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John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 03:03):The US Senate has a new press release saying, among other things:
Cruz-Led Investigation Uncovers $2 Billion in Woke DEI Grants at NSF, Releases Full Database
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
One of these grants is Emily Riehl's project "Homotopical macrocosms for higher category theory".
You can see a complete list of all 3,400 grants on a spreadsheet here. The grants are classified as mentioning one or more of 4 things: social justice, race, gender, and environmental justice. Riehl's grant is flagged as mentioning social justice. She probably got in trouble for the following passage:
IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION.
Below I have quoted the entire grant description on that spreadsheet:
HOMOTOPICAL MACROCOSMS FOR HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY - HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY IS INCREASINGLY BEING USED AS THE METATHEORY FOR NEW RESULTS IN SEVERAL AREAS OF MATHEMATICS, CREATING A HUGE BARRIER TO ENTRY FOR MATHEMATICIANS WHOSE PRIMARY TECHNICAL EXPERTISE LIES IN ANOTHER FIELD. PAST JOINT WORK OF THE PI REIMAGINED THE FOUNDATIONS OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORY THEORY WITH THE AIM OF SIMPLIFYING PROOFS BY REPLACING ANALYTIC METHODS, THAT RELY ON THE COMBINATORICS OF A PARTICULAR MODEL OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES, WITH SYNTHETIC ONES THAT APPLY IN ANY MODEL. ONE PART OF THIS PROJECT SEEKS TO DEVELOP A COMPUTER-VERIFIABLE FORMAL LANGUAGE THAT EXPRESSES ONLY STATEMENTS ABOUT INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES THAT ARE INVARIANT UNDER CHANGE OF MODEL. SUCH A LANGUAGE WOULD FORCE USERS TO SPEAK NO EVIL BY GUARANTEEING THAT EVERY STATEMENT THEY EXPRESS IS MODEL-INDEPENDENT. THIS PROJECT CONNECTS TO THE PLANS TO RECAST THE THEORY OF INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORIES IN A NEW PROPOSED UNIVALENT FOUNDATION SYSTEM FOR MATHEMATICS, IN WHICH HOMOTOPICAL UNIQUENESS UP TO A CONTRACTIBLE SPACE OF CHOICES BECOMES GENUINE UNIQUENESS, PERMITTING STREAMLINED DEFINITIONS OF FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS. BOTH OF THESE PROJECTS WILL BE UNDERTAKEN IN PART WITH MENTEES OF THE PI AT JOHNS HOPKINS. IN PARALLEL, THE PI HAS CONCRETE PLANS TO CONTINUE HER EXPOSITORY AND OUTREACH WORK WHICH INCLUDE A NEW BOOK (ELEMENTS OF INFINITY-CATEGORY THEORY, JOINT WITH VERITY), LECTURES DIRECTED AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC, SURVEY ARTICLES PREPARED FOR A VARIETY OF AUDIENCES, AND EFFORTS TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO ADVANCED MATHEMATICS, SUCH AS HER SERVICE ON THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION ADVISORY BOARD AT THE BANFF INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH STATION. THE PIONEERS OF HOMOTOPY TYPE THEORY - THE NEW PROPOSED UNIVALENT FOUNDATION SYSTEM - ENVISIONED A COMPUTER-VERIFIABLE FOUNDATION FOR INFINITE-DIMENSIONAL CATEGORY THEORY, BUT SOME COMPUTATIONAL CONTENT IS LOST THROUGH THE CLASSICAL REASONING USED IN CLASSICAL HOMOTOPY THEORY. WITH COLLABORATORS, THE PI WILL DEVELOP A NEW MODEL FOR CLASSICAL HOMOTOPY THEORY IN A PARTICULAR CATEGORY OF CUBICAL SETS, IN WHICH CUBICAL FIBRATIONS ARE REQUIRED TO BE EQUIVARIANT, RESPECTING THE SYMMETRIES OF CUBES DEFINED BY PERMUTING THEIR DIMENSIONS. A LONGER-TERM AIM IS TO USE SIMILAR METHODS TO OBTAIN CUBICAL SET BASED PRESENTATIONS OF ALL INFINITY-TOPOI. A COMPUTER PROOF ASSISTANT BASED ON EQUIVARIANT CUBICAL FIBRATIONS WOULD HAVE THE CORRECT CLASSICAL SEMANTICS BUT WOULD BE ABLE TO RESTORE THE COMPUTATIONAL CONTENT TO UNIVALENT MATHEMATICS. A FINAL PROJECT EXPLORES HOMOTOPICAL MACROCOSMS FOR HIGHER CATEGORY THEORY, AIMING TO PROVE THAT THE COLLECTION OF CARTESIAN FIBRATIONS BETWEEN (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORIES ASSEMBLE INTO A CARTESIAN FIBRATION OF (INFINITY,N+1)-CATEGORIES, WHICH CAN BE REGARDED AS SOME SORT OF CATEGORIFIED HYPERDOCTRINE FOR (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORY THEORY. RESULTS OF THIS NATURE WOULD ESTABLISH A GLOBAL LIFTING PROPERTY AGAINST HOMOTOPY COHERENT DIAGRAMS THAT SHOULD AID FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN (INFINITY,N)-CATEGORY THEORY. THIS AWARD REFLECTS NSF'S STATUTORY MISSION AND HAS BEEN DEEMED WORTHY OF SUPPORT THROUGH EVALUATION USING THE FOUNDATION'S INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS REVIEW CRITERIA.
Ryan Wisnesky (Feb 14 2025 at 03:24):no good deed goes unpunished
fosco (Feb 14 2025 at 11:26):be US senator
read -category theory book searching for neo-Marxist warfare propaganda
"unstraightening"
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:07):So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:09):My guess would be that the point is to scandalize awarded grants in order to rally support for slashing NSF funding for future grants, including those that are currently review.
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 12:11):There's also an interesting post about this on Astral Codex Ten: Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science
Ivan Di Liberti (Feb 14 2025 at 12:45):fosco said:
be US senator
read -category theory book searching for neo-Marxist warfare propaganda
"unstraightening"
Funnily enough, they would indeed find Mao's quotes in some of Lawvere's papers.
Arturo De Faveri (Feb 14 2025 at 13:04):Rick Kubelka on mathoverflow: "When I was at the University of Oklahoma in the early '80s, we were all required to write a brief description of our research for the (rather conservative, this being Oklahoma) Board of Regents of the University. A colleague in algebra, perhaps hoping for more state support, wrote that he was studying "annihilating radical left ideals."
JR (Feb 14 2025 at 14:03):Tobias Fritz said:
So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
From https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R48243:
Federal grants are awarded under legally binding agreements, such as grant agreements or cooperative agreements. These agreements include terms and conditions that are required to be met by the grantee in order for the grantee to be in compliance with federal statutory and regulatory provisions. When the grantee is found to be in noncompliance with the terms and conditions of a federal grant award, the grantee may be required to return the funds to the federal government. The process by which a federal agency seeks repayment of expended funds for noncompliance is known as recoupment where the federal government is seeking to recoup funds previously paid to the grantee. Recoupment processes are sometimes called grant funding clawbacks since the federal government is taking back previously awarded funding.
This is happening: the USG is taking granted money back out of accounts.
JR (Feb 14 2025 at 14:06):The legality of the current clawbacks is not something that I think the administration is concerned with. Illegality is a feature, not a bug.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 14 2025 at 15:31):that's depressing...
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 15:32):Thanks @JR. That's infuriating!
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 16:44):Tobias Fritz said:
So what is the point of this "uncovering" of "woke" grants? Those grants have been awarded and there's no way to roll that back, right? Right...?
I guess you missed the whole episode where the NSF froze all grants, and scientists including grad students weren't getting paid until a judge demanded it:
NSF officially paused payments on January 28, saying that the agency needed time to review how its grants comply with President Trump's executive orders, especially those aiming to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government.
This case may go to a higher court now - I don't think anyone knows. But there's no law of physics compelling the executive branch to pay the money it has promised it would pay, and at this point it's only the laws of physics that I trust to be enforced in the USA.
Tobias Fritz (Feb 14 2025 at 17:25):Thanks! There's so much bad stuff going on these days that it's really hard to keep track
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 17:37):I spend about an hour a day keeping track of US politics now. It's like the ship is going down.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 14 2025 at 18:32):Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam (Feb 14 2025 at 18:39):We'd do well to heed warnings from other countries that arbitrary and extensive budget cuts may in fact foreshadow the dismantling of the NSF as an institution.
Take the example of my home country:
The University Grants Commission (UGC) of India played the same role as the NSF (at least until as recently as 10 years ago). The UGC's budget in 2013--14 was about 100bn rupees. In 2016--17 (two years after the present political regime began), it was down to about 25bn rupees. In 2025, its budget is around 33bn rupees. Given that 100 rupees in 2015 are worth around 160 rupees in 2025, this is a ~80% reduction from 10 years ago.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 18:44):What is this doing to research in India? I had no idea the current government had these same anti science tendencies; out of thin air I would have guessed Hindutva would be into glorified Indian science.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 18:46):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
I was thinking of storming the Capitol but then I realized I’m not sure whom to punch to cause funds to keep flowing in a promised direction.
Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam (Feb 14 2025 at 19:07):Kevin Carlson said:
What is this doing to research in India? I had no idea the current government had these same anti science tendencies; out of thin air I would have guessed Hindutva would be into glorified Indian science.
I'm not best-placed to answer this, not having lived or worked in India for over 10 years.
That being said, from what I hear, the situation is pretty grim---I've heard of people having to subscribe to questionable political agendas in order to receive, or to continue to receive, funding for research. Also from what I hear, Hindutva is more into glorifying the "alternative reality" of ancient Indian science --- the work of a surgeon or astronomer from 2000 years ago is more important than one from 20 years ago.
All of this is anecdotal.
It should be noted that some of the budget previously allocated to the UGC has been diverted to a couple of newly set up institutions whose purported goal is to replace the UGC (why it needed replacing is unclear --- the reasons stated range from "inefficiency" to "promoting radical leftism"). This has led to a lot of reshuffling of people with the power to decide what kind of research gets funded (perhaps the actual reason for the creation of these institutions?).
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 19:20):Chaitanya Leena Subramaniam said:
Kevin Carlson said:
Also from what I hear, Hindutva is more into glorifying the "alternative reality" of ancient Indian science --- the work of a surgeon or astronomer from 2000 years ago is more important than one from 20 years ago.
Ah, that's clarifying.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 19:22):It seems very easy to imagine this administration similarly trying to strangle the NSF as a tool of our analogue of the Indian Congress (but under the banner of ending the promotion of neo-Marxism etc) and partly replace it with an "anti-woke" science agency, which would naturally also turn out far more political than the NSF.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 22:00):I've been looking at this list of other math grants that supposedly have appeared on Ted Cruz's list of "woke DEI grants". I've checked to see if they're actually on the spreadsheet, and I can't find the one on "elliptic and hyperbolic differential equations", but I can find some others.
Here's one based in La Jolla, California which is somewhat connected to category theory, but mainly homotopy theory:
COMPUTATIONS IN CLASSICAL AND MOTIVIC STABLE HOMOTOPY THEORY -ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY IS A FIELD OF MATHEMATICS THAT INVOLVES USING ALGEBRA AND CATEGORY THEORY TO STUDY PROPERTIES OF GEOMETRIC OBJECTS THAT DO NOT CHANGE WHEN THOSE OBJECTS ARE DEFORMED. A CENTRAL CHALLENGE IS TO CLASSIFY ALL MAPS FROM SPHERES TO OTHER SPHERES, WHERE TWO MAPS ARE CONSIDERED EQUIVALENT IF ONE CAN BE DEFORMED TO THE OTHER. THE EQUIVALENCE CLASSES OF THESE MAPS ARE CALLED THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES, AND COLLECTIVELY THEY FORM ONE OF THE DEEPEST AND MOST CENTRAL OBJECTS IN THE FIELD. HISTORICALLY, MUCH IMPORTANT THEORY HAS ARISEN OUT OF ATTEMPTS TO COMPUTE MORE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES AND UNDERSTAND PATTERNS WITHIN THEM. THIS PROJECT INVOLVES FURTHERING KNOWLEDGE OF THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES, USING OLD AND NEW TECHNIQUES AS WELL AS COMPUTER CALCULATIONS. THE PROJECT ALSO INVOLVES STUDYING AN ANALOGUE OF THESE GROUPS IN ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY; THIS FALLS UNDER A RELATIVELY NEW AND ACTIVELY DEVELOPED AREA CALLED MOTIVIC HOMOTOPY THEORY, WHICH APPLIES TECHNIQUES IN ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY TO STUDY ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY. THE BROADER IMPACTS OF THIS PROJECT CENTER AROUND SUPPORTING THE LOCAL MATHEMATICS COMMUNITY THROUGH MENTORING AND PROMOTING DIVERSITY. THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR WILL HELP BUILD THE NASCENT HOMOTOPY THEORY COMMUNITY AT THE UNIVERSITY AND PROMOTE WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN THE SUBJECT THROUGH SEMINAR ORGANIZATION AND MENTORING. ONE OF THE MAIN PLANNED PROJECTS IS A LARGE-SCALE EFFORT TO COMPUTE THE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES AT THE PRIME 3 IN A RANGE, USING OLD AND NEW TECHNIQUES SUCH AS THE ADAMS-NOVIKOV SPECTRAL SEQUENCE AS WELL AS INFINITE DESCENT MACHINERY. THIS WORK WILL BE AIDED BY COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, WHICH SHORT-CIRCUITS SOME OF THE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS. ANOTHER MAIN GROUP OF PROJECTS CONCERNS COMPUTING THE ANALOGUE OF THE STABLE HOMOTOPY GROUPS OF SPHERES IN THE WORLD OF R-MOTIVIC HOMOTOPY THEORY. THIS REPRESENTS A CONTINUATION OF PRIOR WORK OF THE PI AND COLLABORATOR; THE PLAN IS TO SUPPLEMENT THE TECHNIQUES USED IN THAT WORK WITH COMPUTER CALCULATIONS AND A NEW TOOL, THE SLICE SPECTRAL SEQUENCE. A THIRD PROJECT CONCERNS THEORY AND SPECTRAL SEQUENCE COMPUTATIONS AIMED AT COMPUTING THE COHOMOLOGY OF PROFINITE GROUPS SUCH AS SPECIAL LINEAR GROUPS AND MORAVA STABILIZER GROUPS. THIS AWARD REFLECTS NSF'S STATUTORY MISSION AND HAS BEEN DEEMED WORTHY OF SUPPORT THROUGH EVALUATION USING THE FOUNDATION'S INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS REVIEW CRITERIA.
