As technology develops, most people will form a non-productive, extractive class, like the nobility of former times. What will this kind of noble life be like?
Once again, so interesting, but also optimistic. I always imagine there are only two options: either to live a comfortable but sterile hi-tech life or to live an uncomfortable lo-tech life of grinding poverty. Yet maybe the two can co-exist side-by-side and even have a symbiotic relationship. Occasionally members could even swap over to the other group.
I also liked your (and TK's) thought that humans are evolved for subsistence work. That is precisely how I feel. Only when I'm forced to work hard do I really feel fulfilled. The rest of the time it's like being involved in a BS game of 'Let's-pretend-we-need-to-work', which must be what living on a dude ranch feels like. Only when you strive to survive does meaning seem to arise - or maybe the question of meaning never arises in the first place.
"Work is also about interaction between people." This is an invaluable insight, and I love that you want to build our culture up from from it.
I worry that we can't say that culture needs to be uncompetitive, because humans who survive are competitive. The benefit of religion is that it finds a dimension for us to compete on that's not zero sum.
As an active resident in a charter city, I'm not there to retreat from the world. I'm there to a proof of concept for a better system and culture. And then create an opportunity for exit for others. I would try to think of charter cities as an element in the culture to build
And finally, how would your analysis change if you added in a frontier? Frontiers are a release-valve for moochers and warriors and innovators. That's why it's critical to open up the next ones.
This seems like a variation of the economic free-rider problem; more specifically, who is freeloading more on whom? Are the superproducers freeloading on Society, or is Society freeloading on the superproducers?
Can this be quantified, and hopefully without undue personal interest? To put it another way, one's own group will naturally tend to argue from a position of contributing more than they receive. That's just human nature and gamesmanship.
So yes, some accomplish much. To do that, they rely on the commons of society. In fact, they depend on people who also depend on the commons. The better the common resources available, the more likely that someone will accomplish much.
A superproducer also has luck and timing. For each superproducer, there are equally competent people who didn't luck out. There are also teams that showed up to the party too early. For context, read 'Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer' by Douglas K. Smith.
Xerox also invented ethernet, the mouse, and the GUI.
I really think by now I should so like Apple Pie and write full posts on a site of my own to respond.
Otoh, I really feel I should stop blogging at all by now (unless I could figure out hos to earn some money from it). I have a large family to provide and care and plenty of religious texts to study and recite.
I think the root of the question here is whether humanity is just a highly efficient means of productivity or there is something more important than productivity.
You wrote "charter cities filled with superproducers will soon consist of quite a share of deadweight after a few generations." Why is this?
The other blog explains
1. "When you pull the smartest people from a population, their kids tend to regress to the mean."
2. A lack of community.
"In their native communities, the midwit children of the local brain trust could seamlessly blend in and become functional members of society, perhaps given a leg up by their parents. In the synthetic coastal metropolitan communities made up of harvested brains, served by immigrant helots, there is no room for midwit kids; they are destined to either become druggie failsons or lifelong beneficiaries of nepotism, legacy admits clogging up the system. Neither is a recipe for social harmony.
In practice, this system is a recipe for disaster. Removing the best and brightest children from their communities over and over, over the span of generations, strip mines those communities’ future leaders and entrepreneurs, leaving those who couldn’t make it. That’s a major part of the reason that you don’t have a serious American Heartland power block-the seed corn has been eaten for generations. J.D. Vance’s book gives you a pretty good indication. I would obviously rather live surrounded by rednecks than coastal metropolitan office plankton-rednecks are far more trustworthy, useful and virtuous-but their society is unfortunately also a trainwreck."
3. (As you explained) "What makes it worse is the antinatalist nature of modern Western society, which depresses birth rates both in the source communities and in the metropolitan ones, more so the latter. Your harvested smart kids become sterile, and your source population is hit with a double whammy-its smartest children disproportionately leave, taking their genetics with them, and the next generation of children is smaller."
East Asia shows us what a society focused solely on productivity looks like. Look at the recent data from China. In 2024 there were only 6.1 marriages and 2.62m divorces. Keep in mind that in 1990 there were 28.3 livebirths in China. That to me indicates societal collapse.
This comes down to the question of whether technology (e.g. computer games) can replace human interaction and thriving human communities as a source of happiness. Perhaps we should ask Jon Haidt and crew for the answer to that question. We can definitely say that to the extent that it does replace human interaction it thereby destroys fertility.
Therefore, I think the future lies in societies that can find joy and fulfillment in human interaction - even and especially interaction between the highly productive and the less highly productive, so the highly productive will not all withdraw to charter cities.
We need a society in which the highly productive respect and cherish all human life, and at the same time the less productive value the achievements of the highly productive and don't seek to achieve equality above all.
That is why I think the religious will inherit the earth.
I have now read Baruch Hasofer's article and I basically agree. Brain drain is a problem. But I imagine that it doesn't have to be as much of a problem as it might look. The highly productive economy changes constantly. Skills that were not in great demand in one generation often become highly sought-after the next generation, while other once-hyped skills get obsolete. For that reason I believe that under the best circumstances, an adjacent low-tech society could really function as a pool of talent.
>>Therefore, I think the future lies in societies that can find joy and fulfillment in human interaction - even and especially interaction between the highly productive and the less highly productive, so the highly productive will not all withdraw to charter cities.
>>We need a society in which the highly productive respect and cherish all human life, and at the same time the less productive value the achievements of the highly productive and don't seek to achieve equality above all.
>>That is why I think the religious will inherit the earth.
You are right. The Jews have found a good balance between success and piety. But from the outside, I also see some signs that Orthodox Jews have problems getting big low-income families on the train. I was sent this https://mishpacha.com/opening-the-books/ a while ago and I have been thinking about it since. You know much more than me about the background of that article. What it says is in essence that income inequality is a challenge.
I want to discuss the last sentence a little more.
First, I must say that in principle I don't like the idea that 'income inequality is a challenge'. I think income inequality is very important for society. It is what motivates people to work harder. As you wrote in the article, it can cause safety issues. Too much inequality can cause a breakdown of society. But as much as possible we should solve that by teaching people to be civilized, rise above their base desires and recognize what is best for society. Additionally, we should ensure that there truly is free opportunity for all, unimpeded by regulations.
