Marx predicted that capitalism would destroy every remnant of feudalism. It would tear asunder “the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’”, in the words of “The Communist Manifesto”. It would drown ecstasies of religious fervour and chivalric enthusiasm in the “icy water of egotistical calculation”. And it would subject every national institution to the revolutionary logic of the global market.

So far the British monarchy, one of the last vestiges of the country’s feudal system, has proved a splendid refutation of Marxism. The Crown has survived both the high-noon of Victorian capitalism and the revival of market orthodoxy after 1979. In “The English Constitution”, Walter Bagehot explained why: far from undermining capitalism, the monarchy, in its British form, reinforced it, acting as glue in a society divided into antagonistic classes and distracting the masses from the real sources of power. It injected pageantry, romance, mystery and drama into the lives of British people, mitigating the dreary business of being a cog in the wheels of capitalism.

But the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may be about to prove Marx right. They represent the most profound danger to the monarchy’s settlement with modernity since Bagehot wielded his pen. Previous threats have been mere individuals—Edward viii, Princess Diana and, most recently, Prince Andrew. The current one is an entire economic system. In stepping down as “senior royals” while pronouncing that they “value the freedom to make a professional income” the Duke and Duchess threaten to unleash the spirit of capitalism on the very core of the monarchy.

This is not the first time the Windsors have experimented with capitalism. Princess Diana referred to the royal family as “the firm” because it was so businesslike in its approach to monarchy. Prince Charles sells over £200m ($260m) a year worth of organic food under his Duchy brand. But until now the firm has treated capitalism as a servant of feudalism. Prince Charles gives the profits from his Duchy brand to charity, and misses no opportunity to preach the superior values of the “old world” to this venal age, denouncing intensive farming methods and modern architecture, while telling off business people for putting profit before principle.

The Sussexes are doing something new. They are embracing capitalism in its rawest, most modern form: global rather than national, virtual rather than solid, driven, by its ineluctable logic, constantly to produce new fads and fashions.

This type of capitalism is the inverse of feudalism. In a feudal society you are bound to your followers by mutual bonds of obligation. In 21st-century capitalism you accumulate followers in order to monetise them. In a feudal society you are bound to plots of land: Harry is the Duke of Sussex while his elder brother is the Duke of Cambridge. In a 21st-century-capitalist society you are propelled around the world in pursuit of the latest marketing opportunity. It is only fitting that the principal agent of the current debacle, Meghan Markle, is the product of an entertainment business that has done more than any other industry to fulfil Marx’s prediction that “all that is sacred” would be “profaned” and “all that is solid” would “melt into air”.

The Sussexes are determined to turn themselves into a global brand. Their first move after they announced that they were stepping down from many of their royal duties was to unveil the name of their brand, Sussex Royal, which sounds a bit like a potato but will soon start to glitter with Hollywood stardust. They started working on their new website in September, according to coding logs, and trademarked the Sussex Royal logo, for use on hundreds of items ranging from socks to counselling services, in December. They have hired a branding agency called Article whose clients include the children’s channel Nickelodeon, the fashion house Diane von Furstenberg and the Toronto Maple Leafs ice-hockey team. They are exploring the possibilities of forging a relationship with Disney, an entertainment company that knows a thing or two about monetising princes and princesses.

Various branding experts have pronounced that Harry and Meghan have “a ready-made brand” that could earn them as much as £500m in their first year. InfluencerMarketingHub, a website, points out that, with 10m Instagram followers, they could expect $34,000 for a sponsored post. semrush, a Boston-based marketing analytics firm, says that Ms Markle’s “search volume” is nearly three times Beyoncé’s.

Already Harry and Meghan are rewriting the rules of royalty, so that they can behave as celebrities rather than as public servants. They are planning to abandon the system of royal reporting, whereby royals put up with journalists chosen by the papers, who share their material with the rest of the press. Harry and Meghan intend to back out of that, in favour of choosing their preferred media toadies—though since it appears that they want to continue to receive money from Prince Charles, the older generation has a certain amount of leverage. Negotiations are under way. The Palace held a “crisis summit” on January 13th to try to work out a peace treaty between the Crown and the Sussexes. Ms Markle, who is in Canada, did not attend, leaving Harry to defend the Sussexes’ corner against his grandmother, father and brother.

