March 13, 2026 NYT: ‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans Luke Ford No sacred cows.

NYT: ‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

The New York Times reports: “A study tracks how the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade competition with Mexico led to earlier deaths for American factory workers.”
Trade arguments usually center on GDP figures or consumer prices. This one focuses on mortality. In communities most exposed to Mexican import competition after 1994, life expectancy dropped sharply. For 45-year-old men in those areas, roughly three percent lost a full year of remaining life.
During the Great Recession, mortality fell in some areas because people drove less, which reduced accidents and cut pollution. The NAFTA shock worked differently. It did not spread pain broadly across the economy. It concentrated destruction in specific geographic communities built around manufacturing, and the damage spread through drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness, suicide, and chronic disease worsened by stress and the collapse of self-reported health. The “China shock” followed the same pattern after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The history of NAFTA shows how powerful alliances shape what counts as economic truth. In the 1990s, a coalition of multinational corporations, trade economists, and centrist politicians from both parties framed free trade as a near-universal good. The narrative stressed aggregate benefits: cheaper electronics, lower clothing costs, stronger North American competitiveness. It treated the destruction of local industries as a manageable transition, the kind of short-term disruption that efficient markets correct over time.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory helps explain why that framing held for so long. Coalitions develop narratives that justify their own interests while presenting those interests as universal moral or economic truths. The pro-NAFTA coalition had every incentive to emphasize diffuse gains and minimize concentrated harms. The concentrated harms happened to fall on communities that lacked the political and institutional power to force the debate. The anti-NAFTA coalition, built from unionized workers and industrial towns, developed a counter-narrative of betrayal and abandonment. For decades, the pro-trade side could answer that critique by pointing to aggregate welfare gains. This study makes that response harder. When the harm includes shortened life spans, cheaper televisions stop functioning as compensation.
The biological decline the study documents also reflects something Ernest Becker described in his work on hero systems. The manufacturing economy gave men without college degrees a coherent path to dignity. A factory worker supported a family, belonged to a union, earned respect through physical competence, and tied his identity to a specific place and community. That system stabilized marriage rates, kept addiction lower, and anchored civic life. When the factories closed, the collapse was not only financial. Men lost the primary pathway through which their culture recognized adult male worth. The professional class, whose own hero system runs on credentials, mobility, and global networks, often failed to see what that loss meant at ground level. From inside their framework, NAFTA looked rational and progressive. From inside the older framework, it looked like an erasure.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the decline of manufacturing connected to rising opioid addiction and deaths of despair from alcohol, drugs, and suicide. This new paper gives that connection a harder econometric edge. The political staying power of anti-trade sentiment was never primarily about nostalgia or ignorance of economics. It persisted because the damage was biological and irreversible. Populist critics of NAFTA were directionally right that elite economists had been too optimistic, and the mortality data now backs that intuition. The deeper failure was institutional: the pro-trade coalition assumed adjustment would happen automatically, that workers would retrain and regions would diversify. That assumption ignored the social infrastructure of manufacturing towns. Economists measured GDP and consumer prices. They did not measure the erosion of the social order those towns depended on.

NYT: His Harvard Lab Was Thriving. Then Came the Cuts.

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jenna Russell writes:

Will Mair, who studies aging, lost almost all his research funds when the White House cracked down on Harvard. He was wholly unprepared for the upheaval that followed….
In October, he traveled to Malta to lead a long-planned conference on aging — after nearly canceling the trip because he lacked the funds for airfare. Flying back home, grateful for the days immersed in dialogue with other scientists, he took comfort in knowing he would re-enter the county with the protection of his new U.S. passport.
Then, at Logan Airport, an officer pulled him aside at the passport control checkpoint and started asking questions: What kind of research did he do? Who were his collaborators? What countries did his postdocs come from?
His hands shook as he answered politely, hiding his disbelief and mounting anger. After about half an hour, they let him go.

The story illustrates a structural shift in how American science has been funded since World War II. For about eighty years the dominant model was simple. The federal government funds basic research. Universities perform the research. Private industry later commercializes the discoveries. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Department became the primary patrons. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCSF built enormous research systems around that assumption.

The Mair episode shows what happens when that assumption breaks.

After World War II the United States created a system sometimes called the “Bush model,” after Vannevar Bush. The idea was that government should fund open-ended basic science because the private sector cannot tolerate the uncertainty.

Companies want projects that might produce a drug or product in five years. Basic biology often takes thirty years and fails most of the time.

That is why the scientist in the article tells the audience that companies cannot tolerate “all the weird, random science.” He is basically describing the economic logic behind NIH funding.

Ozempic is actually a good example. The drug ultimately emerged from decades of obscure metabolic research that no pharmaceutical company would have funded in its early stages.

Public health schools rely heavily on federal grants. The Harvard T.H. Chan School gets roughly 40 percent of its revenue from Washington. Engineering schools have more corporate funding and business schools rely on tuition and alumni donations.

So when the federal government cuts grants, public health labs feel it first.

That is why Mair’s lab suddenly had to operate like a startup. Instead of simply applying for NIH grants he is now pitching donors on Nantucket golf courses and consulting for a private longevity company.

The conflict in the story is not just Trump versus Harvard. It reflects a broader political shift. For decades the American science system assumed three things:

• Federal funding would grow every year.
• Universities would remain politically neutral in the eyes of government.
• International talent would flow freely into U.S. labs.

All three assumptions are now unstable. The federal government is increasingly willing to use funding as leverage over universities. Universities are deeply embedded in political conflicts. Immigration scrutiny now affects scientists and students.

When those conditions change, the whole ecosystem changes.

