The Tangle

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“Snarled, knotted—these neurons got as tangled
As the hair on top. The living are snagged
In their own matted mess, they are this thatch.
Who, I ask you, can fix such a tangle?”

“A person. Ethical. Concentrating. 
Insightful. Methodical yet ardent.
Someone who has fully accepted this task.
This person can unravel the tangle.

“Desire, hatred, and ignorance fade
While you pay attention to untangling.
Name and form fade, and the gap is gone
Between wish and fact. Then: no more tangle.”

This is a loose rendition of Linked Discourses 1.23 from the Pali Canon (a dialogue between a troubled demigod and the Buddha). Buddaghosa presents an entire book, The Path to Purification (probably 5th century CE), as a commentary on the second verse of this poem. See also: “Tangled Beauty,” The Fetter, etc.

federal spending and employment after a year of Trump

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It is common advice-and wise–to specify your own assumptions about the world, find data to test them, and update as necessary.

Thus, as we move through the second year of the second Trump administration, it’s worth noticing what you assume about recent trends and then checking those assumptions.

You might think that Donald Trump has slashed federal spending and fired much of the federal civilian workforce, or you might assume that nothing much has changed in Washington.

Your actual views are probably more nuanced than either of these caricatures. In any case, here is some data. I have chosen to begin the trends in 1970, to limit our attention to the era after the Great Society had expanded the federal government.

First, federal civilian employment is down notably–by about 17%. There was a decline of a similar magnitude under Bill Clinton (“Reinventing Government”), but this one is a steeper and more chaotic. There was no decline at all in the number of civilian federal employees under Reagan, either Bush, or Trump I. On the other hand, the layoffs during Trump II follow considerable growth. The number of federal employees (other than postal workers) was the same this spring as it was in 2009, but it had grown in between. (I think the spikes in the graph represent people hired to conduct the decennial census.)

Staff cuts have been concentrated in certain programs. For example, USAID is gone, its staff of about 16,000 people almost entirely laid off. Such changes have substantial impact on policies, but not so much on total personnel. USAID formerly employed about 0.08% of the federal workforce. In short, Trump’s staff cuts are highly uneven.

Second, total federal spending is up:

This graph is not adjusted for inflation. The spending increase in 2025 was 4.6%, and some of that growth was eaten up by 2.7% inflation. But real spending was up.

Much federal spending goes to defense or entitlement programs such as Social Security. Spending on domestic goods and services (excluding income transfers) fell by almost two percent in Trump’s first year.

But federal transfer payments were up by 5 percent (not shown). Meanwhile, states and localities spent more:

As of late 2025, federal tax receipts had risen substantially (by almost 16 percent compared to 2024). In the spirit of checking one’s prior assumptions, I should disclose that I had assumed that federal tax receipts had fallen.

My goal is not to make any overall point or judgment, but to focus our attention on major trends. For example, it will be crucial to reconstitute USAID, and, ideally, to make it better than it was. But the next president will not have to create a whole federal civil service, because total federal civilian workforce is about the same size as when Obama took office. Nor will the next president have much room to expand federal spending, since that actually rose under Trump.

love of the world

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I have just completed one of my favorite teaching experiences ever, a semester of reading Hannah Arendt with about 20 students who were deeply committed to understanding her, debating her ideas critically, and living up to her expectations for integrity and rigor. On the first day, we watched a portion of her 1964 interview on German national television; and at the end of the semester, I think we agreed that she had cast a spell.

I have posted many short essays on Arendt here over the years.* For anyone who wants a taste of her distinctive thought, I could recommend this sentence from an article she published in The New Yorker on February 18, 1967:

The actual content of political life [is] the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.

This sentence contains several ideas that are characteristic of Arendt.

First, politics is intrinsically valuable. As she emphasizes a bit later in the paragraph, politics is not everything. However, it is a way of living well, of experiencing and earning joy and gratification. Almost everyone assumes that politics is a means to other ends–a necessary evil, or at least a necessary basis for justice, freedom, security, or other desirable goods. For Arendt, politics is a good.

But what is politics? Voting in a national election does not sound like what Arendt has in mind. For her, politics is being in company with peers–people who are equal and who can act together.

