If you are new to Things I Didn’t Learn in School you can see what I am up to here. If you want to skip directly to my conversation with poet Heidi Seaborn, click this link. Also, last night, The Wall Street Journal published a piece I wrote about family and Putin’s propaganda, which you can read here. For US readers, happy Memorial Day!
“When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby,” President Biden asked this week.1 It’s one thing if I ask this question and quite another if the President does. Put aside that the NRA is bankrupt2, the question is a reminder the most powerful man in the world has limited power. All civilizations face challenges—like students getting slaughtered at school—the test is if they are flexible enough to adjust to them.
Success Fuels Complexity
Any organizational system—be it national, corporate or familial—must adapt to new information in order to survive. A system needs to be rigid enough to endure and flexible enough to evolve. The trick is that the more successful a given organizational system, the bigger and more complex it becomes, challenging its ability to adapt.
A single generation successful family becomes multi-generational. A start up goes from a small team to tens of thousands. A country grows, pulling in talent from less functional regions.
Failure to adapt is more the rule than the exception. The average company remains in one of the leading stock market averages for about 10 years, as I wrote in All Companies Die. In the last 1500 years, the average Chinese dynasty lasted 248 years. The US is 244 years old and I hope its relative flexibility allows it to outlive the Chinese average. If one shooter can do that much evil, imagine what a breakdown in order looks like?
The higher chances US children have of being shot is tied to 18th century operating instructions that also stipulate the civil liberties these children grow up to enjoy. Changing one without destroying the other requires a legislative flexibility that has eluded the US Congress. This despite the fact that 83% of Americans support background checks.3
The US has never tried to find compromise at this scale. The US population was 4 million in 1787 when the Constitution was written. When Joe Biden was born the population was 132 million. It is now 332 million and continues to draw in people from all over the world given a delicate combination of favorable geography, rule of law and ability to make money. Smaller countries, like Australia, cracked down hard on the sale of automatic weapons after a single incident.4
Gun Control One Issue of Many
The high polled desire for background checks and terrible legislative follow through doesn’t bode well for problems that also require delicate cooperation, like climate change. One hundred years ago, the use of fossil fuels was much lower but so too were living standards—one rose with the other. Emissions improved during the pandemic, but economic activity collapsed. We need to figure out how to grow the economy without heating the air.
More immediately, the stock market and inflation are each complex systems that, unlike legislation, are easily measured. They are both beholden to a lot of people (the buyers and sellers) but also just one person, the Fed chief. Going forward, difficult choices await.
We got to this point via a series of unfortunate events. A pandemic struck. So the central bank printed a ton of money to help stimulate demand, part of which ended up in the stock market, which made people feel good, and part of which ended up in higher prices, which made people upset. China’s lockdown and Ukraine made already bad inflation even worse.
So far all that’s happened is the price we pay for a stock has come down, driving the stock market lower. But inflation is still high. To reduce inflation, the next thing that is likely to happen and may already be happening, is that the economy needs to slow. If this happens, companies will make less money. This, in turn, will probably drive the stock market down further, notwithstanding this week’s rise. A further decline may or may not provoke a panic, which perhaps marks the bottom (NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE), unless of course a new crisis arises to take the place of the ones that currently capture our attention.
Podcast
Heidi Seaborn is a poet and the author of An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe. What fascinated me about Heidi was not only her work, but her journey. She sensed she was a poet as a teenager, then buried that desire during a corporate career and raising children only to turn back to it later in life. I think the notion of talents lying below the surface is one that resonates with many people.
Heidi comes after a string of remarkable season #4 guests. John Yorke is a student of story. Harold Lopez-Nussa is a master of rhythm and improvisation. Jim Himes is trying to get the US Congress to do what it is supposed to do. Yuhua Wang offers unique insight into China’s dynastic tradition. Amy Butcher and Jay Newman are both writers, one produced the memoir Mothertrucker, the other a thriller, Undermoney. Neuroscientist David Linden had the extreme generosity to share his perspective on both neuroscience and his own mortality. And finally my wife, Marina, spoke on Ukraine and therapy.
We will take a break over the summer as we record new episodes for the fall. If you have suggestions for someone who you think would be great on the show, reach out at paul@paulpodolsky.com. Thanks, as always, for your support!
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/05/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-school-shooting-in-uvalde-texas/
https://apnews.com/article/nra-bankruptcy-dismissed-a281b888b64d391374f24539a820d60f
https://americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/PPP-GunOwnersPollResults-11.17.15.pdf?_ga=2.22803515.1057824656.1653574232-1107523109.1653574232
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/1996-national-firearms-agreement.html