Most likely the funding model will diversify. More philanthropy from billionaires interested in specific fields like aging or AI. More university spin-offs and venture partnerships. Smaller labs with fewer permanent staff. More researchers moving between academia and private industry. You can already see that happening in fields like longevity research, where figures like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Altos Labs have poured billions into private research institutes.

Mair consulting for a longevity investment company is a sign of that shift.

The irony is that American science became dominant precisely because it was insulated from this kind of short-term funding pressure.

The NIH system let scientists pursue strange ideas for decades without needing immediate commercial payoff.

If that insulation weakens, the U.S. may become more like other countries where research is fragmented between government, corporate, and philanthropic patrons.

Some people think that will make science more efficient. Others think it will kill the kind of long-term discoveries that produced things like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and modern cancer therapies.

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NYT: The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Deborah Pearlstein, the director of the Princeton program in law and public policy, writes in the New York Times about her love of truth:

The state bar disciplinary system is far from perfect. Proceedings can drag on for years. Some bar authorities are reluctant to investigate Trump administration lawyers. Even disciplinary systems with the courage to move forward could have a tough time handling the sheer number of administration lawyers who have apparently lied. Still, coupled with other deterrents — the courts themselves and lawyers’ concern for their own reputations — the risk of state bar discipline remains a critical tool for protecting the truth-finding function of the federal courts. No wonder the administration is determined to go after them.
The move against state bars is of a piece with the administration’s broader strategy against universities, the media and law firms — any set of organizations capable of challenging the president’s power. And few things threaten it more than holding it to the truth.

Her article operates on two levels at once. On the surface, it argues a legal point: a proposed Trump administration rule would shield Department of Justice lawyers from state bar discipline, violating the McDade Amendment (28 U.S.C. § 530B), which requires federal lawyers to follow the same ethics rules as every other licensed attorney. The argument holds legal water, and the underlying facts she cites, the erratic briefing, the judges who have called DOJ lawyers liars, the wave of resignations, are all real. But the piece also works as coalition defense, and reading it as only a legal argument misses half of what it does.
Pearlstein writes from within the elite legal-institutional coalition. That coalition, federal judges, career DOJ attorneys, state bar associations, elite law schools, and legal academics, draws its authority from a set of shared norms: lawyers tell the truth to courts, courts can sanction misconduct, and no government is above the professional rules that govern the legal order. If those norms weaken, the coalition weakens. So when she frames the proposed rule as an attack on the “truth infrastructure” of the legal system, she uses language that does two things simultaneously. It describes a real institutional threat, and it signals to every lawyer who identifies with that coalition that the threat is existential.
The Trump administration’s incentives here follow a clear logic. Career DOJ lawyers have used professional ethics rules as a form of internal resistance, resigning rather than filing briefs they consider dishonest. Removing external discipline lowers the cost of staying for lawyers willing to work inside the new order. At the same time, de-emphasizing credentials and protecting lawyers from bar sanctions opens the door to loyalists who lack elite pedigree but carry fewer reservations. The administration moves disciplinary power from state bars, which answer to no one in the executive branch, to the Office of Professional Responsibility, which answers to the deputy attorney general. Todd Blanche, the current deputy, recently said the administration is at “war” with the federal courts. That is who would now oversee internal ethics reviews.
Pearlstein largely ignores the counter-narrative that animates the Trump coalition. From inside that coalition, the legal profession looks less like a neutral referee and more like a politically hostile guild. Career DOJ lawyers delayed or refused to execute policies they personally opposed. State bar authorities, at least some of them, show reluctance to pursue Trump-aligned lawyers for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. Elite law schools and major law firms skew politically in a direction that makes them, in the coalition’s view, structurally adversarial to Republican governance. None of that makes the proposed rule sound policy, but it explains why the coalition treats the legal profession as an adversary rather than an institution worth protecting.
The framing of “truth versus authoritarianism” that runs through the column is coalition language, and not only in the cynical sense. Pearlstein believes it, and the underlying concern has real institutional weight. Courts depend on honest representations by counsel. If the executive branch can shield its lawyers from any external disciplinary review, judges lose one of the few tools they have to enforce the truth-finding function of legal proceedings. The Office of Professional Responsibility has historically operated like a black hole, and it has no subpoena power outside the department. State bar discipline, imperfect as it is, remains the only meaningful external check on DOJ conduct.
What the article finally reveals is less a debate about one rule and more a contest over who controls the machinery of American law. Three competing models of legal authority are in tension. Professional autonomy holds that lawyers regulate themselves through courts and guilds, independent of elected leadership. Executive populism holds that elected authority overrides professional guilds when they obstruct the will of the governed. Bureaucratic technocracy holds that career experts maintain continuity of legal interpretation regardless of who wins elections. The fight over the McDade Amendment is a proxy for that larger contest.