But this all brings me back to a very insightful part of your article, the gray economy. This is something which I probably shouldn't discuss in public, though I hinted at it previously. However, the tuition in private schools is vey much part of this dynamic. When the schools push low-income people (on welfare) to pay high tuition they are essentially pushing them to join the 'grey economy'. Legally. School employees can pay tuition 'off the books' legally. (this is a special loophole. The first Trump administration almost canceled it, thinking that it was a loophole for wealthy college professors, until the Orthodox Jewish community informed them that their entire school system runs on this.) Others can fundraise. It is their responsibility to help the school with fundraising by reaching out to wealthier acquaintances and/or family. Does fundraising preclude offering some services (usually religious services)?
People will often make fun of some religious jobs as make work jobs -but even if that is true, perhaps that is part of the beauty of the religious community, that there is a job for everyone. And these religious services generally do turn out to be extremely meaningful in the lives of the receivers. This is part of what I was aiming at when I said that more productive have to learn how to value the contributions of the less productive. They shouldn't be giving so much welfare or allowing them to 'steal' as you wrote. Rather they should strive to create the sort of economy which has a place for everyone's contributions.
This gets back to the importance of having strong communities, and especially communities with high levels of trust. I think the highly regulated economy is due to a lack of trust. Until NJ started offering excellent daycare vouchers there were no licensed daycares in Lakewood, and most ladies worked out of the home. All children (and perhaps still most children) were sent to private daycares in private homes. The parents knew the carers (or knew someone who knew them) and trusted them. To what extent was/is these sort of thing legal. No none cares to ask. (This isn't Sweden.) Amish have similar structures. How do they manage without SOcial Security? They know they can trust the community and their children (they won't run away to charter cities). Recently there were Amish who ran into trouble for selling raw milk or things of that sort (part of what drove some to go our and vote Republican.) Again, this comes to to the question of trusting the community or trusting the regulators.
The gray economy is probably part of the explanation for the 'non-working' of Ultra-Orthodox men in Israel too. Am I saying too much? Or perhaps too little?
What is fascinating to me about the discussion of two societies, one productive and one sort of a breeder (and stabilizing) society, is that I have been thinking about this for a while in regard to the future of Jewry.
As even Scott Alexander noted about 6 months ago, it is now clear that non-Orthodox Jewry has no future (at least outside Israel). Einstein and his friends who established 20th century science accomplished a lot but do they even have any living descendants? Any that anyone heard. People like Eliezer Yudkowsky come from Orthodox Jewry or at least just a few generations removed. Otoh, there are hardly any Nobel Prize winners who were themselves Orthodox Jews. Does this imply that Orthodox Judaism is necessary for breeding high-IQ people, but to truly be highly productive they must leave the community? Or perhaps over time we will learn how to cultivate highly productive Orthodox Jews?
I guess time will tell.
But I will say that the discussion you raised about the cost of tuition is strongly tied to this. Those communities which have low tuition fes generally have low concern for productivity levels. The more 'modern' communities have schools which are run more like professional private schools and their children are more productive- but less fertile.
The main thing I was taking out of that article is the problem inherent in isolating the highly productive from the less productive. Specifically the destruction of communities which it causes. (And I think Orthodox Jewry is excellent at creating a cohesive community where poor and rich rub shoulders constantly as I mentioned in the comment thread which I linked.) I think communities are essential to society. Perhaps your own life experience suggests otherwise, but I doubt that scales.)
> I also see some signs that Orthodox Jews have problems getting big low-income families on the train.
Hey, I never said Orthodox Jews are perfect. I never even said Orthodox Jews will inherit the earth. The issue of tuition in private schools is definitely a sore point for me. (what do you think I was referring to when I wrote that i have a large family to provide for?)
However, as the article pointed out, there are conflicting values. There is a sense that it is important for parents to be strongly invested in their children's education. As the article points out, the Hasidic community charges lower tuition for parents. The down sides are (a) this allows people to be lazier and be reliant on government welfare which subjects the community to constant attacks from the media on this - and a strong push for government intervention in their schools (b) people often must send to a specific school of their community (Hassidus) leaving them stuck in that community for generations- only because after the Holocaust their ancestors followed a specific spiritual leader and sent to his schools.
I think that the most important change necessary (and Timothy Carney writes the same about Catholic schools) is giving larger tuition breaks to large families. Smaller ('out-of-town) communities do this, but it is simper when control is more centralized. In Lakewood few schools have any affiliation with another, including boys to girls and everyone sends to the schools of their choice. Grandparents (including wealthy grandparents) can have grandchildren in dozens of schools. They can't even keep track of their names. All this contributes to the fact that, unfortunately these days donating to schools is not very glamorous.
However, children are not expelled for not paying tuition. Somehow everyone in the communit manages to send to the community schools.
Orthodox Jewry, especially Ultra-Orthodox Jewry in America is very much still in the midst of an intense learning process. It is a community that barely existed 5 years ago and now has 250,00 children in Ultra-Orthodox schools in the U.S. What will it look like in 75 years hence? I don't think anyone has a clue.
One last point about this is that the root of the worsening crisis in this is actually the strong sense of community. Ultra-Orthodox Jewry has a very hard time establishing new communities, or even getting people to move out to smaller communities. Everyone is connected to everyone else and everyone wants to be near friends and family. Therefore the housing costs rise inexorably (and the housing situation in the U.S. is bad enough as is). Again, I believe (at least I hope) that this is temporary. History has proven that once things reach a tipping point major change can happen quickly. The Lakewood community grew exponentially in recent decades (https://avichai.org/knowledge_base/a-census-of-jewish-day-schools-2018-2019-2020/) mostly from 'exiles' from NYC.
Anders and I reason that the Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews occupy two different niches. While the Amish are forcibly working class, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are forcibly upper class. None of it is entirely true. There are rich Amish and poor Ultra-Orthodox Jews. But Amish rules strongly dictate a rural uneducated working class lifestyle while Jewish rules dictate an urban upper-middle-class lifestyle (private schools, lengthy education, crisp white shirts, fur hats…). Both niches have their advantages and disadvantages. While the Amish are threatened by brain drain, Orthodox Jews are threatened by high-cost living. Something that might be addressed as the community grows.
