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//DH

With the innovation spillovers that innovation policy scholars are used to considering, innovators benefit one another because each individual innovator is unable to reap the full rewards from her innovations. This feature captures an important part of the innovation process, but not the whole story. Another feature of innovation is path dependence, in which the innovation choices of past innovators influence the types of innovation pursued by future innovators. Path dependence does not necessarily directly benefit innovators. Rather, it redirects innovators toward the types of technologies with the larger stock of knowledge by changing the relative profitability of different types of technologies. Redirecting technological development toward cleantech may not increase the profitability of innovating or producing in the energy sector (and thus may not lead to innovation spillovers), but it does reduce pollution externalities. Thus, with innovation snowballing the population at large— not the innovators themselves—gain from technological development with social benefits like lower pollution externalities. And unlike spillovers, innovation snowballing does justify encouraging cleantech innovation even in the presence of an optimal carbon tax and optimal general innovation policy. In particular, new economic research suggests that there are substantial social welfare gains to encouraging clean technology innovation specifically, along with a carbon tax.57 Innovation snowballing resuscitates early environmental law’s goals (though not its means) of using policy to encourage the development of certain pollution-reducing technologies.

//DH

First, innovation snowballing has several implications for domestic innovation policy in areas touching on climate policy. One key implication is that innovation snowballing reduces the appeal of using intellectual property (IP) to promote cleantech relative to subsidies like prizes, research grants, and research and development (R&D) tax credits. Patents and other forms of intellectual property have a main purported advantage of using markets to provide guidance on the value of innovations and main disadvantages of transaction costs and monopoly pricing, making it more difficult to use others’ innovations.18 Innovation snowballing undercuts the benefits of patents by reducing the utility of market valuation, since markets reflect an uneven playing field created by a century of untaxed greenhouse gas externalities. Additionally, because patents hinder the use of others’ innovations, they slow the snowballing process. As a result, innovation snowballing makes patents a less compelling tool for spurring cleantech innovation. We suggest a cleantech R&D tax credit as a possibly useful tool in this context.

//DH

To address social harms like climate change, government policy should encourage innovation in targeted areas. That’s the simple point of this Article. The claim may seem obviously true—for example, that innovation policy should encourage innovations that reduce the risk of climate change over those that exacerbate the problem. But conventional law-and-economics efficiency analysis opposes policies that seek to specifically incentivize innovation in certain areas, and argues instead that, if a party causes a social problem, the party should be taxed to discourage the activity but should not receive subsidies to develop innovations that would help reduce the social harm.1 New economics research overturns this view, based on what we call “innovation snowballing:” innovation builds on itself over time, developing path dependencies in which past innovations make present ones more valuable, with past innovations attracting similar, more advanced innovations.2 Thus, to maximize efficiency in the presence of innovation snowballing, innovation policy should target certain areas to address social problems, so that future innovation will follow the path toward reducing those social harms. This Article explains: (1) how conventional efficiency analysis disapproves of targeting innovation to address social problems, (2) why new economics research on innovation snowballing overturns that view, and (3) how policy should respond in the context of climate law—an area where innovation snowballing is particularly significant.

Volume 151, June 2023, //DH

“positive hysteresis” = “a permanent increase of the growth possibilities of the economy”

Scholars have debated the relative efficacy of these innovation incentives, especially prizes and patents. These debates focus mainly on the “who decides” question: is government or the private sector better situated to determine how research dollars should be spent?111 Underlying this debate is the assumption that the private sector typically has an informational advantage over government when it comes to understanding what consumers want.112 Where that assumption holds, patents and tax incentives are likely superior to prizes and grants in efficiently dispersing research funds. As Hemel and Ouelette argue, “[g]overnment-set rewards are inefficient when the government cannot foresee a potential invention or evaluate its costs and benefits.”113 But there are many settings where the social value of an invention outstrips its market value. Private actors are unlikely to invest in inventions that they do not expect to be profitable (or that they expect to be less profitable than other potential investments) regardless of their beneficial

social impact.114 In these circumstances, government is better situated to determine where research funds should go, making grants and prizes the superior tools.115

Advanced clean technologies (like all radical technologies) have many hurdles to clear. Some hurdles may relate to technical development (such as improving or inventing production techniques), others are due to market conditions or competition. In the case of renewable energy sources like wind or solar power, broad social acceptance and the need to provide energy at a price lower than possible by other firms and technologies are also major hurdles (Hopkins and Lazonick 2012). The residential, commercial and utility energy markets that they compete within are subject to unstable or inadequate government support.