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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber is a book that many people find compelling because it names something real. Everyone has sat in a meeting that could have been an email, or watched a colleague generate reports no one reads. Graeber’s central observation has genuine force: automation did not deliver the leisure Keynes predicted, and a great deal of modern work feels hollow. The book’s emotional appeal rests on that kernel of truth, and for many readers it goes no further than needing the kernel confirmed.
The problem is that Graeber builds an enormous structure on a foundation of anecdote and polemic. He defines a bullshit job as work so pointless that even the employee cannot justify its existence, and then populates this category with his five types: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. The typology is catchy but slippery. Corporate lawyers and lobbyists appear as “goons,” which tells you something about Graeber’s politics but very little about whether those jobs are economically irrational or socially superfluous. The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony put it plainly: the categories are arbitrary distinctions that add little to understanding.
The empirical base is especially thin. Graeber leans on a YouGov poll showing that 37 percent of British workers felt their jobs made no meaningful contribution. But the same survey found that 63 percent considered their jobs personally fulfilling. Graeber builds a theory of civilizational crisis on the minority finding while ignoring the majority one. A reviewer in The Times also pointed out that the average British workweek fell from 56 hours in 1900 to 31 hours by 2018, which undercuts his claim that productivity gains never translated into real relief from labor.
The academic literature has been unkind to his hypotheses. A 2021 study published in Work, Employment and Society examined data from the European Working Conditions Survey and found that the proportion of workers who consider their jobs useless was low and declining, not growing as Graeber predicted. More cutting still, the workers in his designated “bullshit” categories, hedge fund managers, lobbyists, and the like, reported high satisfaction, while manual workers and cleaners often felt their work was meaningless. The study concluded that Graeber’s theory must simply be rejected. A 2023 American study found partial support for his framework, but only with regression controls and only in heavily financialized countries, a much narrower claim than Graeber makes.
His historical argument is more interesting. He traces the Protestant work ethic and its transmutation into a secular religion of productivity, drawing on Locke and the Puritan moral economy of suffering. This part of the book has genuine intellectual substance and connects to a real tradition of cultural criticism. Max Weber covered similar ground with more rigor, but Graeber writes with more energy. His observation that a citizenry kept busy with pointless work has less motivation to revolt carries a dark political logic worth taking seriously.
The solution he offers, a universal basic income, arrives without much argument. It appears almost as an afterthought, a political preference attached to a cultural diagnosis rather than derived from it. Graeber never seriously grapples with how UBI might be structured, funded, or whether it would actually address the psychological alienation he describes, since people might feel just as purposeless with money as without meaningful work.
What Graeber actually wrote, as Andrew Anthony noted, is not much more sophisticated than the 2013 essay that launched the whole project. The book adds anecdotes, extends the typology, and decorates the argument with historical passages, but it does not develop a theory. It confirms what a certain kind of reader already believes and flatters them for believing it. That is a commercially successful thing to do. It is not quite the same as being right.

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Everything Is Incentives: Antisemitism and the Organizations That Fight It

Posted on March 13, 2026 by Luke Ford

With Alliance Theory and his other papers, David Pinsof’s core claim is that behavior follows incentives. Not intentions. Not moral convictions. Incentives. He calls this incentive determinism, and he sets it against what he names likability determinism, the far more popular belief that good things happen when good people prevail and bad things happen when bad people do. Most of public life runs on likability determinism. Political speeches run on it. Cable news runs on it. So do most organizations that describe themselves as fighting hate.
To understand antisemitism in America right now, and to understand the Anti-Defamation League’s response to it, Pinsof’s framework cuts through a great deal of noise.
Start with the antisemitism itself. The standard account says it rises because bad people have bad ideas, and those ideas spread when weak or corrupt institutions fail to check them. The incentive account asks a different question: what do people gain by expressing hostility toward Jews or Jewish institutions? The answer has changed, and changed recently, and that change explains more than any catalog of individual bigots.
For several decades, the incentive structure around antisemitism in American public life was sharply punishing. The Holocaust sat near enough in cultural memory to make overt antisemitism radioactive. Jews had strong alliances with the civil rights movement. Both major political parties competed for Jewish support. The ADL and similar organizations maintained enough institutional reach that being labeled antisemitic carried genuine professional and reputational cost. In that environment, crossing certain rhetorical lines was expensive. Few people did it openly.
That structure has weakened on multiple fronts at once. The Israel question fractured the progressive coalition in ways that matter enormously here. Once a significant portion of activist culture began treating Israel as a colonial project, criticism of Jewish institutions became a way to signal membership in the pro-Palestinian coalition. The signal has value. It generates approval inside certain spaces. The cost of making it, in those same spaces, dropped toward zero. Pinsof would recognize this pattern immediately: the incentive shifted, and behavior followed.
On the populist right, a different shift produced a similar result through entirely different logic. Figures who built audiences by attacking elite gatekeepers discovered that the ADL, along with other major Jewish advocacy organizations, fit neatly into the category of institutions their audiences resented. Criticizing them became a way to perform independence from the liberal establishment, to show that you would say things others would not. The audience rewards that performance. The incentive is attention and loyalty, not theology or ideology.
And then the internet collapsed the old enforcement mechanism. In the legacy media world, accusations of antisemitism could move quickly and stick. Editors and producers acted as filters. Today those filters are gone. Online communities build their own interpretive frames. The cost of being labeled antisemitic dropped for anyone operating outside mainstream institutional life, and once the cost drops, more people test the boundary, and more people follow those who test it without consequences.
These three forces, progressive coalition signaling, populist anti-elite performance, and the collapse of reputational enforcement, do not share an ideology. They share an incentive structure that, in different ways, rewards attacking Jewish institutions. The result looks like a wave of antisemitism. Some of it is. Some of it is coalition positioning wearing the clothes of moral argument. Pinsof would say the two are nearly impossible to disentangle from the outside, and that the effort to disentangle them is often itself a form of coalition positioning.
Now apply the same lens to the ADL.
The organization’s stated mission is to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish civil rights. It does this through incident monitoring, policy advocacy, institutional partnerships, and law enforcement training. None of that is controversial to describe. What Pinsof’s framework adds is the observation that any organization that survives a century does so by aligning its moral language with its institutional incentives. The ADL is no exception, and recognizing that is not the same as calling it cynical.
Its annual audit of antisemitic incidents does several things at once. It documents a real problem. It also validates donor urgency, signals indispensability to policymakers, and reinforces the ADL’s authority as the definitive interpreter of the threat. An organization that publishes the most widely cited data on a problem does not have a neutral relationship to that data. The incentive favors finding that the problem is serious and growing. That does not mean the data is wrong. It means the data is produced inside an incentive structure, like all data.
The push for broad definitions of antisemitism, including the contested claim that certain forms of anti-Zionism constitute antisemitism, follows the same logic. Pinsof predicts that coalitions define norms in ways that protect their allies and disadvantage rivals. A definition that expands the boundary of antisemitism expands the rhetorical and legal territory the ADL’s coalition controls. Critics who see this as motivated reasoning are not entirely wrong. Defenders who see it as a sincere response to genuine blurring at the boundary are not entirely wrong either. The point is that sincerity and institutional interest tend to converge, which is precisely what Pinsof argues.
The coalition architecture the ADL built over decades, inside law firms, universities, tech platforms, and police departments, is exactly what Pinsof means when he says influence flows through alliances. Embedding an organization inside powerful institutions is not merely advocacy. It creates a structure in which the organization’s definitions and priorities become defaults across a wide range of institutional decisions. That is a form of power, and like all forms of power, it eventually generates resistance.
The backlash the ADL now faces from multiple directions at once is, on Pinsof’s model, entirely predictable. When an institution holds the center of a coalition and enforces norms aggressively enough, it accumulates enemies across the ideological spectrum. Progressives accuse it of conflating Israel criticism with antisemitism. Conservatives accuse it of selectively labeling right-wing speech while ignoring left-wing hostility. Tech companies that once deferred to its content moderation guidance now face counter-pressure from free speech coalitions that treat the ADL as a symbol of the old censorship regime. The organization has not become more extreme. The incentive landscape around it shifted, and new coalitions formed to challenge its authority.
Pinsof is careful to note that none of this means the beliefs people express are false or that the causes they advocate are wrong. The ADL does fight real antisemitism. Antisemitism is a real and persistent problem. The current wave of hostility toward Jewish institutions contains genuine prejudice alongside strategic coalition signaling. His point is structural, not cynical. Moral language is the medium people use. Incentives are what move them.
What this framework offers, and why it cuts deeper than most analysis of antisemitism and the institutions that fight it, is that it forces the question of who benefits from a given framing, not as an accusation but as a method. When criticism of the ADL surges, the useful question is not whether the critics have a point, though they may, but what incentive structure rewards the timing and intensity of that criticism. When the ADL pushes a broader definition of antisemitism, the useful question is not whether the definition is defensible, though it may be, but what coalition is strengthened by the expansion.
Pinsof ends his essay with something close to optimism. If awareness of incentive structures can itself change behavior, then thinking this way might matter. The catch is that awareness is also an incentive, and the feeling of having seen through the machinery is one of the most reliable pleasures available to anyone who writes or reads about how the world works. The framework is not exempt from its own analysis. Neither is this essay.

