The politics of plutocracy, and a holiday linkdump
Greetings patrons,
It’s time for another research update. In this letter two things:
The politics of plutocracy
Like many people, I woke up on November 7th wondering what had happened to American politics. And like many bloggers, I started writing a post-election rant. But over the next few weeks, my diatribe morphed into a major research project on the partisan nature of American plutocracy. (The draft currently weighs in at 12,000 words and 39 charts.) I’d hoped to have the piece published by the start of the holidays, but it looks like that won’t happen. So let me share a sneak peak.
My thesis is quite simple: it is the Republican party that is the party of plutocracy. Now in a sense, this thesis is obvious, since Republicans are staunch defenders of the rights (read ‘power’) of the rich. However, it’s common to claim that American plutocracy has been a bipartisan affair.
I think this bipartisanship is certainly true at the federal level. That said, most of the power in American government lies with the states. And when we look at state politics, it becomes clear that one party is far better at handing money to plutocrats.
For example, across states, Republican control of state legislatures is associated with a conspicuous rise in the income share of the top 0.01%. The chart below shows the pattern.
This chart was going to be the centerpiece of my short rant — a simple reminder about the effect of Republican politics. But then I started to think about the bigger picture … about how the US may be at a crossroads … about how democracy can pave the road to plutocracy. And the more I thought about these ideas, the more I realized that they deserved a deeper reflection. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two months.
In some sense, this research is my attempt to avoid getting gaslit. In a remarkable coup d’etat, the Trump-Vance wing of the Republican party has managed to market itself as the party of workers. And many folks have bought it. This is admittedly disorienting.
Fortunately, the dizziness can be cured by facts. And boy are there a lot of them! I’ve been busy scouring the internet for all kinds of state-level data. I’ve analyzed the linguistic patterns in state legislation. I’ve crunched the numbers on union membership, minimum wages, regressive taxation, property income, government spending, income per capita, working hours, bankruptcy, food insecurity, health insurance, deaths of despair, life expectancy, physical and mental health, crime, and incarceration. And guess what? Across all this data, Republicans are implicated in the decline of American welfare.
When you stare at the scope of this badness, you start to wonder how Republicans win votes. And I think the answer is simple: most voters are largely unaware of these disturbing facts. But it gets worse. When we look at surveys of American media consumption, political ignorance has a trend … in the Republican direction. In states with staunch Republican control, people tend to get more of their ’news’ from Fox News and Facebook. What’s more, a larger share of people in deep-red states don’t follow political news at all.
This is all rather worrying, and points to terrifying feedback effect that continues to play out before us. Republicans make the rich richer and decimate the social safety net. Many folks are harmed, but don’t know who to blame. Republicans play to this disillusion, picking an array of convenient scapegoats. Voters get duped, and the cycle repeats, each time more vicious.
Where does this cycle head? No one knows.
A holiday linkdump
I’m an avid reader of Cory Doctorow’s blog Pluralistic. A prolific writer, Cory has a knack for transforming complicated economic concepts into lurid prose. I highly recommend following his work.
Every now and then, Cory publishes a linkdump where he bombards readers with a backlog of material that he hasn’t had time to condense into an essay. Since the holidays are my favorite time to catch up on reading, I thought I’d use the opportunity send you my own linkdump.
Here’s something I’ve never written about. For the last five years, my family and I have been eating a low-carb diet. Here’s how it happened.
Back in 2018, I was in the late stages of my PhD, and having mounting health problems. At the top of the list was chronic acid reflux, which was so bad that I had to sleep inclined and was on H2 blockers to stop the pain. I also had frequent bouts of ‘brain fog’, where I’d try to get work done but couldn’t manage to think straight. (Also … overshare warning … I was getting skin tags.)
I attributed these problems mostly to stress and fatigue. Still, I was looking for solutions.
I did the obligatory internet search for ‘how to cure acid reflex’. Almost all the material I found was garbage. Then I found a book called Heartburn Cured: The Low Carb Miracle. This too looked like trash. (As a rule, books with ‘miracle’ in the title are rarely miraculous.) But I decided to read the book anyway. Boy was I surprised.
You see, the title of the book is misleading, because the contents are not flaky. The author, Norm Robillard, is a hard-nosed scientist — a microbiologist by training — who got involved in acid-reflux research by accident. In an attempt to lose weight, Robillard decided to try a low-carb diet. And lose weight he did. But something else happened too; Robillard’s chronic acid reflux also disappeared.