Given these challenges, the financial risk of supporting a firm until such time that it can mass produce, capture market share and reach economies of scale, driving down unit costs, is too great for most VC funds (see Hopkins and Lazonick 2012, 7). VCs are also unwilling to participate in technological development that does not lead to a successful IPO, merger or acquisition. It is from these 'exit' opportunities that they derive their profits. While a high degree of speculation is behind all VC investment decisions, they are unlikely to invest at all without a strong push from government in the form of a targeted technological development. Indeed, in the absence of an appropriate investment model, VC will struggle to provide the 'patient capital' required for the full development of radical innovations.

The other side of that ideological coin is the belief that only business creates value. Here, risk-taking entrepreneurs, driven by the motive of profit, deserve a special place in society because only they, in the end, generate the tax revenues on which government depends, push innovation forward and create jobs. But the truth is not that simple. How private firms create value has been analysed extensively in the field of microeconomics, and its equivalent in business literature. There is no question that businesses create value and need to make profits, and should be free to do so. The issue is understanding how this occurs. Economics talks about the ‘production function’. It explains how value is created within the firm (the microeconomic theory of value) by combining capital (tangible, such as machinery, and intangible, such as knowledge) with labour and technology.2 In business studies, value is understood as being created inside the company by bringing together managerial expertise, strategic thinking and a dynamic (changing with circumstances) division of labour between workers.3

All this ignores the massive role of government in creating value, and taking risk in the process. In The Entrepreneurial State I argued that Silicon Valley itself is an outcome of such high-risk investments by the state, willing to take risks in the early stages of development of high-risk technologies which the private sector usually shies away from.4 This is the case with the investments that led to the internet, where a critical role was played by DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the US Department of Defense – and also by CERN in Europe with its invention of the World Wide Web. Indeed, not only the internet but nearly every other technology that makes our smart products smart was funded by public actors, such as GPS (funded by the US Navy), Siri (also funded by DARPA) and touch-screen display (funded initially by the CIA). It is also true of the high-risk, early-stage investments made in the pharmaceutical industry by public actors like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – without which most blockbuster drugs would not have been developed. And the renewable energy industry has been greatly aided by investments made by public banks like the European Investment Bank or the KfW in Germany, with private finance often too risk-averse and focused on short-term returns.5 On the demand side, it required organizations such as the Small Business Innovation Research Programme (SBIR), housed in the US Department of Commerce, to create markets for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by designing procurement policy so it is focused on helping SMEs provide goods and services via department budgets (about 3 per cent of the budget).

Of course, technology has rescued its beneficiaries from hardship and starvation, has enabled improved living conditions for many around the globe, has been the principal driver of human ‘progress’ in terms of advances in all aspects of human life, has often facilitated democracy and liberty, and has led to immense material gains. At the same time, it also has left us with significant negative consequences. To begin with a general point, new technologies brought about since the first industrial revolution have severely impacted on our environment – in the form of air, water, soil and other types of pollution and by depleting a broad range of natural resources (mainly as a result of industrial-scale agriculture, mining, water usage for industry and consumption of fossil fuels, all of which have been enabled by advancements in technology). Individual examples such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the insecticide DDT, nuclear (weapon) technologies and plastics aside, leading scientists estimate that the probability of human extinction before the year 2100 is around 50%, based on the possibility of a malicious or accidental release of destructive technology – or simply because the pace of technological change outstrips our ability to control it (Rees, 2003). The Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge is primarily concerned about ‘risks associated with human technology and activity, such as nuclear war, engineered pandemic, climate change, ecological collapse, or advanced artificial intelligence’.