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Decoding Oil Analyst Javier Blas (Bloomberg)

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Javier Blas is an energy and commodities specialist whose reporting focuses on oil markets, commodity trading houses, and global supply chains, and that position gives him a specific lens on world events.
His real audience is the energy-financial coalition: commodity traders, oil companies, energy investors, government energy ministries, and macro hedge funds. Bloomberg Opinion draws heavily from market participants, so his columns signal less about moral narratives and more about practical information that affects oil prices and supply chains. In alliance terms, he coordinates the energy market coalition.
Blas tends to believe three things about the world. Energy markets are more resilient than pundits think. Politics matters less than physical supply constraints. Commodity traders quietly shape geopolitics. That worldview comes from years covering OPEC, oil majors, and trading houses like Vitol, Trafigura, and Glencore. He co-wrote a book about that shadow system. The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy describes the history and influence of the billionaire commodity traders who buy and sell the earth’s resources. It argues that these private companies shaped the modern world by providing the fuel and minerals that industrial economies require, often by navigating the gaps between international law and local corruption.
So when a war breaks out, Blas asks one question: what happens to the barrels?
His columns often puncture the dramatic geopolitical story with a market reality check. You see the pattern in phrases like “not an energy crisis yet” or “the oil market is relaxed.” He tells readers that wars often look enormous politically but smaller in commodity terms. That is a market stabilization narrative, because traders need to know whether supply is actually disrupted.
On climate, Blas quietly pushes back against the more utopian energy transition narrative. He argues that fossil fuels will last longer than activists expect and that demand remains stubbornly strong, but he does it in a technocratic rather than ideological way. His tone is market realism, not culture war. His coalition is pragmatic energy elites.
Where a Washington columnist asks whether the regime is collapsing or what a conflict means for American power, Blas asks whether tankers are moving, whether the Strait of Hormuz is open, and how many barrels per day are offline. Those are the variables that determine oil prices and global economic impact.
His deeper contribution is that he consistently highlights the role of commodity traders, firms that operate in a shadow zone between governments and markets. They buy sanctioned oil, finance risky infrastructure, and move resources during wars. His argument is that these actors quietly stabilize the global economy when governments fail. That explains why he often sounds calmer about geopolitical crises than national security analysts.
The simplest frame: Ignatius writes about power. Think tanks write about strategy. Blas writes about barrels. His columns translate geopolitics into the physical economy.
Television analysts operate inside the geopolitical attention economy, where dramatic scenarios reward them with urgency and clicks. Energy traders operate under a different incentive structure. They lose money if they panic too early. So before reacting to any war, traders ask whether physical supply is actually interrupted, whether tankers are still moving, and whether alternative flows are available. Historically the answer is usually yes. When Iranian exports faced sanctions, crude moved through ship-to-ship transfers and shadow fleets. When Russia faced an embargo, India and China absorbed huge volumes and traders rerouted the flows. Political shock does not automatically equal supply shock.
Hormuz is often described as the most important energy chokepoint in the world, with roughly a fifth of global oil passing through it. But that story has two complications. Many Gulf producers have built bypass infrastructure, including Saudi pipelines to the Red Sea and a UAE pipeline to Fujairah that sits outside the Strait entirely. And closing Hormuz is extremely difficult. Iran could disrupt shipping with mines, missiles, or drones, but permanently sealing the waterway would require sustained naval dominance, trigger overwhelming American military retaliation, and destroy Iran’s own export routes. So Iran’s incentive is harassment, not closure. Temporary disruption raises oil prices and signals strength without provoking total war. Traders understand this pattern from decades of Gulf crises and rarely assume a full blockade.
Oil markets sometimes prefer wars to peace, and that is less counterintuitive than it sounds. Markets dislike uncertainty, but they also like tight supply. A limited conflict in an oil region often produces exactly that combination. The threat of disruption pushes prices higher, but production often continues, and that creates profitable volatility. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s damaged infrastructure but never eliminated exports. Tankers kept sailing under naval protection. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 spiked prices initially, but markets stabilized once traders understood that other producers could compensate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not remove Russian oil from global markets. It reshuffled where the barrels went. Commodity traders thrive in these conditions because they can arbitrage price differences, arrange alternative supply routes, and finance shipments others avoid.
Geopolitical analysts focus on the dry map of territories and capitals. Traders focus on the wet map of sea lanes and port depths, and that map is much harder to break. Even if the Strait of Hormuz faces harassment, the global tanker fleet is an enormous floating buffer. Millions of barrels of oil sit on water at any given moment, providing a temporal cushion that the breaking-news cycle ignores. Politicians might announce a total embargo for a domestic audience while traders watch the cargo manifests and see the reality. Governments often quietly allow leakage to prevent a global economic collapse. The trader’s calm comes from the recognition that the world’s need for energy usually overrides its desire for a clean moral resolution to a conflict.