100% Very on the ball. (It isn't just the Hassidic class. As you pointed out the 'yeshivish dress code to is based on the upper class dress code - though being conservative it hasn't changed with the times.) I have noted to you previously that I think this stems from the difference between Christian virtues and Judaic virtues. (There is also the issue that our community was built almost from scratch ,mostly by refugees and Holocaust survivors, and cultivating the sense of pride was a major part of it.) Our approach is to encourage people to be virtuous through pride in their achievements, not to squash pride. And we don't withdraw from the surrounding culture as much as we focus on strengthening our own culture so as not to fall for the temptations of the outer culture. And yes, this is exactly how I view this challenge. The community needs to decide how to balance the importance of encouraging people to (eventually) take responsibility for their life and their own children's education while still emphasizing the virtue of living a simple lifestyle. As I keep saying, I think the American system which places a stark divide between the upper class and the lower class through welfare (limited to the lower class) and high taxes (for the upper class) makes this much harder. Additionally, living in tight-knit communities where children of billionaires and children of paupers attend the same school, pray in the same synagogues many times a week etc. leads to jealousy etc.
This is all very interesting and likely shows how our societies could be adjusted for the better. But there is one aspect that reduces the strength of this particular dynamic: Many of the superproducers desire status, and as in many societies, one shows status by visibly consuming labor-intensive goods and services. ("Fine" fabrics in the Middle Ages used thinner threads and so used more meters of thread per garment and thus more spinning labor.) The people who provide these are the working masses. In a fundamental sense, this isn't "productive", but the superproducers will pay handsomely for it, so economically it behaves as a necessary input to "superproduction".
In the contemporary US, "hospitality" accounts for a substantial fraction of the economy. (Indeed, a disproportionate fraction of the immigrant labor, and thus the sector is particularly relevant to current political disputes.) This factored into the response to Covid. Back during the Spanish flu, when the current public health emergency laws were established, it made sense to take the tradeoff of shutting down "entertainment" venues to try to limit the epidemic because that was a small fraction of employment. But in the current economy, shutting down entertainment is an economic catastrophe.
This also reflects on ideologies which urge people to stop engaging in "useless" consumption.
Thanks for this! There are so few positive narratives about our era that I forget my optimism. I want to be able to walk in and out of this high-tech society while living kind of on the outskirts. A good life is family, friends, dinner parties and complex social interactions; not money, Instagram fame and burning out!
Very interesting. One piece I think one would have to include in the picture is networking: Given a number of super producers of around equal skill level, it will often be the one who has an aunt working in IBM that ends up the multibillionaire. Super producers will still be competing in who can make the best network, and will probably need to include the outsiders as nodes in this graph, in order to connect to other people they would need.
Figuring out who is a good node in a network is much, much harder than figuring out if a given person has high skills. Thus there will be some very complicated politics going on, where super producers will have to be very diplomatic in dealing with their less productive but better connected warrior brethren.
"So in order to win the wars, a society should keep its population right below the limit of an area's carrying capacity."
Just from my interest in medieval/ancient warfare, this doesn't seem right. I can think of several examples were lower population density gave one side a winning advantage:
1.) Gaul was easier for Rome to conquer than Germania because Gaul was lots of open, farmed land that the romans could easily march through, whereas Germania was full of forest and marshes that the Germans could fight guerilla wars from and the Romans couldn't march through easily. Where pre-railroad armies can go is mainly constrained by transporting and foraging food. They can only carry ~2 weeks worth of grain so anywhere without enough farms to pillage is impassable.
2.) England had a smaller but wealthier (I'm pretty sure at least partly because they had more land per person) population than France and beats them for most of the 100 years war.
3.) China is another example of a state with a massive absolute gdp but 90%+ of that was tied up in subsistence rice farmers growing just enough rice to sustain just themselves and not producing much surplus to use for war, so they lost to a much smaller but individually more productive population of mongols.
Generally the ideal population size for maximising a state's capacity for war will be (probably quite a bit) lower than the carrying capacity imo because the surplus per worker that they can contribute to war above what they need to sustain themselves will be very small at the Malthusian limit. Small pop x eg. 50% surplus > Big pop x 5% surplus
Don't think that affects the overall thesis but might be something to consider.
I have things to add to all of your points, but just to get the general picture straight it is possible that on a tactical level it is desirable to have a lesser population and/or a lesser population density. But on the strategic level it is undoubtedly an advantage to have more resources to play with.
1. While it is true that Germania was poorer and less populated than Gaul, this did not by itself hinder the Roman conquest. In fact, Germania (the land between the Rhine and the Elbe) was quite easily conquered by Drusus around 10 BC. The problem was that the German provinces were never profitable and after the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest the Romans just did not find it worthwhile to occupy the territory any more. One reason for the high cost of occupation was that the Romans were, in fact, not constrained by logistical difficulties. The legions in Germania were supplied by boats along the Rhine and the Elbe, mostly from farms in Gaul but olive oil, a Roman staple, was shipped in great quantities from Iberia.
2. The main reason that England was wealthier than France was wool production, which was very lucrative in the 14th century. It gave the English kings, who taxed the wool trade, a lot of liquidity that the French king lacked. This in turn gave the English opportunities to exploit the inertia of the French feudal system and achieve some stunning victories. When the French got their house in better order and the warfare turned into more stationary attrition warfare, the French triumphed quite easily.
3. Chinese history is not my strongest suit. But your characterization of the Chinese peasantry as mere dead weight is almost certainly wrong. The pride and joy of the Medieval Chinese empire was silk. And the silk was produced by peasant farmers who paid their taxes with silk. The vast Chinese peasantry was thus not only producing enough rice to sustain themselves. They also produced the major trade goods that the Chinese empire used to pay their soldiers (and pay off their enemies).
You are falling afoul of your assumption that was war is only waged by specialists. Standing armies were quite a small part of premodern society, but when on campaign or defending a rather broad swath of peasants were enlisted. When a rather large percentage of the adult male population goes to war it requires a fairly large surplus to maintain them and the rest of the society while they are away from the farm. Thus living right at the Malthusian edge is terrible for warfare, as when you pull away producers you immediately go into the negative range of food produced per mouth.
You are also getting the mix of peasants in China very, very wrong. A very small percentage of peasants produced silk, small enough that the government was fairly successful in preventing the export of the worms themselves from the country. The vast, overwhelming majority of peasants were subsistence farmers.
Lastly, I don't see how this makes sense "One reason for the high cost of occupation was that the Romans were, in fact, not constrained by logistical difficulties." Why is it MORE expensive to have fewer logistical difficulties?
I am sticking to my previous numbering in order to make a semblance of order (I also believe my argument is better served by looking at each question separately).
