I picked up this book after expressing enthusiasm for Snyder's much shorter book, On Tyranny, and being told, oh, right, that shorter book was written while writing this book, and this book is also recommended. And I concur with the recommendation. Strongly.

Recognize that this book was written before Cheetoh had gained the insane head of steam he has now, and just how awful our situation can get once he gets going. Okay, so, we know that Russia helped elect Cheetoh. We know that they have been interfering with not only our political systems, but pretty much every other political system in the world. A super power like the USSR does not go down quietly, and Russia as emerged as a worthy successor.

In order to do that well, you need that whole nationalist thing. And in that light, we have Putin who has set himself up to be a god. How does one do that? Well, tell you what, I have no idea, but Synder does. And here's where this book comes in: a history of Russia sufficient to understand just how much shit we are in, how the soft pudgy of America and the rise of white nationalism has allowed America to be torn apart from the inside, with careful nudging from the outside by Russia. The fat, happy cow being led to the slaughter.

Except, except, hell, I really don't know enough about Russian history to know how much of this is true, and how much of it is, in itself, propaganda. I have no idea. Which is why I asked Rob to read the book when I was done, and let me know just how justified my newly found dislike for the country is. He said he'd let me know.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend the book.

During self-inflicted catastrophes of this kind, a certain kind of man always finds a way to blame a woman. In Vladimir Putin’s case, that woman was Hillary Clinton.
Page 53

The only escape from the alternatives of inevitability and eternity was history: understanding it or making it.
Page 109

To think historically is not to trade one national myth for another,
Page 112

No other land attracted as much colonial attention within Europe. This reveals the rule: European history turns on colonization and decolonization.
Page 119

This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the heights of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life.
Page 122

The reflex of protecting the future, triggered in the minds of students by the fear of losing Europe, was triggered in others by the fear of losing the one generation raised in an independent Ukraine.
Page 125

Once again the word went out, and Kyivans of all walks of life decided to put their bodies in front of batons. A young businesswoman recalled that her friends “were shaving and putting on clean clothes in case they should die that night.”
Page 125

The history of the Maidan between November 2013 and February 2014, the work of more than a million people presenting their bodies to the cold stone, is not the same thing as the history of the failed attempts to put it down. Bloodshed had been unthinkable for protestors within Ukraine; only bloodshed made Americans and Europeans notice the country; bloodshed served Moscow as an argument to send the Russian army to bring much more. And so the temptation is strong to recall Ukraine as it was seen from the outside, the arc of narrative following the arc of bullets.
Page 127

For those who took part in the Maidan, their protest was about defending what was still thought to be possible: a decent future for their own country.
Page 127

The violence mattered to them as a marker of the intolerable.
Page 127

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves.
Page 128

Hrytsak and others recalled the French philosopher Albert Camus and his idea of a revolt as the moment when death is chosen over submission.
Page 130

Poland and Lithuania were not in fact enemies of Russia in the Great Northern War. Getting one’s own history wrong is essential to eternity politics.
Page 133

On January 9, 2014, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine informed Yanukovych that Ukrainian riot policemen would be given Russian citizenship after the coming operation to crush the Maidan. This was a very important assurance, since it meant that these policemen did not need to fear the consequences of their actions. If the opposition won in the end, they would still be safe.
Page 134

Russian military intelligence created fictitious personae on the internet to spread these stories.
Page 138

She claimed that Western objections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were a matter of “double standards.” This common Russian argument made of law not a general principle but a cultural artifact located among non-Russian peoples. Because Western states do not always follow every law, it ran, law had no validity. Russia, too, might violate laws; but since Russia did not accept the rule of law, this was not hypocritical. Since Russia was not hypocritical, it was innocent. If there are no standards, went the reasoning, then there are no double standards.
Page 143

This was Ilyin’s politics of eternity: a cycle back to the past replaces the forward movement of time; law means what Russia’s leader says it means; Russia is repairing God’s failed world with violence. Putin was the redeemer from beyond history who emerged to alter time.
Page 143

This was a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence. It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.” According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism.
Page 145

Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future.
Page 150

Putin returned to the office of president with a parliamentary majority in violation of the laws of his own country. The leader who came to power by such means had to divert attention, blame, and responsibility to external enemies.
Page 151

A coup involves the military or the police or some combination of the two.
Page 153

Yanukovych’s flight to Russia placed Ukrainian citizens and lawmakers in an unusual situation: a head of state, during an invasion of his country, sought permanent refuge in the invading country. This was a situation without legal precedent. The agent of transition was a legally elected parliament.
Page 153

It makes a difference whether young people go to the streets to defend a future or arrive in tanks to suppress one.
Page 154

At the crucial junctures, an innocent Russia is always repelling a sinful West.
Page 155

It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than in 1939. The year 1941 is a moment of Russian innocence only if it is forgotten that the Soviet Union had begun the war in 1939 as Germany’s ally, and that between 1939 and 1941 had undertaken policies in occupied lands that were not so very different from Germany’s own.
Page 155

The Russian supreme court later confirmed that a Russian citizen could be convicted of a crime for a re-posting of elementary facts about Russian history on social media.
Page 156

The future held only more ignorance about the more distant future. As he wrote in Almost Zero: “Knowledge only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.”
Page 160

As Ilyin had done, Surkov invoked familiar biblical verses in order to invert their meanings. In his novel, he has a nun refer to First Corinthians 13: 13: “Uncertainty gives hope. Faith. Love.” If citizens can be kept uncertain by the regular manufacture of crisis, their emotions can be managed and directed. This is the opposite of the plain meaning of the biblical passage Surkov was citing: hope, faith, and love are the trinity of virtues that articulate themselves as we learn to see the world as it is.
Page 160

The first thing we learn when we see from the perspective of another is that we are not innocent.
Page 160

Its employees and those of other Russian state networks were taught that power was real but that the facts of the world were not.
Page 161

RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction.
Page 161

The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis.
Page 164

In the Russian invasion, the strong used the weapons of the weak—partisan and terrorist tactics—in order to pretend to be the weak.
Page 165

Seeing violent death made people vulnerable to stories that imparted to these deaths some larger sense. These stories were provided by Russian television. It was impossible to know who had launched the shell that landed in your neighborhood;
Page 173

Once separatists had brought about the same kind of death that they had seen, the stories of innocence became unimpeachable truth. It is hard to resist lies for which one has already killed.
Page 173

Armies usually evacuate civilians from an artillery range so that they will not be killed by the enemy’s return fire. Russian authorities gave no such orders, presumably because they were confident no counterstrike was coming.
Page 176

Some local Russians felt ill at ease about this one-way war, in which their farmsteads were used to rain down death on people not so different from themselves.
Page 177

Russia needed a monopoly on martyrdom. In order to preserve it, Russia would make war on a nation with a far greater record of suffering (the Ukrainians), while abusing the memory of a people with a still greater record of victimhood (the Jews).
Page 186

Anton Tumanov’s family received a report: the place of death was listed as “location of unit”; the time of death as “time of performing military service”; the cause of death as “blood loss after having lost his legs.” His mother learned more about how her son died because one of his comrades took the risk of telling her. “What I don’t understand,” Tumanov’s mother said, “is what he died for. Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves?” It pained her that her son was killed in a war that was not officially taking place. “If they sent our soldiers there, let them admit it.” When she posted the facts of her son’s death on social media, she was attacked as a traitor.
Page 188

Despite promises of safe passage, Ukrainian soldiers attempting to exit the pocket were killed.
Page 190

He meant that factuality was the enemy. This was the case made by the Izborsk Club in its manifesto and by the Russian commander Antyufeyev before the summer invasion: facts were “information technologies” from the West, and to destroy factuality was to destroy the West. Opinion polls suggest that the denial of factuality did suppress a sense of responsibility among Russians.
Page 194

The underlying logic of the Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and America was strategic relativism. Given native kleptocracy and dependence on commodity exports, Russian state power could not increase, nor Russian technology close the gap with Europe or America. Relative power could however
Page 195

What Europeans and Americans had that Russians lacked were integrated trade zones and predictable politics with respected principles of succession. If these could be damaged, Russian losses would be acceptable since enemy losses would be still greater. In strategic relativism, the point is to transform international politics into a negative-sum game, where a skillful player will lose less than everyone else.
Page 195

Russia would bomb Syria to generate refugees, then encourage Europeans to panic. This would help the AfD, and thus make Europe more like Russia.
Page 198

In her decision to accept Syrian refugees, Merkel was motivated by the history of the 1930s, when Nazi Germany made its own Jewish citizens into refugees. The Russian response was in effect to say: If Merkel wants refugees, we will provide them, and use the issue to destroy her government and German democracy.
Page 199

The undesired exposure of private conversations was incipient totalitarianism, in a country that had been a focal point of Nazi and Soviet aspirations during the twentieth century. This point was rarely made. Polish memories of German and Soviet aggression tended to congeal around heroism and villainy. What got lost was the memory of how totalitarianism endured into the 1970s and 1980s: not by atrocities where the distinction between the perpetrator and victim is clear, but by an erosion of the line between private and public life that demolishes the rule of law and invites the population to participate in the demolition. Poles returned to a world of bugged conversations, unexpected denunciations, and constant suspicion.
Page 202

Public life cannot be sustained without private life. It is impossible to govern, even for the best of democrats, without the possibility for discreet conversations. The only politicians who are invulnerable to exposure are those who control the secrets of others, or those whose avowed behavior is so shameless that they are invulnerable to blackmail.
Page 202

By accepting that the private lives of public figures are the same thing as politics, citizens cooperate in the destruction of a public sphere.
Page 203

If Russians believed that all leaders and all media lied, then they would learn to dismiss Western models for themselves. If the citizens of Europe and the United States joined in the general distrust of one another and their institutions, then Europe and America could be expected to disintegrate. Journalists cannot function amidst total skepticism; civil societies wane when citizens cannot count on one another; the rule of law depends upon the beliefs that people will follow law without its being enforced and that enforcement when it comes will be impartial. The very idea of impartiality assumes that there are truths that can be understood regardless of perspective.
Page 208

A few weeks earlier, on Russian state television, a Russian anchor had claimed that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves; and her interlocutor, Alexander Prokhanov, had agreed. Putin’s government paid the anchorwoman, and Putin himself made media appearances with Prokhanov (who also took a joyride in a Russian bomber, a rather clear expression of official support). These people were not condemned.
Page 212

Pilger wrote his article under the influence of a text he found on the internet, purportedly written by a physician, detailing supposed Ukrainian atrocities in Odessa—but the doctor did not exist and the event did not take place.
Page 213

None of these influential American and British writers visited Ukraine, which would have been the normal journalistic practice. Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality; in so doing, they submerged their own countries and themselves.
Page 214

When Moscow brought to bear in the United States the same techniques used in Ukraine, few on the American Right or the American Left noticed. And so the United States was defeated, Trump was elected, the Republican Party was blinded, and the Democratic Party was shocked. Russians supplied the political fiction, but Americans were asking for it.
Page 215

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. —OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1770
Page 217

“Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism. Russians raised “a creature of their own” to the presidency of the United States. Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.
Page 219

Russia is not a wealthy country, but its wealth is highly concentrated. It is thus common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later.
Page 221

In June 2017, after Russia’s victory, Putin spoke for himself, saying that he had never denied that Russian volunteers had made cyberwar against the United States. This was the precise formulation he had used to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine: that he had never denied that there were volunteers. Putin was admitting, with a wink, that Russia had defeated the United States in a cyberwar.
Page 227

American exceptionalism proved to be an enormous American vulnerability.
Page 227

