaks down, and suicides skyrocket. An Australian researcher writes about "suicide contagion or cluster deaths - the phenomenon of indigenous people, particularly men from the same community taking their own lives at an alarming rate". [3] Canada's Aboriginal Health Foundation reports, "The overall suicide rate among First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population; the rate among Inuit is still higher - 6 to 11 times higher than the general population." [4] Suicide is epidemic among Amazon tribes. The London Telegraph reported on November 19, 2000,

The largest tribe of Amazonian Indians, the 27,000-strong Guarani, are being devastated by a wave of suicides among their children, triggered by their coming into contact with the modern world. Once unheard of among Amazonian Indians, suicide is ravaging the Guarani, who live in the southwest of Brazil, an area that now has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. More than 280 Guarani have taken their own lives in the past 10 years, including 26 children under the age of 14 who have poisoned or hanged themselves. Alcoholism has become widespread, as has the desire to own radios, television sets and denim jeans, bringing an awareness of their poverty. Community structures and family unity have broken down and sacred rituals come to a halt.

Of the more than 6,000 languages now spoken on the planet, two become extinct each week, and by most estimates half will fall silent by the end of the century. [5] A United Nations report claims that nine-tenths of the languages now spoken will become extinct in the next hundred years. [6] Most endangered languages have a very small number of speakers. Perhaps a thousand distinct languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, many by tribes of only a few hundred members. Several are disappearing tribal languages spoken in the Amazon rainforest, the Andes Mountains, or the Siberian taiga. Eighteen languages have only one surviving speaker. It is painful to imagine how the world must look to these individuals. They are orphaned in eternity, wiped clean of memory, their existence reduced to the exigency of the moment.

But are these dying remnants of primitive societies really so different from the rest of us? Mortality stalks most of the peoples of the world - not this year or next, but within the horizon of human reckoning. A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. Fertility has fallen so far in parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian will be endangered within a century and German, Japanese, and Italian within two. The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today's more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today's cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.

The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon, and the Islamist boast, "You love life, and we love death." Which brings us to Spengler's Universal Law #2: When the nations of the world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. Like the terminally ill patient cashing in his insurance money, a culture that anticipates its own extinction has a different standard of rationality than does conventional political science.

Game theorists have tried to make political strategy into a quantitative discipline. Players with a long-term interest think differently than players with a short-term interest. A swindler who has no expectation of encountering his victim again will take what he can and run; a merchant who wants repeat customers will act honestly as a matter of self-interest. By the same token, the game theorists contends, nations learn that it is in their interest to act as responsible members of the world community, for the long-run advantages of good behavior outweigh the passing benefits of predation.

But what if there isn't any long run - not, at least, for some of the "players" in the "game"? The trouble with applying game theory to the problem of existential war is that the players may not expect to be there for the nth iteration of the game. Entire peoples sometimes find themselves faced with probable extinction, so that no peaceful solution appears to be a solution for them.

Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world's cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. Many of them rather would die fighting. 

Paradoxically it is possible for wars of annihilation to stem from rational choice, for the range of choices always must be bounded by the supposition that the chooser will continue to exist. Existential criteria, that is, trump the ordinary calculus of success and failure. If one or more of the parties knows that peace implies the end of its existence, it has no motive to return to peace. That is how the radical Islamists of Hamas view the future of Muslim society. A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome. Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.

But why are Muslims - and Europeans, and Japanese - living under a societal death sentence? Why are populations collapsing in the modern world? Demographers have identified several different factors associated with population decline: urbanization, education and literacy, the modernization of traditional societies. Children in traditional society had an economic value, as agricultural labor and as providers for elderly parents; urbanization and pension systems turned children into a cost rather than a source of income. And female literacy is a powerful predictor of population decline among the world's countries. Mainly poor and illiterate women in Mali and Niger bear eight children in a lifetime, while literate and affluent women in the industrial world bear one or two.