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David Ignatius: Iran’s Islamic Republic 2.0 is coming — and it won’t be pretty

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

From his Washington Post column:

How Trump’s tactical victory could turn into a forever war.
Maybe the answer to the gut question “So how does this end?” in Iran is simple: It doesn’t. Not for a long while…
If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory — in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.
The Iran war will be a tactical triumph in the short run, and all the encomiums about America’s unmatched military power will remain true. If the conflict ends tomorrow, Iran will have lost nearly all its nuclear facilities and scientists, most of its missiles and missile launchers, most of its weapons factories, most of its navy, and much of the command and control for its military, intelligence and security forces.

David Ignatius concedes the military operation worked. Iran has lost most of its nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, navy, and command structure. That is an enormous admission for a columnist in his position. But the concession lasts about two sentences before the familiar frame takes over: tactical triumph, strategic disaster, forever war, Islamic Republic 2.0.
To understand why the column works this way, you need to know whose interests Ignatius represents. He is not simply a journalist analyzing events. He is a node inside the Washington national security ecosystem, drawing his sources from intelligence officials, Gulf diplomats, and the defense bureaucracy. That coalition values stability, institutional control of escalation, and long-term geopolitical management. Large disruptive wars unsettle bureaucracies. When a president launches a major military campaign outside the normal consensus channels, the ecosystem responds by reframing the victory as strategically dangerous.
The “tactical victory, strategic disaster” narrative performs two jobs at once. It avoids directly attacking military success, which would look defensive and petty. And it warns the policy world that the political consequences might spiral in ways that matter to the people who run things. If the war turns out badly, the coalition already warned us. If the region stabilizes, the column still acknowledged the military success. This is a hedging strategy, and Ignatius executes it smoothly.
His explanation for Iranian persistence is the weakest part of the column. He argues that pride and dignity explain why the regime keeps fighting. That answer feels satisfying, but it misses the simpler logic. Regimes fight because surrender is often fatal for the leadership. If the IRGC stops fighting and the regime collapses, the people at the top face prison or execution. Continuing the war preserves bargaining power and maintains internal legitimacy. That is regime survival logic, not wounded national pride.
The Islamic Republic 2.0 prediction is the most credible part of the piece. Wars tend to accelerate power consolidation inside security institutions. Pakistan shifted in this direction after repeated conflicts with India. Egypt consolidated under Nasser’s security apparatus. Russia did the same after the Chechen wars. When the dust settles, the military-security complex tends to emerge as the dominant political actor. Ignatius is right about this, but the prediction also carries a quiet political message: if Iran becomes a harder military state, the case for restraint in future U.S. operations grows stronger.
The Black September analogy near the end is a signal aimed at a specific audience. It tells policymakers that escalation might shift into covert and asymmetric warfare. It reminds readers of the intelligence community’s institutional memory about blowback. The mention of midterm elections serves a similar function. It tells Democratic politicians and foreign policy elites that there is political space to oppose escalation without looking naive.
This pattern repeats whenever an outsider president disrupts the foreign policy consensus. You saw it during Reagan’s early Cold War escalations, after the Iraq invasion, during the Libya intervention. The establishment rarely attacks the military directly. Instead it reframes the outcome as a strategic trap. The real message of the Ignatius column is not that Iran will keep fighting. The message is that the strategic environment is now unpredictable, and the people who normally manage these things were not fully in charge when the shooting started.
That framing protects the reputation of the national security establishment while preparing readers for a long and messy aftermath. It is exactly what you would expect from someone embedded in that coalition.