Unlike Ukrainians, Americans were unaccustomed to the idea that the internet might be used against them.
Page 227

In 2016, about a million sites on Facebook were using a tool that allowed them to artificially generate tens of millions of “likes,” thereby pushing certain items, often fictions, into the newsfeeds of unwitting Americans.
Page 228

An important scholarly study published the day before the polls opened warned that bots could “endanger the integrity of the presidential election.” It cited three main problems: “first, influence can be redistributed across suspicious accounts that may be operated with malicious purposes; second, the political conversation can be further polarized; third, spreading of misinformation and unverified information can be enhanced.”
Page 229

Having used its Twitter bots to encourage a Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, Russia now turned them loose in the United States.
Page 230

As in Poland in 2015, so in the United States in 2016: no one considered the totalitarian implications of the selective public release of private communications. Totalitarianism effaces the boundary between the private and public, so that it is normal for us all to be transparent to power all of the time.
Page 232

More fundamentally, it was a foretaste of what modern totalitarianism is like: no one can act in politics without fear, since anything done now can be revealed later, with personal consequences.
Page 232

Of course, citizens play their part in creating a totalitarian atmosphere. Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism.
Page 232

If they take as knowledge only what is revealed by foreign hackers, citizens become beholden to hostile powers.
Page 233

The drama of revelation of one thing makes us forget that other things are hidden.
Page 233

This was a telling omission, since no American presidential campaign was ever so closely bound to a foreign power. The connections were perfectly clear from the open sources.
Page 233

One success of Russia’s cyberwar was that the seductiveness of the secret and the trivial drew Americans away from the obvious and the important: that the sovereignty of the United States was under visible attack.
Page 233

In important respects, American media had become like Russian media, and this made Americans vulnerable to Russian tactics.
Page 244

The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse.
Page 245

Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.
Page 245

The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage.
Page 245

Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia.
Page 246

Russians exploited American gullibility.
Page 247

Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.
Page 247

The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others.
Page 249

Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.
Page 249

Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an expectation of the future that calms the present. The meaning of each democratic election is promise of the next one. If we anticipate that another meaningful election will take place, we know that the next time around we can correct our mistakes, which in the meantime we blame upon the people whom we elect. In this way, democracy transforms human fallibility into political predictability, and helps us to experience time as movement forward into a future over which we have some influence. If we come to believe that elections are simply a repetitive ritual of support, democracy loses its meaning.
Page 249

The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle.
Page 249

The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness.
Page 250

Russia’s support of the NRA resembled its support of right-wing paramilitaries in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Page 251

Democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, where “free” means “without the threat of violence.”
Page 251

An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.
Page 251

Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.
Page 252

As a result of gerrymandering, Democratic voters in Ohio or North Carolina in effect have, respectively, about one-half or one-third as much ability to elect a representative in Congress as do Republican voters. Citizens did not have an equal vote.
Page 252

When a minority president and a minority party control the executive and legislative branches of government, they can be tempted into a politics where victory depends not upon policy that pleases majorities but upon further limitation of the franchise.
Page 252

In 2016 in Florida, some 23% of African Americans were denied the vote as convicted felons. Felonies in Florida include releasing a helium balloon and harvesting lobsters with short tails.
Page 253

The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made clear that the Senate would not consider any nominee of Barack Obama. This broke one of the most important conventions of the federal government of the United States, and was commented upon in Moscow.
Page 255

Moscow was attacking, and Congress declined to defend the country.
Page 256

Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.
Page 257

It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics.
Page 257

Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion.
Page 257

Russian oligarchy emerged in the 1990s, but was consolidated as the kleptocratic control of the state by a single oligarchical clan under Putin in the 2000s.
Page 258

The appeal of the politics of eternity to such men is all too understandable. Far better to shackle a nation and rattle the world than to risk the loss of so much.
Page 258

address. Russians used shell companies to purchase American real estate, often anonymously.
Page 259

Since the 1980s, the tax rates paid by the top 0.1% of American earners fell from about 65% to about 35%, and for the top 0.01% from about 75% to below 25%.
Page 260

In the 2010s, the United States approached the Russian standard of inequality.
Page 261

Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism. American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations.
Page 261

The problem was that American leaders took globalization as the solution to its own problems, rather than as an invitation to reform the American state.
Page 262

Persistent opioid use makes it harder for people to learn from experience, or to take responsibility for their actions.
Page 265

The politics of eternity triumphs when fiction comes to life.
Page 266

In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle.
Page 267

His spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that Hitler did not kill “his own people.” The idea that German Jews were not part of the German people is how the Holocaust began.
Page 268

The politics of eternity demands that effort be directed against the enemy, which can be the enemy within.
Page 268

of eternity takes racial inequality and makes it a source of economic inequality, turning whites against blacks, declaring hatred normal and change impossible.
Page 270

Americans living in the countryside tend to believe that their taxes are distributed to people in the cities, although the opposite is the case.
Page 270

Trump was a loser since he could only win thanks to Russia; Republicans were greater losers since he had trapped their party; Democrats were still greater losers since they were excluded from power; and the Americans who suffer from deliberately engineered inequality and health crisis were the greatest losers of all.
Page 271

Trump was called a “populist.” A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sadopopulist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate.
Page 272

On another level, such a voter is changing the currency of politics from achievement to suffering, from gain to pain, helping a leader of choice establish a regime of sadopopulism.
Page 272

Moscow won a negative-sum game in international politics by helping to turn American domestic politics into a negative-sum game.
Page 273

Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.
Page 273

If people who support the government expect their reward to be pain, then a democracy based upon policy competition between parties is endangered.
Page 273

In the long term, a government that cannot assemble a majority through reforms will destroy the principle of rule by majority.
Page 274

The electoral logic of sadopopulism is to limit the vote to those who benefit from inequality and to those who like pain, and take the vote away from those who expect government to endorse equality and reform.
Page 274