Perhaps mercifully, the PI's names are not listed in the spreadsheet. If they were, I can imagine Trumpies harrassing these people online. Any idea who this is?
Joe Moeller (Feb 14 2025 at 22:51):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Without wishing to (explicitly) incite anything, how much would more will it take before people in the US start physically resisting what's happening?
It's very difficult to figure out exactly where all the lines are. The first thing to consider is that the US has some unique features, obvious, but worth listing:
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:16):I agree with Joe. So far the most important resistance is coming from judges staying or overturning the Trump administration's actions. That's how people got their NSF grants back, for example.
However, there were coordinated protests in all 50 states on February 6th, and there's a Wikipedia article detailing them:
The same organization is organizing protests in all 50 states on President's Day, February 17th. I wouldn't be surprised if these keep getting bigger. I think in March there's a planned "don't show up to work" day, but I'm not finding what I read about that.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 14 2025 at 23:30):All of which is well and good, though I probably wouldn’t call any of it “physical resistance”.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:34):Right. I'm not sure exactly what Morgan was talking about - maybe fired federal employees going limp as security guards drag them out of the office, or people resisting arrest from ICE agents? It's true I haven't heard of that going on.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:37):When a security guard kept congresspeople from entering the Department of Education, they did not physically force their way in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWwu5YZS28Y
Joe Moeller (Feb 14 2025 at 23:40):John Baez said:
Right. I'm not sure exactly what Morgan was talking about - maybe fired federal employees going limp as security guards drag them out of the office, or people resisting arrest from ICE agents? It's true I haven't heard of that going on.
Of course, certain acts of resistance are better kept out of broadcast.
John Baez (Feb 14 2025 at 23:41):The best way to resist arrest is to be somewhere else when they're trying to arrest you.
Cole Comfort (Feb 15 2025 at 08:11):I find it hard to believe that the research itself is "woke" in any way. It is likely that it got flagged for that one passage.
But it is possible that there is something even more sinister going on and the executive has investigated the sexual orientation, political opinions, etc. of grant holders in order to try to purge them from academia. This happened to communists and socialists in Canada and the United States not so long ago. Certainly, I wouldn't put it past them if they had the ability.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 15 2025 at 08:35):I would be shocked if they worked that hard (it looks more like they ran a query for all grants containing the word “equity”) although it’s certainly worth keeping the possibility in mind.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 10:05):What I'd like to see is a list of the grants in maths that didn't end up in this database. I saw people saying things like including a sentence or two about running a workshop to which underrepresented people will be particularly invited is something that everyone had to include. But if this were true, every single grant would have ended up in this database. This cannot be true, right? I suspect we would have heard if every mathematics grant, nay, nearly every grant across all of academia (save, say, parts of it that are fairly resistant to having "DEI boilerplate", as I imagine economics might be), was suddenly cancelled by the move.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 10:13):I've seen some other vaguely DEI-relevant statements from other grants, and a number of them really are almost analogous to "we will run a workshop in a poor district that hasn't got to see this stuff before, to encourage students to study maths". Except instead of school students, it's grad students or ECRs, and instead of "poor district" it's a different group with fewer chances in the past.
Zoltan A. Kocsis (Z.A.K.) (Feb 16 2025 at 15:06):@David Michael Roberts:
(This comes from public sources and conversations with friends who have lived and worked in the U.S. I am Australian and have never worked in the U.S., so it's possible that I missed or misunderstood something)
The Cruz press release says the list covers nearly 10% of grants approved in the past four years.
It's true that having a "Broader Impacts" section is required by the NSF. This works almost the same way as the National Interest Test in our ARC grant proposals: it explains how the project will provide environmental, social, or cultural benefits beyond directly advancing knowledge in the field.
Expanding science participation among underrepresented groups counts as a broader impact. Despite what the extreme right claims, this does not mean projects without a direct focus on these groups lose funding. It just is (should I say, used to be? ) one specific way in which a project can have broader impact. E.g. if your research outputs will help save birds from oil spills, that's definitely broader impact, even though it has nothing to do with underrepresented groups. I think the people you read might have confused "including a broader impact statement was mandatory" with "including a sentence or two about underrepresented people was mandatory" (or chose to conflate them for some reason).
It looks like they selected all grants whose broader impact included specific actions benefiting certain underrepresented groups (not veterans, not disabled people, but ethnic minorities, women, etc.). This would not lead to all grants being proscribed, but may plausibly affect 10% of them. It's less likely (not that I would put it above them) that they cherrypicked specific PIs that they personally wanted to inconvenience. I think at this point they're happy to inconvenience anyone who they perceive as a potential opponent.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 16 2025 at 20:16):Thanks, Zoltan.
John Baez (Feb 17 2025 at 04:59):Cole Comfort said:
I find it hard to believe that the research itself is "woke" in any way. It is likely that it got flagged for that one passage.
But it is possible that there is something even more sinister going on and the executive has investigated the sexual orientation, political opinions, etc. of grant holders in order to try to purge them from academia.
Please don't give Ted Cruz's staff more credit than they deserve. They did a naive text search on grant proposals, and didn't check the results:
A quote:
I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
40% were woke
20% were borderline
40% weren’t woke
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
For example, from Grant 1731:
New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures: An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power is inherently unstable and often goes out. To address the problem, EHS leverages a capacitor as an energy buffer and computes when the capacitor secures a sufficient amount of energy, i.e., capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable in the presence of frequent power failure across which they continuously charge and discharge, losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices. To this end, this research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Did you catch the last sentence?
The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact.
Typical examples include:
We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.
We will employ undergraduates or PhD students, and probably some of them will be underrepresented minorities.
People will benefit from our work, and probably some of the beneficiaries will be underrepresented minorities.
This was probably 90% of the false positives. But there were other categories, including grants that accidentally used scientific terms that had alternative woke meanings. For example, Grant 1424:
Cis-Regulatory Basis of Developmental Plasticity and Growth in the Development and Evolution of Beetle Horns, a Class of Highly Diversified Weapons - This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY22, integrative research investigating the rules of life governing interactions between genomes, environment and phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. How organisms develop is regulated through the interactions of genes and environmental conditions like nutrition. Gene regulation (turning genes "on" or "off") therefore is an important point of control for many aspects of development, such as growth. Further, when gene regulation is modified by evolution, it can lead to the emergence of new traits. Yet, exactly how gene regulation is controlled is not fully understood. The fellow will research horned beetles, which are well known for their diverse forms of environment-dependent development, in order to understand how environment affects gene regulation to promote diversity.
This one gets off to a rocky start by mentioning the word “cis” (a cis-regulatory pathway is when genes regulate the expression of other genes on the same DNA molecule). Then it ends with the words “promote diversity” - in context referring to how genes promote a diversity of beetle phenotypes, but probably this looks bad in a simple CTRL+F search.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 08:48):Yes, I think that supposing a politician had invested any time to actually read any of the grant proposals in this list is extremely generous.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:22):John Baez said:
Of the hundred:
40% were woke
20% were borderline
40% weren’t woke
This would be so funny if it wasn't so depressingly fascist
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:23):and surely the inclusion criteria are vague and loose by design, they rather have people bend the knee for survival than miss someone they want kick out
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 17 2025 at 09:26):also, the fascist definition of 'degenerate' people/science/art is deliberately vague because it simply coincides with the complement of what people in power believe in/need to keep staying in power...
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 17 2025 at 12:24):John Baez said:
A quote:
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
This. My question is: Do you think this was right in the first place? To me, it seems that the general idea of 'having to align with/subscribe to some political program/agenda/topic to get money' is shortsighted, and basically wrong. It has no political effect really, as a lot of people will squeeze whatever fashionable opinion in to get extra points, without caring an inch about it. It also has no positive long-term incentive as in doing so, one has to factor in that the political climate may shift and said stuff will inevitably backfire.
I think it would be much better for academics, institutions, universities and the entire research ecosystem if math grants would be about maths, and maths only. This said I clearly don't agree with Trump's policies even a little bit (I can't believe I have to write it explicitly), but at least I hope people will be mindful about the consequences of squeezing politics into anything the next time they have to submit some application.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 17 2025 at 12:27):To me (a non-American, very much non-concerned with America's internal state of affairs) the worst outcome of 'squeezing politics into everything and bringing the country to the brink of a civil war' is that now Americans have managed to elect a guy which is carrying out the worst foreign policy since pretty much forever (yes, way worse than Kissinger, incredibly!), and America's historical allies (as we Europeans are) will suffer the biggest consequences of this.
Ryan Wisnesky (Feb 17 2025 at 18:37):certainly value statements have always been controversial: https://archive.is/Rsoqw (links to non-paywall version of (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/hypocrisy-mandatory-diversity-statements/674611/)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:46):Allow me temporarily to play some kind of devil's advocate. In Australia, we don't have an NSF, we have the Australian Research Council, which is something like the complement of the NIH - it covers all non-clinical basic/fundamental research. So you have maths and physics and chemistry and engineering and history and philosophy and .... all funded by the same body. One of the things that is necessary to do is add some statement about the benefit to Australia more broadly rather than just one's own field. It used to be worse (imposed by the centre-right government of the time) in that it was a non-negligible part of the process, even if relatively small.
This part of the grant has to be reflected in the one-paragraph public summary, which is the analogue of the stuff we are seeing above from the NSF grants.
So you get inanities like "This will have benefits within mathematics and also in physics/chemistry in the long run." in a grant about tensor categories (this is a small one, because the people applying are big shots are half of them outside Australia) or "Expected outcomes include flexible techniques for constructing twisted algebras for use further along the research pipeline, and cross-pollination of ideas within mathematics. Benefits include enhanced international collaboration and increased Australian capacity in pure mathematics, particularly algebra and operator algebras." on a grant linking categories and operator algebras. You cannot get away from including this, it's not a matter of some kind of vague social expectation. Here's one on a mathematics of string theory grant: "Significant benefits include bringing leading international researchers to Australia, cutting-edge research outcomes and research training in high-profile international collaborations."
This is to my mind one of the silliest parts of the application, because nearly everyone in pure maths has to put in some bland slop, because there almost always simply isn't anything that fits the bill. These 'benefit statements' are so small because the whole piece looks like this:
Character sheaves and Langlands duality. In the recent years a large part of mathematics has been driven by the Langlands program. The aim of work proposed is to contribute to this program from our unique point of view. The expected outcomes include a comprehensive understanding of character sheaves and how they apply to longstanding difficult problems in mathematics. In addition to addressing fundamental questions in mathematics and expanding our understanding, the research program connects Australia to the most exciting recent mathematical developments thus benefiting Australian researchers and students. The project will also train highly qualified individuals who can make significant impact on science, industry, technology, and economy through their specialised skills.
These paragraphs are what the Government Minister in charge of the ARC in principle could look at before giving the final approval to the awarding of the grants. Thankfully this is not the process any more, but it used to be the Minister could veto grants based on the short paragraph as I quoted. And people in the humanities whose research was niche sometimes did (!)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:48):However, it is probably the case that having something like this keeps people on their toes and makes them think about, at least for a moment, potential benefits to Australia, and see if they can say anything at all that the taxpayer footing the bill would feel is some epsilon of justification.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 22:51):Note that for the Australian system you don't actually have to go and give public lectures, or write a book, or go and teach poor kiddies in a local high school about how maths is useful to study. The point is to specify what benefit the research itself will bring.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:03):do you prefer to believe the evaluators believed in the slop, or they completely understood it was just slop, but preserved the tradition?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:04):what was the saying, the king is naked...
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:06):To return to the main topic here, I repeat my statement that I'd like to see some grant descriptions, if there are any, along the lines of the above that in their broader impacts statement say nothing about side-benefits that might be aligned with DEI purposes. I suspect there are some, which if so would give the lie to the claim that everyone has to include DEI stuff. If they did, there'd be no NSF grants left under the current process. So if it isn't required, one might ask why people include a statement like "my side-channel advocacy for underrepresented groups..."
If it isn't required by the NSF in some vague way, then it is at most something like a social pressure, or perhaps people gaming the system in the same way that people puff up their college admissions ("I spent a summer digging wells in Africa for poor villages while teaching the kids to read")
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:06):To be clear, I don't agree with mandated political loyalty stuff in grant applications.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:07):fosco said:
do you prefer to believe the evaluators believed in the slop, or they completely understood it was just slop, but preserved the tradition?
Who do you think the evaluators are? For whom is the "wider benefits" statement written?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:09):ah, I have no idea; in a functional, rational system, mathematicians would evaluate mathematicians, and not too far from their field of specialization; this is not always possible, but I have seen something on the lines of pure maths proposals evaluated by biologists.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:09):I listen to Sean Carroll's podcast episode on the affair, and he outlined at least part of the assessment process. As in Australia, academics play a huge role, if not at minimum the vast majority, in assessing grants. If the "wider benefits" statement is written for them, then one is only persuading one's colleagues, not shadowy government employees filtering grants for sufficiently "woke" text
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:10):In Australia, the panels are fairly broad, because the funding body is so broad. Maths usually gets lumped in with physics, but there are mathematicians on the panel.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:11):But in the NSF I am given to understand that the panels are actually rather focused.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:13):You can see here a timeline of upcoming panels, and they are very narrow in scope: https://www.nsf.gov/events/proposal-review-panels
Eg:
and there's three different panels for maths down the page...