Was it a coincidence? Robillard decided to find out. He went off the low-carb diet, and his reflux symptoms reappeared. He went back on the low-card diet, and his reflux symptoms vanished. Weird. What was going on?
Backing up a bit, the standard explanation for acid reflux is that it’s caused by a weak stomach sphincter, which lets stomach contents leak back up the throat. But why would a low-carb diet affect the stomach sphincter? That doesn’t make sense. What also didn’t make sense to Robillard was the clinical finding that taking antibiotics helped reduce reflux. How could antibiotics strengthen the stomach sphincter?
Robillard’s answer was that they didn’t (and couldn’t). In fact, he decided that the focus on the stomach sphincter was a red herring. The cause of acid reflux, he proposed, was an overgrowth of gut bacteria.
Now this hypothesis sounds like it’s coming from left field. But when Robillard works through the logic, it seems obvious in hindsight. Let’s run through the facts.
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Your gut is full of bacteria (sometimes called your microbiome).
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These bacteria get their energy by fermenting the food you eat.
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This fermentation creates gas (in the form of methane and hydrogen).
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If there is too much gas (specifically in the small intestine), it puts back-pressure on the stomach. If this pressure is great enough, it pushes the stomach sphincter open, causing stomach acid to reflux up the throat.
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Gut bacteria ferment two things — carbohydrates and digestible fibre (everything but cellulose).
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Cutting back on carbohydrates and fibre will starve the bacteria overgrowth, reduce the gas they produce, and thereby solve acid reflux.
(For more details about Robillard’s reasoning, I recommend his follow-up book called Fast Tract Digestion. It’s better written and better documented than his first foray. He also has a third book called Fast Tract Digestion IBS where he makes the case that a low-card diet can be used to treat irritable bowel syndrome.)
When I read this chain of logic, I was stunned by its simplicity. It made perfect sense! But there’s just one problem, which Robillard notes: his thesis contradicts received wisdom about nutrition. According to standard food-pyramid advice, a healthy diet is rich in carbohydrates and high in fibre. Yet Robillard argues that to cure acid reflux, you should drastically reduce your intake of both of these ’nutrients’.
Since I was desperate — and since I’ve never cared much for received wisdom — I decide to take Robillard’s advice and try a low-carb diet. And it worked! Within a few weeks, my acid reflux was mostly gone. And after a few months, it vanished completely (and has never returned). But that was not all. Along the way, my brain fog disappeared and (overshare warning) my skin tags fell off.
This was bizarre.
Why would eating a diet that contradicts standard nutritional advice solve my chronic health problems and make me feel great? Well, as luck would have it, around this time, I finished my PhD thesis, so I had time on my hands to do some research. And so I read everything I could find on the science of low-carb diets.
Here’s what I have learned.
A good way to dive into the science of nutrition is to start with evolutionary biology. As Theodosius Dobzhansky noted, ’nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’. But despite this central importance, most 20th-century nutrition science paid little attention to human evolution.
The main exception was the British physiologist John Yudkin. In his 1972 book Pure, White and Deadly, Yudkin begins by reflecting on an apparent contradiction:
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All animals require essentially the same nutrients for survival, most of which they get from food;
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Different species get these same nutrients from drastically different diets.
For example, Koala bears eat nothing but eucalyptus leaves, a plant that is toxic to most other animals. Some animals, like cats, are obligate carnivores. And still other animals (like cows) eat only plants. Yet despite these dietary differences, all mammals have essentially the same cellular metabolism and the same cellular demands for nutrients. So how did these differences come to be?
Well, the answer is obviously evolution. All multi-cellular animals share a common ancestor. But over millions of years, different species radiated into different food niches, resulting in the wide range of diets we see today. As a consequence of this evolution, there is a very simple difference between a food that is ’toxic’ and a food that is ’nutritious’: it comes down to time. Given enough time, an animal can adapt to eat almost anything.
The corollary is that if we are searching for foods that are harmful to an animal’s health, we should focus on the newest entries to the animal’s diet, since these are the foods which have had the least evolutionary time to become ’nutritious’.
Returning to humans, it’s here that things get weird. During the twentieth century, many nutrition scientists decided that saturated fat — which is found mainly in meat and animal fats — was the dietary villain. True, they had reasons for this vilification (which we’ll get to). But in evolutionary terms, the blame-game made little sense.
Evidence suggests that hominids have been eating meat for at least 2.6 million years. And during that time, there have been drastic changes to human physiology, including the development of larger brains and simpler guts. In short, all the signs suggest that humans are well-adapted to eating meat. But the same is likely not true of other parts of our modern diet.