The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all. If all the federal government did was maximize inequality and suppress votes, at some point a line would be crossed. Americans, like Russians, would eventually cease to believe in their own elections; then the United States, like the Russian Federation, would be in permanent succession crisis, with no legitimate way to choose leaders. This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia’s problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalization of Russia’s syndromes by way of contagion.
Page 275

Politics is international, but repair must be local. The presidential campaign
Page 275

To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others.
Page 275

To experience its destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee.
Page 277

Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history, ways of experiencing our time that accelerate its trends while slowing our thoughts.
Page 277

The virtues of equality, individuality, succession, integration, novelty, and truth depend each upon all the others, and all of them upon human decisions and actions. An assault upon one is an assault upon all; strengthening one means affirming the rest.
Page 277

All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all.
Page 278

Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.
Page 278

To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.
Page 278

If it is true that we are individuals, and if it is true that we live in a democracy, then each of us should have a single vote, not greater or lesser power in elections as a result of wealth or race or privilege or geography.
Page 278

A fascist says “the people” and means “some people,” those he favors at the moment.
Page 279

If there is no truth, there can be no trust, and nothing new appears in a human vacuum.
Page 279

In conditions of distrust and isolation, creativity and energy veer towards paranoia and conspiracy, a feverish repetition of the oldest mistakes.
Page 279

I have been a fan of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits methodology for breaking bad habits and learning good (often new) habits. BJ Fogg did not write this book. James Clear did, with methodologies that are strongly drawn from Fogg's work.

Fogg's new habit forming process is 1. start small (like, way smaller than you just thought for "small"), 2. piggyback on an existing routine, and 3. reward yourself immediately after doing the new habit. Fogg has shown much success at Stanford with this process, and I love it. It works very, very well for me.

Fogg does not have a book about this particular technique of developing good habits. With this book, James Clear does.

Atomic Habits is pretty much a long version of those three steps from BJ Fogg. Until Fogg writes a book on them, this is a fantastic substitute, interpretation of Fogg's work.

Much of the book is rah-rah, how-to-internalize-good-internal-chatter, "obvious," self-help rhetoric, which, let's face it, if you're picking up this book to learn good habits, you actually need. And, while I'm not a fan of the "habit journal" (you can draw lines on a notebook page for the same effect), I do appreciate the habit making guides in the book.

For anyone not a Fogg fan or even aware of BJ Fogg, I strongly recommend this book. If you don't have good habits, aren't the person you want to be, ignore the kabillion quotes I have from the book here, grab a copy and read it.

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
Page 15

Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.
Page 15

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Page 18

In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
Page 24

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
Page 24

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
Page 24

Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
Page 32

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
Page 32

It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
Page 33

It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
Page 33

True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
Page 34

Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.
Page 34

Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.
Page 35

The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it. It can feel comfortable to believe what your culture believes (group identity) or to do what upholds your self-image (personal identity), even if it’s wrong.
Page 35

We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
Page 37

First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?
Page 39

Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
Page 39

But the true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be.
Page 40

Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
Page 41

The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Page 41

This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently.
Page 45

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
Page 46

The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.*
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Because the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
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Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
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Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
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The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
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a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it.
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Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
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The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving.
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Your brain is a reward detector.
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All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Sometimes the problem is that you notice something good and you want to obtain it. Sometimes the problem is that you are experiencing pain and you want to relieve it. Either way, the purpose of every habit is to solve the problems you face.
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How to Create a Good Habit The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
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How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.
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Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?
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Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human nature.
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Your habits are shaped by the systems in your life.
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A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
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Consider hunger. How do you know when you’re hungry? You don’t necessarily have to see a cookie on the counter to realize that it is time to eat. Appetite and hunger are governed nonconsciously.
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As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and non-conscious mind. You fall into old patterns before you realize what’s happening. Unless someone points it out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth with your hand whenever you laugh, that you apologize before asking a question, or that you have a habit of finishing other people’s sentences.
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If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
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If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?” Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad.
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If you waste time online, notice that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.
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Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real. It adds weight to the action rather than letting yourself mindlessly slip into an old routine.
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With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
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The sentence they filled out is what researchers refer to as an implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
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Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals,
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Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
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If you aren’t sure when to start your habit, try the first day of the week, month, or year. People are more likely to take action at those times because hope is usually higher. If we have hope, we have a reason to take action. A fresh start feels motivating.
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Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
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Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet.
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Finances. When I want to buy something over $ 100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.
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One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits.
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People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
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In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P, E).
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Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones.
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Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out.
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Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
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Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them.
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Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
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Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.
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The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits.
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Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose.
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Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment.
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The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness.
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The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.
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When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
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The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.
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Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
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This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible.
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Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
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People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.
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The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
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Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
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A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
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The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming. Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.
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Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it.
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Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.
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Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
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You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
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Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
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It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
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Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to
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We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
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Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.
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We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.
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Proximity has a powerful effect on our behavior.
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We pick up habits from the people around us. We
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As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
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One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
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Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
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Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
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Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
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This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
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Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?”
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The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.
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There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
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When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
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Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status.
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Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
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Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.
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Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
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Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not. As we
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our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
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You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.
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A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
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You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
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You simply practice associating your habits with something you enjoy, then you can use that cue whenever you need a bit of motivation.
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It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change:
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We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
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If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
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If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it.
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To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to make practice happen is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it easy.
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Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.
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You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state.
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Certainly, you are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that some days you feel like doing the hard work and some days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way. The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge.
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For example, when deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
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Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
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As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
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The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
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It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
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Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
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I really need to do my book reviews immediately after reading the book, lest I, like in this instance, not recall what I actively thought about the book as I was reading it.

I liked this book enough to say, "This book belongs on my bookshelf." Rather than reading a borrowed copy from the library and returning it, likely never to read it again, I bought a copy of the book to keep on my shelf, to pull down and perhaps read again, or to loan to a friend.