1. I might have been unclear. What I meant was that the Roman armies, at least from the early empire, did not generally live off the land. They were supplied through intricate logistics that in some cases spanned most of western Europe. This is in response to Citizen Penrose who claimed that ancient armies needed farms to pillage in order to stay in the field, something that was generally true for armies of antiquity, but not so much for the Romans.
2. I am not sure I follow your reasoning here. When having a surplus population it is of course the surplus that goes off to war. The most productive peasants are left behind, and if they are not their positions are always taken up by others left behind. That way, war hardly ever affects the productive capacity of the land unless the war passes straight over the land (which it often did during the hundred years war, but it was beneficial to have a surplus population too, since that gave more hands that could help with restoration).
3. I have absolutely no idea about the proportion of silk producing peasants in ancient China. You might very well be correct. What I am asking myself now is if this was a conscious choice on the bureaucracy's part, an attempt to keep supply down and prices up, or was it so very difficult to produce silk that only a tiny sliver of the peasants managed to?
1: The Romans did have supply lines back to Rome, but for food they did get local sources. Caesar's Gallic Wars mentions this frequently, the securing of a grain supply from local villages being a key goal every year. I don't know what the ratio of calories that was local vs transported was, but his writing seems to make it clear that failure to secure grain didn't mean going hungry, it meant going home.
2: So, in your argument you are saying that a nation that stays close to the Malthusian limit is ideal for warfare. The trouble with that is that at the Malthusian limit everyone is right on the edge of starvation, only just producing enough food to feed people, when considering the ebb and flow of yearly crop cycles etc. So if you take 20% of the labor force and march them off to war, unless they were sitting entirely idle, you are going to starve a huge number of people. If it took everyone working to produce food to feed everyone, and you reduce that to 80%, you cannot feed everyone, and everyone includes your soldiers.
That's what the Malthusian limit means, that everyone working just as hard as they can only just scratch out enough food to live, such that new people added can't grow enough food to feed themselves.
Now, maybe you can get around this by having very short "campaigns" like the Greeks often did, where they would fight a bit after the planting was done and there was downtime, never going too far so they could get back for the harvest. Maybe you can get around this by living entirely off raiding while on campaign, but that's really difficult for a moderately sized army.
Or, what you really do, is have production of food well in excess of the needs of the population so that you can afford to have a fair percentage go walk around in someone else's country and still feed everyone. That is, you are well within the Malthusian limit.
3: That's a good question on why silk production wasn't ramped up to 11. On the one hand, it might have been a regional thing; China is big enough that some parts might be really bad for growing the worms. The South part of China was the bread basket (rice sack?) and the North was somewhat more industrialized, so perhaps that had more to do with it as well. China also didn't trade as much as they could have with their neighbors, so perhaps ramping up production did hit pretty sharp diminishing returns.
China and India are both strange from an economic history stand point, though. Both tended towards the "don't produce capital, just throw more people at it" solution to production, which doesn't make sense to the western way of thinking. That sort of stuff makes it really hard to impute the reasons for why they did things.
I think you have a very good point here, a huge population living at the starvation limit might be a liability rather than a boon during war.
That being said, I think with Rome and Gaul you are overlooking one fact: Rome conquered Gaul in order to take over those farmlands to feed their armies and project power further away. A small highly organized city (Rome) can beat a large disorganized country (Gaul). BUT, in order to survive in competition with other highly organized cities (Carthage) Rome was forced, against their will, to conquer huge tracts of lands and extract resources from them. If Rome had just stayed Rome, and kept to their own lands, they would in the end have lost out to a more expansionistic city state.
And now that said, I would like to join you in another example of how I myself am wrong: Thomas Moore complains in Utopia of how England in his time is reducing its population by shifting many areas from agrarian villages to sheep land. That was pretty hard on the poor farmers, but it made England rich through the wool trade. So there have definitely been times where countries have become stronger by having a smaller, more productive population. But again, this happened not long before England started expanding into a global empire, again beeing forced to do so in order to not be outcompeted by expansionist Spain and Portugal.
You are right that Carthage controlled a much larger territory before the Punic wars. This probably gave Carthage an initial advantage. My point was more that in order to win the wars and get to a position where they weren't under threat by other Mediterranean cities Rome had to conquer a large area and get control of a large population. Strong cities had to expand their populations through conquest in order to win in the long run.
I think your timeline is a little mixed up. Rome didn't invade Transalpine Gaul until after the Punic wars. They did take over some of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy today) during that long period, but that wasn't a huge area, so it sounds like you are talking Transalpine, what is now France etc.
Rome also expanded their control of the Grecian peninsula during that span as well, along with some of the Iberian peninsula taken from Carthage.
So, while conquering and controlling land can help, it certainly didn't help the Carthaginians enough, as they were defied and eventually defeated by an upstart despite having the territorial and population advantage.
I wonder what we can learn from resource cursed societies like petrostates where maximally efficient production is already decoupled from the populace. Places like the Congo and Venezuela don’t seem very nice, the Gulf states are alright if you’re a citizen, Norway seems decent
How did you and your husband not end doing high paying jobs, I know the story where you got hurt and your journalism ethics were discredited,but my assumption is you are both probably very high in IQ and conscientiousness( you have phds restacking your articles+assortative mating)and could bounce back in a different sector.
A combination of personality and circumstances. First of all, we wanted high-paying jobs much less than many other people. High-paying jobs were also bit difficult to attain for people in our circumstances - we weren't exactly head-hunted. The combination of those two forces resulted in our current lifestyle.
Once again, so interesting, but also optimistic. I always imagine there are only two options: either to live a comfortable but sterile hi-tech life or to live an uncomfortable lo-tech life of grinding poverty. Yet maybe the two can co-exist side-by-side and even have a symbiotic relationship. Occasionally members could even swap over to the other group.
I also liked your (and TK's) thought that humans are evolved for subsistence work. That is precisely how I feel. Only when I'm forced to work hard do I really feel fulfilled. The rest of the time it's like being involved in a BS game of 'Let's-pretend-we-need-to-work', which must be what living on a dude ranch feels like. Only when you strive to survive does meaning seem to arise - or maybe the question of meaning never arises in the first place.
"Work is also about interaction between people." This is an invaluable insight, and I love that you want to build our culture up from from it.
I worry that we can't say that culture needs to be uncompetitive, because humans who survive are competitive. The benefit of religion is that it finds a dimension for us to compete on that's not zero sum.