Branding experts purr that Harry and Meghan have an interest in preserving the integrity of their brand. But the logic of 21st-century capitalism is against a peaceful settlement. They will need more than Prince Harry’s inheritance, which is estimated at £20m-30m, to keep up with the global super-rich. Ensuring that their brand remains hot and providing their “distribution channels” with “content” will require them to extract more and more value from the monarchy—perhaps including revelations about racism and sexism at the heart of the royal family. The daylight that Walter Bagehot said should not be let in upon the magic of monarchy is as nothing to the glare of 21st-century capitalism.

The Economist

Research shows your significant other makes a huge impact on your financial success. (And so can your business partner.)

Money certainly isn't everything. Money isn't anywhere close to the top of the list of things that contribute to happiness.

But still: Achieving a degree of financial freedom, and the peace of mind that comes with it, is important.

How? Your mindset plays a huge role. Developing greater determination, willpower, and grit -- because those qualities can be developed -- can be key.

And so can marriage.

According to a 2005 longitudinal study published in Journal of Sociology, married people experience 77 percent higher per-person net worth increases than single people. Because that's per person, 1 plus 1 can actually equal a lot more than 2.

Oddly enough, people in the study who eventually divorced saw their start wealth falling four years before they separated.

Which makes sense, both intuitively and science-backed. A 2014 Washington University in St. Louis study found that people with relatively prudent and reliable partners tend to perform better at work: Earning more promotions, making more money, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.

"Partner conscientiousness" predicted future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion (even after factoring in the participants' level of conscientiousness).

According to the researchers, "conscientious" partners perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, all of which enables their spouse to focus more on work. As one researcher said, "These results demonstrate that the dispositional characteristics of the person one marries influence important aspects of one's professional life."

In non-research-speak, a good partner not only sets a good example, he or she helps create an environment where you can be a better you.

But clearly not when when the relationship is crumbling, much less headed towards divorce.

All of which makes deciding who to marry -- and deciding to devote considerable time, effort, and thought into making that relationship work -- one of the most important decisions you can make where your overall happiness is concerned.

And, clearly, where you and your partner's financial success is concerned.

That premise extends to business. Many co-founders talk about their business partnership as a quasi-marriage, especially since most spend more time with their co-founder than they do with a spouse or significant other.

For one thing, good habits rub off.

For another, a natural division of labor might mean the person who is extremely organized can keep the business train running on time while the other focuses on longer-term strategies.

While in a perfect world both would share train-engineer duties so that both can spend more time doing what they do best, in many business partnerships, one person tends to spend more time working in the business while the other works on the business.

Think Jobs and Woz, a partnership that worked well until it didn't.

In that case, just like in a marriage, one plus one really can equal more than two.

Especially if you and the person you partner with never stop trying to be thoughtful, considerate, and mutually-supportive.

Because getting married -- or becoming business partners -- is just the first step.

What you do from that day forward is what really matters.

Inc

For those who haven’t taken time to carefully study the zigzag of Pastor Tunde Bakare’s political grandstanding, they would be taken aback by his encomium on ex-governor Bola Tinubu who is pursuing the office president of Nigeria Bakare himself has been self-prophesying to occupy in 2023. The seeming inconsistency of Bakare is actually a long thread of consistency in self-promotion and positioning. I’ll explain.

A few days ago, right from the pulpit of his Church, Bakare poured encomium on Tinubu, while viciously attacking those who raised issue with the dubious place-of-birth background of the former Lagos governor who has singlehandedly installed successive governors of the state since he completed his own two terms in 2007. Bakare went ahead to justify the pillage of the resources of Lagos state through so-called tax consultancy as “merely exploiting a loophole in the system”. Despite knowing how duplicitous he’s been, I shuddered at the unconscionable justification of banditry by a supposed Christian leader spewing such out right from the sacred pulpit of God. Even Satan would be a lot more subtle in his justification of such evil as the monumental pillage that has been going on in Lagos for 21 years.

But those who were genuinely shocked by Bakare’s glorification of Tinubu in his sermon a few days ago were so because they hadn’t forgotten what the same Bakare said of the same lord of Bourdillon barely a year earlier. Read him: “The foolish person would no longer be called generous. You can say ‘so so and so’ has stolen all the money in the state, but he is a very generous man, you are foolish.