The book has elements of Stoicism in it, always an attraction to me these days, but also includes some active how-tos and exercises on surviving these end of days. There are elements of journaling, active reflection, some disassociation, and whoa whoa whoa wait is that true? that help one, well, stay sane.

I"m not sure I'd recommend the book to anyone not actively asking for a book on how to settle, even if just a little bit, but I will strongly recommend this one to, even buy a copy for, anyone who does, indeed, ask for a guidebook on growing up, staying sane, and existing as an adult.

Our ways of bonding to others; how we trust; how comfortable we generally feel with ourselves; how quickly or slowly we can soothe ourselves after an upset have a firm foundation in the neural pathways laid down in the mammalian right brain in our early years.
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You may be aware of the influence of both what I am calling the left and the right brains when you experience the familiar dilemma of having very good reasons to do the sensible thing, but find yourself doing the other thing all the same. The
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1. Self-Observation Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.
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2. Relating to Others We all need safe, trusting, reliable, nourishing relationships.
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... someone who not only listens but reads between the lines and perhaps even gently challenges us.
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The right kind of stress creates positive stimulation. It will push us to learn new things and to be creative, but it will not be so overwhelming that it tips us over into panic.
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4. What’s the Story? (Personal Narrative) If we get to know the stories we live by, we will be able to edit and change them if we need to.
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We may have beliefs that start with ‘I’m the sort of person who …’ or ‘That’s not me; I don’t do that …’
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The ability to observe and listen to feelings and bodily sensations is essential to staying sane.
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There is a difference between saying ‘I am angry’ and saying ‘I feel angry’. The first statement is a description that appears closed. The second is an acknowledgement of a feeling, and does not define the whole self.
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It may help to think of our self-observing part as a distinct component of ourselves. It is self-accepting and non-judgemental. It acknowledges what is, not what should be, and does not assign values such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It notices emotions and thoughts but gives us space to decide how to act on them.
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To begin self-observing, ask yourself these questions: What am I feeling now? What am I thinking now? What am I doing at this moment? How am I breathing?
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What do I want for myself in this new moment?
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... take time to notice what I call post-rationalization, which could also be called self-justification. This describes the way we have of mentally ‘tidying up’ what is going on inside and outside of ourselves, often coming up with convenient explanations which may actually be nonsense, to justify our behaviour.
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Instead we can increase our tolerance for uncertainty, nurture our curiosity and continue to learn.
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A feeling cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is how we act out our feelings that is moral or immoral.
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What you write is up to you. I am a fan of random memories, as well as what you are thinking and feeling at the moment of writing. I also like dreams.
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... stream-of-consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning just after waking, has been found to be effective in raising self-awareness.
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If you read your diary back to yourself you may identify some of your behavioural and emotional habits. For example, can you spot how much justification or reasoning you are using, or how much compassion you show yourself, or how much of what you write is fantasy?
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Our heads are always full of chatter, littered with phrases, images, repeated messages, running commentaries on our actions and thoughts. Much may be harmless, but some can be toxic:
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Throughout our lives we have a desire and a need to be acknowledged and understood. Although this is most productively achieved in conjunction with another person, contemplative practice is one way we can achieve this on our own.
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A brain, like a neuron, is not much use on its own. Our brains need other brains –or, as we more often put it, people need people.
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We run about, earning a living, achieving things and making a decent show of it all (or not), but what affects us most are the people around us: our parents, our children, our lovers, our colleagues, our neighbours and our friends.
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In crowded countries such as Japan and Britain we tend to have ‘negative-politeness’. This means that people are aware of others’ need for privacy, and their desire not to be intruded upon. In countries where there is more space, like the USA, people are more inclined to practise ‘positive politeness’, where the emphasis is on inclusion and openness. The anthropologist Kate Fox says that what looks like stand-offishness in a negative-politeness culture is really a sort of consideration for people’s privacy.
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I really wish I had kept track of where books are recommended to me. Difficulty with that is that it means I'm actually curating my to-read pile and not using serendipity to read something interesting.

Wait....

Okay, this book is, self-described, better titled "How We Are All Fucked." Yang does a phenomenal job of describing society not from the loftiest learned lofts, nor from the victor's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of the normal person, the non-famous, the person who is middle class or below, has a family or doesn't, has an education or doesn't, and is making it or isn't.

The book describes the global and federal and societal forces that shape the success of those lives, though not successfully and not well, because the normal person is definitely losing this war. The realization of which should cause everyone to both thank Yang, and read this book.

Read this book, because there is hope at the end. The hope requires effort, something we seem to keep forgetting.

