Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics changes the subject of economics rather less than many seem to assume. The central claim is that resources are scarce and therefore there’s only some amount, number, of resources that can be used before we run out of those scarce resources. An advantage of this claim is that it is correct. It changes economics less than many think because economics is, in one description, the science of the allocation of scarce resources. So, we’ve rather got built into economics the concept that resources are scarce. We’re not hugely changing the subject by pointing out that resources are scarce that is.

There are those who take the observation further. That because of the scarcity of resources we therefore need to have a more communal, socialist even, attitude toward resource use. Some even claim that we’ve got to get rid of the capitalism, markets, even neoliberal type ideas, in order to stay within those resource limits. This has the disadvantage of not being correct. A test of more communal, more socialist, non-neoliberal resource use is a quick visit to where the Aral Sea isn’t.

But what if we actually tested, properly, the assertion? Capitalist, market based, even neoliberal, places would have worse environments than those wihch already did the communal and socialist things. Puerto Rico would have a fouler environment than Cuba, say. This is a testable proposition.

So, tested it has been:

Degrowth scholars often claim that capitalism generates social and ecological imbalances, as captured by Kate Raworth's leading doughnut model. We formalize this model using social and environmental indices and measure imbalances using their coefficient of variation. We then test if capitalism, proxied by economic freedom, is associated with greater imbalances across multiple datasets, specifications, and functional forms. We find little support for the model's central prediction. If anything, the relationship often runs in the opposite direction.

Ah.

Yes, resources are scarce. Therefore if we price resources then we’ll use them better. Further, if we price the output from the use of resources then we’ll gain more output from less use of resources. By making every economic participant see the immediate scarcity of resources all decisions are made fully cognizant of that scarcity. We thus gain, for any use of resources, a higher standard of living. Or, equally, for any given standard of living we use fewer resources. Prices, markets, capitalism, dare we say neoliberalism, optimise scarce resource use.

The lesson of this analysis is that Captain Obvious has entered the room.

The takeaway is that neoliberalism - that insistence upon the use of capitalism, prices, markets, in decision making - is therefore the desired, even required, system to deal with the environment.

Captain Neoliberal is here to save the planet.

Tim Worstall

Every communist state in history has either collapsed, reformed into something unrecognisable, or survived only through external life support. The Soviet Union lasted 69 years before structural decay outpaced its capacity to maintain coherence. Maoist China killed tens of millions of its own citizens through policy-induced famine before quietly abandoning the economic model that caused it. Cuba persists on foreign subsidy and remittance income. North Korea sustains itself through nuclear extortion and a prison-state apparatus that would be unsustainable without Chinese patronage. Venezuela’s Bolivarian experiment collapsed an oil-rich economy into hyperinflation and mass emigration within two decades.

The standard explanation for these failures is ideological. Communism is bad because it denies freedom, punishes ambition, and consolidates power in the hands of corrupt elites. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It treats communism as a moral failure when the deeper problem is structural. Communism does not collapse because bad people run it. Communism collapses because it is architecturally incapable of surviving its own contradictions.

The argument is straightforward and does not require ideology. Any system that suppresses internal deviation, eliminates meaningful feedback, and centralises all decision-making into a single loop will accumulate errors faster than it can correct them. This is not a political claim. It is a structural one. It applies to corporations, organisms, software architectures, and governments alike. Communism simply represents the purest political expression of this failure model because it suppresses deviation by design rather than by accident.

Consider what a functioning system requires. It needs internal variation, meaning individuals and subgroups must be free to try different approaches, take different risks, and produce different outcomes. It needs feedback, meaning the results of those different approaches must be visible, measurable, and consequential. And it needs selection pressure, meaning successful approaches must propagate while failed approaches must be allowed to die. These three conditions—variation, feedback, and selection—are not optional features of resilient systems. They are the mechanism by which any complex structure adapts to changing conditions. Remove any one of them and the system loses its capacity to self-correct. Remove all three and the system is running on inertia alone, consuming stored capital until it hits a problem it cannot solve with the tools it already has.

Communism removes all three. Variation is suppressed because individual deviation from the collective plan is treated as a threat rather than an input. The Soviet Union did not merely discourage entrepreneurial activity; it criminalised it. Private enterprise was a prosecutable offence. The message is structural, not merely legal; deviation from the plan is not tolerated, regardless of whether or not the deviation produces better outcomes than the plan itself. Feedback is eliminated because outcomes are measured against political targets rather than reality. When Soviet agricultural quotas produced famine, the system did not revise the quotas, it revised the reporting. Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics was not a scientific mistake; it was a structural inevitability of a system in which political doctrine overrides empirical observation.