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:13):So I believe mathematicians are evaluating mathematicians, here
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):good, but then, why the inanities?
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):there must be something I am failing to understand
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:14):https://www.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review#nsfs-proposal-review-process-2fb
tells me
Typically, NSF program officers identify at least three external reviewers, who are experts in the fields represented by the proposal, to review the proposal. The review may be conducted by ad hoc reviewers, a panel of experts, or a combination of both.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:17):David Michael Roberts said:
So if it isn't required, one might ask why people include a statement like "my side-channel advocacy for underrepresented groups..."
if the sidetrack about evaluation process feels off-topic the question "why the slop, if we all know and agree it's slop?" applies also here.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:18):Well, there are some options: people really do keenly support and believe the stuff they write (this would be true for some proportion, and it may well be a rather large proportion); people are not opposed to the general idea of addressing things like the extreme gender imbalance in the field, and so will go along with any suggestions or encouragements or social norms that lead to inclusivity-related comments (this would be another reasonable chunk of people, I guess); people don't care either way, but are willing to play the game for the purposes of boosting their chances (again, we are pushing towards most people, once the previous groups are taken into account); and then people who don't like it, but will grit their teeth and do it; people who don't like it (or maybe just don't care) and won't do it.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:19):If there are grants without even a DEI-lite statement that get funded, then of the above groups, there must be some in the last one that get funded.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:20):We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:21):With my breakdown of different groups of applicants, maybe the keen people are only a minority, and everyone else just finds other "broader impacts" to talk about.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:22):David Michael Roberts said:
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
indeed, I'd like to know as well (and I tried to scrape the xlsx gigantic file but desisted because, heh, better things to do with my day)
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:22):What if only 25% of grant applications mention what you are describing as slop? How is this some kind of problem like the people stopping grants want everyone to think?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:23):The narrative is very different depending on the baseline numbers.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:25):I agree -as much as I agree that the slop should be written, and evaluated, by machines, leaving mathematicians to evaluate the mathematics.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):and by slop I don't mean DEI-keywords... I just mean "boilerplate text that has to be there lest bureaucrats be angered"
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):Being at such a distance, and never having applied for an NSF grant (but I have twice applied for an ARC grant here in Australia, and been in conversations around applying for funding for a conference), I also have no idea about the process. Maybe the assessment criteria that expert assessors are given says they must look for social impacts like DEI-related stuff and give a mark on these. I don't know. But I'm not going to assume I know how widespread such statements are.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:26):after all it's 2025; we have technology whose best use is generate boilerplate text....
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:27):Oh, the boilerplate stuff is painful, I agree. I'd rather not have to say things about how category theory or higher geometry is going to benefit Australia, but I appreciate why people asking for taxpayer money should at least try to think about it, even if the answer is inane.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 17 2025 at 23:28):It's almost like there's a canonical answer for all pure maths in that respects, and all the panel people know it, but ultimately these paragraphs get released to the public, and worse, politicians, who want every excuse to question the value for money for the Australian public in general.
fosco (Feb 17 2025 at 23:28):David Michael Roberts said:
Oh, the boilerplate stuff is painful, I agree. I'd rather not have to say things about how category theory or higher geometry is going to benefit Australia, but I appreciate why people asking for taxpayer money should at least try to think about it, even if the answer is inane.
Certainly! Here's an itemized list explaining how tensor categories can benefit the flora and fauna of the southern emisphere
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 04:01):@David Michael Roberts
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
I don't know the numbers, but in that blog article I quoted, Scott Alexander concluded with this remark:
Some people are saying “Well it still seems bad that 40% of Biden-era science was woke.” No! This post just finds that 40% of the science that Ted Cruz flagged as woke was actually woke. I think this works out to 2-3% of all Biden-era science.
Regardless of whether we accept Alexander's concept of "wokeness", I think this means only a small fraction of NSF grants included DEI language or other language that got flagged by Ted Cruz's keyword search.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 04:10):OK, so if I haven't made a mistake, and working with a round figure in the middle of 2-3%, does this mean something like 8% of grants were flagged as having key words that triggered the anti-DEI warning bells? That's not too far off from the smaller figure I mentioned:
We are not working with complete data. Having all the Ctrl-F-for-buzzwords grants in front of us, it looks like there's some huge mandate to include such things. But what if this were only 10% of maths grants? What if 75% of maths grants didn't include DEI-adjacent phrases and words?
Obviously extrapolating from all-NSF to just maths is going to not be exact, but as a prior estimate, this means in the ballpark of only 10% of successful NSF maths grants invoked some kind of DEI. I presume that the people who wrote these take such initiatives seriously, and only a tinier fraction again of them would be either feeling pressured to include such a statement against their general judgement, to either game the system or for fear of reprisal.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 04:21):If these are the kinds of figures we are talking about, there are other much more plausible explanations for the presence of DEI-related statements (and pretty soft ones, at that) in grant applications than "forced to do so otherwise No Grant For You!"
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 06:06):Right, I agree with your conclusion: if only a small fraction, say 10%, of successful NSF grant applications mention DEI and other phrases that make Cruz see red, this language is not required to get a grant. And this suggests that people who do include this language actually mean it.
Retreating from generalizations to the initial case at hand, I'm pretty sure that Emily Riehl does indeed advocate diversity, equity and inclusion in mathematics. I gather this both from her many public statements and the fact that in her grant proposal she mentions serving on the DEI board at Banff (the math research station in Canada).
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 06:29):And, might I add, serving on an advisory board is the kind of activity that academics tend to do anyway (not dissimilar from being a journal editor, broadly speaking), and not something that grant money goes to.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 06:31):I of course appreciate that "nuance" like this was not exercised by the people doing a Ctrl-F on the spreadsheet of all grants and their descriptions...
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 07:58):It looks like a detail missing here is that NSF grants require a Broader Impacts statement, and one of the official ways in which you can satisfy this is by diversifying the STEM workforce. This is the basic pull factor leading to many grants including DEI-related statements, especially in pure math where immediate broader impacts are less plausible.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 07:59):The ways you can have broader impacts are listed here. So far, “Inclusion” is still on the list!
John Baez (Feb 18 2025 at 08:01)::shh: Cruz's team was apparently only looking at some sort of abstract in the grant proposals.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 08:02):Right; I guess these abstracts probably often contain words like “equity” because the associated broader impacts statements focus on “Inclusion”.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 09:59):Ok, the problem of having a 'broader impact statement' is clearly a top-down one: Since in the end a good chunk of grant money is taxpayer money, higher up in the political foodchain people need a way to justify the expense. "My grant application is good for nothing aside for marginal improvement in a god forsaken field" makes it difficult to justify the budget expenditure over the years.
Still, a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes: Something along the lines of "actual practical impact", "important theoretical advancements" and "god knows, probably useless but worth a gamble". The funny thing is that we developed very good techniques to estimate the risk that comes attached with each category, so budgeting according to these lines is definitely possible.
In this case, someone that wants to submit a grant that is _purely_ theoretical wouldn't have to put any bs about impact in their application (be it broader impact, DEI stuff, "trump-will-like-it" stuff, applications that will never really exist and whatnot) and just focus on the actual problem they want money to solve.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 10:01):It seems to me that the thing academics complain about the most as of today is not just lack of funding but the incredible bureaucratic/administrative overload they need to cope with. "Just be honest" grants would probably do a better job in making this load at least an epsilon more bearable.
Ralph Sarkis (Feb 18 2025 at 10:38):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes
I don't agree with that. It seems the US government tried to encourage researchers to spend some of their time on achieving a broader impact, and I don't know why this would be considered irrational.
Instead of removing these statements, I would rather academics took them more seriously. Perhaps the institutions are not yet ready to enforce this.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:01):Ralph Sarkis said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
a rational government would allocate money separating it in various classes
I don't agree with that. It seems the US government tried to encourage researchers to spend some of their time on achieving a broader impact, and I don't know why this would be considered irrational.
Instead of removing these statements, I would rather academics took them more seriously. Perhaps the institutions are not yet ready to enforce this.
It is irrational because asking "what is the real world impact?" about something that has multiple layers of separation from the real world is basically equivalent to ask people to do a future forecast 100 years from now.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:02):Grothendieck's mathematics is more than 50 years old at this point and only now we're BARELY starting to see it applied to non-pure-maths fields like Engineering. In asking researchers questions like those, you're only giving them the incentive to lie. This sort of questions creates nothing but noise, and since noise must still be produced somehow, it translates to more work for grant writers in exchange of, well, nothing.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 11:04):So what you have is a huge entropy increasing machine that takes people's time as input and produces a string of random characters as output. You may as well put them on a threadmill to disperse heat in the environment at this point. (Thinking more about this, it would be strictly better as one would probably get at least some minor health benefits in return)
Ralph Sarkis (Feb 18 2025 at 11:15):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
"what is the real world impact?" about something that has multiple layers of separation from the real world
The question does not seem to be "How is your research on, say, categories going to solve real world problems?", but rather "What other activities will you undertake, as a researcher, to contribute to the broader community?". At least that is what I understand from Emily Riehl's answer at the start of the thread.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 18 2025 at 11:19):I agree it's annoying, and I would prefer to not have to put some relatively shallow statement about the broader impact, but in Australia mathematicians kind have it sorted, with a true statement that indicates the benefit that is essentially so generic and indirect it can feel silly writing it. Something like "will benefit the country by building capacity in research and boost Australia's international standing" is true, barely, and requires very little thought. The people on the ARC panel assessing grants after the external expert reviewers have gone over them know that this is the best we can do.
It's different to the US system where it seems to be "you must add in something that will be a real-world benefit", as Ralph says.
I certainly can't make claims about if the system is sensible or not, but big string of posts above was just digging into the evidence and what it implied from a mere numbers game.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 12:54):Ralph Sarkis said:
but rather "What other activities will you undertake, as a researcher, to contribute to the broader community?".
To which my standard answer would be: How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
Josselin Poiret (Feb 18 2025 at 13:20):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
except that your job is not just researching ∞-categories in a vacuum. it also entails participating in a community and nurturing it. how you interact and what impact you have on it is as important as the papers you put out. for example, you can take students, collaborate and organize events like seminars. the effects it will have on your research field cannot be understated
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:41):Josselin Poiret said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
How - the fuck - would this be relevant wrt my ability to research on infinity categories? :lol:
except that your job is not just researching ∞-categories in a vacuum. it also entails participating in a community and nurturing it. how you interact and what impact you have on it is as important as the papers you put out. for example, you can take students, collaborate and organize events like seminars. the effects it will have on your research field cannot be understated
Yes, but this sort of impact has nothing to do with the impact evaluation metrics researchers are asked to answer in a grant. Note: They not only ask "how will your research impact your field of research?", which is a perfectly legit question which includes also what you're pointing out. They also ask things like "how will your research impact society, the country, politics, the galaxy and the whole universe timeline", which to be honest seems a bit too much and/or far-fetched to be of any relevance.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:44):Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher? Why should I be forced to teach and/or to 'broaden the scope of my research grant application' if I just have a very relevant idea, a very well detailed program to carry it out, and a clear track record that shows I have the right skill set to be successful? The 'broader community' will still be able to read whatever papers come out of the grant, and benefit from it.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 13:45):I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process. I just don't understand trying to conflate apples and pears under the same category.
fosco (Feb 18 2025 at 14:17):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher? Why should I be forced to teach and/or to 'broaden the scope of my research grant application' if I just have a very relevant idea, a very well detailed program to carry it out, and a clear track record that shows I have the right skill set to be successful? The 'broader community' will still be able to read whatever papers come out of the grant, and benefit from it.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.01508 <- relevant
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 18 2025 at 15:21):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher?
I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process.
Grant applications are in many ways the only leverage that any external authority has over academics. There are extremely well-documented systemic problems in academia (because they're the problems most visible to academics, of course). If its participants aren't required to commit to improving things in one way or another in grant applications, there is no other way to inspire such commitments.
Relatedly, I can see why it's appealing to think of research in purely utilitarian terms (money goes in, research comes out), but academics are responsible for most of the things that happen in academia: we are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions... The systemic problems can only be addressed by acting to fulfill those responsibilities appropriately. As a fellow academic, let alone as a citizen, why should I tolerate you isolating yourself and doing research by yourself in a corner when there are so many other responsibilities to attend to?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 18 2025 at 15:39):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
We are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions...
Not all of these are inherent, by the way, it would improve things greatly if there was a separation of responsibilities beyond the purely bureaucratic. In some rare places there are people who have the job of, say, teaching PhD students to write articles, and in some communities the conferences are big enough that there are dedicated roles (held by people who aren't actively doing research) for their organisation. But to the extent that researchers de facto share responsibilities with their peers beyond research, I apply my argument that no one should be exempt from them by default.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 17:29):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Also, what if I do not want to impact the broader community with social activities, seminars and the like? What if I am a loner which is a great researcher but a terrible teacher?
I don't know, I keep thinking that the main purpose of a 'research grant' should be 'research'. There are a lot of important things that are very clearly not research, and they should deserve their own budget and application process.
Grant applications are in many ways the only leverage that any external authority has over academics. There are extremely well-documented systemic problems in academia (because they're the problems most visible to academics, of course). If its participants aren't required to commit to improving things in one way or another in grant applications, there is no other way to inspire such commitments.
Relatedly, I can see why it's appealing to think of research in purely utilitarian terms (money goes in, research comes out), but academics are responsible for most of the things that happen in academia: we are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions... The systemic problems can only be addressed by acting to fulfill those responsibilities appropriately. As a fellow academic, let alone as a citizen, why should I tolerate you isolating yourself and doing research by yourself in a corner when there are so many other responsibilities to attend to?