Turning back the historical clock, about 10,000 years ago humans started farming. This transition introduced larger quantities (and fewer varieties) of carbohydrates into our diet. (Incidently, agriculture seems to have come with a deterioration of health.) Along the way, we learned how to refine carbohydrates to make things like bread and pasta. About 300 years ago, we developed cheap ways to refine sugar (and started eating drastically more of it.) And about a hundred years ago, we created industrial processes for extracting oil from vegetables like corn, soy, and canola (and started eating far more of these ‘heart-healthy’ fats).
Looking at this history, if we want to investigate the dietary components of bad health, it makes sense to start with the newest entries to our diet — vegetable oils, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. And yet mainstream nutrition science went in the opposite direction. First, it headed on a saturated-fat goose chase that went nowhere. Second, it told us to eat more of the very foods that are newest to the human diet. Unsurprisingly, it did not go well.
In the fifty years since Yudkin wrote Pure, White and Deadly, we have learned much about the science of nutrition. Unfortunately, little of this knowledge has filtered into the mainstream.
For a crash course in unlearning received nutrition wisdom, there’s no better place to start than with the work of journalist Gary Taubes. Back in 2002, Taubes caused a sensation with a New York Times article called “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”. (Taubes likes to stress that the editors picked the polemic title, not him.) The article deconstructs the received wisdom that carb-rich diets are ‘heart healthy’, and high-fat diets are death sentences.
Thrust into the limelight, Taubes went on to pen two must-read books about nutrition science. The first is Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is best described as a tomb. (It’s over 640 pages.) Taubes’ follow up, Why We Get Fat, is a more readable synopsis of the same science.
So what is the science? In a sentence, it’s that different foods have different hormonal effects on the body. In other words, eating 2000 calories of sugar is different than eating 2000 calories of fat. The two diets have have a completely different hormonal (and hence, metabolic) affect on the body.
Backing up a bit, all animals have two basic pathways for metabolizing energy. The first pathway is to metabolize glucose. And the second pathway is to metabolize fat in the form of ketones. Both pathways are essential for survival.
Let’s start with the glucose pathway. When humans eat carbohydrates, the body converts them into glucose. And as we all know, humans have a taste for the richest source of carbohydrates, which is delivered via sugar. Now, humans have a sweet-tooth for a reason. First, in nature, sweet things generally contain vitamin C, which we need. But more importantly, sweet things have a profound hormonal affect on our body.
When we gorge on sugar, we spike our insulin levels. And high insulin, in turn, says to the body that it is in ‘fat-storage’ mode — that glucose should be taken out of the blood stream and stored for later use in the form of fat. Of course, we are not alone in this gorging behavior. Before hibernation, bears gorge on berries to fatten up. But that is precisely the point; the bears gorge in preparation for a prolonged period of starvation.
In humans’ ancestral environment, the same was likely true. Fruits would have been available sparingly (and would likely have been more tart than our modern, domesticated varieties). And so after fattening up on sugar, humans would have an energy reserve for the ensuing fast. And it is when we fast that the second metabolic pathway comes in.
When we stop eating, the body rapidly exhausts its supply of glucose (which is stored mostly in muscle and liver tissues as glycogen.) Once the glucose is gone, the body transitions to metabolizing our fat reserves in the form of ketones. Now, for this transition to happen, insulin levels must drop, because it is insulin that determines which of the two metabolic pathways will dominate.
But what if insulin levels never drop? What if the sugar feast never ends? Well, then bad things happen.
Here, the science is still be worked out, but the general idea is this: when the feast never ends and insulin levels remain perpetually high, cellular metabolism starts to get damaged. As that happens, cells become ‘insulin resistant’, meaning they need a higher and higher dose of insulin to get the job done.
As this illness unfolds, the body becomes chronically inflamed, leading to many pathologies. For example, if the pancreas cannot synthesize enough insulin to meet the body’s demands, blood sugar begins to rise and you develop diabetes. Alternatively, the inflammation may lead to arterial plaque build up, causing heart disease. (Diabetes and heart disease are co-morbid.)
Looking at the pathology of insulin resistance, there are two related ways out. The first is to simply stop eating. While this advice sounds insane, starvation was almost surely a regularly feature of our ancestral experience. So without us knowing it, regular periods of food scarcity may have kept our bodies healthy (while admittedly killing the less fortunate).