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In Elite Speak, ‘Grievance’ Means Illegitimate Claims By White People

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In elite discourse the word “grievance” usually signals that the speaker believes the underlying complaint is exaggerated, misdirected, or illegitimate.

It is a framing device.

If an elite commentator thinks a complaint is justified, they normally use words like injustice, discrimination, harm, or inequality. Those words treat the claim as morally valid. The moment the same phenomenon is labeled grievance, the moral status changes. The complaint becomes psychological rather than structural. It sounds like resentment, bitterness, or wounded pride rather than a legitimate claim about reality.

You can see the pattern across different political camps.

When progressive elites talk about “white grievance politics,” they are saying that the complaints of white voters are not real injustices but status anxiety. When conservative elites talk about “victimhood culture” or “grievance studies,” they are making the same move toward progressive activists. The tactic is symmetrical.

The word performs three functions.

First, it delegitimizes the claim. A grievance is something people feel, not something that necessarily happened.

Second, it pathologizes the claimant. The problem becomes their psychology or identity rather than the system they are criticizing.

Third, it signals coalition boundaries. By calling something a grievance, the speaker tells their audience which complaints belong inside the moral circle and which belong outside.

This is why the term shows up constantly in elite commentary about populism. “Grievance politics” is a polite way of saying that the grievances are not morally compelling to the speaker’s coalition.

From an Alliance Theory perspective, the label helps a coalition avoid having to engage with the substance of a complaint. If the complaint is framed as resentment, then responding to it is unnecessary. The coalition can treat it as noise rather than a claim that might require concessions.

In American elite discourse the word shows up far more often in connection with white politics. Phrases like “white grievance,” “white grievance politics,” or “grievance-driven populism” became common after about 2015. In those contexts the term signals that the complaint is being interpreted as status resentment rather than a legitimate injustice.

When elites talk about the complaints of minority groups they usually switch vocabulary. You hear terms like racism, discrimination, inequality, civil rights, injustice, or marginalization. Those words assume the claim may be morally valid and worthy of redress.

So the linguistic asymmetry is real. The same emotional experience can be described in two different ways depending on how the speaker evaluates the legitimacy of the complaint.

If the coalition sees the claim as justified, it is framed as injustice.
If the coalition sees the claim as illegitimate or exaggerated, it is framed as grievance.

That logic applies across the political spectrum.

Progressive elites often talk about “white grievance politics” when referring to populist movements or right-wing voters. Conservative elites, meanwhile, use similar framing toward progressive activism with phrases like “grievance industry,” “grievance studies,” or “victimhood culture.” In that context the grievances being dismissed are usually those of minority activists or progressive institutions.

So the word itself is less about race and more about legitimacy. It signals that the speaker’s coalition does not view the complaint as morally compelling. Race enters the picture because different coalitions currently view different groups’ complaints as legitimate or illegitimate.

In other words the vocabulary reflects the moral map of the coalition using it. When a complaint sits inside that coalition’s moral circle it is injustice. When it sits outside, it becomes grievance.

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The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (2013)

