There’s a wisecrack attributed (without evidence) to Gandhi. When asked “What do you think of western civilization?” he is said to have responded “I think it would be a good idea.” In his Washington Post column George Will laments President Trump’s lack of understanding of “western civilization” in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. He writes:

Donald Trump’s frustration with Putin’s refusal to split differences like a rational real estate broker flows from Trump’s failure of imagination. Trump’s incomprehension of Putin, his inability to understand Putin as Putin understands himself, is a failure to recognize the reality of deep-rooted, durable civilizational conflicts.

Varouxakis, citing U.S. scholars James Kurth and Michael Kimmage, says, “No recent American president has shown himself more prepared to withdraw from ‘Western civilization’ and ‘the West.’” And “there is truth in the statement that during his 2017-2021 presidency, Trump was ‘the first non-Western president of the United States.’”

I probably should read the book on the history of the term “the West” cited by Mr. Will in his column. I think that “Western civilization” was a term revived in the 18th century to distinguish between Britain, Netherlands, and secular France on the one hand and Germany, Austro-Hungary, parts east, along with southern Spain, Portugal, and Italy on the other. In the 20th century it was redefined to include the United States whenever Britain needed our help to win a war. After World War II it was redefined again to include West Germany as part of “the West” for the first time. That’s what created the “Plato to NATO” historical construct.

Contrary to Mr. Will I don’t believe there has ever been a meaningful “West” that included the United States. The U. S. is an outlier in an enormous number of ways. Not just in size, demographics (until recently), and wealth but the rights asserted in the Bill of Rights, property rights, commerce, government, and almost every other way.

I am no Trump supporter. I have supported Ukraine against Russia’s invasion not to defend “the West” against “the East” but to save Ukrainian lives and because Russia was wrong to invade just as the U. S. was wrong to bomb Serbia, invade Iraq, and encourage if not foment the Ukrainian putsch against the legitimately elected but pro-Russian Yanukovych government.

The American Anglophile Henry James wrote:

… unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. With the Americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous;…

That was over a century ago. Europhiles continue to preach that gospel today.

In my opinion the greatest mistake we could make would be to abandon what makes us distinctively American in favor of some imagined, chimeric, and ephemeral “West”

I found the American Bar Association’s analysis of the demographics of the practice of law interesting. I did not realize that the number of lawyers had grown by more than 1 million since 1960. That’s nearly twice as fast as the growth in population.

IMO such a large number of lawyers is both bad for the public and bad for the lawyers—too much competition in trying to scrape a living together.

I also found the list of states with highest per capita number of lawyers interesting: New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland, Missouri. Is it a coincidence that the most corrupt states in the Union (Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey) are also on that list? I can think of several explanations for that:

1. It’s a coincidence.
2. All of the states have high levels of corruption—it’s just in states with high proportions of lawyers that the corruption has been uncovered.
3. There’s a positive feedback relationship among corruption, activist governments, and lots of lawyers.

I don’t believe it’s #2. I certainly hope it isn’t.

Lawyers are disproportionately men and of primarily European or Asian descent, i.e. only 5% of lawyers are black and only 6% Hispanic.

BTW, as I’ve pointed out before incomes in lawyers occur in a bimodal distribution (like the humps on a camel). There are the lawyers who graduated from Top 20 elite law schools who earn very good incomes, indeed, and the rest. That means there’s no such thing as average or median income for lawyers. There are two averages and two medians.

Chris Power’s post at The Free Press suggests to me that there are others on the same page as I am:

Every great power—the Dutch, the British, and then the Americans—rose to dominance by building the strongest industrial base of their time. That industrial strength produced unmatched military power and global economic influence. It also gave them the reserve currency of the world. It’s not trust alone that keeps the dollar dominant. It’s the belief that America can project power, produce what it needs, and manage a war or crisis. Lose that industrial edge, and we risk losing the dollar’s central place in the global system.