“That’s why potholes are killing you, that’s what pools of water… you can’t drive now anymore because what is meant for road has been stolen since democracy began, they are living larger than life having jets here, having jets there, having house in Bourdillon, having house in this place, having house in that place, having house in every place at the expense of the public.

“You will not go without vomiting what you have stolen. Wait, and see. Because a king will reign in righteousness and princes will rule with justice. Unfortunately, Nigeria(n) people, you celebrate your villains and crucify your heroes.”

The villain Bakare rightly vilified in October 2019, he’s celebrating in December 2020. What changed, you would ask?

Nothing has changed. The villain is still a villain. The looting of the commonwealth of Lagos hasn’t abated. What has changed is the political calculation of the man of vision who must occupy Aso Rock by all means in 2023. He’s lobbying seriously that the APC presidential ticket be handed to him on the platter of gold by the cattle chief he deputized for three elections back. Part of the calculation is for him, by cant and flattery, to neutralize the powerful opposition of the Bourdillon lion who is also desperate for the same ticket. The advise from the Cabal is for the pastor to go make peace with the lion so that the latter will not actively work against him from the home front. That’s the mandate. Simple.

It is a measure of the low esteem that someone like Bakare has for the Nigerian public that he would think that people won’t see through shenanigans as this. But he should have known that Nigerians are not so dumb as to not see through his hypocrisy and duplicity. How possible is it not to know the Bakare that mobilized against subsidy removal in 2012 only to keep mute about its removal in 2020, and later actually later came out to justify it? Or that people can’t see the staggering hypocrisy of the Bakare that condemned Pastor Adeboye for building a N3 billion auditorium only for him to erect one for N12 billion that he pompously christened The Citadel? How about his many failed prophecies against then President-elect Olusegun Obasanjo that he swore God told him would never be sworn in as president in 1999? And then his many prophecies about a Nigerian saviour who would come from Adamawa in 2007? He described the fellow as “a gentle shoot” that would put Nigeria right. All that, of course, before he started prophesying about himself as the anointed of God for the Aso Rock seat.

Now, even if God told a man what he would do with him and for him, just a little knowledge of the Bible that Bakare carries about should instruct that self-help thwarts God’s agenda. Despite all the prophetic misses of Bakare on the political trajectory of Nigeria, I still won’t commit the error of saying definitively that God couldn’t have spoken to him along the line he’s claiming. But one thing I’m sure of as a Christian is that God isn’t the author of confusion. God doesn’t approbate and reprobate at the same time. The supposed God’s servant who condemned someone just yesterday and is praising that same fellow the day after couldn’t have been driven by the Holy Spirit of God.

The Spirit of God brooks not the kind of desperation that would make a Christian Minister sell out the Body of Christ as Bakare did in 2015 and 2019 and as he’s trying to do his Yoruba race for the prize of 2023. By their fruit you’ll know them, so says the Master Himself.

My counsel to this my brother-in-Christ is that he should relax and let God work out His purpose in his life and for Nigeria. The disposition to self-promote, defile the pulpit of God for inordinate ambition, lick the arse of a failed man of power, and consistently play on public intelligence are neither edifying nor promotive of God’s purpose. All the ongoing schemings of the power mongers will soon be revealed to be exactly as the counsel of Ahitophel. Bro, calm down; please calm down!

* Kawonise, former Commissioner for Information, Ogun State, is publisher/Editor-in-Chief, NewsScroll newspaper.

A few days ago, the United Kingdom announced a new variant of Coronavirus. This variant reportedly spreads at least 70 percent faster, though not necessarily deadlier. To curb the rapid spread of this new strain, tagged B.1.1.7, the UK government has tightened its lockdown of much the country.

Outside of the UK, more than 40 countries around the world have banned flights and other transportation links from and to UK. Along this line, federal government of Nigeria, out of abundance of caution, is also considering banning flights from the UK. But does the Nigerian government need to do that?

When the government opened Nigeria’s airspace for inbound and outbound flights, it stipulated that all inbound passengers must show documentary evidence of negative Covid-19 status. The laboratory test for the Coronavirus must not be earlier than 72 hours before the passenger’s flight into the country. In addition to this, all new arrivals must self-isolate for 7 days and conduct a follow-up Covid test immediately after. This mandatory test is actually pre-paid for by all inbound passengers.