Taking a look at the looming climate meltdown, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently issued its 6th Assessment Report – where a Working Group II report finds that human-induced climate change has already caused widespread adverse (and in part irreversible) impacts for nature (in the form of a critical loss of biodiversity) and people – with the most vulnerable people and systems disproportionately affected and half of the world’s current population (around 3.5 billion people) living in areas ‘highly vulnerable’ to climate change. Limiting temperature rise to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels therefore constitutes a ‘critical level’ beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and become increasingly irreversible (IPCC, 02/2022). However, the Working Group III report warns that ‘[w]ithout a strengthening of policies beyond those that are implemented by the end of 2020, GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions are projected to rise beyond 2025, leading to a median global warming of 3.2 [2.2 to 3.5] °C by 2100’ (IPCC, 04/2022). Given continued reliance on fossil fuels, the group found that exceeding 1.5C is ‘almost inevitable’, and suggests ‘negative emissions’ technologies (such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or direct air capture) are likely to be necessary. The problem is that such technologies are often experimental and are likely to involve interventions with the potential for unforeseen consequences – while on the other hand, there is no time to take a pre-cautionary approach.

As these examples attest, many innovations are, on balance, harmful to people. While we don’t deny the value of lifesaving breakthroughs like the Covid-19 vaccine, it is important for policymakers to recognize that many, and perhaps most, innovations do not fit the rosy image offered by politicians and tech gurus. This Article begins to challenge that image, and it offers a renewed vision of policymaking in a world where innovation can be beneficial but where it can just as easily be awful.

Our first step in this direction is to categorize and taxonomize antisocial innovations. From a legal and policymaking perspective, our concern is with innovations that are privately beneficial to innovators and their clients but socially harmful. For example, some financial innovations, like credit default swaps, made a lot of money for their creators, but wreaked havoc on the global economy.40 Similarly, the pricing algorithms just discussed are principally a means to extract money from consumers for the benefit of suppliers.41 And many chemicals may help firms increase profits at the expense of the environment.42 With this understanding of what makes an innovation a net benefit or harm, we propose a taxonomy of antisocial innovations according to the kinds of harms that they cause. We categorize and elucidate six main varieties of antisocial innovation harms: individual harms to people’s health, wealth, and well-being; environmental harms; harms to competition; harms to labor; privacy harms; and a catch-all category that we label social harms, involving concerns for democracy, stability, and the fair distribution of society’s resources. Of course, some technologies will cause multiple varieties of harm.

Several times this week I’ve seen people of low character go after Steve Pinker because of his supposed association with accused sexual predator and child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (Note: my own view is that there’s overwhelming evidence that Epstein is guilty and, after a fair trial, deserves to go to jail for decades.)

But that’s not enough. I see articles where, on no evidence at all, scientists and atheists are tarred because they either knew Epstein or associated with him. This innuendo is meant to imply that those people knew about Epstein’s crimes and either ignored them or, perhaps, even participated in them. In other words, they’re complicit. I could reproduce several examples, but I suspect readers have already seen them, and I’m not going to highlight and send traffic to miscreants involved in slander or character assassination.

Pinker explained his connection to Epstein earlier on this site, and it wasn’t a very close connection. He also explained one thing he did for which he is sorry:

In the interests of full disclosure, there was another connection. Alan Dershowitz and I are friends and colleagues, and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute. While he was representing Epstein, he asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document. I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague, not as a paid expert witness, but I now regret that I did so. And needless to say I find Epstein’s behavior reprehensible.

And there’s the fact that Pinker flew on Epstein’s jet to a TED conference and a dinner held by John Brockman in Monterrey, California. Note that they give the plane the name “The Lolita Express”, as it’s been dubbed by the media. But Epstein was accused of trafficking in underaged girls and having sex with minors in Florida (where he was convicted), and in New York, New Mexico, and the Virgin Islands, not California. But there’s no flight record that Pinker went to those places on Epstein’s dime, nor visited Epstein’s private island in the Virgin Islands.