But what determines whether it is one child or two? Children also have a spiritual value. That is why the degree of religious faith explains a great deal of the variation in population growth rates among the countries of the world. The industrial world's lowest fertility rates are encountered among the nations of Eastern Europe where atheism was the official ideology for generations. The highest fertility rates are found in countries with a high degree of religious faith, namely the United States and Israel. And demographers have identified religion as a crucial factor in the differences among populations within countries. When faith goes, fertility vanishes, too. The death-spiral of birth rates in most of the industrial world has forced demographers to think in terms of faith. Dozens of new studies document the link between religious belief and fertility.

But why do some religions seem to provide better protection against the sterilizing effects of modernity than others? The fastest demographic decline ever registered in recorded history is taking place today in Muslim countries; demographic winter is descending fastest in the fifth of the world where religion most appears to dominate. And even more puzzling: why does one religion (Christianity) seem to inoculate a people against demographic decline in one place (America) but not in another (Europe)? In many parts of the world, what once looked like an indestructible rock of faith has melted in the hot light of modernity. In others, modernity has only added compost for the growth of faith. Apparently some kinds of faith will survive in the modern world, and others will fail.

Strategic analysts and politicians are poorly equipped to understand these new and disturbing circumstances, with their overarching implications for political strategy and economics. To make sense of the world today we must do better than secular political science, which pigeon-holes faith as one more belief-structure among the other belief-structures in its collection of specimens.

Our political science is uniquely ill-equipped to make sense of a global crisis whose ultimate cause is spiritual. But was not always so. From the advent of Christianity to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the West saw politics through the lens of faith. St Augustine's fifth-century treatise The City of God looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood that civil society as a congregation - a body bound together by common loves, as opposed to Cicero's state founded only on common interests. (In the concluding chapter, we will consider Augustine's view as a lodestar for an American foreign policy that realistically addresses the threats created by the imminent demographic collapse of nations.)

We might call Augustine's view "theopolitics." A millennium later, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes changed the subject, to the individual's desire for power, wealth, and personal survival. Hobbes, the 17th-century grandfather of modern political science, introduced a radically truncated anthropology, centered on the individual's struggle for survival. The state, he argued, was a compact among individuals who survival prospects were poor in a "state of nature"; thus they ceded their individual rights to a sovereign in return for protection. A century later Montesquieu added differences in climate, terrain, and resources to the mix. The modern view of atomized man motivated only by the pursuit of material advantage is loosely known as "geopolitics".

What prompted this revolution in political thinking that has left modern political theory without the tools to understand the causes and implications of the current demographic collapse? Undoubtedly, the terrible religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries poisoned the idea of faith-based politics. Europe fought dynastic and political wars under the false flag of religion until the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 destroyed almost half the population of Central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia that ended this fearful war forever buried the political model that Christendom had advanced since Augustine: a universal Christian empire that would keep the peace and limit the arbitrary power of kings. Things are not as simple as they seem in the standard account of the violence that soured the West on theopolitics. For - as we shall see - the nation-states that opposed universal empire were founded on a contending kind of faith, a fanatical form of national self-worship whose internal logic was not played out until world war and genocide in the 20th century, and the collapse of faith and fertility in the 21st. But when Thomas Hobbes published his great book Leviathan three years after the end of the Thirty Years' War, it seemed credible that "the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof".

One powerful attraction of the Hobbesian revolution in political thinking was the power it promised to intellectuals. If politics reduces to the individual and his material concerns, then it is possible to manipulate the individual through the alternation of his material circumstances. A clever elite could fix all the problems of the world. Immanuel Kant boasted in 1793 that he could write a constitution for a race of devils, "if only they be rational." Europe ignored him and proceeded to destroy itself in the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars of the past century. Today, as in Kant's time, the great frustration in world affairs is the refusal of some players to act rationally. Something was gained, but much more was lost, in the 17th-century Hobbesian revolution in political thought. To view human beings as creatures concerned solely with power, wealth, and security is an impoverished anthropology. The missing tools - the ones Machiavelli and Hobbes removed from the toolbox - are exactly the ones we need to understand and cope with the dangers inherent in the wholesale collapse of cultures that faces us today.