That’s why the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency today—not only because of Wall Street, but because of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and the industrial base that made America indispensable. Remember: We won World War II because we had the strongest industrial base in the world. We didn’t have the best tanks; we had the strongest capacity for production.

and

It starts with reindustrialization: ramping up nuclear energy, building advanced factories, and employing the millions of people we left behind when we sent our capital equipment and manufacturing jobs to China.

and

All the progress we’ve seen on deregulation, manufacturing, energy, jobs, and defense over the past year is a drop in the ocean of what we actually need to do. What we have seen, and what we are seeing, was driven by a small group of people in industry and government risking their careers to fight against the system and win.

I think he’s on the right track but I would add additional priorities. We need some basic reforms in education as well, refocusing on readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic. Kids need to learn to read—not just how to recognize letters and sound out words but to read books as a preferential way of gaining information and entertainment. Of the top 10 bestselling children’s/young adult books, six are Harry Potter novels. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was first published nearly 30 years ago. The non-Harry Potter books in the list are even older, some pushing 100 (like The Little Prince), others like Heidi even older. By the time I was 10 I had read David Copperfield, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Three Musketeers, and all of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

I have been struggling to organize my thoughts on the subject of the challenge that artificial intelligence in its present forms of generative artificial intelligence (gAI) and agentic artificial intelligence (aAI). I finally realized it was going to require several posts and I don’t believe I can put what’s going on now into its proper perspective without a brief discussion of the Industrial Revolution. In this post, the first in a series, I will discuss the Industrial Revolution with a special focus on three individuals who made notable contributions to its evolution: Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Marie Charles dit (nicknamed) Jacquard, and Henry Ford.

The Industrial Revolution, a term coined by the French and popularized by the historian Arnold Toynbee, refers to the technological, economic, and cultural changes that began in the early 18th century in Britain and spread east to France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and, eventually, China and India. In some senses it’s still taking place.

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795)

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) was at the forefront of this development. He started as a potter, becoming a master potter. As you are presumably aware, craftsmen, e.g. potters, weavers, metalsmiths, etc., began as apprentices, working for a master, then became journeymen, and finally masters in their own right. Their works were one-offs. Such a process was inevitably labor intensive.

While recovering from smallpox, he read and studied, learning everything he could about his craft. He invented new recipes for pottery, specially creamware, glazes, and new methods for making dinnerware. He used assembly lines in his factories, the products making their way from pressing (or pouring) clay into molds, decorating them, glazing them, and firing them. His factories were the first in Britain to use steam power.

The price point of his products was such that his market expanded beyond the rich to the middle class. Importantly, he employed advertising and direct mail to sell his products. He created a distribution network. At the time of his death he employed almost 300 people and was one of the wealthiest commoners in Britain.

Joseph Marie Charles dit Jacquard (1752-1834)

Illiterate until he was 13, Jacquard worked as a bookbinder, a type-founder, a maker of cutlery, a soldier, and, finally, a weaver. He invented a treadle loom, a loom for weaving fishing nets, and, eventually, capitalizing on the inventions of others, the “Jacquard” mechanical loom. Although the invention was perfected by Breton, who corrected the punch card driving mechanism, by 1812 there were 11,000 Jacquard looms in France. As inventor Jacquard received a royalty of 50 francs for each loom sold.

By 1830 there were at least an additional 8,000 Jacquard looms in Britain. Each loom was operated by a single individual.

The enormous savings in labor produced by the Jacquard loom expanded the market for fabrics woven with them beyond the wealthy to the growing middle class.

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. He did not invent the assembly line (cf. Josiah Wedgwood above). He did invent something referred to as “Fordism”, ensuring that the automobiles he manufactured were inexpensive enough that the men who worked in his plants could afford to buy them.

In 1880 there were roughly 15,000 people working in blacksmithing in the U. S. By 1908, the year in which Henry Ford introduced the Model T, that number had already declined considerably, a victim of mail order commerce among other things.

By 1930 there were 600,000 people employed in the automobile industry.