There is really only one entity—the federal government—that can realistically reformat society in ways that will prevent large swaths of the country from becoming jobless zones of derelict buildings and broken people. Nonprofits will be at the front lines of fighting the decline, but most of their activities will be like bandages on top of an infected wound. State governments are generally hamstrung with balanced budget requirements and limited resources.
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It was less the buildings and surroundings and more the people. They seemed despondent and depressed, like their horizons had been lowered to simply scraping by.
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As for me, I had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special.
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spent a lot of time with people who had already won, which was not what I’d envisioned.
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Think of your five best friends. The odds of them all being college graduates if you took a random sampling of Americans would be about one-third of 1 percent, or 0.0036.
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Google “Adsum” by Iamus and take a listen.
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Surgeons are among the highest-trained, most highly compensated doctors because cutting people open is a big deal. Yet their highest-value work is, for the most part, manual and mechanical.
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Some patients also might prefer seeing a human doctor, though I suspect this preference will fade over time.
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There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.
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It’s worth considering whether humans are not actually best suited for many forms of work. Consider also the reverse: Are most forms of work ideal for humans? That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?
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Voltaire wrote that “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” The total absence of work is demonstrably a bad thing for most people.
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Part of this understanding in America is a high level of commitment to work—educated Americans are working longer hours than they did 30 years ago, and many are expected to be available via email on nights and weekends, even as working hours have dropped in other developed countries.
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Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, argues that if a cashier’s job were a video game, we would call it completely mindless and the worst game ever designed. But if it’s called a job, politicians praise it as dignified and meaningful. Hunnicutt observes that “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.
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Whether work is good for humans depends a bit on your point of view. We don’t like it and we’re almost certainly getting too much of it. But we don’t know what to do with ourselves without it. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately that may describe the vast majority of us.
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The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.
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Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past.
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History repeats itself until it doesn’t.
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The United States instituted universal high school; in 1910 only 19 percent of American teenagers were in a high school, and barely 9 percent of 18-year-olds graduated.
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In college, I learned about the efficient capital market hypothesis: stock market prices reflect all available information, and attempts to beat the market are going to be ineffective over time. Now, most every investment professional believes that this is grossly incorrect or at least incomplete given the financial crash, the rise of behavioral economics, the success of certain hedge funds, and the fact that trading firms are investing millions in having a faster pipe to the exchanges to front-run other traders.
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The employment market is loaded with friction. We all know that in real life. Yet so much of our policy assumes a dream world where people are infinitely mobile across state lines, know what jobs are there, have the savings to wait it out, make wise decisions about school, are endlessly resilient, and encounter understanding employers who are rooting for them and can see their merits.
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The demise of retail could make drone pilots more of a need over time. The
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Short story - drone pilot to deliver, dodge other drones trying to steal delivery
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Successfully retraining large numbers of displaced workers would require a heroic number of assumptions to prove true. The government needs to be able to identify displaced workers over a range of industries and have both the resources to pay for mass retraining and the flexibility to accommodate individual situations. Each person needs to have the capacity and will to be retrained in an in-demand field. The government needs to be an effective disseminator of information to thousands of individuals in real time. The worker needs to actually learn new marketable skills from the course or school in question. Last, there need to be new employers in the region that want to hire large numbers of newly trained middle-aged workers as opposed to, say, younger workers.
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We should 100 percent invest in successful retraining of employees. But we should also know that we’re historically very bad at it even in situations where we know displacement is happening.
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There are presently a record 95 million working-age Americans, a full 37 percent of adults, who are out of the workforce.
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Ryan Avent of the Economist poses a theory that technology has created an abundance of labor, both human and machine, and that companies when faced with both low labor costs and a low-growth environment invest less in new technology, which leads to lower productivity growth. This would suggest that we’re in an environment where employers are faced with low incentives to innovate because people are quite cheap to hire.
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The way management teams work is that we generally try to grow and take advantage of opportunities. We try to operate efficiently, but it’s not our number one priority all of the time. We also don’t walk around trying to be jerks in periods of relative prosperity.
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We joked at Venture for America that “smart” people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC. Conventional wisdom says the “smartest” things to do today are to head to Wall Street and become a financial wizard or go to Silicon Valley and become a tech genius.
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Instead of seeing college as a period of intellectual exploration, many young people now see it as a mass sort or cull that determines one’s future prospects and lot in life.
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It turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies. This will have effects for decades to come.
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This is a disaster in the making because technology is transforming society and our economy while politicians are left responding to the effects ineffectively years after the fact or, worse yet, ignoring them.
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Occasionally we see people leave for a more hospitable or child-friendly environment. We envy them a little, while also patting ourselves on the back for sticking it out. Professional empathy is limited.
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On some level, most of us recognize that we are servants to the tide of innovation and efficiency. As the water rises, we will protest as we clamber to higher ground.
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The underlying logic of the meritocratic system is this: If you’re successful, it’s because you’re smart and hardworking, and thus virtuous. If you’re poor or unsuccessful, it’s because you’re lazy and/ or stupid and of subpar character. The people at the top belong there and the people at the bottom have only themselves to blame.
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Being good at these tests, however, has very little to do with character, virtue, or work ethic. They just mean you are good at the tests.
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We say success in America is about hard work and character. It’s not really. Most of success today is about how good you are at certain tests and what kind of family background you have, with some exceptions sprinkled in to try to make it all seem fair. Intellect as narrowly defined by academics and test scores is now the proxy for human worth. Efficiency is close behind. Our system rewards specific talents more than anything.
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The meritocracy was never intended to be a real thing—it started out as a parody in a British satire in 1958 by Michael Young. At the time, a world where “intelligence fully determined who thrived and languished was understood to be predatory, pathological and far-fetched,” observes journalist David Freedman.
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gives everything a tinge of justice. It makes the suffering of the marginalized more palatable, in that there’s a sense that they deserve it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that they often agree—they think they deserve it, too. They’re wrong. Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all.
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People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else.
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Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that “the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.”
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also thought—correctly—that even if it didn’t work out I’d be fine. My story is one of relative abundance, and it should feel familiar.
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There’s a substantial correlation between one’s socioeconomic background and starting a successful company.