Because maybe i'm the only one that would be really able to tackle some question. Or maybe because I'm just a really, really bad teacher and everyone would be better off without me teaching
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 17:31):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
We are the only people with the relevant knowledge to organise conferences, communicate our results, teach our specialised subjects, train students, coordinate with other researchers, assess others' research contributions...
Not all of these are inherent, by the way, it would improve things greatly if there was a separation of responsibilities beyond the purely bureaucratic. In some rare places there are people who have the job of, say, teaching PhD students to write articles, and in some communities the conferences are big enough that there are dedicated roles (held by people who aren't actively doing research) for their organisation. But to the extent that researchers de facto share responsibilities with their peers beyond research, I apply my argument that no one should be exempt from them by default.
I agree that there should be a separation of concerns. That's precisely my point. BTW the "academics must take care of everything" is a rather new thing (it has become the status quo in the last 3 decades), and all academics are complaining about this because it overloads them administratively. It seems a net loss to me, which derives precisely from the Reaganian posture that Unis should be treated like they were companies, not the other way around.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:14):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
..."god knows, probably useless but worth a gamble". The funny thing is that we developed very good techniques to estimate the risk that comes attached with each category, so budgeting according to these lines is definitely possible.
Fabrizio, I have no idea what you could mean by estimating the risk attached to a "...god knows..." grant, such as, presumably "I'm going to make progress with the theory of -cosmoses." Care to expand?
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 18 2025 at 18:26):Sure. What I mean is that on one hand you have a bunch of taxpayer money that you need to allocate. On the other hand you have a bunch of projects that need resources to be carried over. If the funding requested is more than the money available (read: always), you have the typical allocation problem, namely: what do I fund?
From the grant-giving perspective (the organism allocating funding), one could rank projects according to various parameters: One parameter could be impact (how good does the project do?). The other could be risk (what are the probabilities that the project actually delivers?). If you go back a few years (ex-post reasoning is obviously easier), on one hand of the spectrum you have, for instance, building a hospital (decent positive impact, all things considered low risk). On the other hand of the spectrum you have funding AI research (potentially huge impact, very high risk it goes nowhere).
In absolute layman terms, the higher the risk, the less percentage of the budget should go into it (or the highest the need to hedge the high-risk allocation with something else). What matters is that budget allocation according to risk is one of the most studied fields of practical economics, and we have all sort of techniques to allocate funding to maximize impact when risk is known.
...The other most studied field of practical economics is probably 'risk assessment'. There are, especially, a lot of techniques to assess the risk of projects that have a potentially big, but really not-so-clear impact, like, for instance, the impact of some super novel category theory to some field of engineering in n decades.
All in all what I'm saying is that we have developed, over the last 5-6 decades or so, a lot of tools to be really good at allocating budgets for research, and to evaluate research for what it is, without the need of any far-fetched, hyperbolic claims. Deciding not to walk the rational path when it comes to this is a choice. A choice that many governments do, and that I personally find borderline criminal.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:51):Thanks. The thing is, the words you say are profoundly divorced from my understanding of the matter. How in the world would you assess the risk of a category theory project, concretely? I have literally no idea how you could possibly even begin to do so in a way that would track at all with the truth, so it’s quite shocking to hear that apparently this is a solved problem. If it is, then how come all grants are instead allocated using profoundly insufficient heuristics of, essentially, legible prestige and signaling of seriousness?
Kevin Carlson (Feb 18 2025 at 18:52):To be clear, if you could calculate the risk, I am sure there are great economic algorithms for budgeting. It would just be an ontologically shattering event for me to be convinced that you can actually calculate that risk.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:23):To draw an analogy, many government (and other) funding agencies now require that the results of the research they fund ends up open access in some form, because the intellectual results are a public good, and shouldn't be monopolised by publishers. This is just a condition on accepting the funding. The work of open access advocates to directly persuade academics to sort out their own open access was at best a very limited success, so the focus switched to promoting the idea to funding bodies, who have slowly come around to the idea. The funding bodies hold the levers over academic behaviour, and so this has been a more effective tack.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:27):Asking academics to make at minimum an effort to not exclude a subgroup of the population (aka taxpayers) from academic society (for whatever reason: implicit bias, entrenched culture etc etc), or at least consider making a minimum effort, or at least consider promising to probably make a minimum effort (which is what a number of these grants have), as part of getting access to taxpayer money, feels like a very small price to pay. No one seems to be putting a declaration to promise to be "woke" in front of people that must be signed to even enter the lottery that is grant application season, but perhaps its invisible to me, an outsider in another country.
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:36):Were this latter to be happening then I agree this is a rather disagreeable state of affairs. We in Australia have (nearly) had the reverse problem, with the centre-right (verging on neoliberal, I guess) government pushing for all publicly-funded research to be essentially focused towards immediate societal (read: economic) impact and industry engagement. Also, the success rates of funding a rather low. Sean Carroll mentioned a 50% success rate for the NSF funding panel he was on. For the ARC it's more like 16%, and even though there's no "pay for my summer salary, plz" effect here, universities (at least, research universities I am familiar with) compel people to apply for grants regularly as part of their KPIs; essentially, if you don't have one, you need to apply for one every year until you do. And these are hundred-page applications, and a real nightmare.
So imagine what it's like in pure maths where the government is pushing to try to only fund things that have immediate impact, but the universities push everyone to apply every year, and the successful grants are usually only those with a full professor on them, and maybe at best half a dozen get funded a year?
David Michael Roberts (Feb 19 2025 at 00:36):Anyway, this is getting a bit off -track, I should stop, I don't have more to add on the original topic. Just wanted to give some contrast.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 07:09):Kevin Carlson said:
Thanks. The thing is, the words you say are profoundly divorced from my understanding of the matter. How in the world would you assess the risk of a category theory project, concretely? I have literally no idea how you could possibly even begin to do so in a way that would track at all with the truth, so it’s quite shocking to hear that apparently this is a solved problem. If it is, then how come all grants are instead allocated using profoundly insufficient heuristics of, essentially, legible prestige and signaling of seriousness?
No surprise, to everyone their job :joy: If you were to explain that thanks to calculus you can compute instant velocity of objects and whatnot to someone living in the 1400s, you'd be mistaken for a wizard as well. Let's just say that a lot of research around uncertainty has been produced by people in the business of making money. Does it always work? No, it works like 80% of the time in normal conditions. Still better than allocating budget following philosophy and ideology, tho.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 07:16):Bayesian inversion too seems like magic to the uninitiated... In any case some efforts would be really low hanging fruits. Even feeding all the grants applications to an LLM together with outcomes and results and finding out which grants end up winning and which of those winning end up producing cited/impactful results would be really insightful or at least insightful. The overall lack of experimentation and willingness of improving things is the real depressing factor in all this.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 19 2025 at 08:07):Don’t worry, I haven’t mistaken you for a wizard…You keep asserting research exists you haven’t given any evidence exists, and then tossed off a suggestion that is both rather horrifying (let’s have the robots tell us which hidden variables in grant application text correlate with the h-index of resulting publications, that’s sure to fix science!) and itself contingent on assuming we even know what an impactful result is in a reasonable time horizon, which is precisely the question at issue. Respectfully, I’m going to go ahead and consider my ontology non-shattered.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Feb 19 2025 at 10:57):Kevin Carlson said:
Don’t worry, I haven’t mistaken you for a wizard…You keep asserting research exists you haven’t given any evidence exists, and then tossed off a suggestion that is both rather horrifying (let’s have the robots tell us which hidden variables in grant application text correlate with the h-index of resulting publications, that’s sure to fix science!) and itself contingent on assuming we even know what an impactful result is in a reasonable time horizon, which is precisely the question at issue. Respectfully, I’m going to go ahead and consider my ontology non-shattered.
Sorry, I didn't understand that you wanted 'evidence' of the fact that - for instance - insurance companies work and don't usually go bankrupt. I can scavenge some papers if that's what you want.
I also never mentioned h-indexes explicitly, I don't hink they are a good metric. I merely said that there are probably _a lot_ of unexplored correlations between applications and outcomes which could be analyzed and studied, if only whoever decides on budget allocation had the will to do so. I am also convinced that the lack of will to do so may depend on the fact that when decision procedures are murky, decision makers have a better edge at inserting their own biases (and interests) into the process. I don't see this as a particularly efficient outcome, and rejecting tout court the posture that the actual system can (and should) be improved by, well, approaching the problem from a rational stance seems more like a religious opinion to me than anything else. I am also not interested in engaging in ideological conversations, so I'll shut up.
James Deikun (Feb 19 2025 at 12:58):Sufficient conditions for insurance being successful are:
Real world insurance typically adds:
to lower the insurer's risk further.
It is my understanding that the above conditions are how insurance actually functions. Insurers have failed and been bailed out on certain occasions when their "acts of god" clause was insufficiently comprehensive. (The phrase "too big to fail" may bring one such occasion to mind.) This is a far cry from saying quantifying risk is a solved problem.
I don't think this is a reason to abandon all attempts to improve the process of awarding grants, but the problem space is very different from insurance and there's no off-the-shelf solution.
Kevin Carlson (Feb 19 2025 at 16:22):Yeah, to be clear, of course we should try to improve the grant-making system. It’s just not possibly going to be by quantifying risk like an insurer at this point.
John Baez (Feb 20 2025 at 00:58):Oh-oh: Trump has just declared that mathematicians who get NSF grants can't work on homomorphisms! They can only work on heteromorphisms!
Kevin Carlson (Feb 20 2025 at 02:06):Even just morphisms are too wishy-washy, I’m sure. Which side are we on, anyway?
Eric M Downes (Mar 24 2025 at 19:26):Some general thoughts on the issues under discussion here... One thing Emily Riehl has done, though I've no idea if it appeared in her broader impact statements, is present the stable marriage problem on numberphile (and she reverses the usual roles of the genders, which was cutesy... nobody tell Ted Cruz!!)
This kind of public promotion of mathematics knowledge is the kind of thing STEM people can do to avoid the blandness and vagueness of what DMR is complaining about. Some will say "oh but anybody could do that, her expertise is not needed", and I hear them but disagree: the little things she chooses to emphasize I think are quite important from a certain perspective. As she says somewhere in there, this is a math problem... without any numbers! That's quite novel for most of her younger viewers, I suspect, and the kind of insight your average popularizer without the depth in pure theory, seems less likely to make.
The ongoing disaster in the US highlights in part the importance of social bonds across class, and what happens when they are not maintained. I think it is important for scientists, including those doing even very abstract mathematics, to stay connected to this kind of thing and be proactive about engagement. Wether or not the risk-metrics are really well-calibrated or not, keeping the public engaged in STEM is absolutely crucial for fighting back against efforts to undervalue science. There was a time in the US when being a land-grant school meant something in terms of the work done at that school: it was agriculture related, the farmers actually used the research on some level. When Dick Feynman put an O-ring in a glass of ice water he was standing up as a kind of "clever everyman" against the suits and bureaucrats who tried to sweep Challenger under the rug. He was taking great pains to avoid being seen talking down to people as an "expert", or excluding them.
The blessing of government funded research is that it greatly increases the kinds of problems that can be worked on. The danger of publicly funded research is that it gets all the experts talking to each-other on peer-reviewed panels, which is much more efficient and effective at certain ends, but inherently disconnects them from the public and industry, or at least risks doing so. We have entered an age of populist authoritarianism, and things are going to get worse before they get better. Many excellent people are going to have to reach outside of the usual grant system in order to get their work funded in the coming decades. I may be preaching to the choir here, but I encourage everyone looking with concern at the funding situation in your country to embrace the discomfort and engage outside of the traditional systems.
John Baez (Mar 24 2025 at 21:27):I agree with most of that, though "embracing" the discomfort may be unnecessary or impossible: the discomfort will embrace us whether we like it or not, in the form of hiring freezes at many universities, bans on the use of language Trump doesn't like in all federally funded activities, etc.
Eric M Downes (Mar 25 2025 at 06:41):Great point and thanks.
I mean embracing more the pain that leads to growth — discomfort of public speaking, self-promotion if one is bad at that, and just generally engaging in things one isn’t good at, that point in this direction but don’t yet have an immediate measurable impact on one’s work, of dealing with social anxiety, etc.; things that are needed for public engagement. I think for you (JB) these things are perhaps natural at this point, because public engagement feeds your curiosity which animates your work, but for many highly educated people these skills are perhaps less well honed. Especially the kind of people who have been socialized to look down on “popularization”. Everyone probably knows where their edge is after some honest reflection.
For Trump’s litany of unending bullshit and fascist tendencies I think the word is “accept”, as in “accept this is real and it’s going to get worse, possibly a lot worse”. Several countries in EU might be only one election from the same thing happening there.
For some people pivoting to “real world” work might be a solution. For others really clarifying and focusing on what is the one thing they would want to accomplish in this life. For all of us making sure to keep ties with communities that fulfill and support us will be crucial. You know what animates you.
Eric M Downes (Mar 25 2025 at 06:43):These things are all obvious from a certain point of view, so why am I prattling on about it… I saw an initial consensus on “politicization of science is bad, real impacts are good also hard” descend into bickering focused on some idealized problem of “how should grant funding work”.
Certainly if it is possible to make something useful to future reformers then please don’t let me stop anyone! (Even just reaching a consensus among people in disagreement on “how we got here” might fit the bill.)
But failing that… I just wanted to emphasize that as far as I can tell the design problem we’d rather work on is not the one actually staring us in the face right now.
John Baez (Mar 25 2025 at 14:58):Indeed. I'm giving a talk about "Science under authoritarian rule" today at the Topos Institute, when I'd much rather be talking about another nasty problem, climate change. Alas, we don't get to choose the big problems of the day.
Jencel Panic (Apr 06 2025 at 12:32):Ivan Di Liberti said:
Funnily enough, they would indeed find Mao's quotes in some of Lawvere's papers.
That's not the way I'd hope for CT to make headlines.