What the Industrial Revolution Wrought

There are several themes emerging from the preceding discussion. Yes, the Industrial Revolution produced great wealth for a few people. But not only did it not destroy jobs, it created an enormous number of jobs and, contrary to images of “Satanic mills”, those jobs paid decent wages, at least they did in places where the vision of the owners extended to expanding the markets for the goods they were producing so that ordinary people could buy them.

I wanted to call your attention to this article by William Boston at the Wall Street Journal because it makes a point I have been trying to articulate for some time.

In the verdant hills of Washington state’s Palouse region, Andrew Nelson’s tractor hums through the wheat fields on his 7,500-acre farm. Inside the cab, he’s not gripping the steering wheel—he’s on a Zoom call or checking messages.

A software engineer and fifth-generation farmer, Nelson, 41, is at the vanguard of a transformation that is changing the way we grow and harvest our food. The tractor isn’t only driving itself; its array of sensors, cameras, and analytic software is also constantly deciding where and when to spray fertilizer or whack weeds.

Many modern farms already use GPS-guided tractors and digital technology such as farm-management software systems. Now, advances in artificial intelligence mean that the next step—the autonomous farm, with only minimal human tending—is finally coming into focus.

Imagine a farm where fleets of autonomous tractors, drones and harvesters are guided by AI that tweaks operations minute by minute based on soil and weather data. Sensors would track plant health across thousands of acres, triggering precise sprays or irrigation exactly where needed. Farmers could swap long hours in the cab for monitoring dashboards and making high-level decisions. Every seed, drop of water and ounce of fertilizer would be optimized to boost yields and protect the land—driven by a connected system that gets smarter with each season.

It goes on to discuss autonomous tractors, weeders, fruit pickers, and other applications. Here’s a snippet on picking fruit:

Automation, now most often used on large farms with wheat or corn laid out in neat rows, is a bigger challenge for crops like fruits and berries, which ripen at different times and grow on trees or bushes. Maintaining and harvesting these so-called specialty crops is labor-intensive. “In specialty crops, the small army of weeders and pickers could soon be replaced by just one or two people overseeing the technology. That may be a decade out, but that’s where we’re going,” says Fiocco of McKinsey.

Fragile fruits like strawberries and grapes pose a huge challenge. Tortuga, an agriculture tech startup in Denver, developed a robot to do the job. Tortuga was acquired in March by vertical farming company Oishii. The robot resembles NASA’s Mars Rover with fat tires and extended arms. It rolls along a bed of strawberries or grapes and uses a long pincher arm to reach into the vine and snip off a single berry or a bunch of grapes, placing them gingerly into a basket.

“Robotic harvesting can offer greater consistency and efficiency than manual labor, while reducing expenses and addressing the labor shortages affecting the industry as a whole,” Brendan Somerville, chief operating officer and co-founder of Oishii said in an email, adding that the company’s long-term vision is to fully automate its harvesting operations.

Israel-based Tevel Aerobotics Technologies aims to help fruit growers reduce the need for labor with its “Flying Autonomous Robots” that can prune, thin and harvest crops. Using AI and machine vision, the robots locate the fruit, determine whether it’s ripe and then pluck it off the tree.

I think that the reference to AI in the first passage is largely a red herring. What’s being discussed is more robotics than AI. IMO this is the right direction for the United States. There’s a future for the United States in agrorobotics. There is none in importing an unskilled manual labor force that is only financially viable with a reliable supply of new workers and you can offload the actual costs of your labor force, e.g. healthcare, education, safety, etc., onto someone else.

We should be leading the world in developments like this as we did with the steel plow, the combine harvester, etc. Unfortunately, we’re playing catch-up as this video illustrates:

What happened? If farm owners can make money without capital investment, they will and that’s what’s happened. BTW, IMO Deere is correct in its approach: encouraging farmers to become comfortable with the technology and ensuring they see immediate payoffs.