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The truth is that it’s a lot easier to start a company if you have a few things going for you. In addition to resources, you have a mindset of abundance. After you make one thing work out, you kind of think you can make anything work out.
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But the mechanics of entrepreneurship make it a lot more accessible to people who can realistically gather meaningful resources, defer money, and take on risk.
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That’s an environment of abundance. Money comes to you and good things happen to you seemingly for no reason, though the real reason is where you happen to be sitting.
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A mindset of scarcity is more than just “stress”—it actually makes one less rational and more impulsive by consuming bandwidth.
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We all respond poorly to scarcity.
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One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.
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A culture of scarcity is a culture of negativity. People think about what can go wrong. They attack each other. Tribalism and divisiveness go way up. Reason starts to lose ground. Decision-making gets systematically worse. Acts of sustained optimism—getting married, starting a business, moving for a new job—all go down.
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When jobs leave a city or region, things go downhill pretty fast.
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They don’t want to move because this is what they are used to. Do you want to go and do your own thing, or be with your family? They say places are what you make of them, but it’s hard to make something beautiful when it is shit.”
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The central point is this: In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.
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In a growing organization, people are more optimistic, imaginative, courageous, and generous. In a contracting environment, people can become negative, political, self-serving, and corrupt.
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One of the great myths in American life is that everything self-corrects. If it goes down, it will come back up. If it gets too high, it will come back down to earth.
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Historically, virtually all American cities had more businesses open than close in a given year, even during recessions. After 2008, that basic measurement of dynamism collapsed.
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realized that, if you’re managing in a contracting environment, it’s possible that leaving the urinal duct-taped might be a perfectly reasonable way to go. Optimism could be stupid. When you’re used to losing people and resources, you make different choices.
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Getting married is an act of optimism, stability, and prosperity. It also can be expensive.
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Women are now the clear majority of college graduates—in 2017 women comprise 57 percent of college graduates, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years.
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Single mothers outnumber fathers more than four to one.
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J. D. Vance made the same observation about school being something boys were supposed to ignore: “As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were ‘sissies’… studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.”
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Frederick Douglass wrote that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
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I realized that there are many similarities between being a parent and being an entrepreneur. Here is a partial list: • Everyone’s got an opinion. But no one knows what they’re doing. • The first two years are brutal. • No one cares as much as you do. • On its best days it fills you with meaning and purpose. • People lie about it all the time. • Choose your partner wisely. • Heart is more important than money. But money helps. • It is very, very hard to outsource. • You find out who your friends are. And you make some new ones. • Occasionally the responsibility blows your mind. • If you knew what it entailed you might not get started. But you’re glad you did. • There will be a thousand small tasks you never imagined. • How you spend your time is more important than what you say. • Everything costs more than you thought it would. • Most of the work is dirty, thankless, and gritty. • You learn a lot about yourself. You get tested in ways that you can’t imagine. • When you find someone who can really help you’re incredibly grateful. • You have to try to make time for yourself or it won’t happen. • Whatever your weaknesses are, they will come out. • You think it’s fragile. But it will surprise you. • You sometimes do things you weren’t sure you were capable of. • When it does something great, there’s nothing like it. • You start out all-important. Yet the goal is to make yourself irrelevant. • People sometimes give you too much credit. • There is a lot of noise out there, but at the end of the day it’s your call. • It gives your life a different dimension. You grow new parts of yourself. • It’s harder than anyone expects. It’s the best thing ever.
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A study showed that one out of every 550 patients started on opioid therapy died of opioid-related causes a median of 2.6 years after their first opioid prescription.
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The percentage of working-age Americans who received disability benefits was 5.2 percent in 2017, up from only 2.5 percent in 1980.
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Disability payments received by beneficiaries in these five states exceed $ 1 billion per month.
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One judge who administers disability decisions said that “if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.”
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J. D. Vance writes of how the people in Ohio became angry that they were working hard and scraping by while others were doing nothing and living off of government checks.
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The numbers have grown to a point where more Americans are currently on disability than work in construction.
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We pretend that our economy is doing all right while millions of people give up and “get on the draw” or “get on the check.” It’s a $ 143 billion per year shock absorber for the unemployed or unemployable, whose ranks are growing all of the time.
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And it’s likely easier to think of yourself as genuinely disabled than as someone cheating society for a monthly draw.
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They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/ geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.
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How exactly are these game-playing men getting by? They live with their parents.
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You experience a continuous feeling of progress and accomplishment.
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We have entered an age of transparency where we can see our institutions and leaders for all of their flaws. Trust is for the gullible. Everything now will be a fight. Appealing to common interests will be all the more difficult.
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We are the most heavily armed society in the history of mankind—disintegration is unlikely to be gentle.
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In his book Ages of Discord, the scholar Peter Turchin proposes a structural-demographic theory of political instability based on societies throughout history. He suggests that there are three main preconditions to revolution: (1) elite oversupply and disunity, (2) popular misery based on falling living standards, and (3) a state in fiscal crisis. He uses a host of variables to measure these conditions, including real wages, marital trends, proportion of children in two-parent households, minimum wage, wealth distribution, college tuition, average height, oversupply of lawyers, political polarization, income tax on the wealthy, visits to national monuments, trust in government, and other factors.
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By his analysis, “the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s [before the Civil War] and, more surprisingly, with… France on the eve of the French Revolution.” He projects increased turmoil through 2020 and warns that “we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp at which American society will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.”
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Even now, people of color report higher levels of optimism than poor whites, despite worse economic circumstances. It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an afterthought or failure.
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Contributing to the discord will be a climate that equates opposing ideas or speech to violence and hate. Righteousness can fuel abhorrent behavior, and many react with a shocking level of vitriol and contempt for conflicting viewpoints and the people who hold them. Hatred is easy, as is condemnation. Addressing the conditions that breed hatred is very hard.
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However, it would be nearly impossible to curb automation for any prolonged period of time effectively across all industries.
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Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.
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Doing nothing leads to almost certain ruin. Trying to forestall progress is likely a doomed strategy over time.
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When you’re left with no other options, the unthinkable becomes necessary.
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Robert Kennedy famously said that GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play… it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
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Peter Frase, author of Four Futures, points out that work encompasses three things: the means by which the economy produces goods and services, the means by which people earn income, and an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people’s lives.