Patrick Nicodemus (Apr 07 2025 at 00:47):That's not the way I'd hope for CT to make headlines.
It did make headlines!
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John Baez (Apr 07 2025 at 05:07):When was that? Henry Crapo is a friend of mine.
David Michael Roberts (Apr 07 2025 at 07:19):@John Baez 1976 https://formandformalism.blogspot.com/2011/09/lawvere-on-mathematics-and-maoist.html
John Baez (Apr 07 2025 at 15:59):Thanks! If I'd known about that, I would have asked Henry about it.
Jencel Panic (Apr 10 2025 at 12:10):Anyone have some more info about the connection between Marxism and category theory (hope they don't shut us down ;) )?
Jencel Panic (Apr 10 2025 at 12:11): John Baez (Apr 21 2025 at 20:57):Here is an article by a noted mathematician about Ted Cruz's attack on "woke DEI grants":
John Baez (Apr 21 2025 at 21:55):She gives many hilarious examples of how words like "inequality" aren't necessarily signs of wokeness in mathematics grant proposals, despite what Cruz's staff seemed to think. The more serious part is an attempt to understand the anti-science stance lying behind the superfically anti-DEI stance.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 22 2025 at 09:40):I was struck by the following passing comment she makes:
Scientists, and mathematicians, generally tend not to be very politically active and focus their energies almost entirely on their science.
I'm sure this supports her overall point that the science flagged by the Trump administration does not actually contain anything relevant to the claimed goals of their censorship. But if she's right, science in America doesn't even stand a chance of fighting back. :pensive:
The subsequent analysis of fascism is excellent, I would recommend reading this.
Paolo Perrone (Apr 22 2025 at 10:05):This was an excellent read, thank you for sharing.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 22 2025 at 10:32):I find it generally unconvincing that any of what is happening is about anti-science values and a rejection of complexity---as I argued in another thread I think the leaders of the fascist takeover are broadly also steeped in scientific-rationalist ideology. Marcolli even notes that DOGE has enlisted a bunch of STEM graduates from prestigious unis, but instead of taking this as a sign that maybe they are not ideologically anti-science, she only takes it as a sign that their anti-science plan is not based on ignorance and stupidity.
I find this point particularly indicative of an ideological blind spot --- Marcolli seems to find it more likely that a Caltech graduate will be “clever but anti-science” than “stupid but pro-science”!
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 22 2025 at 10:35):I am much more convinced by the readings according to which this is a classic “revolutionary takeover of institutions”.
The main point is not ultimately to defund science or whatever, the point is to force enough people that currently have the power to decide the allocation of science funding to leave, so that they can be replaced with loyalists.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 22 2025 at 10:41):The arguments are not total nonsense (they probably wouldn't have much of a hold otherwise)---it seems to be broadly true that these institutions have their own culture which they propagate independently of what is happening in politics, and that like every culture this has its own ideology; of course it seems to be nonsense that this ideology is woke, marxist, or leftist; it's probably not nonsense that this ideology is broadly opposed to whatever Trumpianism represents, and certainly not giving the kind of loyalty that they want as part of their new regime.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 22 2025 at 10:49):So “takeover by replacing people” is a sensible strategy if they want results quickly!
For comparison, we know that it is very unlikely that we can get category theory papers in Annals, and that this is based in culture and ideology, not in merit-based rationalism (it also doesn't mean that it's because the editorial board of Annals is full of crazy extremist ideologues). Suppose we all decide we want to change that.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 22 2025 at 15:45):I appreciate the analogy with the editorial board, and I find the counter-argument convincing. After all, plenty of scientific advancement took place in Nazi Germany...
John Baez (Apr 22 2025 at 17:05):The counter-argument has some force, but we have to note that the Trump gang universally denies the science on global warming (that it exists, that it matters, that it's human-caused, etc. - different people may say different things), claims that wind power is more dangerous than coal, and that their government is now advocating taking vitamin A as a treatment for measles (in response to the measles outbreak in Texas due to under-immunization), and making other ridiculous claims about health and medicine.
John Baez (Apr 22 2025 at 17:06):I think it's not so much that they're "anti-science" as that they won't let science or facts stop them from doing whatever they want.
On second thought, that's an exaggeration: they don't try to fly by flapping their arms. So maybe they're just lacking empathy, and are willing to ignore science when it says someone else will get hurt.
John Baez (Apr 22 2025 at 17:50):I do think they underestimate the long-term damage, even to their own interests, that will be caused by defunding scientific research at elite academic institutions like Harvard, Columbia, etc.
James Deikun (Apr 22 2025 at 18:08):Engineers can be surprisingly clever-and-anti-science. A lot of engineers graduate from Caltech.
John Baez (Apr 24 2025 at 22:16):Director of the National Science Foundation Sethuraman Panchanathan abruptly resigned Thursday, Science Magazine first reported.
Panchanathan, who goes by Panch, did not cite a reason for his departure, which comes as 16 months are left in his six-year term. However, like most other federal agencies, the scientific funding organization is awash in turmoil due to the Trump administration. Specifically, the NSF is facing a 55 percent cut to its $9 billion annual budget in the next fiscal year, as well as a mass layoff of half of its 1,700-person staff, according to Science.
I wonder why he resigned? :thinking:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 25 2025 at 09:47):Seems he couldn't stop (or was forced to enact) grants getting terminated before resigning...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/science/trump-national-science-foundation-grants.html
John Baez (Apr 25 2025 at 15:46):My question was sarcastic. Anyone whose agency is destroyed while they are heading it is likely to resign. But yes, staffers from DOGE moved into the NSF on April 14th. Two days later, the NSF announced it was halting all new grants. Two days after that, it announced it was terminating about $1 billion in grants already awarded. And now half their staff has been fired and Trump is trying to cut their budget in half. Science will be seriously wounded in the US.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 11:54):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
I am much more convinced by the readings according to which this is a classic “revolutionary takeover of institutions”.
The main point is not ultimately to defund science or whatever, the point is to force enough people that currently have the power to decide the allocation of science funding to leave, so that they can be replaced with loyalists.
"Quantitatively, periods of unrest included many times more events of instability per decade and occurred when the population was declining, rather than increasing. Pre-industrial agrarian societies typically faced instability after one or two centuries of stability. However, a population approaching its carrying capacity alone is not enough to trigger general decline if the people remained united and the ruling class strong. Other factors had to be involved, such as having more aspirants for positions of the elite than the society could realistically support (elite overproduction), which led to social strife, and chronic inflation, which caused incomes to fall and threatened the fiscal health of the state.[79] In particular, an excess in especially young adult male population predictably led to social unrest and violence, as the third and higher-order parity sons had trouble realizing their economic desires and became more open to extreme ideas and actions.[80]"
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 12:37):I'm also totally unconvinced by her analysis of fascism btw.
The historical fascism of the 1920s was an emergent phenomenon, a violent reaction against the rapidly growing complexity of modernity. Fascism is in essence an agrarian fantasy: the “sheaves” in the historical symbol of “fascism” hinting to an essentially rural idealization of society, rejecting complexity and urban modernity, pandering a mythological image of an unspecified past whose return is to be sought.
This is true of the later Fascism movement and Nazism, but Fascism has its roots in Italian Futurism, that, as the term says, it is quite literally the opposite. People like Marinetti or D'Annunzio idealized modern technology like the car (just read the Futurist Manifesto if you have doubts), and in today's term they would be identified as staunch accelerationists. Their political idea was indeed to use any mean (violent or not, that is) to enact an accelerationist revolution.
Indeed, many of the 'revolutionary fascists' of the first period (including Marinetti and D'Annunzio) were completely dismayed, saddened and disgusted with what fascism became in the second period (agrarian dream, strong clericalism, basically the opposite of what it was in the beginning), to the point of either being exiled, or going to exile by themselves (see D'Annunzio being basically confined in the Vittoriale).
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 12:39):If you want a simple, well-known, generally shared definition of what the ideological core of Fascism is, I suggest to go with Umberto Eco's one (totally not a fan of the guy, but this analysis is quite good):
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 12:41):Many of these points can be for sure seen in current Trump's administration ideology btw. This comes from an essay dated 1995, and Eco died in 2016, before Trump's first term began, so you can be sure this definition wasn't made up just to label Trump a fascist.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 12:46):This said, I do not think this matters much. My 2cents is that the US has a huge problem with scarcity of resources, elite overproduction and general decline of living standards and conditions (in part due to this, in part due to the super high income inequality). The result is a fight to the death between different factions which say that people in the other faction are killing the country for "reasons", and that do what they can to put the members of their factions in positions of power. In such a framework ideology is probably more performative than anything else. What really matters is that there are too many people and too little resources (think jobs, money, material goods, position of power). This won't end until the factor that caused this scarcity in the first place aren't solved.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 12:47):I suggest reading something about Peter Turchin's "cliodynamics" if this is of interest to you. He uses also a lot of dynamic system theory to model and understand historical cycles, which is really cool.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 28 2025 at 13:14):Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak".
I often think about this one because I feel it has transcended fascism, become universalised and a kind of "defining" rhetoric of our society.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 28 2025 at 13:16):It is hard to think of any "enemy" in "Western"-world rhetoric that is not cast as "at the same time too strong and too weak".
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 16:53):The idea that there’s too little money and material goods or too many people in the modern US (which is twice as rich per capita as even the EU and less than half as dense in population) is really just beyond my comprehension.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 16:56):The elite overproduction stuff is closer to passing a smell test but, still…the Trumpian “elite” is mostly not even from the pre-existing elite.
John Baez (Apr 28 2025 at 17:52):What do you mean by "Trumpian elite"? The people that the MAGA crowd calls "elites", or the actual elite who support Trump, like Musk and Thiel?
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 18:24):I'm thinking mostly of people Trump is appointing to high-level positions in government, many of whom are woefully underqualified relative to pre-existing standards. I suppose you could try to model this as an intra-elite clash where Musk and Thiel etc are fighting all the academics and journalists etc by trying to induct people like Hegseth into a new elite.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 18:26):Kevin Carlson said:
The idea that there’s too little money and material goods or too many people in the modern US (which is twice as rich per capita as even the EU and less than half as dense in population) is really just beyond my comprehension.
There are plenty of material goods. But economic inequality makes it so that many, many people cannot afford even a hint of them. I stressed how economic inequality is a main cause of all this in the post above
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 18:27):But here the problem is not "material goods". The problem is having plenty of people that study, spend years in formation of all sorts (either university or technical) with the promise that "this will be the start of an incredible career) and then find out that the space they have to compete in is overcrowded
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 18:29):Think about how many people want to pursue an academic career vs available tenure, for instance. And this is true in many sectors. Maybe you study years to become a programmer because 10 years ago it was the "way to go" and now you're jobless or earn little, outcompeted by foreign dev shops and/or AI. What all this creates is a very resentful elite overproduction: People that according to the social belief should be elite but aren't actually.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 18:30):This creates a kernel of highly educated people that have all interest in overthrowing the current elite/system with whatever means. It was also one of the chief reasons behind the French Revolution btw: Bourgeois were doing all the work and producing everything but they weren't allowed to access nobility. Quite understandably, they decided to chop some heads at some point.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 18:41):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
There are plenty of material goods. But economic inequality makes it so that many, many people cannot afford even a hint of them. I stressed how economic inequality is a main cause of all this in the post above
I'm almost happy to move on to what you say is your real point, but, like...the US GINI coefficient is about 0.4. GINIs in the EU rise as high at 0.35. The median household disposal income after transfers here is still 50% higher than in the EU. The 20th percentile American household has income analogous to the median Italian household. It's certainly easy to argue that the US has critical problems with inequality at the top, i.e. our oligarchs, or that you'd prefer to be poor in the EU over the US due to the more solid safety net, but it's comically inaccurate to claim that many, many Americans can't afford "even a hint" of material goods.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 19:02):And this isn't just me being persnickety. It's a very common myth that the Trump movement has something to do with lots of people being poor and resisting the system that materially immiserated them, but this just doesn't align with the facts in the US.
Ryan Wisnesky (Apr 28 2025 at 19:05):define "many people"? Here in SF's financial district, one of the richest places in the US, there are many, many people that cannot afford even a hint of basic necessities like food, water, and shelter, that's for sure.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 19:09):There are a few points:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 19:10):TL;DR: If you convince a good part of the population that "they deserve more", where "more" means an unattainable lifestyle, they won't be content with what they have. Basically, there's a difference between real inequality (GINI) and perceived inequality.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 19:12):Kevin Carlson said:
And this isn't just me being persnickety. It's a very common myth that the Trump movement has something to do with lots of people being poor and resisting the system that materially immiserated them, but this just doesn't align with the facts in the US.
A big problem with "facts" is that, if you consider them macroeconomically, they tend to give you a statistical picture that doesn't capture how people feel. With Biden the economy was growing, but many people felt in their ordinary lives that they were actually doing worse. So what happened there? Did the economy grew as a whole? Yes, but when you look closer, you see that average salaries/income went up very little, whereas billionaires made a BOATLOAD of money. So what really happened there is that very few people got unbelievably richer, whereas everyone else marginally improved their income, with a net negative result if you correct for inflation/rising prices.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 19:13):Now, money is not a real good and holds no value. Money is just a way to decide how to allocate resources in a society. If the net result is that money moved from the hands of many in the hands of few, it's not surprising that people felt poorer even if the economy was growing.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 28 2025 at 19:18):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Now, money is not a real good and holds no value. Money is just a way to decide how to allocate resources in a society. If the net result is that money moved from the hands of many in the hands of few, it's not surprising that people felt poorer even if the economy was growing.
This guy puts it better than I can:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1k06lJsRQeo
Kevin Carlson (Apr 28 2025 at 20:19):Ryan Wisnesky said:
define "many people"? Here in SF's financial district, one of the richest places in the US, there are many, many people that cannot afford even a hint of basic necessities like food, water, and shelter, that's for sure.