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe is a sustained attack on the DSM-5 and on the institutional culture that produced it. Greenberg writes as both a practicing therapist and a journalist, which gives him an unusual vantage point. He understands the clinical world from the inside, but he approaches the American Psychiatric Association and its diagnostic manual with the skepticism of a reporter who has learned not to take official stories at face value.
The book’s central argument is that the DSM is not a scientific document. It is a political one. The diagnoses it contains do not reflect discoveries about the nature of mental illness. They reflect negotiations, compromises, votes, and the accumulated weight of professional and commercial interests. Greenberg follows the making of the DSM-5, which was released in 2013, and documents the process with considerable detail. He attended conferences, interviewed key figures, and gained access to internal debates that the APA would have preferred to keep quiet. What he found was a process riddled with disagreement, ego, and institutional defensiveness masquerading as scientific rigor.
One of his sharpest targets is the concept of validity. A diagnostic category is valid if it corresponds to something real in nature, a genuine disease with a distinct cause, course, and biological signature. Greenberg argues that almost no DSM diagnosis meets this standard. The categories are reliable in the narrow sense that clinicians can agree on how to apply them, but reliability is not validity. Two doctors can reliably agree that a patient meets the criteria for major depressive disorder without that agreement telling us anything about what is actually wrong with the person or what might help them.
He traces this problem back to the DSM-III, which Robert Spitzer oversaw in 1980. That revision was a deliberate attempt to save psychiatry’s scientific reputation by replacing vague psychoanalytic concepts with specific, checklist-based criteria. It worked as a political move. It gave psychiatry the appearance of precision. But Greenberg argues it buried a deeper problem rather than solving it. The new criteria were operationalized descriptions of symptoms, not explanations of causes. Psychiatry got better at agreeing on labels while understanding no more about what produced the conditions those labels described.
The pharmaceutical industry runs through the book as a persistent presence. Greenberg does not reduce everything to pharma corruption, but he makes clear that the DSM’s expansion of diagnostic categories created enormous markets for drug treatment, and that this financial logic shaped what got included and how conditions got defined. The relationship between the APA and the drug industry is not a simple conspiracy. It is something more structural and therefore harder to address.
Greenberg also takes on the Research Domain Criteria project, or RDoC, which the National Institute of Mental Health launched as an alternative framework grounded in neuroscience rather than symptom checklists. He is skeptical of this too, not because neuroscience is worthless but because the confidence with which its proponents speak outstrips what the science can currently deliver. The brain is complicated, mental illness is complicated, and the history of psychiatry is full of moments where a new biological framework promised to resolve everything and delivered far less than advertised.
What makes the book work beyond its arguments is Greenberg’s voice. He is funny, angry, and genuinely troubled by what the medicalization of suffering has done to the way people understand themselves. He treats his own patients with care and takes their pain seriously, which keeps the book from sliding into the kind of antipsychiatry polemic that dismisses suffering along with diagnosis. His complaint is not that mental illness does not exist. It is that the DSM pretends to know more about it than anyone does, and that this pretense does real harm to real people.
Stephen Park Turner‘s framework adds something genuinely useful here, and it cuts deeper than most sociological critiques of psychiatry because it targets the epistemological foundation rather than just the institutional behavior.
Greenberg gets at the reliability versus validity problem, and Horwitz identifies the conceptual mistake of stripping context from diagnosis, but neither fully explains why the DSM project keeps failing on its own terms while the profession continues to defend it with such confidence. Turner’s concept of tacit knowledge helps explain that gap. The clinician who has seen thousands of patients develops a feel for distress that no checklist captures, and when the DSM-III tried to replace that feel with operational criteria, it did not eliminate the tacit dimension. It just made it invisible. The criteria look explicit and scientific, but applying them still requires judgment that lives below the surface of the written rules.
The circularity point is particularly sharp. Psychiatric authority validates itself through professional consensus rather than through the kind of external verification that other branches of medicine can at least gesture toward. A cardiologist can point to a blocked artery. A psychiatrist points to a committee vote. Turner would say this is not unique to psychiatry, that all expertise has this self-referential quality to some degree, but psychiatry is unusually vulnerable because it simultaneously claims biological grounding it cannot demonstrate and dismisses that vulnerability as a temporary problem that more research will eventually solve.
The epistemic prison argument, borrowed from Steven Hyman, connects well to what Scull shows historically. Each generation of psychiatrists inherits a set of tacit assumptions so thoroughly embedded that they do not register as assumptions at all. The belief that mental suffering is fundamentally medical, that it belongs to doctors rather than priests or philosophers or communities, shapes every question the field asks before any data gets collected. Turner would likely say this is how tacit knowledge operates at the institutional level. It does not just inform practice. It forecloses alternatives without anyone noticing.
Where Turner adds the most to Greenberg specifically is on the DSM’s self-defeating ambition. Greenberg treats the shift from clinical intuition to checklist criteria primarily as a political maneuver, which it was. Turner lets you see it also as an epistemological mistake, an attempt to make explicit what is by nature resistant to explicit formulation. The result is a document that looks rigorous and functions as a shared fiction, which is more or less what Greenberg concludes, but Turner gives that conclusion a theoretical backbone.
The one place Turner’s framework might need some friction is the implication that tacit knowledge is primarily a problem or a source of illegitimate authority. Tacit knowledge is also how expertise actually works in any field that deals with complex, variable phenomena. The question is not whether psychiatry relies on tacit judgment but whether it acknowledges that reliance honestly and builds its institutions around that reality rather than around a fantasy of algorithmic precision. Greenberg’s book is largely a document of what happens when an institution chooses the fantasy.
Allan Horwitz cites The Book of Woe sparingly but it fits directly into the argument he develops across his own work, particularly in Creating Mental Illness and The Loss of Sadness. Greenberg provides him with a journalistic account of the DSM-5 process that corroborates what Horwitz argues at a more analytical level, namely that the diagnostic categories produced by that process reflect professional and institutional pressures rather than scientific discovery.
The most useful thing Greenberg offers Horwitz is evidence of what happened inside the APA during the DSM-5 revision. Horwitz’s critique depends on showing that diagnostic expansion was not driven by better science but by something else, and Greenberg’s reporting on the internal debates, the resistance to reform, and the ultimate conservatism of the revision supports that claim. When Horwitz argues that the profession could not bring itself to restore the contextual distinctions the DSM-III had eliminated, Greenberg’s account of why that proved politically impossible fills in the institutional detail.
Greenberg also reinforces Horwitz’s reliability versus validity argument without using exactly that vocabulary. When Greenberg shows that the APA prioritized inter-rater agreement over any deeper correspondence to biological reality, he is making the same point Horwitz makes more formally. The two accounts strengthen each other.
That said, Horwitz does not lean heavily on Greenberg because their projects differ in kind. Horwitz builds a sociological and conceptual argument that stands on its own. Greenberg writes reported narrative. Horwitz uses him the way a scholar uses good journalism, as illustration and corroboration rather than as a primary theoretical source.
Charles Taylor‘s distinction between the buffered self and the porous self comes from A Secular Age and it adds something neither Horwitz, Scull, nor Greenberg fully develops, which is an account of how the person receiving a diagnosis experiences it and why that experience has changed historically.
The porous self is the pre-modern condition. The boundary between the self and the world is permeable. Meanings, spirits, moral forces, and social obligations flow through that boundary and constitute the person from the outside in. Madness in this framework is not simply an internal malfunction. It might be possession, divine punishment, a rupture in the person’s relationship to cosmic order. The mad person is embedded in a web of meanings that extend far beyond the skull.
The buffered self is the modern condition. The boundary hardens. The self becomes an interior space, insulated from external meanings, responsible for its own mental states, and understood primarily through the lens of individual psychology. Suffering becomes something that happens inside you rather than something that happens between you and the world. This is the anthropological precondition for the DSM project. You cannot build a checklist of internal symptoms unless you already assume that the relevant unit of analysis is the bounded individual rather than the person-in-context.
This connects to Horwitz’s central argument in a precise way. When Horwitz says the DSM stripped context from diagnosis, he describes a technical failure, a conceptual mistake made in 1980 by people who should have known better. Taylor would say something deeper is going on. The decontextualization Horwitz identifies is not just a professional error. It reflects the buffered self’s basic assumption that internal states are primary and context is secondary. The DSM did not invent that assumption. It codified it and gave it institutional authority.
Greenberg’s frustration throughout The Book of Woe is partly a frustration with this same assumption. He keeps pointing out that the DSM treats suffering as if it exists independently of the life that produces it, and that this produces absurdities like the bereavement exclusion debate, where the APA argued over whether grief after loss should count as depression. Taylor would recognize that debate immediately. A culture of buffered selves finds it genuinely difficult to think about suffering as a relational and contextual phenomenon rather than an internal one, because the buffered self experiences itself as the origin of its own states.
Turner’s tacit knowledge argument also looks different through this lens. The tacit knowledge that experienced clinicians carry includes, among other things, a feel for the person in front of them as a social and relational being embedded in a particular life. That knowledge is porous in Taylor’s sense. It crosses the boundary between the clinician’s interiority and the patient’s situation. The DSM’s explicit criteria are buffered by design. They locate the disorder inside the individual and bracket everything outside. When Turner says codifying the tacit fails, part of what gets lost in that codification is precisely the porous dimension of clinical judgment.
Scull’s historical work gains something here too. The asylum as an institution is a buffered technology. It extracts the person from their social world, places them in a controlled environment, and treats their condition as separable from the relationships and circumstances that may have produced it. The history of that institution looks different if you understand it as the expression of a particular anthropology rather than simply a practical response to social disorder.
The buffered self also helps explain why biological psychiatry has such cultural appeal despite its weak track record. If you experience yourself as a bounded interior self, the idea that your suffering has a biological cause inside your brain feels like an explanation that matches the shape of your experience. It locates the problem exactly where the buffered self already assumes problems live. An explanation that pointed outward, to poverty, isolation, trauma, or social dislocation, would require a different and less comfortable anthropology, one closer to Taylor’s porous self, where the boundary between self and world is not a fixed wall but a permeable membrane.