Finally, VICE mentions this from an unsealed manuscript by one of the underaged girls trafficked by Epstein:

If the second order of politics in the age of the spectacle is to harvest our attention and seduce us into desiring our own oppression, our task is to [End Page 220] recognize our own shameful compromises with the spectacle. This requires modes of critical reflection which not only forces us to be alert to the ways in which our attentions might be harvested by the seduction of violent images, but how we might be co-opted by forms of depraved aesthetics that debase the political subject. We need to learn to live with violence less through the modality of the sacred than through the critical lens of the profane. By this we mean that we need to appreciate our violent histories and how our subjectivities have been formed through a history of physical bloodshed. This requires more of a willingness to interrogate violence in a variety of registers (ranging from the historical and concrete [registers] to the abstract and symbolic) than it does a bending to the neoliberal discourses of fate and normalization. We need to acknowledge our own seductions with the varied forces of violence. And we need to accept that intellectualism and the ideas it generates, the imaginaries it creates, and the visions of the world it endorses shares an intimate relationship with violence both in its complicity with violence and as an act of violence. Having said this, we cannot divorce here the idea of the desiring subject of violence from wider systemic relations and historical configurations. Too often, the mediation of suffering through the formal qualities of tolerability and design are presented as matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of a broader engaged social-political discourse. This all too easily leads to questions of individual pathology altogether removed from any sense of the conditions that give rise to libidinal investments. If we are to have a better picture of the debasement of the human subject, we need to address the relationships between individual desires, representations of human suffering, humiliation and death as part of a wider economy of pleasure that is collectively indulged. As decadence and despair are normalised in the wider culture—though this is very different from accomplished in the goal to remove all dissent—people are increasingly exploited for their pleasure quotient while any viable notion of the social is subordinated to the violence of a deregulated market economy and its production of cultures of cruelty.

Adrian Johnson 05. PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta, “Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive,” p. 340-1

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior. The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.

Evidence that Implicit Biases Are Malleable¶ Scientists have developed a body of empirical evidence that implicit biases are malleable over the past quarter century. The empirical record is now well established and offers strong evidence that implicit attitudes are neither inaccessible nor inescapable; they are not impossible to control; they are not out of reach. In fact, implicit associations can be influenced both by the individual who unconsciously holds these stereotypes and prejudices and by external factors. Researchers have reported and reviewed numerous studies that put two important misconceptions about implicit biases to rest. First, the evidence demonstrates that unconscious implicit attitudes are responsive to the deliberate choices and influences of an individual even though that person is not consciously experiencing the bias. Second, implicit biases are not impervious to relatively short-term change even though they arise from social knowledge that was acquired slowly, and over a lifetime. In fact, the evidence reveals that learning can continue to take place and alter social group knowledge, after initial attitudes and associations are formed. Take, for example, a person who developed bad driving habits over time and subconsciously incorporated those habits into driving behavior for many years. If this person chooses to be mindful of improving his or her driving, either out of a conscious decision to do so or in response to external influences, those bad habits can be altered. External authorities may incentivize improvement through a media campaign, new rules of the road, prosecution for reckless driving, or a driver's education class. Thus, malleability describes an ongoing learning process in which people with old, objectionable implicit biases learn to respond to newer, more appropriate attitudes and beliefs. Put another way, longstanding and unconscious thinking can change.¶ This understanding of malleability is called the “connectionist" model of implicit bias. Unlike the prior notion that implicit associations are static and inaccessibly fixed, the empirical record reveals that stereotypes and prejudicial beliefs to which we may adhere at any given time are “states” of thinking that form based on past experiences and current inputs. Biases can be revised depending upon current informational inputs gathered and weighed with each new encounter. This flexible view of stereotyping replaces an outdated rigid one and allows for the evidence that individuals can constantly update the stored group knowledge that produces implicit biases. The connectionist model ex. plains that a stereotype is merely a pattern of activation that, at a given point in time, is jointly determined by current input (i.e., the context) and the weight of the new information’s connection to existing and underlying beliefs. Psychologists now conclude that “stereotypes are quite elastic and thus any individual could hold and even change an infinite number of representations of social category's members, when viewed across time and place?”¶ The connectionist model contrasts with early theories of implicit bias, which focused on their automaticity. ‘Automaticity' refers generally to the way that individuals make associations without any awareness, without intentionality, and without responsibility for the influence the associations have in directing their conduct and choices.“ Early researchers concluded that automaticity meant inevitability. For example, one researcher said, “a crucial component of automatic pro~ ceases is their inescapability; they occur despite deliberate attempts to bypass or ignore them.”7 This view is no longer correct. Over the past twenty years. researchers have collected a strong record to contradict this notion that implicit attitudes change slowly, if at all, simply because they develop slowly over time. This idea has been replaced by what Dr. Irene Blair has called “the now-bountiful evidence that automatic attitudes and self-reported attitudes-~are sensitive to personal, social, and situational pressures." Blair points out that “the conclusion that automatic stereotypes and prejudice are not as inflexible as previously assumed is strengthened by the number and variety of demonstrations. . . . The fact that the tests were conducted in the service of many different goals, and by the similarity of findings across different measmres."9¶ The importance of understanding that implicit biases are malleable cannot be overstated. First, malleability means that interventions may be strategically introduced to provide current inputs that alter implicit biases. Thus, we can expect that implicit biases can be reduced. To say that biased attitudes may be “reduced” is to say that current informational inputs can be adjusted so that the resulting stereotype patterns to longer conform to traditional, discriminatory, or inequitable stereotypes, but instead lead individuals and institutions to more equitable judgments and more equitable conduct. Furthermore, malleability also leans that the discriminatory impacts that result from implicit biases so maybe reduced. The research that gave rise to the connectionist mode has provided important insights concerning the several methods available to individuals and institutions wishing to ameliorate the discriminatory impact of decisions and conduct informed by imme biases, stereotyping, and prejudice. Finally, by demonstrating that even subconscious racial biases are within reach and control, researchers have provided a sound basis for holding individuals and institutions responsible for reducing implicit racial and ethnic biases and for reducing the discriminatory harms caused by unconscious racism.

Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation.2 We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights—the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall—is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.3 The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” Barack Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.4 And in 2015, just a dozen years after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples. But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society—which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accomplished nothing after decades of struggle. Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American suspects, some of them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three. The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place. The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream? I’ll end with a coda about progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children. By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters. Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values and from vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion.7 The shift is visible in figure 15-1, which plots reactions to three survey statements that are representative of many others. Other surveys show the same shifts.8 Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.10 Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline in prejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social scientists, but recently the economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we’ve come to a digital truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together with many you can’t imagine. (Common searches include “How to make my penis bigger” and “My vagina smells like fish.”) Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the [n word] (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than expected for a Democrat.12 He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private racism. Let’s use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we’re at it, private sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don’t find it as amusing.13 And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015–2016 and inauguration in early 2017. Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves probably underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who’s Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn’t record the searchers’ ages or levels of education, but it does record where the searches where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “[n word] jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “[f*g] jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘[b word] jokes.’”) Stephens-Davidowitz also got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for “[n word]” is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such as “social security” and “Frank Sinatra.” The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child pornography—anything you’re not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts. Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.” Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights. Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people’s lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children’s readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.17 Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-1 shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.)18 The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians.19 Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015.20 At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it’s premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year. The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers; some of the incidents were ironic hoaxes, and many were boorish outbursts rather than actual crimes.21

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN HISTORY IN THE millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.

However, the appearance of these networks was, for many, a dubious blessing. The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression. Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.

Calling the racial ideology of refusing to acknowledge race color-blindness also implies that racism is perpetuated only through sight and resisted through sightlessness (Obasogie 2010). However, racism is multimodal and is not limited to only one modality. In other words, racism is informed by visuals, graphic, text, speech, and audio (Lopez 2015). For example, Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) responded to 1300 employment ads with more than 5000 resumes, some with Black sounding names and others with white, and found that resumes with white names receive 50% more callbacks for interviews. More recently, Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky (2015) found that in the sharing economy, guests with Black sounding names on the website Airbnb were approximately 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with white names. Huber (2011) shared the experiences of a Latina participant, who was forced to go to speech classes to correct her accent,

Despite her fluency in English several years later, she was removed from the mainstream classroom to participate in “speech therapy” where she was taught the “proper” pronunciation of English words. Carolina’s description of this experience as “speech therapy” signifies that there was something wrong with the way she spoke English that required a remedy. (392)

Often, when used in everyday discourse, disabilities are metaphors for weaknesses or limitations (Schalk 2013). Consider these examples: disabled cars on the highway, myopic views and emotionally handicapped, to name a few. Moreover, race scholars also use dis/ability as a metaphor for disadvantage: racism cripples, deaf to the argument on racial injustices, and shortsighted views on racial inequities. Yet, people with physical differences experience racism; deaf people can listen to arguments; and those who are nearsighted can still understand complex situations. These terms are inherently problematic, as they do not accurately depict the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while simultaneously maintaining a deficit notion of people with disabilities (Watts and Erevelles 2004). Color-evasiveness, as an expansive racial ideology, resists positioning people with disabilities as problematic as it does not partake in dis/ability as a metaphor for undesired.