Sure. I was taking Fabrizio's "many, many" to imply something like an entire social class; certainly people who have no income at all mostly can't afford many material goods.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 29 2025 at 08:28):We Italians often talk hyperbolically. Taking what I say literally is not going to fly well with me. :)
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 29 2025 at 08:29):I still believe my main points stand: Elite overproduction, income inequality and "too little things to distribute among too many people"are still the biggest causes of what is happening in the US and in the western world in general. Then you can choose to read everything I say literally or to read between the lines, try to connect the dots, understand the general sense and do your own research to see if I have a point or not.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 29 2025 at 10:22):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Think about how many people want to pursue an academic career vs available tenure, for instance. And this is true in many sectors. Maybe you study years to become a programmer because 10 years ago it was the "way to go" and now you're jobless or earn little, outcompeted by foreign dev shops and/or AI. What all this creates is a very resentful elite overproduction: People that according to the social belief should be elite but aren't actually.
I agree with income inequality being a (possibly the main) source of social unrest, as I find Gary Stevenson makes a very compelling case for it. However, I don't follow the argument about "elite overproduction" that you've repeated the most in this discussion. Society managed to support a much larger number of academics even ten years ago, so it doesn't seem "unrealistic" that a comparable number could be supported today, to contest one of your examples. What's your basis for this argument?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 29 2025 at 10:24):fwiw I also don't think the choice of term is accurate. I haven't seen anyone going into academia for the prestige, to 'join the elite', at least outside the US
Eric M Downes (Apr 29 2025 at 11:23):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
It is hard to think of any "enemy" in "Western"-world rhetoric that is not cast as "at the same time too strong and too weak".
Yes this. 100%. The second most disturbing thing that I have seen unfold during my lifetime is the US become ripped in two, politically/socially speaking. Pew Research has documented this
The US has many own-goals: a lot of the political "action" (read: screaming hatefully at everyone else) on the extremes of the right and the left harms the center, the social glue of a high-trust society, and the institutions that democracy (or even just political sanity) depends upon. The ultimate responsibility has to lie with the US for what is happening.
And. Perhaps the most disturbing realization has been that this process may not have happened entirely in a vacuum, worse that the active measures provoking it are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Yuri Bezmenov's chilling explication of Soviet-subversion/demoralization techniques are eerily familiar to anyone watching current events; "true information does not matter anymore, a person who is demoralized is unable to asses". As the TENET Media case clearly shows, the post-Cold-War Z/Ruscist-equivalent's innovation is to be at least as ready to use right-wing or politically-opportunist useful idiots to sabotage clear thinking and democratic processes. I even did a -test to confirm this political "diversification" in disinformation tactics.
I have no desire to wade into the academic/technical "what is Fascism (not)" quagmire, but I'm also not sure the technical details are that important to our situation... the way I see it, there's an Egregore, call it whatever you want, that can be recognized by what it does. That egregore uses ideology, be it futurist/fascist/communist/utopianist/whatever like an anglerfish uses its lure: a bright shiny bauble to lure in the unsuspecting bright-eyed youth and idealists. Then two processes: a sort of digestion of society through demoralizing actions and rhetoric and violence, and also an escalation of privileges to move past the idealists to reach the more cynical and more powerfully-placed. Once oligarchs (or some other powerful group) are onside/co-opted with this transformation, you get decapitation strikes, coups, and the ultimate betrayal of the very people and concepts the ideology-lure originally drew in. Then the really bad stuff starts... Maksim Erisatvi's bleak three-word summary of this process is apropos.
IMO the more our societies are still in denial about ugliness in our own past, say colonialism or racial violence for instance, the easier this becomes: if you are emotionally committed to avoiding uncomfortable truths, you become easier to deceive or corrupt, all while perceiving yourself a victim. As my Irish family says "The Past is very unpredictable." In this sense science can be useful or a detriment to the egregore digesting society: a detriment because science seeks truth and openness, but useful if its productive capacity can be maintained while practitioners are lured into a distracted state of unhealthy skepticism and detail-orientation, where we cannot see the dark forest growing around us for the details of the trees.
Returning to Amar's point, this is to say that this perception of the "enemy" being simultaneously "too weak and too strong" is so common, perhaps, because it really is picking up on something. Rarely is it to do with the specified enemy (often a red herring) actually being this way, but with demoralization and the nature of the more sinister forms of power. We are in a liminal time in which we no longer accurately perceive what power and strength are. People and organizations that by the standards of the old era seem weak or hopelessly incompetent, or self-destructively toxic, etc. are able to pull off coups and inflict tremendous damage from a position of "weakness", precisely because they are applying different types of strength. So long as we fail to perceive these forms of strength as they are, we exist in a state of confusion. In such a state, perhaps by Yoneda, the misattribution of paradoxical qualities to others merely witnesses this internal paradox.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 29 2025 at 16:41):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Think about how many people want to pursue an academic career vs available tenure, for instance. And this is true in many sectors. Maybe you study years to become a programmer because 10 years ago it was the "way to go" and now you're jobless or earn little, outcompeted by foreign dev shops and/or AI. What all this creates is a very resentful elite overproduction: People that according to the social belief should be elite but aren't actually.
I agree with income inequality being a (possibly the main) source of social unrest, as I find Gary Stevenson makes a very compelling case for it. However, I don't follow the argument about "elite overproduction" that you've repeated the most in this discussion. Society managed to support a much larger number of academics even ten years ago, so it doesn't seem "unrealistic" that a comparable number could be supported today, to contest one of your examples. What's your basis for this argument?
Elite overproduction means you have more qualified people than available places for people with that qualification. If the number of available places goes down for whatever reason (e.g. cutting funds to universities in the case of academic position), then the probability of elite overproduction increases. So I don't see how your counterpoint is actually a counterpoint :/
Ryan Wisnesky (Apr 29 2025 at 19:04):Probably worth pointing out that "elite overproduction" is definitely in the zeitgeist here in the US, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction and https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/180jkmh/the_elite_overproduction_hypothesis/ and https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-and-instability/ for example
John Baez (Apr 29 2025 at 19:13):I'm doing my own small part to counteract the overproduction of elites in the US: I'm leaving.
John Baez (Apr 29 2025 at 19:18):More seriously, I agree with @Eric M Downes here:
We are in a liminal time in which we no longer accurately perceive what power and strength are. People and organizations that by the standards of the old era seem weak or hopelessly incompetent, or self-destructively toxic, etc. are able to pull off coups and inflict tremendous damage from a position of "weakness", precisely because they are applying different types of strength.
Indeed, it amazed me how things like birtherism and Pizzagate got real traction in the US. I feel like a large number of people have gotten dumber than when I was a kid. But in fact some people have learned to manipulate crowds using the internet and other new tools. I shudder to think about how the rise of increasingly powerful AI will play into this. Why did it have to come at precisely this moment? Sigh.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 30 2025 at 07:15):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Think about how many people want to pursue an academic career vs available tenure, for instance. [...] What all this creates is a very resentful elite overproduction: People that according to the social belief should be elite but aren't actually.
I don't follow the argument about "elite overproduction" that you've repeated the most in this discussion. Society managed to support a much larger number of academics even ten years ago, so it doesn't seem "unrealistic" that a comparable number could be supported today, to contest one of your examples. What's your basis for this argument?
Elite overproduction means you have more qualified people than available places for people with that qualification. If the number of available places goes down for whatever reason (e.g. cutting funds to universities in the case of academic position), then the probability of elite overproduction increases. So I don't see how your counterpoint is actually a counterpoint :/
"Overproduction" means "producing too many". The phrase implies that the education system is producing too many educated or qualified people, and "there aren't enough jobs now" doesn't support that point, since the jobs available are not a good metric for the needs (or even wants) of society. Medical research or nuclear facility maintenance in the US is a very clear example of this. So I'm asking you to justify the claim that there are too many """elites""".
There is already a term, "surplus" for when supply exceeds demand, which is not as loaded (although it has some similar problems in connotation). So if you prefer to argue semantics I would ask why you chose to repeat the particular phrase of Peter Turchin.
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 07:23):I found a - probably incomplete - list of NSF grants that have been terminated. These are the grants classified as "MPS", meaning I suppose mathematical and physical sciences. Sorry for the bad formatting. The number on top is the grant number.
2317570
MPS
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
American Institute of Mathematics
CA
$82,680
2025-04-18
2317573
MPS
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Brown University
RI
$155,785
2025-04-18
2317572
MPS
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
CA
$111,805
2025-04-18
2317571
MPS
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
University of Chicago
IL
$182,559
2025-04-18
2309307
MPS
Collaborative Research: Evaluating Access: How a Multi-Institutional Network Promotes Equity and Cultural Change through Expanding Student Voice
Rochester Institute of Tech
NY
$195,917
2025-04-18
2318841
MPS
Minnesota Partnership to Foster Native American Participation in Astrophysics
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
MN
$247,686
2025-04-25
2332592
MPS
Conference: Gender Equity in the Mathematical Study (GEMS) of Commutative Algebra
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
MN
$20,000
2025-04-18
2139125
MPS
Conference in Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics: Celebrating the Work of Diverse Mathematicians
University of Wisconsin-Madison
WI
$7,508
2025-04-25
2317569
MPS
Collaborative Research: Conference: Mathematical Sciences Institutes Diversity Initiative
University of California-Los Angeles
CA
$215,820
2025-04-18
2332232
MPS
PRIMES: Researching and Teaching Mathematics of Fairness and Equity
Morehouse College
GA
$365,861
2025-04-18
2428059
MPS
Collaborative Research: ATD: Hawkes Process-Based Causal Relationship Discovery For Complex Threat Detection and Forecasting
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 07:27):You can see from the titles why some of these were considered "woke DEI grants" - but not all, e.g. not "Collaborative Research: ATD: Hawkes Process-Based Causal Relationship Discovery For Complex Threat Detection and Forecasting". You can get abstracts of the grants at the actual database. Perhaps this particular grant committed the sin of saying
This project aims to establish a foundational understanding of causality for algorithmic threat detection, provide principled algorithms for analyzing complex event streams, and broaden the application of these methods to diverse social and scientific domains.
(Italics mine.)
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 30 2025 at 07:48):I'm sure that saving those 7508$ in Wisconsin will make a huge difference
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 08:04):They're not doing that to save money: they're doing it to prevent a conference "Celebrating the Work of Diverse Mathematicians".
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 30 2025 at 08:08):Yes, of course, but I presume this is still phrased as an economic argument (we should not be wasting taxpayers' money on woke DEI stuff).
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 30 2025 at 08:12):I don't know if anyone has made the extra step of saying “woke DEI stuff must simply not happen (even if self-funded)” yet.
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 08:24):Of course they have. To take just one example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos Trump said "My administration has taken action to abolish all discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense — and these are policies that were absolute nonsense — throughout the government and the private sector." (Italics mine.) And they are attempting to do just that.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 30 2025 at 08:58):Oh, I had missed that, I thought that private companies stopping their DEI programs was more of a case of "we are now free to do what we always wanted to do (+ we want to suck up to the Trump admin)" than something that the Trump admin was openly wanting to achieve.
Eric M Downes (Apr 30 2025 at 09:29):well, its both. Many of those same companies cynically played to the perceived zeitgeist, because there was thought to be money in it. (Some like UniLever might actually hold such values, but assuming that is a poor null hypothesis.) Now they have buyers remorse and get to wash their hands of it, while saving face.
For Trump its clearly a bit of an obsession, and with his base as well. He is preternaturally good at predicting what will get him attention, and he's not often wrong about these things... there's a lot of bad history in the US and those are very important conversations. and the deplorable strategy I witnessed on W coast US cities of brow-beating and intimidating people into silence, or allowing others to do for you, well, it has backfired tremendously... when you do not allow someone to speak their lived experience, no matter how coarse their words might be, you drive that frustration inside them, where it turns to bitterness and eventually rots into hate.
One takeaway message for everyone else in the world I hope will be: do not pretend issues are settled in society, just because you want them to be, especially if you are "in the right"! This is inimical to democracy, and the alienation it brings, forms a foothold for every malefactor out there to "strangle you with your own system" as a certain Chinese saying goes.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:32):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Think about how many people want to pursue an academic career vs available tenure, for instance. [...] What all this creates is a very resentful elite overproduction: People that according to the social belief should be elite but aren't actually.
I don't follow the argument about "elite overproduction" that you've repeated the most in this discussion. Society managed to support a much larger number of academics even ten years ago, so it doesn't seem "unrealistic" that a comparable number could be supported today, to contest one of your examples. What's your basis for this argument?
Elite overproduction means you have more qualified people than available places for people with that qualification. If the number of available places goes down for whatever reason (e.g. cutting funds to universities in the case of academic position), then the probability of elite overproduction increases. So I don't see how your counterpoint is actually a counterpoint :/
"Overproduction" means "producing too many". The phrase implies that the education system is producing too many educated or qualified people, and "there aren't enough jobs now" doesn't support that point, since the jobs available are not a good metric for the needs (or even wants) of society. Medical research or nuclear facility maintenance in the US is a very clear example of this. So I'm asking you to justify the claim that there are too many """elites""".
There is already a term, "surplus" for when supply exceeds demand, which is not as loaded (although it has some similar problems in connotation). So if you prefer to argue semantics I would ask why you chose to repeat the particular phrase of Peter Turchin.
I used the phrase of Turchin because I think Turchin is right. The needs or wants of society are completely irrelevant economically unless someone can pay for them and they are sustainable. Society needs more nurses and doctors, obviously, but if the healthcare system is public and the government hasn't enough money to allocate to healthcare, then the available jobs will be limited. So yes you can definitely have elite overproduction in a situation where actual needs justify it. Needs are not economic demand.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:33):On the contrary, if the healthcare system is private, but a plethora of economic factors are such that the pricing of that services makes them unappealing also with high needs, the outcome is the same. Economics is really convoluted and non linear, there are plenty of situations where everyone wants the same thing and yet there is no equilibrium nor agreement.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:36):There's an interesting theory around this in the context of civilization collapse which has to do with energy return of investment. I'm quoting from wiki:
Energy has played a crucial role throughout human history. Energy is linked to the birth, growth, and decline of each and every society. Energy surplus is required for the division of labor and the growth of cities. Massive energy surplus is needed for widespread wealth and cultural amenities. Economic prospects fluctuate in tandem with a society's access to cheap and abundant energy.
Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and ecologist Charles Hall proposed an economic model called energy return on investment (EROI), which measures the amount of surplus energy a society gets from using energy to obtain energy.[85][86] Energy shortages drive up prices and as such provide an incentive to explore and extract previously uneconomical sources, which may still be plentiful, but more energy would be required, and the EROI is then not as high as initially thought.[84]
There would be no surplus if EROI approaches 1:1. Hall showed that the real cutoff is well above that and estimated that 3:1 to sustain the essential overhead energy costs of a modern society. The EROI of the most preferred energy source, petroleum, has fallen in the past century from 100:1 to the range of 10:1 with clear evidence that the natural depletion curves all are downward decay curves. An EROI of more than ~3 then is what appears necessary to provide the energy for socially important tasks, such as maintaining government, legal and financial institutions, a transportation infrastructure, manufacturing, building construction and maintenance, and the lifestyles of all members of a given society.[86]
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:39):I think this si somehow connected to this context: A lot of societal needs are covered, for instance, by taxation. How much one can collect by taxes is directly connected to how much one can produce, which is directly connected to how much one can spend. So a decline in productivity in apparently completely different sectors can have an impact on things like, say, welfare. With more degrees of separation this is also true in the private sector, where some goods/services stop being produced because there isn't enough market for them, even if the need is apparently high.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:40):My point is that saying "it's not true that we cannot have more academics, we used to maintain more in the past" really is a moot point. Do we _need_ more academics? Probably yes. Can we afford them? Most likely not, since if you draw a comparison to when, say, Reagan was in power the government and in general many institutions were way less burdened with debt, interest in the education sector was probably higher, etc etc.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:41):So, in layman terms: There aren't too many elites compared to what we need or want. There are too many with respect to what we can afford.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 13:42):(Yes, the fact that many of the wealthiest people in the west don't pay enough taxes is part of this problem btw. But that itself leads to a much bigger problem that is "how do you tax the superwealthy", which is absolutely non-trivial for a lot of unrelated reasons).
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 30 2025 at 14:54):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
So, in layman terms: There aren't too many elites compared to what we need or want. There are too many with respect to what we can afford.
I think this sentence really captures the irony that was disturbing me earlier with the term "elite". There are actual elites (which I mean here in the most disparaging way possible), the ultra-wealthy, that are preventing the "we" you refer to from affording the basic needs of society. They are not selected on a meritocratic basis; they are not the most qualified. We have not been pushed out by "the market".
(Yes, the fact that many of the wealthiest people in the west don't pay enough taxes is part of this problem btw. But that itself leads to a much bigger problem that is "how do you tax the superwealthy", which is absolutely non-trivial for a lot of unrelated reasons).
Alright, that sounds like a more interesting discussion, and one that we can learn from. Name one reason that it's non-trivial!
Eric M Downes (Apr 30 2025 at 15:52):I will jump in here and say that in general if a problem has not been fixed despite it seeming SO OBVIOUS … it probably really is non-trivial?
Rich people and corporate entities have options poor people do not and can afford to pay tax/legal/lobbying/market-manipulating professionals quite in excess of regulators to maintain such options. Cf Panama Papers, the capital gains tax being lower than the employment tax for almost every bracket, and the way that the biggest US corporations in particular have managed to hold their wealth abroad and are not taxed very much on it (looking at you, Apple!)
We can and should shout “corruption!” but words are not an enforcement mechanism. Nor am I saying you should give up or not try. But when the thing “we” are trying to effect can react and effect us back (say, back out of power)… well “non trivial” doesn’t even cut it!
And that’s not even getting into the issue of wealth vs income, or regulatory capture, or diversion of government spending in ways that help economic elites, or black market / organized crime… or the concept validity of “we” out of context of the incentives of the game “we” are all playing.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 30 2025 at 16:13):You've made it sound very complex. Certainly the wealthy have a lot of resources with which to thwart attempts to redistribute their wealth, but conceptually what needs to be done is pretty simple: tax wealth.
The problem of wealth held abroad might make this seem tricky, yet the US already manages to tax its citizens' income even if they reside outside the US, so a prospective solution to that already exists... and it could even stand a chance of being implemented as long as one lives in a democracy. Maybe.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 30 2025 at 16:26):Is there any example of a modern economy taxing wealth more-or-less successfully? The conceptual challenge with wealth taxes is very clear: it's easier to hide a stock (no pun intended) than a flow. That's true even when the stock is a big pile of gold, and of course when most large stocks are held as hypothetical paper gains in a market that can't actually sustain liquidating those gains, you get a whole new layer of rather extraordinary challenges.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Apr 30 2025 at 16:35):Japan has extraordinarily high taxes on inheritance and gifts, and seems to be at least a success case of limiting intergenerational wealth accumulation.
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 17:40):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
Oh, I had missed that, I thought that private companies stopping their DEI programs was more of a case of "we are now free to do what we always wanted to do (+ we want to suck up to the Trump admin)" than something that the Trump admin was openly wanting to achieve.
You are right that many companies got rid of their DEI programs shortly after Trump announced his dislike of these. UnitedHealth Group, MLB, Victoria’s Secret, Warner Bros. Discovery, Goldman Sachs, Paramount, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citigroup, Pepsi, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Coca-Cola, Deloitte, PBS, Google, Disney, GE, PayPal, Chipotle, Target and others scaled back or canceled their DEI programs even before April.
But Trump also signed two executive orders banning federal agencies from contracting with companies that embrace DEI policies. An example is LinkedIn: federal agencies dropped millions of dollars in contracts for LinkedIn services.
Then judges started issuing injunctions trying to stop the Trump administration from doing this. Here's a story from April 22nd:
Federal courts continue to navigate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) landscape including Executive Orders targeting DEI. In a recent development last week, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly granted a preliminary injunction against the United States Department of Labor (“DOL”) from enforcing the Executive Order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” issued by President Trump on January 20, 2025 that effectively bans DEI programs for federal contractors and grantees.
The ruling in Chicago Women in Trades v. Trump (N.D. Ill., No. 1:25-cv-2005) extends a prior temporary restraining order, concluding that requiring contractors to certify non-participation in DEI programs likely violates their First Amendment rights. There, Chicago Women in Trades, a nonprofit that provides job training to women, challenged the requirement for contractors to certify that they do not operate DEI programs.
It's not clear the Trump administration will follow the judge's orders.
Threats to federal funding for the University of California made my university flip-flop. Until recently, UC required that any candidate for an open position write a "DEI statement" describing what they've done in support of diversity, equity and inclusion. There were required courses for faculty on how to read and evaluate such statements. Now there's a policy that bans the use of DEI statements. The mandatory has become forbidden.
So far I'm not sure of pressure beyond words and "the power of the purse", but I expect that when the low-hanging fruit is picked, the pressure will increase on any remaining holdouts. E.g. the Republicans could pass laws that forbid DEI (based on their usual argument that it's a form of discrimination).
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:45):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
So, in layman terms: There aren't too many elites compared to what we need or want. There are too many with respect to what we can afford.
I think this sentence really captures the irony that was disturbing me earlier with the term "elite". There are actual elites (which I mean here in the most disparaging way possible), the ultra-wealthy, that are preventing the "we" you refer to from affording the basic needs of society. They are not selected on a meritocratic basis; they are not the most qualified. We have not been pushed out by "the market".
(Yes, the fact that many of the wealthiest people in the west don't pay enough taxes is part of this problem btw. But that itself leads to a much bigger problem that is "how do you tax the superwealthy", which is absolutely non-trivial for a lot of unrelated reasons).
Alright, that sounds like a more interesting discussion, and one that we can learn from. Name one reason that it's non-trivial!
We're getting there! That is exactly the essence of elite overproduction. There is an economic elite, wich is above everything else. There are a lot of people that would like to get there, or getting equivalent status. How do you do that? Historically there is a "cursus honorum" that brought people there, e.g. "get a degree from Oxbridge" was a pretty good starting point. So people pursued those careers, often exactly with the _expectation_ of being able to join said elite. So now you have a lot of Harvard graduates from whatever background that, say, try to join some hedge fund. Many of them won't be able tho, because demand is too high, and will have to go for something else. This creates lower and lower tiers of alternatives and, in the end, you'll have people that "I did all that I did to be part of this elite, and instead I end up working a shit job that doesn't respect all the effort I put into building my career nor my expectations". And that's 'elite overproduction' for you.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:46):It's like you say: "Here's society's ladder. It's hard, but feel free to climb it." And it works for a while, but then as more and more people try to climb the ladder, it gets longer and longer, and increasingly many people end up falling, feeling they didn't deserve the fall. And everything seems more and more miserable.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:47):This works at all levels: It's not necessarily the super-rich, in general a "healthy" society gives everyone the possibility to better their condition with the right effort. So maybe one is a peasant but studying hard enough lands a better job and guarantees a better outcome for their kids, and so on and so forth. As soon as this mechanism breaks down for entire pieces of the population, then it's game over and you'll have deeply unsatisfied people that basically want to overturn the system.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:50):Now, on tax evasion, it's more or less what @Eric M Downes said.
If you say "let's tax the rich" then, either:
James Deikun (Apr 30 2025 at 17:53):Yeah, you can't really tax the rich too much without taxing "taking it with you" when you leave the country, and after the Iron Curtain very few Western countries have an appetite for making it harder to leave.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:53):An example of this is Apple/Amazon. Let's break it down.
Then, after being taxed, many things can happen: You can move them to Bahamas or whatnot through the NL, for instance.
As soon as the EU or whatever will finally force Ireland to raise their IP tax (and they don't want to since Apple for instance hires I don't know how many people in Ireland in exchange of this favor), Apple's lawyers will deploy another strategy, and i'm sure they have 1000000 already figured out.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:55):Now, onto owners. Say you own 1% of Apple. That's a whopping 10B of wealth more or less. Say you wanna buy a house. Do you sell it? Fuck no, you'd have to pay tax on it. What you do is you use it as collateral with a bank for a loan, which is given at an interest which is super low because you've got an incredibly high credit score.
James Deikun (Apr 30 2025 at 17:55):As for unrealized assets, I've often thought there should be a tax on borrowing against unrealized assets, which has many of the benefits of taxing unrealized assets and a lot fewer downsides.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:56):So you loan the money, and you buy your house, and pay no tax. So basically equity works as unrealized gain for the government (not taxable) but you have ways to spend it. And then you can either let the loan default to repay it, or do another 1000000 tricks to stay afloat
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:56):James Deikun said:
As for unrealized assets, I've often thought there should be a tax on borrowing against unrealized assets, which has many of the benefits of taxing unrealized assets and a lot fewer downsides.
I agree 100%.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 17:56):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
So you loan the money, and you buy your house, and pay no tax. So basically equity works as unrealized gain for the government (not taxable) but you have ways to spend it. And then you can either let the loan default to repay it, or do another 1000000 tricks to stay afloat
For instance Musk did an incredible charade with XAI, lemme find a video because this is really hard to explain
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 18:01):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpgNHaCuu44
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 18:02):This guy is great at explaining how a lot of this stuff works.
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 18:23):Left unstopped, these tricks used by the super-rich keep increasing in scope, and they keep gaining more and more influence over the governments, until the states they manipulate cease to be democracies except in a very limited sense. At that point it becomes extremely hard to collect more taxes from the super-rich. The system may just "collapse" in some way, or there may be some sort of revolution.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 30 2025 at 18:26):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
Japan has extraordinarily high taxes on inheritance and gifts, and seems to be at least a success case of limiting intergenerational wealth accumulation.
Well, that's still critically a tax on a flow, and it means at best that the American people can't do anything about Musk's money for several more decades. But thanks for the observation.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 30 2025 at 18:29):John Baez said:
Left unstopped, these tricks used by the super-rich keep increasing in scope, and they keep gaining more and more influence over the governments, until the states they manipulate cease to be democracies except in a very limited sense. At that point it becomes extremely hard to collect more taxes from the super-rich. The system may just "collapse" in some way, or there may be some sort of revolution.
This is an intuitive model, but are you reasoning from past examples or from theory? There just aren't that many examples of backsliding in rich democracies in the modern world, and I'm not sure this story fits well in much of what I know of the ancient.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 18:57):John Baez said:
Left unstopped, these tricks used by the super-rich keep increasing in scope, and they keep gaining more and more influence over the governments, until the states they manipulate cease to be democracies except in a very limited sense. At that point it becomes extremely hard to collect more taxes from the super-rich. The system may just "collapse" in some way, or there may be some sort of revolution.
Interestingly, back in the 50-60s, probably the most prosperous time in US history, taxes on rich people were waaaay higher. What happened is that starting from Reagan (prob the worst president in US history for my taste):
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 18:57):That worked amazingly in the short term (dragged the world out of the 70s economic crisis) but now we're paying the long-term price for it.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 18:59):In general there are a lot of different layers of "problems" piling up: Economic inequality, dominance of finance over production (which shifted to China etc), cultural problems, bureaucracy is really getting in the way of pretty much everything, etc etc etc.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 19:01):Also I've a feeling that society, esp in the west, is stupidifying itself at a mind-boggling rate. The average quality of education is down (my dad was a Uni professor for instance and he always said that a A+ student in 2005 would probably be less prepared than a D student in the 90s), average IQ is down, average functional literacy rate is down (this is especially true in Italy btw), etc
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 19:03):And it really feels that the overwhelming majority of "solutions" proposed in the last decades are basically like patches that do not solve the real issues at the price of making everything more complicated for everyone else. I think this is one of the reasons why DOGE was really hailed as a great initiative before they actually started acting, making a huge mess.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (Apr 30 2025 at 19:04):I mean as an entrepreneur in Europe I can guarantee that you have no idea how uselessly bureaucratic and complicated the process is. We spend like 20% of our time compiling useless forms instead of doing R&D and building products, and this is true for pretty much any sectors (administrative load is sky-high also for academic stuff I'm told)
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 19:53):Kevin Carlson said:
John Baez said:
Left unstopped, these tricks used by the super-rich keep increasing in scope, and they keep gaining more and more influence over the governments, until the states they manipulate cease to be democracies except in a very limited sense. At that point it becomes extremely hard to collect more taxes from the super-rich. The system may just "collapse" in some way, or there may be some sort of revolution.