When feedback is subordinated to ideology, the system is no longer receiving information about reality. It is receiving confirmation of its own assumptions. Selection pressure vanishes because failure carries no structural consequence for the failing institution. Factories that produced goods nobody wanted continued operating because closure would contradict the plan. Managers who delivered catastrophic results were rotated rather than removed because the system could not acknowledge that its own appointments had failed. Without selection, dead structures persist and consume resources that functioning structures need.

The result is predictable and has been observed in every instance. The system accumulates errors, contradictions, and inefficiencies with no mechanism for resolving them. Each unresolved contradiction increases the load on the remaining functional structures. Each failed correction generates new distortions. The trajectory is not linear decline; it is compounding decay, where each failure makes the next failure more likely and more severe. The system does not gradually weaken. It looks stable until it does not, because the internal contradictions are being absorbed by diminishing reserves rather than being resolved by adaptive correction.

A Hundred Years of Communism

Ten Years of Ideas

QuilletteBen Sixsmith

The Soviet collapse followed this pattern precisely. For decades, the USSR appeared structurally sound to outside observers. It maintained a nuclear arsenal, a space program, and a military that NATO treated as a peer threat. What it could not maintain was internal coherence. Agricultural production consistently failed to meet domestic needs, which required grain imports from the very capitalist nations the Soviet system claimed to be surpassing. Industrial output was measured in gross tonnage rather than utility, which produced goods that fulfilled quotas but served no functional purpose. The shadow economy, which the state treated as criminal deviance, became the actual mechanism by which citizens obtained necessities the formal system could not deliver. By the time Gorbachev attempted reform, the internal contradictions had compounded beyond the system’s capacity to absorb them. The structure did not fall to external pressure. It collapsed under the accumulated weight of its own unresolved errors.

Mao’s China demonstrated the same failure at an even more lethal scale. The Great Leap Forward was not a miscalculation, it was the logical output of a system in which political targets replaced empirical feedback. When local officials reported grain yields that matched ideological expectations rather than agricultural reality, the central government exported food that did not exist while tens of millions starved. The system was not cruel by intention, it was blind by construction. It had no feedback channel capable of transmitting the information that people were dying, because the only permitted feedback was confirmation that the plan was working.

The most frequent counterargument is that China disproves the thesis, because the Chinese Communist Party has maintained power for over 75 years and overseen extraordinary economic growth. But China survived by abandoning the structural features that define communism. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms introduced private enterprise, market pricing, foreign investment, and individual economic incentive, which is to say, he reintroduced variation, feedback, and selection into the Chinese economic system. The CCP maintained political control while surrendering economic control to mechanisms that are structurally capitalist. What remains communist about China is the one-party surveillance state, not the economy. The economy survives precisely because it was allowed to deviate from communist structure. The political system survives precisely because it has not yet been tested by a contradiction it cannot suppress by force.

Cuba offers the inverse proof. Where China reformed, Cuba did not. The result is an economy frozen in structural amber, sustained not by internal productivity but by Soviet subsidy until 1991, and by Venezuelan oil shipments thereafter. When both external supports weakened, the economy contracted because it had no internal adaptive capacity. There was nothing to fall back on because no parallel structures had been allowed to develop. The system had been running on imported capital rather than generated feedback for decades, and when the imports stopped, the underlying starvation became visible.

It should be noted that capitalist systems also fail when they develop the same structural pathologies, through monopoly, regulatory capture, or financialisation that disconnects markets from productive feedback. Any system that allows a single entity to suppress variation, distort feedback, or eliminate selection pressure will decay by the same mechanism. The difference is that capitalism does not require these pathologies by design. They emerge as corruptions of the system rather than features of it. Communism is unique in that the suppression of variation, feedback, and selection is not a bug—it is the defining structural commitment of the ideology. The system is not corrupted into fragility. It is built fragile.

The men and women who have lived, suffered, and died under communist regimes deserve more than moral outrage. They deserve a clear explanation of why their suffering was not an accident of implementation but a consequence of structure. Every communist state that has ever existed has either collapsed, reformed beyond recognition, or persisted through external subsidy and internal repression. This is not coincidence. It is not bad luck. It is not the result of Western interference, although interference certainly occurred. It is the structural output of a system that was designed to suppress the only mechanisms capable of keeping it alive.

Once upon a time, we frowned upon wishing death on a sitting president.

Kathy Griffin’s career collapsed in 2017 after she shared an image of her holding President Donald Trump’s bloody head aloft, ISIS style.

That same year, actor Johnny Depp apologized after suggesting it’s time for another actor to kill a president, a Lincoln-Trump gag that landed badly.

That was then. Now?

Griffin wears that bloody image like a badge of honor. And “Saturday Night Live” not only joked about Trump’s possible death last night, but the show’s far-Left audience celebrated the crack.