Secularism in all its forms fails to address the most fundamental human need. Sociologist Eric Kaufmann, who himself bewails the fecundity of the religious and the infertility of the secular, puts it this way: "The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people's powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones." Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by hunger, disease, and war. That shouldn't be too troubling, however: "We may not be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can easily forget about it."

Has death really become infrequent? Call it Spengler's Universal Law #3: Contrary to what you may have heard from the sociologists, the human mortality rate is still 100%.

We can stick our fingers in our ears and chant "I can't hear you!" only so long in the face of mortality. Religion offers the individual the means to transcend mortality, to survive the fragility of a mortal existence. Homo religiosus confronts death in order to triumph over it. But the world's major religions are distinguished by the different ways in which they confront mortality. We cannot make sense of the role of religion in demographic, economic, and political developments - and of the different roles of different religions in different places and times - without understanding the existential experience of the religious individual. It is challenging to recount this experience to a secular analyst; it is somewhat like describing being in love to someone who never has been in love. One doesn't have to be religious to understand religion, but it helps.

But without understanding humankind's confrontation of his own morality in religion, political science is confined to analysis on the basis of the survival instinct - which suddenly seems to be failing whole peoples - and rational self-interest - at a time when nations and peoples are not behaving in a conspicuously rational manner.

At the conclusion of a previous irruption of irrationality - the First World War - a young German soldier at a remote post in Macedonia jotted down his thoughts on army postcards in the final months of the First World War. A small, bespectacled man with a thin mustache, he had been groomed to be one of the mandarins of the German academy, a philosopher whose function was to reinforce the country's confidence in its culture. Just before the war began he had returned to Judaism, after a near conversion to Christianity. As the casualty lists rose in inverse proportion to the hope of victory, the consolations of philosophy seemed hollow. Philosophers, he wrote, were like small children who clapped their hands over their ears and shouted "I can't hear you!" before the fear of death. "From death - from the fear of death - comes all of our knowledge of the All," the soldier began. It was not the individual's fear of death that fascinated the young soldier, but the way entire nations respond to the fear of their collective death. He wrote:

Just as every individual must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.

The soldier was Franz Rosenzweig, and the postcards would become his great book The Star of Redemption. Awareness of death defines the human condition, so that human beings cannot bear their own mortality without the hope of immortality. And our sense of immortality is social. The culture of a community is what unites the dead with those yet to be born.

The death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless generations whose lives no longer can be remembered, for no living being will sing their songs or tell their stories.

The first surviving work of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh written perhaps 3,700 years ago, recounts the Sumerian king's quest for immortality. After a journey beset by hardship and peril, Gilgamesh is told: "The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping."

In the pre-Christian world, Rosenzweig points out, the peoples of the world anticipated their eventual extinction. Every nation's love of itself is pregnant with the presentiment of death, for each tribe knows that its time on earth is limited. Some fight to the death. Others cease to breed. Some do both.

Christianity first taught them the Jewish promise of eternal life. To talk of "man's search for meaning" trivializes the problem. What humankind requires is meaning that transcends death. This need explains a great deal of human behavior that otherwise might seem irrational. One does not have to be religious to grasp this fundamental fact of the human condition, but religion helps, because faith makes explicit the human need to transcend morality. Secular rationalists have difficulty identifying with the motives of existentially challenged peoples - not so much because they lack faith, but because they entertain faith in rationality itself, and believe with the enthusiasm of the convert in the ability of reason to explain all of human experience.

But not only the religious need the hope of immortality. The most atheistic communist hopes that his memory will live on in the heart of a grateful proletariat. Even if we do not believe that our soul will have a place in heaven or that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, we nonetheless believe that something of ourselves will remain, in the form of progeny, memories, or consequences of actions, and that this something will persist as long as people who are like us continue to inhabit the Earth. Humanity perseveres in the consolation that some immortal part of us transcends our death. Sadly, our hope for immortality in the form of remembrance is a fragile and often a vain one. Immortality of this sort depends upon the survival of people who are like us - that is, upon the continuity of our culture. If you truly believe in a supernatural afterlife, to be sure, nothing can really disappoint you. But there is no consolation in being the last Mohican.