There’s a lot of kerfuffle over CBS/Paramount’s announcement of the impending cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Night for “financial reasons”. I suspect there’s an element of truth to that. Consider the graph above, sampled from a piece by Tim Baysinger at Atrios. He attributes the decline to a transition to streaming:

Late-night TV is expensive — with the top hosts like Colbert and Jimmy Fallon making north of $15 million per year — and the social media age has dramatically changed how viewers watch them, choosing online clips the next morning over live viewing.

That was two years ago. The figures that I’ve seen suggest that Stephen Colbert’s program is losing $40 million per year at this point.

I don’t think it tells the whole story. Since it premiered in 2021, viewership of Greg Gutfeld’s late night program on Fox has grown from 1.69 million to 3 million viewers—that’s the opposite of other late night programs.

Starting with Steve Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno, late night comics have always been topical, at least occasionally but they haven’t been steadfastly partisan. That’s been different for the last ten years or so. Late night programming on ABC, CBS, and NBC has all been left-leaning.

I don’t expect The Late Show to be the last late night program to be cancelled. I expect we’ll see others fall by the wayside in coming years.

The questions I have for those who lament the departure of Stephen Colbert are:

1. How many times have you watched Stephen Colbert in the last month? I suspect none.
2. How long do you expect CBS/Paramount to carry programs that aren’t making money?

Late night has had a good run—more than 60 years. I’ve never been a regular viewer of late night television and haven’t watched it once since the Leno and Letterman days but I’m not the target demographic. I think it’s time for a change in late night television.

At the Wall Street Journal Max Meizlish warns:

Multinationals and finance houses recognize South Africa’s deteriorating domestic conditions: youth unemployment above 60%, frequent power and water outages, and failing state-owned enterprises. But they haven’t priced in sanctions and compliance risks stemming from Pretoria’s foreign alignments and collapsing standing in Washington. South Africa’s rand is one of the world’s most volatile currencies, yet its modest 4.28% dip against the U.S. dollar since the beginning of President Trump’s second term doesn’t capture the scale of Pretoria’s increasing isolation.

Amid South Africa’s alignment with China, Russia and Iran, its anti-Israel lawfare and systemic corruption, the Trump administration has taken steps to isolate Pretoria: suspending financial assistance in February, expelling the country’s ambassador in March, denying its special envoy a visa in May, and signaling it may oppose reauthorization of a key regional trade program. This week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent skipped the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in South Africa. These moves reflect South Africa’s pariah-like status in Washington.

concluding:

Most investors still see South Africa as the country of Nelson Mandela—the “rainbow nation” of democratic reform, racial reconciliation and rule of law. But that legacy has long given way to a pernicious reality: a corrupt, anti-American kleptocracy aligned with some of the world’s worst regimes. Mandela’s legacy no longer guides the country. It blinds the world to the menace the ANC has become. And it’s in that blind spot that all the risk lies.

There may still be time to change course. But if the ANC refuses to recalibrate, the Trump administration won’t hesitate to act. Trade preferences will vanish. Sanctions will hit hard. And China will fill the vacuum left by Western firms—not to invest, but to extract.

The risk is real. Yet Wall Street is still pricing in business as usual while South Africa edges toward collapse.

I have no way of determining whether his alarm is realistic or not. It’s certainly consistent with the Trump Administration’s actions WRT South Africa since coming into power.

This story just came across my desk. Apparently, the lawyers for the Chicago Housing Authority, Goldberg Segalla, have been very naughty boys and girls. The story is reported by Lizzie Kane at the Chicago Tribune:

Lawyers hired by the Chicago Housing Authority recently cited Illinois Supreme Supreme Court case Mack v. Anderson in an effort to persuade a judge to reconsider a jury’s $24 million verdict against the agency in a case involving the the alleged poisoning of two children by lead paint in CHA-owned property.

The problem?

The case doesn’t exist.