Arendt believes that individuals become peers when they can talk and act in a political forum whose rules and norms give them equal say. They need not have equal amounts of wealth, strength, or status to be equal in a fair political forum. My class debated this claim extensively, but it could be partly true, even if Arendt overstates it at times. Therefore, one reason that politics is good is that it enables equality. It makes us into peers.

Politics as acting-together also brings joy or gratification. This is because when we argue about what our group should do and commit to acting the way we have advocated, we make ourselves visible to others. And only by appearing before others and receiving a response do we know who we are as individuals. In this sense, appearing in public allows us to acquire a personal identity.

Bosses, dictators, and oligarchs fail to develop worthy identities because they never interact with peers. When they speak, everything they hear back from their subordinates is calculated and transactional. Only in the company of people who are free to agree or disagree do we learn what we are made of.

Finally, politics is about starting something new. A keyword for Arendt is “natality.” We are mortal creatures, which means not only that we must die–as many philosophers have emphasized–but also that we are born. Each human birth is a beginning of a story, and each new person changes the others’ stories.

About three weeks before Arendt published “Truth and Politics” in The New Yorker, I had turned one woman into a mother and one man into a father by being born. My story had just begun and had begun to change others’ stories. By acting together in this mortal world, we produce a legacy of “word and deed” that can outlast us.

For Arendt, “the world” is what people make by acting together. We are limited by nature, “by those things which men cannot change at will.” Failing to recognize stubborn facts prevents us from building a genuine world, within which “we are free to act and to change” (“Truth and Politics”). Science tells us what must be, and then politics allows us to make new things.

I suspect that Hannah Arendt’s ability to love the world was shaken by the Holocaust, from which she barely escaped. But the love came back. In 1955, she wrote to her former professor and lifelong friend Karl Jaspers, who was somewhat isolated at age 72, still living in German-speaking Europe as an anti-Nazi thinker with a Jewish wife. Arendt’s letter bubbles with enthusiasm for the books and ideas that she wants to share with him from her cosmopolitan life in New York. She writes:

Yes, I would like to bring the wide world to you this time. I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world that I shall be able to do that now. Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories ‘Amor Mundi.’ I want to write the chapters on work this winter, as a lecture series for Chicago University, which has invited me there in April.

This book was actually published as The Human Condition, and it represents the most comprehensive statement of her thought. Apparently, Arendt believed that it could have been entitled Amor Mundi: love of the world.

Another statement of that core idea came in her essay on “The Crisis in Education” (1955), which concludes with these sentences:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

*See also: living life as a story; how Hannah Arendt moved away from pure thinking; Hannah Arendt seminar; Hannah Arendt: “The problem wasn’t what our enemies did, but what our friends did”; Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent, etc.

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

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This is the last of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” (terrible in the sense that they seem to describe deep depression):

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
 
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
 
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
 
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

This poem begins with a clear problem–the narrator feels tormented–and a solution: he should be kinder to himself. This outcome is expressed as a wish (“Let me live. …:”), not as an explicit direction or decision. We might call the first stanza a “forgiveness meditation.” The syntax is straightforward and the words are familiar. The lines represent grammatical units and conclude with monosyllabic words that neatly rhyme, ABBA.

In contrast, the second stanza is an elaborate simile with challenging syntax, where adjectives function as nouns and nouns turn into verbs. The narrator gropes around his “comfortless.” He fails to find comfort there, just as blind eyes cannot “day.” He also resembles a thirsty person who finds no relief (“thirst’s all-in-all”) even though everything is wet. Perhaps he is alone at sea where there is ne’er a drop to drink.

These are tropes for being unable to obey one’s commands to oneself. If you are blind, you cannot order yourself to see light. If you are in Hopkins’ condition, your “sad self” will not comply with your entreaty to be “hereafter kind” to yourself. A person cannot decide to “day.”

In the third stanza, the narrator tries to grab his own attention, calling to his soul, then to his self, and then to his “poor Jackself,” where “Jack” means a regular guy, a common man. (You could get a stranger’s attention with, “Hey, Jack!). “Lét be” bears a stress mark, which is common in Hopkins; here it represents an interrupting cry.