As an active resident in a charter city, I'm not there to retreat from the world. I'm there to a proof of concept for a better system and culture. And then create an opportunity for exit for others. I would try to think of charter cities as an element in the culture to build
And finally, how would your analysis change if you added in a frontier? Frontiers are a release-valve for moochers and warriors and innovators. That's why it's critical to open up the next ones.
This seems like a variation of the economic free-rider problem; more specifically, who is freeloading more on whom? Are the superproducers freeloading on Society, or is Society freeloading on the superproducers?
Can this be quantified, and hopefully without undue personal interest? To put it another way, one's own group will naturally tend to argue from a position of contributing more than they receive. That's just human nature and gamesmanship.
"superproducers"
So yes, some accomplish much. To do that, they rely on the commons of society. In fact, they depend on people who also depend on the commons. The better the common resources available, the more likely that someone will accomplish much.
A superproducer also has luck and timing. For each superproducer, there are equally competent people who didn't luck out. There are also teams that showed up to the party too early. For context, read 'Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer' by Douglas K. Smith.
Xerox also invented ethernet, the mouse, and the GUI.
Ok, now it is my turn to respond again.
I really think by now I should so like Apple Pie and write full posts on a site of my own to respond.
Otoh, I really feel I should stop blogging at all by now (unless I could figure out hos to earn some money from it). I have a large family to provide and care and plenty of religious texts to study and recite.
For now, I will try an off-the-cuff response.
I will begin by contrasting this post with this. https://postkahanism.substack.com/p/chudjak-vs-the-tech-bros
And my comment there https://postkahanism.substack.com/p/chudjak-vs-the-tech-bros/comment/83902771
I think the root of the question here is whether humanity is just a highly efficient means of productivity or there is something more important than productivity.
You wrote "charter cities filled with superproducers will soon consist of quite a share of deadweight after a few generations." Why is this?
The other blog explains
1. "When you pull the smartest people from a population, their kids tend to regress to the mean."
2. A lack of community.
"In their native communities, the midwit children of the local brain trust could seamlessly blend in and become functional members of society, perhaps given a leg up by their parents. In the synthetic coastal metropolitan communities made up of harvested brains, served by immigrant helots, there is no room for midwit kids; they are destined to either become druggie failsons or lifelong beneficiaries of nepotism, legacy admits clogging up the system. Neither is a recipe for social harmony.
In practice, this system is a recipe for disaster. Removing the best and brightest children from their communities over and over, over the span of generations, strip mines those communities’ future leaders and entrepreneurs, leaving those who couldn’t make it. That’s a major part of the reason that you don’t have a serious American Heartland power block-the seed corn has been eaten for generations. J.D. Vance’s book gives you a pretty good indication. I would obviously rather live surrounded by rednecks than coastal metropolitan office plankton-rednecks are far more trustworthy, useful and virtuous-but their society is unfortunately also a trainwreck."
3. (As you explained) "What makes it worse is the antinatalist nature of modern Western society, which depresses birth rates both in the source communities and in the metropolitan ones, more so the latter. Your harvested smart kids become sterile, and your source population is hit with a double whammy-its smartest children disproportionately leave, taking their genetics with them, and the next generation of children is smaller."
East Asia shows us what a society focused solely on productivity looks like. Look at the recent data from China. In 2024 there were only 6.1 marriages and 2.62m divorces. Keep in mind that in 1990 there were 28.3 livebirths in China. That to me indicates societal collapse.
This comes down to the question of whether technology (e.g. computer games) can replace human interaction and thriving human communities as a source of happiness. Perhaps we should ask Jon Haidt and crew for the answer to that question. We can definitely say that to the extent that it does replace human interaction it thereby destroys fertility.
Therefore, I think the future lies in societies that can find joy and fulfillment in human interaction - even and especially interaction between the highly productive and the less highly productive, so the highly productive will not all withdraw to charter cities.
We need a society in which the highly productive respect and cherish all human life, and at the same time the less productive value the achievements of the highly productive and don't seek to achieve equality above all.
That is why I think the religious will inherit the earth.
I have now read Baruch Hasofer's article and I basically agree. Brain drain is a problem. But I imagine that it doesn't have to be as much of a problem as it might look. The highly productive economy changes constantly. Skills that were not in great demand in one generation often become highly sought-after the next generation, while other once-hyped skills get obsolete. For that reason I believe that under the best circumstances, an adjacent low-tech society could really function as a pool of talent.
>>Therefore, I think the future lies in societies that can find joy and fulfillment in human interaction - even and especially interaction between the highly productive and the less highly productive, so the highly productive will not all withdraw to charter cities.
>>We need a society in which the highly productive respect and cherish all human life, and at the same time the less productive value the achievements of the highly productive and don't seek to achieve equality above all.
>>That is why I think the religious will inherit the earth.
You are right. The Jews have found a good balance between success and piety. But from the outside, I also see some signs that Orthodox Jews have problems getting big low-income families on the train. I was sent this https://mishpacha.com/opening-the-books/ a while ago and I have been thinking about it since. You know much more than me about the background of that article. What it says is in essence that income inequality is a challenge.
I want to discuss the last sentence a little more.
First, I must say that in principle I don't like the idea that 'income inequality is a challenge'. I think income inequality is very important for society. It is what motivates people to work harder. As you wrote in the article, it can cause safety issues. Too much inequality can cause a breakdown of society. But as much as possible we should solve that by teaching people to be civilized, rise above their base desires and recognize what is best for society. Additionally, we should ensure that there truly is free opportunity for all, unimpeded by regulations.
But this all brings me back to a very insightful part of your article, the gray economy. This is something which I probably shouldn't discuss in public, though I hinted at it previously. However, the tuition in private schools is vey much part of this dynamic. When the schools push low-income people (on welfare) to pay high tuition they are essentially pushing them to join the 'grey economy'. Legally. School employees can pay tuition 'off the books' legally. (this is a special loophole. The first Trump administration almost canceled it, thinking that it was a loophole for wealthy college professors, until the Orthodox Jewish community informed them that their entire school system runs on this.) Others can fundraise. It is their responsibility to help the school with fundraising by reaching out to wealthier acquaintances and/or family. Does fundraising preclude offering some services (usually religious services)?