On this front, its interesting to note that even when food was no longer scarce, many cultures retained periods of ritualistic fasting. Did these cultures know the health benefits of not eating? That’s hard to say. But today, science suggests that fasting has many benefits. On this topic, Jason Fung is undoubtedly the world’s expert. His books are well-worth reading. (They include: Complete Guide To Fasting, The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and The Cancer Code.)
Still, it takes considerable will power to purposeful not eating when you are surrounded by food. And that brings me to the second path out of insulin-resistance pathology: drastically cut back the amount of carbohydrates in your diet. The upside of this approach is that you still get to eat, while you get many of the benefits of fasting.
The purpose of a low-carb diet is to force the body to switch to burning fat as its main source of energy. Although it varies by person, this transition generally happens when you eat less than 20g of carbohydrates per day. At this low level of carb intake, insulin levels drop dramatically, and the body starts running on ketones.
Now, any person, healthy or unhealthy, can eat a ketogenic diet. That said, when a person with chronic health problems (like me) eats a low-carb diet, dramatic things can happen. And that’s because the switch to burning fat elicits a different metabolic pathway — a pathway that (for reasons that are not well understood) is less damaged.
This fact is crucial, and is often overlooked in the so-called ’nutrition wars’. It’s clear that humans can be healthy on a variety of diets, some low in fat and others high in fat. (Note that historically, all traditional societies had are diets low in both sugar and vegetable oils.) That said, once you’ve damaged your metabolism from years of eating the standard Western diet (high in both sugar and vegetable oil), it doesn’t follow that you can eat the same thing as person who’s never sustained this abuse.
I should know. I spent my teen years gorging on sugar. After school, I used to eat a bowl of cereal piled with so much brown sugar that the milk looked like dark chocolate. And for much of my twenties, my dietary staple was pasta and pierogis, topped with a bed-time bowl of ice-cream. For years, this sugary feast seemed fine. But by my thirties, things started to unravel.
In part due to environmental concerns, I spent a few years as a vegetarian. It was an interesting experiment, but it made me feel terrible, so I eventually abandoned it. And then sometime around 2017 (my memory is hazy) I watched Robert Lustig’s tour-de-force video Sugar: The Bitter Truth. That convinced me to stop eating anything with added sugar. (My god, sugar is in everything!) But still, the refined carbs remained, and I felt bad. And so it took an obscure book on acid reflux to convince me to try a low-carb diet.
Today, I know that I’ll will never go back. Still, I have reservations. The first is simply the cost. Eating a low-carb diet will likely double (if not triple) your grocery bill.
My second reservation is more substantial. If you eat a low-carb diet, you will invariably eat more meat. And there’s no doubt that meat comes with a huge environmental toll. This fact weighs on my conscience, with no easy resolution.
The problem, as I see it, is that in our deep past, humans often functioned as apex predators. (For example, a recent study found that a clovis-era child had a diet rich in mammoth.) But the defining feature of apex predators is that they are rare. And so today we have a mismatch: our evolutionary history gives us a hunger for meat, and yet industrialization has given humanity the abundance of a herbivore. Needless to say, the two behaviors cannot co-exist, and there seems no easy way out.
Let’s return to the 20th-century vilification of saturated fat. Regular readers will know that I am fascinated by the sociology of (bad) science. It is simply astonishing how often dubious ideas become ensconced in the halls of academia. Unfortunately, mainstream nutrition science is a textbook example of this social pathology.
The (flawed) case against saturated fat likely dates to 1913, when a Russian pathologist named Nikolaj Anitschkow reported something interesting: when he fed rabbits a high-fat diet, they developed atherosclerotic-type lesions similar to those found in human heart disease.
In the years that followed, many physiologists took this experiment (which was replicated many times) to be smoking-gun evidence of the ills of eating fat. And yet, in evolutionary terms, this conclusion was dubious. You see, rabbits are herbivores, which means they’re not adapted to eating high quantities of fat. So of course feeding them fat led to pathology.
What’s fascinating is how no one thought to run the same experiment on a carnivore, like a cat. Also interesting is how no one thought to vilify carbohydrates by feeding cats a high-carb diet, and then watching them develop diabetes. (Of course, we run this experiment all the time when we feed house cats corn-laced chow.)
Despite its dubious origins, the idea that fat might cause heart disease became the leading ‘diet-heart hypothesis’. And its leading proponent was undoubtedly the American physiologist Ancel Keys. Keys’ magnum opus was his famous ‘seven-country study’, which began in 1956, and was published in 1970. The study claimed to find strong epidemiological evidence that saturated fat caused heart disease.