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Andrew T. Scull vs Allan V. Horwitz On The History Of Psychiatry

Posted on March 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Both Andrew Scull and Allan Horwitz write about psychiatry and mental illness, but they approach the subject from different angles and reach somewhat different conclusions, even when they cover similar ground.
Scull is a historian, and his work reflects that. He traces the rise of institutional psychiatry over centuries, asking how and why society came to medicalize deviant behavior and place it under the authority of doctors. His most celebrated book, Museums of Madness: Social Organization of Insanity in 19th Century England, examines the rise of the asylum in England, and his later Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud offers a sweeping history of mental illness from antiquity to the present. Scull tends to be skeptical, even caustic, toward organized psychiatry. He sees the profession as having repeatedly overstated its knowledge and authority, from the 19th-century asylum keepers who promised cures they could not deliver to modern biological psychiatry’s confident claims about brain chemistry. His book Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness catalogs treatments that caused enormous harm, often carried out by well-intentioned doctors who convinced themselves that crude interventions worked. Scull does not argue that mental illness is a myth, but he does argue that the history of psychiatry is a history of professional ambition often outrunning genuine understanding.
Horwitz is a sociologist, and he focuses more tightly on the present. His most influential work, Creating Mental Illness, argues that modern diagnostic psychiatry, particularly after the DSM-III in 1980, stripped context from the definition of disorder. By eliminating the distinction between contextually appropriate distress and genuine dysfunction, psychiatry inflated the prevalence of mental illness and made normal suffering look like pathology. He developed this argument further in The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder, co-authored with Jerome Wakefield, which focuses specifically on depression and argues that much of what psychiatry diagnoses as a disorder is a proportionate response to loss or adversity. More recently he has written about anxiety in a similar vein.
The two share considerable common ground. Both view the expansion of psychiatric diagnosis with suspicion. Both argue that social forces, professional interests, and institutional pressures shape what gets called mental illness. Neither is a straightforward antipsychiatry polemicist in the Thomas Szasz mold, but both question the authority and precision that mainstream psychiatry claims for itself.
The differences are real, though. Scull writes with historical depth and tends toward the dramatic. He takes the long view, which lets him show how confident each generation of psychiatrists has been about theories that later collapsed. The rhetorical weight of his work comes from that accumulated evidence of failure and hubris. Horwitz writes more narrowly and sociologically. His argument is less about institutional overreach across centuries and more about a specific conceptual mistake embedded in contemporary diagnostic categories. He wants to fix something precise: the failure to distinguish disorder from distress. Where Scull tends toward indictment, Horwitz tends toward critique and reform.
Scull also engages more directly with the experiences of patients and the material conditions of institutions. His history of madness has a human texture that Horwitz’s sociological analyses sometimes lack. Horwitz argues at a more abstract level about categories and definitions, which makes his work precise but occasionally dry.
One tension worth noting is that Horwitz, despite his critique of diagnostic inflation, still works within a framework that accepts the concept of genuine mental disorder. He wants better distinctions, not the elimination of the category. Scull is harder to pin down on this. His historical work raises deeper questions about whether psychiatric categories have ever tracked anything stable in nature, without fully resolving that question. He is more comfortable sitting with the uncertainty.
Together they make a useful pair. Scull provides the historical sweep and the sense of how deep the problems run. Horwitz provides a more targeted analytical argument about what went wrong at a specific moment and why it matters. Reading them together gives you both the long arc of the problem and a precise account of its contemporary form.