People will often make fun of some religious jobs as make work jobs -but even if that is true, perhaps that is part of the beauty of the religious community, that there is a job for everyone. And these religious services generally do turn out to be extremely meaningful in the lives of the receivers. This is part of what I was aiming at when I said that more productive have to learn how to value the contributions of the less productive. They shouldn't be giving so much welfare or allowing them to 'steal' as you wrote. Rather they should strive to create the sort of economy which has a place for everyone's contributions.
This gets back to the importance of having strong communities, and especially communities with high levels of trust. I think the highly regulated economy is due to a lack of trust. Until NJ started offering excellent daycare vouchers there were no licensed daycares in Lakewood, and most ladies worked out of the home. All children (and perhaps still most children) were sent to private daycares in private homes. The parents knew the carers (or knew someone who knew them) and trusted them. To what extent was/is these sort of thing legal. No none cares to ask. (This isn't Sweden.) Amish have similar structures. How do they manage without SOcial Security? They know they can trust the community and their children (they won't run away to charter cities). Recently there were Amish who ran into trouble for selling raw milk or things of that sort (part of what drove some to go our and vote Republican.) Again, this comes to to the question of trusting the community or trusting the regulators.
I should add that in the U.S the attitude is very different than in Sweden. (I believe Apple Pie once commented to you along these lines too.) The goverment will generally stay away from you if you stay away from them. And tax law seems designed to be full of gray areas ( https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-rumsfeld-absolutely-no-idea-if-he-paid-taxes-properly-2014-4 ). But if you come too close to them for comfort they will throw everything they can a to you with no pity. Like this https://thevoiceoflakewood.com/finally-free/ https://mishpacha.com/sweet-vindication/ The Jews have known for a long time that one must be very wary of government https://www.dafyomi.co.il/general/info/ref/avot/mobile/23.html
https://dafyomireview.com/avot/mobile/12.html
The gray economy is probably part of the explanation for the 'non-working' of Ultra-Orthodox men in Israel too. Am I saying too much? Or perhaps too little?
What is fascinating to me about the discussion of two societies, one productive and one sort of a breeder (and stabilizing) society, is that I have been thinking about this for a while in regard to the future of Jewry.
As even Scott Alexander noted about 6 months ago, it is now clear that non-Orthodox Jewry has no future (at least outside Israel). Einstein and his friends who established 20th century science accomplished a lot but do they even have any living descendants? Any that anyone heard. People like Eliezer Yudkowsky come from Orthodox Jewry or at least just a few generations removed. Otoh, there are hardly any Nobel Prize winners who were themselves Orthodox Jews. Does this imply that Orthodox Judaism is necessary for breeding high-IQ people, but to truly be highly productive they must leave the community? Or perhaps over time we will learn how to cultivate highly productive Orthodox Jews?
I guess time will tell.
But I will say that the discussion you raised about the cost of tuition is strongly tied to this. Those communities which have low tuition fes generally have low concern for productivity levels. The more 'modern' communities have schools which are run more like professional private schools and their children are more productive- but less fertile.
>I have now read Baruch Hasofer's article etc.
The main thing I was taking out of that article is the problem inherent in isolating the highly productive from the less productive. Specifically the destruction of communities which it causes. (And I think Orthodox Jewry is excellent at creating a cohesive community where poor and rich rub shoulders constantly as I mentioned in the comment thread which I linked.) I think communities are essential to society. Perhaps your own life experience suggests otherwise, but I doubt that scales.)
> I also see some signs that Orthodox Jews have problems getting big low-income families on the train.
Hey, I never said Orthodox Jews are perfect. I never even said Orthodox Jews will inherit the earth. The issue of tuition in private schools is definitely a sore point for me. (what do you think I was referring to when I wrote that i have a large family to provide for?)
Orthodox Jewry has a long history of providing publicly funded education (https://www.torahweb.org/torah/2015/parsha/rwil_vayigash.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_ben_Gamla ) and I think it is a victim of neglect.
However, as the article pointed out, there are conflicting values. There is a sense that it is important for parents to be strongly invested in their children's education. As the article points out, the Hasidic community charges lower tuition for parents. The down sides are (a) this allows people to be lazier and be reliant on government welfare which subjects the community to constant attacks from the media on this - and a strong push for government intervention in their schools (b) people often must send to a specific school of their community (Hassidus) leaving them stuck in that community for generations- only because after the Holocaust their ancestors followed a specific spiritual leader and sent to his schools.
I think that the most important change necessary (and Timothy Carney writes the same about Catholic schools) is giving larger tuition breaks to large families. Smaller ('out-of-town) communities do this, but it is simper when control is more centralized. In Lakewood few schools have any affiliation with another, including boys to girls and everyone sends to the schools of their choice. Grandparents (including wealthy grandparents) can have grandchildren in dozens of schools. They can't even keep track of their names. All this contributes to the fact that, unfortunately these days donating to schools is not very glamorous.
However, children are not expelled for not paying tuition. Somehow everyone in the communit manages to send to the community schools.
Orthodox Jewry, especially Ultra-Orthodox Jewry in America is very much still in the midst of an intense learning process. It is a community that barely existed 5 years ago and now has 250,00 children in Ultra-Orthodox schools in the U.S. What will it look like in 75 years hence? I don't think anyone has a clue.
One last point about this is that the root of the worsening crisis in this is actually the strong sense of community. Ultra-Orthodox Jewry has a very hard time establishing new communities, or even getting people to move out to smaller communities. Everyone is connected to everyone else and everyone wants to be near friends and family. Therefore the housing costs rise inexorably (and the housing situation in the U.S. is bad enough as is). Again, I believe (at least I hope) that this is temporary. History has proven that once things reach a tipping point major change can happen quickly. The Lakewood community grew exponentially in recent decades (https://avichai.org/knowledge_base/a-census-of-jewish-day-schools-2018-2019-2020/) mostly from 'exiles' from NYC.
Anders and I reason that the Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews occupy two different niches. While the Amish are forcibly working class, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are forcibly upper class. None of it is entirely true. There are rich Amish and poor Ultra-Orthodox Jews. But Amish rules strongly dictate a rural uneducated working class lifestyle while Jewish rules dictate an urban upper-middle-class lifestyle (private schools, lengthy education, crisp white shirts, fur hats…). Both niches have their advantages and disadvantages. While the Amish are threatened by brain drain, Orthodox Jews are threatened by high-cost living. Something that might be addressed as the community grows.
