In Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," the most uncomfortable scenes aren't the cyclops or the shipwreck. They're the ones set at home.
Dozens of men have moved into Odysseus's palace on Ithaca. They slaughter his herds. They drain his wine. They lounge in his hall demanding his wife choose one of them, and every day they consume a little more of an estate none of them will ever own. Telemachus watches it happen. He is a boy. He has no standing, no army and no idea when — or whether — his father is coming back.
That is not a Bronze Age problem.
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We will soon be over $40 trillion in national debt. I have spent my career as an mergers-and-acquisitions banker valuing what things are truly worth, and I can tell you what that number is: it is a claim on people who cannot yet vote — taxation without representation.
I became a grandfather last year. When I watch my grandson playing, there is one question that never once crosses my mind — how could I steal from him? I don't know a single person who thinks that way. And yet, collectively, year after year, our politicians buy votes with money belonging to people who haven't been born.
That is the hall on Ithaca. The suitors were not monsters. They were ordinary men, following ordinary incentives, in a house where nobody could stop them.
Socrates proposed that "lovers of wisdom" should make decisions for society. Two and a half millennia later, how are we doing? He would say we never understood his "ship of state." The skill that gets a person elected is not the skill required to govern, and we keep being surprised by this.
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Cut the time frame by 90%, to 1776. The Founders were so wary of faction they warned us about it in the founding documents themselves. They made Congress Article I — not merely one branch among three, but the body meant to write the laws. They would be stunned at how much of that work now happens in the other two branches, and how comfortable Congress has become with the arrangement.
Cut 90% again, to 2001. Those Americans had just watched a Democratic president and a Republican Congress run a budget surplus while expanding trade. Tell them we would arrive here, in just two and a half decades — $40 trillion in debt, in the middle of a global trade war — and they would simply not believe you.
Three data points, each a tenth of the distance of the last, and the trend does not improve.
How did we get here? At bottom: incentives.
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People respond to them, and our system gives citizens almost none to really understand the issues — because understanding does not translate into any real say. We hand our authority to a proxy selected largely on partisan soundbites, then root for our political team the way we root for a ball club.
Wealth and civic health are twin engines. The nations with the strongest safety nets don't have them because their politicians are nicer; they have them because their economies are richer and their systems reward productivity over plunder. If we align citizen incentives with actual legislative understanding, capitalism and democracy can do what they do best: make the poor ever richer.
Nolan's ending is not Homer's. His Odysseus clears the hall and discovers he cannot stay in it. He has killed the sons of noble houses under his own roof, and a man who does that cannot govern the place afterward. So, he abdicates. He puts the crown on Telemachus and sails west into exile.
That is our arrangement exactly. We are handing the next generation an estate with a great deal eaten out of it.
Plato distrusted democracy because he doubted ordinary people could become lovers of wisdom. In his world, with no printing press and no schools, he had a point. We have an information age that can educate anyone, issue by issue, better than the best minds in ancient Athens — but little incentive for anyone to use it.
So, we need to build those incentives. We have the tools to give our citizens incentive to truly learn the issues and have their voices mean something. Make understanding an issue worth the hour it takes. A Congress receiving that kind of informed feedback would be answerable. A Congress that spends more time listening to constituents spends less time listening to lobbyists. A Congress with that standing might start reclaiming the ground Article One has quietly surrendered.
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If we would just harness our amazing technologies, we could make our ancestors of 2,500, 250, and even 25 years ago proud. Imagine if we used these tools to attack some of our 80/20 issues for starters.
Nobody is sailing home to clear our hall. Our grandchildren are getting the house. We have spent 25 centuries asking who should make decisions for society. Perhaps we've been asking the wrong question. Perhaps we should instead ask how to give ordinary citizens stronger incentives to become "lovers of wisdom." My grandson wants lovers of wisdom to make decisions for society. So does yours.