The poem has moved from a hortatory subjunctive (“let me more pity”) to an insistent imperative. The neat line breaks of the first stanza have broken down as most lines are now enjambed. (This trend continues to the point that a later line begins with an apostrophe-S.)

The strategy has changed, too. At the start, the narrator had wished that his self would be kinder to itself. Taken as an instruction, this failed, just as you can’t tell a blind person to try harder to see. Now the narrator “advises” not trying to change. “Call off thoughts awhile,” and maybe comfort will begin to grow like a root left alone with room. (Also, a root-room sounds like a place of comfort, a quiet cellar in which to borrow.)

The final stanza begins, “At God knows when to God knows what.” This sounds like an idiom for ignorance–“God knows what” can mean “I have no idea.” I think the phrase is meant to land like that, representing the mental state of a despondent person. But we gradually realize that Hopkins is serious about God. The divine smile is not “wrung.” We can’t squeeze grace out of damp material after a rain. Instead, it just breaks out as sunshine between mountains, dappled like a cow.

Here the grammatical mood is indicative. In the phrase, “skies betweenpie mountains,” “betweenpie” is a verb of Hopkins’ invention. The subject of this verb is “the skies,” but behind them is the divine subject that makes them look pied, or dappled, or stippled.

The mile ahead is lovely, not because we have made ourselves happy but by sheer grace.

See also: for Gerard Manley Hopkins; Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall; gratitude and the sublime; Pied Beauty, illustrated; tangled beauty; when you know, but cannot feel, beauty

the Gulf War and the energy transition

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Whether the current war in the Persian Gulf will push the world away from carbon depends on many factors, including the trajectory of the war and the policy responses of many countries. David Wallace-Wells offers a roundup of recent news, which generally paints an optimistic picture about the rapid recent shift to renewables. I’d also note that Ukraine has developed the capacity to hit Russian oil infrastructure at long range, which could take another batch of oil off the world market.

Meanwhile, it’s worth taking stock of the energy transition so far. I don’t think the basic patterns are well known. Here I will make some observations based on two datasets that have limitations:

  • The World Bank presents data on carbon use from 2022, which is now significantly dated. However, it covers almost all countries.
  • The Energy Institute has data through 2024 but only for 75 countries, omitting most of the Global South.

The World Bank’s 2022 data show that the countries that used the highest proportions of renewables were very poor, such as the DRC at 96.3% and Somalia at 95.4%. All of Sub-Saharan Africa used 70.3% renewables, and all of the world’s low-income countries used 69.2%–compared to 10.9% in the USA. (The Energy Institute puts the US share even lower, at 7.2%.)

Poor countries use too little total energy per capita, but their people cannot afford to import oil, and the energy that they do use is mostly renewable. I presume that as the price of oil rises and the cost of solar panels and electric vehicles continues to fall, many poor countries will move almost entirely off oil. Tankers will virtually stop visiting them.

Rich countries will continue to have the option to buy oil and gas. As shown in the graph above this post, the relationship between a country’s wealth and its dependence on carbon energy was strong and monotonic in 2022, although the countries with the very lowest proportions of renewables were mostly petro-states. Bahrain and Qatar were at zero renewables, and Iran was at 0.9%. The Russian Federation got 2.6% of its energy from renewables, mostly hydroelectrics.

For 2024, I show the per capita income (from the IMF) and the share of renewable energy (from the Energy Institute) for each of 75 countries in 2024. The OECD countries–which are wealthier–are shown with x’s. Some outliers are labeled.

For this smaller set of more affluent countries, dependence on carbon is weakly related to income, and other factors evidently matter more. The highest performing wealthy countries are in Scandinavia, where policy and nature (mainly hydroelectrics) help.

The best performing large market is Brazil, at 35% renewables. Brazil is classified as upper-middle-income but has no oil and lots of hydropower (55% of the energy that it generates instead of importing). The USA is below the regression line.

In the Energy Institute data, the countries that had achieved the best improvements in carbon intensity by 2024 were Bulgaria and Chile. (Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon used to generate a unit of energy.)

I suppose the conclusion is that poor countries will virtually stop using oil, and petro-states will probably keep using it. Those with abundant hydropower will be more likely to wean off oil. The USA is a bit of a petro-state but also a dynamic and diversified economy, so we could go either way.