100% Very on the ball. (It isn't just the Hassidic class. As you pointed out the 'yeshivish dress code to is based on the upper class dress code - though being conservative it hasn't changed with the times.) I have noted to you previously that I think this stems from the difference between Christian virtues and Judaic virtues. (There is also the issue that our community was built almost from scratch ,mostly by refugees and Holocaust survivors, and cultivating the sense of pride was a major part of it.) Our approach is to encourage people to be virtuous through pride in their achievements, not to squash pride. And we don't withdraw from the surrounding culture as much as we focus on strengthening our own culture so as not to fall for the temptations of the outer culture. And yes, this is exactly how I view this challenge. The community needs to decide how to balance the importance of encouraging people to (eventually) take responsibility for their life and their own children's education while still emphasizing the virtue of living a simple lifestyle. As I keep saying, I think the American system which places a stark divide between the upper class and the lower class through welfare (limited to the lower class) and high taxes (for the upper class) makes this much harder. Additionally, living in tight-knit communities where children of billionaires and children of paupers attend the same school, pray in the same synagogues many times a week etc. leads to jealousy etc.
Your footnote made me think of:
https://www.inverse.com/input/features/tropetrainer-thomas-buchler-torah-software
This is all very interesting and likely shows how our societies could be adjusted for the better. But there is one aspect that reduces the strength of this particular dynamic: Many of the superproducers desire status, and as in many societies, one shows status by visibly consuming labor-intensive goods and services. ("Fine" fabrics in the Middle Ages used thinner threads and so used more meters of thread per garment and thus more spinning labor.) The people who provide these are the working masses. In a fundamental sense, this isn't "productive", but the superproducers will pay handsomely for it, so economically it behaves as a necessary input to "superproduction".
In the contemporary US, "hospitality" accounts for a substantial fraction of the economy. (Indeed, a disproportionate fraction of the immigrant labor, and thus the sector is particularly relevant to current political disputes.) This factored into the response to Covid. Back during the Spanish flu, when the current public health emergency laws were established, it made sense to take the tradeoff of shutting down "entertainment" venues to try to limit the epidemic because that was a small fraction of employment. But in the current economy, shutting down entertainment is an economic catastrophe.
This also reflects on ideologies which urge people to stop engaging in "useless" consumption.
Thanks for this! There are so few positive narratives about our era that I forget my optimism. I want to be able to walk in and out of this high-tech society while living kind of on the outskirts. A good life is family, friends, dinner parties and complex social interactions; not money, Instagram fame and burning out!
Very interesting. One piece I think one would have to include in the picture is networking: Given a number of super producers of around equal skill level, it will often be the one who has an aunt working in IBM that ends up the multibillionaire. Super producers will still be competing in who can make the best network, and will probably need to include the outsiders as nodes in this graph, in order to connect to other people they would need.
Figuring out who is a good node in a network is much, much harder than figuring out if a given person has high skills. Thus there will be some very complicated politics going on, where super producers will have to be very diplomatic in dealing with their less productive but better connected warrior brethren.
There's a lot to think about in this. Thank you
"So in order to win the wars, a society should keep its population right below the limit of an area's carrying capacity."
Just from my interest in medieval/ancient warfare, this doesn't seem right. I can think of several examples were lower population density gave one side a winning advantage:
1.) Gaul was easier for Rome to conquer than Germania because Gaul was lots of open, farmed land that the romans could easily march through, whereas Germania was full of forest and marshes that the Germans could fight guerilla wars from and the Romans couldn't march through easily. Where pre-railroad armies can go is mainly constrained by transporting and foraging food. They can only carry ~2 weeks worth of grain so anywhere without enough farms to pillage is impassable.
2.) England had a smaller but wealthier (I'm pretty sure at least partly because they had more land per person) population than France and beats them for most of the 100 years war.
3.) China is another example of a state with a massive absolute gdp but 90%+ of that was tied up in subsistence rice farmers growing just enough rice to sustain just themselves and not producing much surplus to use for war, so they lost to a much smaller but individually more productive population of mongols.
Generally the ideal population size for maximising a state's capacity for war will be (probably quite a bit) lower than the carrying capacity imo because the surplus per worker that they can contribute to war above what they need to sustain themselves will be very small at the Malthusian limit. Small pop x eg. 50% surplus > Big pop x 5% surplus
Don't think that affects the overall thesis but might be something to consider.
I have things to add to all of your points, but just to get the general picture straight it is possible that on a tactical level it is desirable to have a lesser population and/or a lesser population density. But on the strategic level it is undoubtedly an advantage to have more resources to play with.
1. While it is true that Germania was poorer and less populated than Gaul, this did not by itself hinder the Roman conquest. In fact, Germania (the land between the Rhine and the Elbe) was quite easily conquered by Drusus around 10 BC. The problem was that the German provinces were never profitable and after the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest the Romans just did not find it worthwhile to occupy the territory any more. One reason for the high cost of occupation was that the Romans were, in fact, not constrained by logistical difficulties. The legions in Germania were supplied by boats along the Rhine and the Elbe, mostly from farms in Gaul but olive oil, a Roman staple, was shipped in great quantities from Iberia.
2. The main reason that England was wealthier than France was wool production, which was very lucrative in the 14th century. It gave the English kings, who taxed the wool trade, a lot of liquidity that the French king lacked. This in turn gave the English opportunities to exploit the inertia of the French feudal system and achieve some stunning victories. When the French got their house in better order and the warfare turned into more stationary attrition warfare, the French triumphed quite easily.
3. Chinese history is not my strongest suit. But your characterization of the Chinese peasantry as mere dead weight is almost certainly wrong. The pride and joy of the Medieval Chinese empire was silk. And the silk was produced by peasant farmers who paid their taxes with silk. The vast Chinese peasantry was thus not only producing enough rice to sustain themselves. They also produced the major trade goods that the Chinese empire used to pay their soldiers (and pay off their enemies).
You are falling afoul of your assumption that was war is only waged by specialists. Standing armies were quite a small part of premodern society, but when on campaign or defending a rather broad swath of peasants were enlisted. When a rather large percentage of the adult male population goes to war it requires a fairly large surplus to maintain them and the rest of the society while they are away from the farm. Thus living right at the Malthusian edge is terrible for warfare, as when you pull away producers you immediately go into the negative range of food produced per mouth.
You are also getting the mix of peasants in China very, very wrong. A very small percentage of peasants produced silk, small enough that the government was fairly successful in preventing the export of the worms themselves from the country. The vast, overwhelming majority of peasants were subsistence farmers.