And that's because of Spengler's Universal Law #4: The history of the world is the history of humankind's search for immortality. When nations go willingly into that dark night, what should we conclude about human nature?

Human beings may not be the only animals who are sentient of death. (Elephants evidently grieve for their dead, and dogs mourn their dead masters.) But we are the only animals whose sense of continuity depends on culture as much as it does upon genes. Unlike men and women, healthy animals universally show an instinct for self-preservation and the propagation of their species. We do not observe cats deciding not to have kittens the better to pursue their careers as mousers.

I do not mean to suggest that humans beings of different cultures belong to different species. On the contrary, the child of a Kalahari Bushman will thrive if raised in the family of a Glaswegian ship's engineer. (As Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, observes it is easier to be stupid in a modern welfare state than in a hunter-gatherer tribe in New Guinea.)

But culture performs a role among human beings similar to the role species plays for animals. An adult Bushman would never fully adapt to industrial society, any more than a Glaswegian ship's engineer would last a fortnight in the Kalahari. Insofar as an animal can be said to experience an impulse toward the future beyond his own life, that impulse is fulfilled by the propagation of the species. But individual human existence looks forward to the continuation of the culture that nurtures, sustains, and transmits our contribution to future generations. Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of immortality - not merely through genetic transmission but through inter-generational communication.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.

The truth is - to invoke Spengler's Universal Law #5 - Humankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality. When men and women lose the sacred, they lose the desire to live. Despairing of immortality, we stand astonished before the one fact we know with certainty - that someday we must die. This is as true of modern homo sapiens sapiens as it was of our remotest ancestors. Even Neanderthal burial sites have been unearthed with grave gifts. "Man does not live by bread alone," Moses said on the east bank of the Jordan River. The affluent peoples of the world have all the bread they need, but have lost the appetite for life.

Americans are ill-equipped to empathize with the existential fears of other nations. America is the great exception to the demographic collapse sweeping the modern world. As an immigrant nation we regenerate ourselves. We bear no baggage from a tragic past. The glue that holds us together is a common concept of justice and opportunity. The United States is what John Courtney Murray called "a propositional nation". In our benevolence and optimism we assume that all peoples are like us, forgetting that we are or descend from people who chose to abandon the tragic fate of their own nations at the further shore and selected themselves into the American nation. But we have learned that our capacity to influence events in the rest of the world, even in the absence of a competing superpower, is limited, and that the dissipation of our resources can be deadly for us. Our strategic thinking suffers from a failure to take into account the existential problems of other nations. We think in the narrow categories of geopolitics, but we need to study theopolitics - the powerful impact of religious beliefs and aspirations on world events. Even we exceptional Americans must come to grips with the collapse of faith and fertility - especially in the rapidly and dangerously declining Muslim world - in order to prevail in a world in which tragic outcomes are more common than happy endings.

Notes
1. These ratios are based on the Elderly Dependency Ratio calculated by the model of the United Nations World Population Prospects 2010 revision, assuming constant fertility. The model is available at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm 2. Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed blames exhaustion of resource and environmental damage. The extinct people of Easter Island and the pre-Columbian Mayans chopped down too many trees, Diamond observes, and thus he argues that environmental damage is the greatest threat to our civilization. (Never mind that America has expanded its forests by 20 million acres during the past quarter century: disaster stories of this sort resonate with a public fed on media reports of global warming and apocalyptic disaster movies.) Easter Island, though, is something of a rarity in world history. The cultures about which we know the most - and from which our own civilization descends - failed from a different cause. Classical Greece and Rome died for the same reason that Western Europe, Japan, and other parts of the modern world are dying today: they lost their motivation to bring children into the world. The infertile Greeks were conquered by Rome’s army and the inexhaustible manpower of the farms of the Italian peninsula; as the Romans later grew childless, they were overrun by a small force of barbarian invaders.