This isn’t shocking. It’s the new, ghoulish normal.

Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che noted that President Trump attended a showing of the Broadway musical “Chicago” this week.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Che said, alluding to actor John Wilkes Booth’s infamous act.

Wild, sustained applause and cheers ensued. Not laughs, mind you. Cheers. Co-host Colin Jost couldn’t have smiled any wider at the crowd’s reaction to the Trump assassination joke.

Late-night audiences in the modern era expect one-sided, far-Left content. And that’s exactly what they get. They’re also religiously liberal, angry and, too often, full of hate.

Sound hyperbolic?

Late-night crowds cheered Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in cold blood.  The pro-Luigi sentiment even caught far-Left “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart by surprise.

The same audiences howled at arsonists attacking Tesla dealerships. Then again, the hosts found it funny, too.

And, now, audiences aren’t simply laughing at dark humor. That’s an involuntary response to tragic news, a way for people to process pain or ugly events. Remember how comedians reacted to 9/11, allowing us to laugh again after the national tragedy.

This wasn’t that. These audiences are cheering on death, assassination dreams and arson.

Hope Lorne Michaels and co. are proud of what they helped build.

The post ‘SNL’ Audience Cheers Trump Assassination Joke appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

“The Drama” is neither a standard comedy nor run-of-the-mill rom-com.

The film boasts darkly comic moments, no doubt, but the heart of the story is serious. We meet a couple (Zendaya, Robert Pattinson) blissfully in love until a revelation changes their dynamic.

Will they make it to their wedding day without splitting up? The better question might be, should they?

The film pivots on a confession made in the first act. It’s one this critic hid in the HiT review, and it’s something that shouldn’t be glibly shared. For the purposes of this article, though, it must be revealed.

And some Legacy Media outlets have done just that. And, in the process, suggested the movie’s key plot point should never have been attempted.

SPOILER ALERT

Zendaya’s character admits she seriously considered shooting up her school as a distressed teen, but she thankfully never saw her plans come to fruition.

The story takes the confession very seriously. Her betrothed is unmoored by the revelation.

Yet USA Today ran a feature decrying the film, written by someone who apparently hadn’t screened the movie or refused to add the necessary context. It also puts a school shooting survivor front and center, letting her weigh in on the film without having seen it.

Naturally, anyone who survived such a terrifying ordeal will have extreme opinions on a film or TV show exploring that subject matter. It’s like a cancer survivor watching a movie about a beloved character dying of melanoma.

So why write it in the first place?

USA Today goes further, enlisting “experts” who suggest the film is too triggering for audiences. Even more, they argue the film’s PR push, including stars Zendaya and Pattinson, is too positive and doesn’t reflect the gravity of the movie.

For somebody walking into the movie theater blind, “it could definitely be triggering,” Dr. Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at The Ohio State University, says. “It’s a very sensitive topic for many people, and I worry that such [films] could glorify mass shootings and treat them as no big deal.”

Bushman could have actually screened the film before weighing in on the matter. The film does no such thing.

Even the article itself has a trigger warning at the top.

Next, the co-founder of the anti-gun group March for Our Lives attacks the film, presumably sight unseen.

Movies like “The Drama” run the “very strong likelihood of resurfacing very real fears, particularly for viewers whose lives have been directly impacted by gun violence, and who may not be aware of the key plot elements in advance,” says Jackie Corin, cofounder and executive director of March For Our Lives. “For those who have experienced a gun crime firsthand or lost or nearly lost a loved one, the trauma that comes with it is permanent and can resurface at any time.”

Yes, it can. Should films avoid the issue? What other topics are off limits given these parameters? War? Molestation? Murder?

Not to be outdone, the far-Left Hollywood Reporter taps a different school shooting survivor to attack the film. The article also calls on Corin to weigh in, admitting that she hasn’t seen the film.

Seems important, no, to have a thorough understanding of the film?

THR then cues Corin up with a wildly unfair question to get a specific answer.

When asked whether the casting of two glamorous celebrities — Zendaya and Pattinson — as the leads can grant a cool factor to the idea of planning a shooting, Corin quickly points out that this has been a worry of hers.

“That was my biggest concern upon hearing about the plot,” she says. “When you have someone like Zendaya and Robert Pattinson attached to a project, they both — separately, but also especially together — bring an enormous amount of attention and cultural weight.”

The film doesn’t make school shootings look remotely cool. In fact, the entire film argues the opposite.

Did anyone at THR actually watch the movie? It’s a Hollywood news organization, isn’t it?

Why attack “The Drama” in the first place? The film has generated mostly positive reviews, and it’s only been out two days. Is there some major blowback happening already?

If so, these articles don’t share it.

The post Media Declares War on ‘Drama,’ Free Expression appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.