In the latest headache for CHA, law firm Goldberg Segalla used artificial intelligence, specifically ChatGPT, in a post-trial motion and neglected to check its work, court records show. A jury decided in January, after a roughly seven-week trial, that CHA must pay more than $24 million to two residents who sued on behalf of their children, finding the agency responsible for the children’s injuries, including past and future damages.

The firm apologized for the error in a June 18 court filing, calling it a “serious lapse lapse in professionalism.”

The Goldberg Segalla partner who used ChatGPT has since been terminated for violating a company policy barring the use of gAI. IMO the problem is greater than a violation of company policy—it was unethical. Although the Chicago Bar Association does not have a standalone policy on the use of gAI, its policies are based on American Bar Association Formal Opinion 512 which says, in part:

Because GAI tools are subject to mistakes, lawyers’ uncritical reliance on content created by a GAI tool can result in inaccurate legal advice to clients or misleading representations to courts and third parties. Therefore, a lawyer’s reliance on, or submission of, a GAI tool’s output—without an appropriate degree of independent verification or review of its output—could violate the duty to provide competent representation as required by Model Rule 1.1.1

and

Competent representation presupposes that lawyers will exercise the requisite level of skill and judgment regarding all legal work. In short, regardless of the level of review the lawyer selects, the lawyer is fully responsible for the work on behalf of the client.

or, in short, using ChatGPT uncritically, not informing the CHA of its use, and billing for any time spent in training or eliciting information from ChatGPT were all unethical.

I think that every attorney whose name was on any briefs filed with the court that used ChatGPT without disclosing that should be disbarred. Terminating a single attorney for violating company policy is insufficient.

I also think that ABA FO 512 is far too lenient in that I do not believe that lawyers are capable of assessing the reliability of gAI tools without professional advice any more than computer scientists are qualified to prepare legal opinions without professional legal advice.

I don’t oppose the use of gAi tools by attorneys but I do think that they should have guidance and assistance from qualified professionals, they should disclose the use to their clients, and they should not bill clients at their prevailing rates for using gAI tools.

I’m not sure what has evoked the bumper crop of articles on the situation in which the Democrats find themselves. Maybe it’s the dog days of summer. Writing always slows down then. Maybe they’re being written by ChatGPT. Maybe it’s Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York. Maybe it’s polls like the most recent Quinnipiac poll:

Fewer than 2 in 10 voters (19 percent) approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 72 percent disapprove and 10 percent did not offer an opinion. This is a record low since March 2009 when the Quinnipiac University Poll first began asking this question of registered voters.

Among Democrats, 39 percent approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 52 percent disapprove and 9 percent did not offer an opinion.

The Republicans don’t fare a lot better:

One-third of voters (33 percent) approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, while 62 percent disapprove and 5 percent did not offer an opinion.

Among Republicans, 77 percent approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, while 20 percent disapprove and 3 percent did not offer an opinion.

Quinnipiac doesn’t ask about “own Congressman”. But that’s a significant difference in approval between Democrats and Republicans. I suspect that Karl Rove (of all people) has the thinking of the Democratic leadership about right in his most recent WSJ column:

Maybe blind opposition to anything Mr. Trump does will be enough to sweep the midterms, especially if the economy weakens.

but he’s right about his as well:

Even so, effective leadership that shaped a forward-looking agenda and undercut the White House on important issues would produce a bigger Democratic victory.

There are explanations being forwarded other than lack of effective leadership. The gang at Liberal Patriot (Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, etc., Democrats all) continue to beat the drum that the Democratic leadership must embrace positions held by more than 20% of the electorate if they seek to be a “big tent” party. That 20% is coincidentally quite close to the approval rating for Congressional Democrats reports by the Quinnipiac poll.

Some think that the Democrats’ problem is that they’re just not radical enough. I would venture that’s the view of Mamdani’s supporters in New York.

My own opinion is that while opposition to Trump might, as Mr. Rove says, be enough to gain some seats in the midterms, it won’t tell the 70% who disapprove of them anything about what they actually support.