This evidence formed the backbone for the low-fat craze, and prompted fifty years of (bad) nutritional advice. But there was a slight problem. You see, Keys knew that epidemiological evidence could only demonstrate correlation. To show that saturated fat actually caused heart disease, you needed to run an experiment. Here’s where things get interesting.
It turns out that at the same time that Keys published his famous epidemiological results, he was running a massive double-blind, randomized experiment. Conducted on roughly 10,000 patients in Minnesotan mental hospitals, the study was meant to test the meat of Keys’ diet-heart hypothesis. One group of patients ate a diet with traditional animal fats. And the other grouped was fed a diet high in corn oil.
So what were the study’s results? Well, for over forty years, no one knew. Despite being a landmark experiment sure to be of scientific interest, the results of this Minnesota Coronary Experiment were not fully analyzed during Keys lifetime.
Fortunately, in 2016, a group of researchers was able to access the archived data and re-analyze it. And what they found was stunning. As expected, the cohort eating corn oil had significantly lower cholesterol levels. But contrary to Keys’ hypothesis, the reduction of cholesterol was associated with a higher death rate.
While the details of this suppressed data are salacious, the results are consistent with contemporary science. It’s now well-established that all-cause mortality (the scientific term for dying from anything) tends to increase with low-levels of cholesterol. And rigorous experiments, like the The Women’s Health Initiative have failed to find evidence that reducing fat intake reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.
But it gets worse. From the outset, the advice to replace animal fats with vegetable oils was dubious in evolutionary terms. Prior to the 20th century, humans simply did not eat vegetable oils (which are rich in polyunsaturated fat) in any significant quantity. (See Nina Teicholz’s talk for the fascinating history of the vegetable-oil industry.) And so simple evolutionary logic suggests that these oils might be toxic to human health.
Alarmingly, linoleic acid (an oxidative omega 6 fat) appears to be accumulating in the tissues of American adults. And while research is in its infancy, lab studies link vegetable oil consumption to higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
In short, 20th century nutrition science reads like a Shakespearean drama, in what charisma, hubris, and the selective appeal to evidence ended in public-health tragedy.
Wrapping up, if you try a low-carb diet (and boilerplate waiver, I’m not giving medical advice), there are two main pitfalls. The first is what’s called the ‘keto-flu’, which is a feeling of unwellness that often comes about a week into the diet. Know that these symptoms are largely caused by electrolyte deficiency. To be healthy on a low-carb diet, you must get plenty of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. (Yes, eating lots of salt contradicts standard medical advice; but again, standard advice was never backed by much science.)
The second pitfall is that if you’re over forty and your doctor monitors you cholesterol levels, they will see your high LDL levels and likely try to prescribe you statins (drugs for lowering cholesterol). My doctor did this, and I happily said no.
To start with, statins are effective at lowering LDL cholesterol. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that lowering cholesterol is a bad goal, associated with higher rates of mortality. Importantly, this fact leads to a disturbing cohort affect in statin research. You see, it is typically people with higher cholesterol who are prescribed statins. But it is precisely these people who we expect to have lower mortality. But in statin studies, this lower mortality gets (wrongly) attributed to the statins themselves, not the higher cholesterol.
(As Nadir Ali explains here, you can control for this cholesterol confounder by comparing people on different doses of statin. When you do that, statin outcomes are … not good.)
Worse, the biochemistry of statins is quite clear: they function as a mitochondrial toxin, inhibiting key pathways of the electron transport chain. (Statins were discovered by Akira Endo when studying micro-toxins produced by fungi.) Looking at this metabolic affect, a group of Japanese scientists recently argued (convincingly, in my opinion) that statins ‘stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure’. (Of particular interest in this paper is the dramatic change in statin-study results before and after the European Union introduced regulation penalizing conflicts of interest in drug trials.)
At any rate, if you try a low-carb diet, be prepared to have a statin discussion with your doctor, since they will almost surely not be keeping up with the latest science.
(This is my third take home from five years of research; family doctors keep up with the latest nutrition science about as well as neoclassical economists keep up with heterodox research in political economy … which is to say, not at all.)
Until next time
Well, that was an unexpectedly long dump of information. (Apparently it’s been ruminating in my mind for years.) I hope you find some of it useful.
Thanks for your support, and I’ll see you in the new year with my deep dive on partisan-driven plutocracy.
Best,
Blair