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Twelve thousand dollars a year is not enough to do more than scrape by. Very few people will quit their jobs because of a guaranteed income at this level unless they were in a marginal or exploitative situation. The available data bears this out. On the other hand, the benefits would be absolutely enormous: • It would be a massive stimulus to lower-cost areas. • It would empower people to avoid making terrible decisions based on financial scarcity and month-to-month needs. • It would be a phenomenal boon to creativity and entrepreneurship. • It would enable people to more effectively transition from shrinking industries and environments to new ones. • It would reduce stress, improve health, decrease crime, and strengthen relationships. • It would support parents and caretakers for the work that they do, particularly mothers. • It would give all citizens an honest stake in society and a sense of the future. • It would restore a sense of optimism and faith in communities around the country. • It would stimulate and maintain the consumer economy through the automation wave. • It would maintain order and preserve our way of life through the greatest economic and social transition in history. • It would make our society more equitable, fair, and just.
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Putting money into people’s hands and keeping it there would be a perpetual boost and support to job growth and the economy.
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Businesses will benefit immensely from the fact that their customers will have more money to spend each month—most Americans will spend the vast majority of their money locally.
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You may not recall that the U.S. government printed over $ 4 trillion in new money for its quantitative easing program following the 2008 financial collapse. This money went to the balance sheets of the banks and depressed interest rates. It punished savers and retirees. There was little to no inflation.
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With the Freedom Dividend, money would be put in the hands of our citizens in a time of unprecedented economic dislocation. It would grow the consumer economy. It’s a stimulus of people. The vast majority of the money would go directly into the economy each month, into paying bills, feeding children, visiting loved ones, youth sports, eating at the local restaurant, piano lessons, extra tutoring help, car repairs, small businesses, housing improvements, prenatal vitamins, elder care, and so on. Most Americans are so cash-strapped that most of the money would be spent locally and quickly.
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To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Americans will always do the right thing. After they’ve tried everything else.”
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We’re trying relative deprivation and it’s not working. Half-measures are wasting time. Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.
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Money has to come from somewhere. We’re used to the government spending billions wastefully to no great effect.
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By definition, none of the money would be wasted because it goes to citizens. It’s analogous to a company giving dividends or moneys to its shareholders. No one regards that as a waste of money, because the shareholders theoretically are the owners of the company.
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Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?
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You know what’s really expensive? Dysfunction. Revolution. Keeping people and families functional will largely pay for itself.
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“It will destroy people’s incentives to work.” All of the available data shows that work hours stay stable or at most decrease modestly with a basic income.
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First, work is vital and the core of the human experience. Second, no one will want to work if they don’t have to. These two ideas are at complete odds with each other. Either work is a core of the human experience and we’ll do it even if we don’t necessarily have to, or work is something we have no interest in doing and we do it only to survive.
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“People will spend the money on stupid things, like drugs and alcohol.” The data doesn’t show this. In every basic income study, there has been no increase in drug and alcohol use. If anything, an improved sense of the future motivates people to figure out a plan for how to improve their lot.
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There are true addicts, and some people are self-destructive. But it’s not like a lack of money is presently keeping people from using opioids and alcohol—they find a way to get both money and drugs right now, sometimes illicitly.
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Here’s the thing—poor people tend to be much more careful with their money than rich people.
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The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth. There’s a tendency for rich people to dismiss poor people as weak-willed children with no cost discipline. The evidence runs in the other direction. As the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman and others put it, “Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”
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Many of the populations people are most eager to see employed and kept from idleness are among the least competent and able to be employed by the private sector. The natural tendency is to spend a lot of money on people doing things that aren’t actually that valuable.
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But an economy where most people work for the government has been tried and failed in many environments—
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Perhaps most crucially, endless new businesses would form. If you are in a town of 5,000 people in Missouri and everyone is struggling to get by, starting, say, a bakery may not be that attractive. But with a UBI, there will be an additional $ 60 million being spent in that town next year. You personally will have an income to fall back on if the bakery doesn’t work out.
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Time banking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks—transporting an item, walking a dog, cleaning up a yard, cooking a meal, providing a ride to the doctor, and so on.
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Some might ask, “Why create a new digital currency instead of just using dollars?” First, people will respond to points in a different way than they would if they were paid very low monetary amounts.
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Second, everyone will feel much more open and comfortable sharing balances if it’s a new social currency. You want people to advertise and reinforce their behavior. Behavior is much more likely to be reinforced if it’s social and recognized.
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Third, by creating a new currency, the government could essentially induce billions of dollars of positive social activity without having to spend nearly that amount.
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At present, the market systematically tends to undervalue many things, activities, and people, many of which are core to the human experience.
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First, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist system. There
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Our current form of institutional capitalism and corporatism is just the latest of many different versions.
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Now imagine a new type of capitalist economy that is geared toward maximizing human well-being and fulfillment.
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Human Capitalism would have a few core tenets: 1. Humanity is more important than money. 2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. 3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
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Our economic system must shift to focus on bettering the lot of the average person. Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace. We shape the system. We own it, not the other way around.
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In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as: • Median income and standard of living • Levels of engagement with work and labor participation rate • Health-adjusted life expectancy • Childhood success rates • Infant mortality • Surveys of national well-being • Average physical fitness and mental health • Quality of infrastructure • Proportion of elderly in quality care • Human capital development and access to education • Marriage rates and success • Deaths of despair/ despair index/ substance abuse • National optimism/ mindset of abundance • Community integrity and social capital • Environmental quality • Global temperature variance and sea levels • Reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality • Artistic and cultural vibrancy • Design and aesthetics • Information integrity/ journalism • Dynamism and mobility • Social and economic equity • Public safety • Civic engagement • Cybersecurity • Economic competitiveness and growth • Responsiveness and evolution of government • Efficient use of resources
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I’m no fan of big government. The larger an organization is, the more cumbersome and ridiculous it often gets.
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We have so many brilliant doctors—they should be innovators, detectives, guides, and sources of comfort, not glorified assembly line workers. And freeing health care from being locked to a job would be a massive boon to economic growth and dynamism.
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Similar to health care, the automation wave should lead us to invest more people in education and human capital development. It should also drive us to dramatically increase our emphasis on technical and vocational training and apprenticeships at the high school level to take advantage of the jobs that will continue to exist.
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In an age with less and less employment, the abilities to self-manage and socialize will become the new keys to success in life. We
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Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant.
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The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.
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People teach other people. If you want to teach thousands of students well, you teach one student well. Then you do it thousands of times.
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Climb to the hilltop and tell others behind us what we see. What do you see? And build the society we want on the other side.
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