This is an intuitive model, but are you reasoning from past examples or from theory?
I'm just bullshitting. I guess people call that "reasoning from theory". Now I'd like to understand how the Gilded Age ended.
From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation's wealth, while the top 10% owned roughly three-quarters of it.[61] The bottom 40% had no wealth at all.[5] In terms of property, the wealthiest 1% owned 51%, while the bottom 44% claimed 1.1%.
But what happened? It seems there was a rise in labor unions, and a lot of violent attempts to suppress them:
Starting in the mid-1880s a new group, the Knights of Labor, grew too rapidly, and it spun out of control and failed to handle the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. The Knights avoided violence, but their reputation collapsed in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886, when anarchists allegedly bombed the policemen dispersing a meeting.[75] Police then randomly fired into the crowd, killing and wounding a number of people, including other police, and arbitrarily rounded up anarchists, including leaders of the movement. Seven anarchists went on trial. Four were hanged even though no evidence directly linked them to the bombing.[76] One had in his possession a Knights of Labor membership card.[76] At its peak, the Knights claimed 700,000 members. By 1890, membership had plummeted to fewer than 100,000, then faded away.[77]
Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s as the gap between the rich and the poor widened.[78] There were 37,000 strikes from 1881 to 1905. By far the largest number were in the building trades, followed far behind by coal miners. The main goal was control of working conditions and settling which rival union was in control. Most were of very short duration. In times of depression strikes were more violent but less successful, because the company was losing money anyway. They were successful in times of prosperity when the company was losing profits and wanted to settle quickly.[79]
The largest and most dramatic strike was the 1894 Pullman Strike, a coordinated effort to shut down the national railroad system. The strike was led by the upstart American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs and was not supported by the established brotherhoods. The union defied federal court orders to stop blocking the mail trains, so President Cleveland used the U.S. Army to get the trains moving again. The ARU vanished and the traditional railroad brotherhoods survived but avoided strikes.[8]
John Baez (Apr 30 2025 at 19:56):If these struggles indeed led to a decrease in wealth inequality after 1900, then I'd say this was short of a full-fledged revolution, but still a lot of strife. (As far as I'm concerned that's better than a revolution, which usually involves a lot more violent death.)
Now I'd like to learn a lot more history about this and other ways that eras of high wealth inequality ended.
Kevin Carlson (Apr 30 2025 at 20:37):There was a lot of top-down work against the trusts of the Gilded Age, starting with the federal Sherman Act of 1890 that's being used against Google, Meta, and Amazon today, including the best part of the career of the great populist lawyer Louis Brandeis, and remaining a central interest of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. While everyone hated the trusts, unions and strikes remained highly controversial during this period (i.e. my impression is that even respectable middle class progressives mostly didn't like them) and Debs, though by far the most successful socialist in US history, was never quite a truly serious candidate for President; I don't have a strong conclusion about what this means about the load-bearingness of the strike era, since even a relatively minor radical population might help scare the "normies" into a stronger response. I'm personally quite hopeful about the neo-Brandeisian movement that's been working to revitalize antitrust law today, as I think it was so central in the Progressive era, then against Bell and IBM later, in enabling probably the eras of the least horrific failures of economic justice in American history.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 06:55):Kevin Carlson said:
There was a lot of top-down work against the trusts of the Gilded Age, starting with the federal Sherman Act of 1890 that's being used against Google, Meta, and Amazon today, including the best part of the career of the great populist lawyer Louis Brandeis, and remaining a central interest of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. While everyone hated the trusts, unions and strikes remained highly controversial during this period (i.e. my impression is that even respectable middle class progressives mostly didn't like them) and Debs, though by far the most successful socialist in US history, was never quite a truly serious candidate for President; I don't have a strong conclusion about what this means about the load-bearingness of the strike era, since even a relatively minor radical population might help scare the "normies" into a stronger response. I'm personally quite hopeful about the neo-Brandeisian movement that's been working to revitalize antitrust law today, as I think it was so central in the Progressive era, then against Bell and IBM later, in enabling probably the eras of the least horrific failures of economic justice in American history.
Another important point: Much of the bettering of the working conditions for "common people" in the XX century, compared to the Victorian era, is due to the commies. In the west people were shit-scared that the Russian revolution could spread everywhere, and made many concessions (such as the 8hr work day) to mitigate the revolutionary impulse.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 07:03):There are a lot of "non-socialist, but still better than we have today" movements that have been forgotten but are kinda resurfacing. One of these is Georgism, which I find very intriguing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The idea of Georgism is very simple: Active income (e.g. the profit stemming from work) should be taxed very lightly, or none at all, whereas passive income (e.g. profit from renting land, revenue bering assets etc.) should be taxed heavily. I tend to agree with this position, as what makes the ultra rich so rich is precisely the vast accumulation of assets and property that generate passive income, esp. across generations. So basically you can stop working and do nothing, and you'll still end up generating more wealth than average Joe working a lot.
Since as I said some posts earlier money is not value, but a tool to determine how resources are allocated, this makes all the resources go to the superwealthy, leaving everyone else with very little. Now, I do not believe that being stinking rich is per sé morally bad, but I believe that wealth should be the fruit of one's work, and so I find the idea of getting passive revenue kinda unfair, esp if the passive-revenue bearing assets are inherited. Moreover, the productivity of society as a whole is inherently related to how much and how well people work, so a societal system that puts "passive income earning" above "get rich by working your ass off" is inherently doomed to slip into stagnation and decadence in my personal view.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 07:05):Another interesting point: This kind of posture should be considered "as capitalist as one can get": What really matters is the fruit of your own work. And instead it's very frowned upon by neoliberals, which fundamentally believe in private property and in inalienable ownership much more than they believe in work. I find this contradiction really amusing.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 08:27):I think there's a psychological trap whereby getting rich is encouraged but also getting rich purely for one's own sake is frowned upon and so the go-to justification for greed is: “I'm doing it for my children”; or in the absence of children, one will display generosity in gifts/charity. Remove that by making it really hard to inherit or gift, and extraordinary accumulation is displayed in its selfish nature.
Not to mention that “get wealthy not for yourself but for your children” is also used as a moralised motivator for lower classes to accept the race, so it is quite easy for the upper classes to coopt the lower ones in opposing any action in this direction.
This is why I think that, in fact, acting on gifts/inheritance would not only have the obvious “first-order” effect which is delayed by a few decades, but also a “second-order” effect in immediately making excessive accumulation harder to morally justify; but at the same time it seems incredibly hard to achieve politically, Japan is probably an outlier due to basically single-party system + enormous social trust
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 12:21):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
I think there's a psychological trap whereby getting rich is encouraged but also getting rich purely for one's own sake is frowned upon and so the go-to justification for greed is: “I'm doing it for my children”; or in the absence of children, one will display generosity in gifts/charity. Remove that by making it really hard to inherit or gift, and extraordinary accumulation is displayed in its selfish nature.
Not to mention that “get wealthy not for yourself but for your children” is also used as a moralised motivator for lower classes to accept the race, so it is quite easy for the upper classes to coopt the lower ones in opposing any action in this direction.
This is why I think that, in fact, acting on gifts/inheritance would not only have the obvious “first-order” effect which is delayed by a few decades, but also a “second-order” effect in immediately making excessive accumulation harder to morally justify; but at the same time it seems incredibly hard to achieve politically, Japan is probably an outlier due to basically single-party system + enormous social trust
I am not sure moral justification is a strong point. It may be in societies that are collectivist in nature, but in many places the rich live among themselves, often in fenced boroughs, and barely know any "normal" person. So the "social shame component" is very much dampened. One just doesn't care about what others think if everyone is aligned in one's clique.
JR (May 01 2025 at 12:38):Kevin Carlson said:
Is there any example of a modern economy taxing wealth more-or-less successfully? The conceptual challenge with wealth taxes is very clear: it's easier to hide a stock (no pun intended) than a flow. That's true even when the stock is a big pile of gold, and of course when most large stocks are held as hypothetical paper gains in a market that can't actually sustain liquidating those gains, you get a whole new layer of rather extraordinary challenges.
Here is an example of failure: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75percent-supertax
François Hollande’s unpopular tax changes that imposed a 75% rate on earnings above €1m (£780,000) will quietly disappear into the history books from Thursday...
The final nail in the coffin came from the former investment banker who is now France’s economy minister, Emmanuel Macron...
Finance ministry studies showed that despite all the publicity, the sums obtained from the supertax were meagre, standing at €260m in 2013 and €160m in 2014, and affecting 1,000 staff in 470 companies. Over the same period, the budget deficit soared to €84.7bn.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 13:51):@Fabrizio Romano Genovese Rereading my message it did seem like I was suggesting "social shame" (from others) was the main factor, but tbh my feeling is that justification for oneself is even more important, and though I may be too optimistic, it seems to me that (bar, perhaps, some particularly psychopathic characters) the need for some sort of “meaning of it all” is quite universal.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 13:53):That certainly seems to be a factor in why billionaires who could just be enjoying their money end up wanting to also do politics or “achieve greatness” in some other way, counter to financial interests...
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:04):Perhaps a compact way of phrasing what I'm thinking of is a tax policy aimed at limiting discretionality in the flow of wealth, be it via gifts, inheritance, political lobbying, charity; that is, act on the ability of wealthy people to choose the “meaning” of their accumulation for themselves...
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:08):It could be a “compromise” message: nobody will limit your ability to get rich, nobody will limit your ability to enjoy the fruits of your money for yourself, what we will limit is your ability to choose the social effects of your wealth beyond yourself
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:08):You don't get to create a dynasty, you don't get to be kingmaker, you don't get to be a philanthropist
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:09):My feeling is that this would create immense economic inefficiency
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:11):In general when capital is flowing easily it becomes also easier to borrow money and "do stuff". For me, the best thing a rich person can do is fund some other person's effort, basically helping people with capital. I'd like to see this happening without the negative externalities ensuing from obvious passive income dynamics, but that's a very hard thing to achieve.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:11):High taxes on rent-seeking are probably the closest one can get to this
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:12):BTW there's also a very good outcome in taxing land and rent-seeking activities. It doesn't matter if someone is in a tax haven or not. These kinds of goods are almost always non-movable and so they get taxed in the country they are in.
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:13):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
In general when capital is flowing easily it becomes also easier to borrow money and "do stuff". For me, the best thing a rich person can do is fund some other person's effort, basically helping people with capital. I'd like to see this happening without the negative externalities ensuing from obvious passive income dynamics, but that's a very hard thing to achieve.
This is also the big problem of "taxing the rich" btw. Many rich people are involved in VC/investing activities. When they leave, they take their money with them, making obtaining credit for everyone else generally harder.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:20):Well it's "the best thing a rich person can do" until they're funding the efforts of white supremacists, or worse...
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:21):Sorry, I know that this is not what you had in mind, but I guess neither “limiting discretion in funding other business activities” is what I had in mind :)
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:22):This feels like when people say "Bitcoin should be illegal because organized crime uses it" and then one checks and we're talking about less than 1% of total transactions tho
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:22):Yeah my point is that you don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 01 2025 at 14:27):Sure, but wouldn't there be ways to discern between flow into other business activities that one would want to keep as frictionless as possible, and other kinds of flow of the sorts that I was mentioning (gifts, inheritance, charity, funding political activities)?
I mean, I imagine that like for every tax policy there would be a whole industry of finding ways to go around the limitations (e.g. by “recasting” a bunch of non-business activities into businesses) but still, it seems to me that e.g. keeping company assets distinct from non-company assets is something that the current system is able to do decently?
Fabrizio Romano Genovese (May 01 2025 at 14:52):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
Sure, but wouldn't there be ways to discern between flow into other business activities that one would want to keep as frictionless as possible, and other kinds of flow of the sorts that I was mentioning (gifts, inheritance, charity, funding political activities)?
I mean, I imagine that like for every tax policy there would be a whole industry of finding ways to go around the limitations (e.g. by “recasting” a bunch of non-business activities into businesses) but still, it seems to me that e.g. keeping company assets distinct from non-company assets is something that the current system is able to do decently?
You can do a loooot of things with trusts :lol:
Kevin Carlson (May 01 2025 at 16:06):JR said:
Here is an example of failure: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75percent-supertax
Not even a wealth tax!
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 02 2025 at 10:41):Fabrizio Romano Genovese said:
Now, on tax evasion, it's more or less what Eric M Downes said.
- Many times rich people do not own wealth, they own assets, often unrealized.
- Sometimes these assets are overseas, so not taxable,
- When they aren't they can be easily moved.
- Taxing some classes of assets (e.g. unrealized assets) makes it very difficult to do business in a global context.
If you say "let's tax the rich" then, either:
- The rich leave the country, and this is an economic problem since they're among the highest spenders, or
- They find loopholes in the law (and they have the best tax lawyers around that move much faster than any government can do)
It would already solve a lot of social problems imo if there were taxes on wealth taking forms that people actually need: housing, basic services including transport and water, which are not mobile and so cannot be evaded so easily. Even if this doesn't have the scale of impact one would like in overall wealth distribution, it would incentivise redistribution of those specific things.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 02 2025 at 11:31):btw I am really appreciating this discussion :)