Lastly, I don't see how this makes sense "One reason for the high cost of occupation was that the Romans were, in fact, not constrained by logistical difficulties." Why is it MORE expensive to have fewer logistical difficulties?
I am sticking to my previous numbering in order to make a semblance of order (I also believe my argument is better served by looking at each question separately).
1. I might have been unclear. What I meant was that the Roman armies, at least from the early empire, did not generally live off the land. They were supplied through intricate logistics that in some cases spanned most of western Europe. This is in response to Citizen Penrose who claimed that ancient armies needed farms to pillage in order to stay in the field, something that was generally true for armies of antiquity, but not so much for the Romans.
2. I am not sure I follow your reasoning here. When having a surplus population it is of course the surplus that goes off to war. The most productive peasants are left behind, and if they are not their positions are always taken up by others left behind. That way, war hardly ever affects the productive capacity of the land unless the war passes straight over the land (which it often did during the hundred years war, but it was beneficial to have a surplus population too, since that gave more hands that could help with restoration).
3. I have absolutely no idea about the proportion of silk producing peasants in ancient China. You might very well be correct. What I am asking myself now is if this was a conscious choice on the bureaucracy's part, an attempt to keep supply down and prices up, or was it so very difficult to produce silk that only a tiny sliver of the peasants managed to?
1: The Romans did have supply lines back to Rome, but for food they did get local sources. Caesar's Gallic Wars mentions this frequently, the securing of a grain supply from local villages being a key goal every year. I don't know what the ratio of calories that was local vs transported was, but his writing seems to make it clear that failure to secure grain didn't mean going hungry, it meant going home.
2: So, in your argument you are saying that a nation that stays close to the Malthusian limit is ideal for warfare. The trouble with that is that at the Malthusian limit everyone is right on the edge of starvation, only just producing enough food to feed people, when considering the ebb and flow of yearly crop cycles etc. So if you take 20% of the labor force and march them off to war, unless they were sitting entirely idle, you are going to starve a huge number of people. If it took everyone working to produce food to feed everyone, and you reduce that to 80%, you cannot feed everyone, and everyone includes your soldiers.
That's what the Malthusian limit means, that everyone working just as hard as they can only just scratch out enough food to live, such that new people added can't grow enough food to feed themselves.
Now, maybe you can get around this by having very short "campaigns" like the Greeks often did, where they would fight a bit after the planting was done and there was downtime, never going too far so they could get back for the harvest. Maybe you can get around this by living entirely off raiding while on campaign, but that's really difficult for a moderately sized army.
Or, what you really do, is have production of food well in excess of the needs of the population so that you can afford to have a fair percentage go walk around in someone else's country and still feed everyone. That is, you are well within the Malthusian limit.
3: That's a good question on why silk production wasn't ramped up to 11. On the one hand, it might have been a regional thing; China is big enough that some parts might be really bad for growing the worms. The South part of China was the bread basket (rice sack?) and the North was somewhat more industrialized, so perhaps that had more to do with it as well. China also didn't trade as much as they could have with their neighbors, so perhaps ramping up production did hit pretty sharp diminishing returns.
China and India are both strange from an economic history stand point, though. Both tended towards the "don't produce capital, just throw more people at it" solution to production, which doesn't make sense to the western way of thinking. That sort of stuff makes it really hard to impute the reasons for why they did things.
I think you have a very good point here, a huge population living at the starvation limit might be a liability rather than a boon during war.
That being said, I think with Rome and Gaul you are overlooking one fact: Rome conquered Gaul in order to take over those farmlands to feed their armies and project power further away. A small highly organized city (Rome) can beat a large disorganized country (Gaul). BUT, in order to survive in competition with other highly organized cities (Carthage) Rome was forced, against their will, to conquer huge tracts of lands and extract resources from them. If Rome had just stayed Rome, and kept to their own lands, they would in the end have lost out to a more expansionistic city state.
And now that said, I would like to join you in another example of how I myself am wrong: Thomas Moore complains in Utopia of how England in his time is reducing its population by shifting many areas from agrarian villages to sheep land. That was pretty hard on the poor farmers, but it made England rich through the wool trade. So there have definitely been times where countries have become stronger by having a smaller, more productive population. But again, this happened not long before England started expanding into a global empire, again beeing forced to do so in order to not be outcompeted by expansionist Spain and Portugal.
Contrary to your first point, consider this map of Roman and Punic territory at the start of the Second Punic War: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Map_of_Rome_and_Carthage_at_the_start_of_the_Second_Punic_War_Modified.svg/1280px-Map_of_Rome_and_Carthage_at_the_start_of_the_Second_Punic_War_Modified.svg.png
Rome was much smaller, although it is quite possible the Punic controlled area was less controlled to an extent that makes a big difference.
You are right that Carthage controlled a much larger territory before the Punic wars. This probably gave Carthage an initial advantage. My point was more that in order to win the wars and get to a position where they weren't under threat by other Mediterranean cities Rome had to conquer a large area and get control of a large population. Strong cities had to expand their populations through conquest in order to win in the long run.
I think your timeline is a little mixed up. Rome didn't invade Transalpine Gaul until after the Punic wars. They did take over some of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy today) during that long period, but that wasn't a huge area, so it sounds like you are talking Transalpine, what is now France etc.
Rome also expanded their control of the Grecian peninsula during that span as well, along with some of the Iberian peninsula taken from Carthage.
So, while conquering and controlling land can help, it certainly didn't help the Carthaginians enough, as they were defied and eventually defeated by an upstart despite having the territorial and population advantage.
I really liked this essay.
I wonder what we can learn from resource cursed societies like petrostates where maximally efficient production is already decoupled from the populace. Places like the Congo and Venezuela don’t seem very nice, the Gulf states are alright if you’re a citizen, Norway seems decent
How did you and your husband not end doing high paying jobs, I know the story where you got hurt and your journalism ethics were discredited,but my assumption is you are both probably very high in IQ and conscientiousness( you have phds restacking your articles+assortative mating)and could bounce back in a different sector.
A combination of personality and circumstances. First of all, we wanted high-paying jobs much less than many other people. High-paying jobs were also bit difficult to attain for people in our circumstances - we weren't exactly head-hunted. The combination of those two forces resulted in our current lifestyle.
I'd say one is where one is and does what one does mostly through path dependence.