Specifically, the racial ideology of denying the significance of race should not be equated with blindness because it is an inadequate descriptor. Color-blindness, as a racial ideology, conflates lack of eyesight with lack of knowing. Said differently, the inherent ableism in this term equates blindness with ignorance. However, inability to see is not ignorance; in fact, blindness provides unique ways of understanding the world to which sighted people have no access. Blind people are knowers. DisCrit encourages us to resist the urge to position blind people as deficit (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013b). By identifying the ideology of race as irrelevant – as color-blindness – scholars critiquing race and racism are perpetuating what Gotanda (1991) was arguing against, non-recognition. ‘Nonrecognition fosters the systematic denial of racial subordination and the psychological repression of an individual’s recognition of that subordination, thereby allowing such subordination to continue’ (Gotanda 1991, 16). The ways ableist language perpetuates non-recognition allows for the subordination of dis/abled people and misses the intersections between being socially constructed racially as the other and dis/abled.

When Marx does turn to the disintegration of the clan (gens) and the consolidation of kin-centered households (oikos), he centralizes tensions associated with rank and hierarchy already present in the primitive commune (Dunayevskaya, 1991: 180). It is in these tensions that we can grasp his speculative foray into barter as liminal zones where communities encounter each other in difference; it is also in mediating this difference that slaves play a pivotal role, not through repression, as in Engels, but in absentia, as the “n’est pas” of capitalism (Marriott, 2021: 19). If money masks the impossibility of commensurability, and labor and race ground the conditions for commensurability exemplified in freedom, slavery is not-capital by marking the space of incommensurability itself, encrypting nonsubstantialism in the heart of exchange. The integration of slavery into the story of money and subjectivity can work as a wedge to expose the origins of money in violence but necessarily makes slavery a vehicle for other concerns, which is precisely the problem of slavery. Understanding (and abolishing) capitalism—developing substantive conditions of freedom through a determinate negation of capitalist subjectivity—comes at the cost of understanding (and abolishing) slavery and the absolute negation it secrets.

Sohn-Rethel’s historical and textual medley, including both Engels and Thomson the classicist, is one telling example of how this cost is subjectified. Because Sohn-Rethel derives money from immediate commodity exchange, his rendering of transcendental subjectivity remains “external to the actual social mediation” (the social activity of labor) and instead migrates to the private abstract mind (Engster and Schlaudt, 2018: 293). While appearing to historicize philosophical categories, Sohn-Rethel diverges from Marx’s logical reconstruction, leaving the specificity of production and abstract labor underdetermined. In this way Sohn-Rethel expresses the other side of a premonetary theory of value: “not a labor abstraction but an exchange abstraction” (Postone, 1996: 178). It is ultimately the “real abstraction operating in exchange” that unites, for Sohn-Rethel, “the birth of philosophy in Greek society of slave-labour, and of the birth of modern science in European society based on wage-labour” (2020: 23). The exchange a priori would seem to locate the condition of transcendental subjectivity in a non-historical unification of slavery and wage-labor. But slave labor has historical movement in Sohn-Rethel too, movement whose consequences for subjectivity remain unspecified. Though arguing that “monied wealth” “did not spring from the land or from the workshops of manual producers,” Sohn-Rethel adds one addendum: “at least not before these were replaced by slaves, who themselves became the source of commodities for exchange” (2020: 85). Here we can deduce that by replacement, SohnRethel means the effect of Solonian reforms, though his only reference to Solon concerns the lawmaker’s success in “separating society from nature and presenting it as a moral order based on obligations peculiar to man” (at which point he cites Thomson’s The First Philosophers) (2020: 59). Slaves become a disrupting force in Sohn-Rethel’s efforts to keep production and circulation separate, despite his nod to money-begetting slavery and its role in history. By repressing the contemporaneity of capitalism, rejecting its unity of production and exchange in favor of the latter, Sohn-Rethel also represses the contemporaneity between slavery and labor as a feature of the material-social conditions of possibility for transcendental subjectivity as such.