From the data released by the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19, only about 10 percent of new infections comes from international passengers into Nigeria. The remaining 90 percent of infection source was attributed to community spread. It is noteworthy that the 10 percent linked to inbound passengers covers scores of international flights out of which flights from the UK are a fraction.

Given this statistic from the PTF, it stands to reason that Nigeria does not face imminent danger if the authorities continue to allow flights from the UK. The key issue is for the government to continue to be uncompromising on extant protocols for all inbound passengers.

Incidentally, the protocols established by the Nigerian government are precisely what leading international airlines (such British Airways, Virgins, etc) with UK as hub, have adopted in carrying passengers across the Atlantic. Two days ago, British Airways announced that all its passengers to New York in the United States must test negative to Covid-19. That’s precisely what the Nigerian authorities have insisted on since September 5. And that’s what makes sense in the present circumstance.

To strengthen existing protocols, we recommend that NCDC shoud insist that airlines must demand fit-to-fly certificates from test centres approved by authorities of originating countries. It should also mandate that tests must be only in-person and administered by a medical personnel (not mail-in test kits). The federal government may consider increasing the penalty for airlines which violate these requirements for inbound passengers flying on them.

We need to note that since land borders have been opened, it’ll be difficult to totally keep out passengers from the UK who could fly into neighboring countries and thereafter cross the borders into the country. It is certainly not logical to single out air travel as the only source of international transmission. Rather, one major advantage of air traffic is that it is easier to monitor and manage.

It’s gratifying that President Muhammadu Buhari himself said, on at least two occasions recently, that Nigeria cannot afford another lockdown that will further depress the economy that is currently in recession. The movement to and fro the UK carries with it significant economic transactions that benefit both countries. In 2019 alone, trade between Nigeria and the UK was about £5.1 billion (N2.55 trillion). Banning flights to and from UK will certainly affect this economic flow. As we know, travels are a key enabler of international trade.

It is also known that a lot foreign currencies flow into the country from Nigerians residing overseas who come home for Christmas and New Year holidays. Parallel market rates for the Naira often appreciate significantly at the year end season. This benefit will of course elude the economy generally and Nigerians specifically who get financial boosts from this end of year diasporan visits, mostly from our compatriots in the UK.

On both epidemiological and economic grounds, it is both safe and expedient that Nigeria keeps its airspace open to UK travels.

• Laoshe, is former Member and Deputy Whip (AD) of the House of Representatives, National Assembly; while Kawonise, former Commissioner for Information, Ogun State, is publisher/Editor-in-Chief, NewsScroll newspaper.

Jamie Bartlett

Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century

If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh’s rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.

We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can’t. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.

Which is all rather odd, since they’re not really that old. Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. Revolutions – especially in the United States (1776) and France (1789) – helped to create the idea of a commonly defined ‘national interest’, while improved communications unified language, culture and identity. Imperialistic expansion spread the nation-state model worldwide, and by the middle of the 20th century it was the only game in town. There are now 193 nation-states ruling the world.

But the nation-state with its borders, centralised governments, common people and sovereign authority is increasingly out of step with the world. And as Karl Marx observed, if you change the dominant mode of production that underpins a society, the social and political structure will change too.

The case against the nation-state is hardly new. Twenty years ago, many were prophesising its imminent demise. Globalisation, said the futurists, was chipping away at nation-states’ power to enforce change. Businesses, finance and people could up sticks and leave. The exciting, new internet seemed to herald a borderless, free, identity-less future. And climate change, internet governance and international crime all seemed beyond the nation-state’s abilities. It seemed too small to handle international challenges; and too lumbering to tinker with local problems. Voters were quick to spot all this and stopped bothering to vote, making matters worse. In 1995, two books both titled The End of the Nation State – one by the former French diplomat Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the other by the Japanese organisational theorist Kenichi Ohmae – prophesised that power would head up to multinational bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations, or down to regions and cities.

Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at the turn of the millennium. But now it’s back, and this time it might be right.

There were only tens of millions of people online in 1995 when the nation-state was last declared dead. In 2015, that number had grown to around 3 billion; in 2020, it’s already more than 4 billion. (And more than 20 billion internet-connected devices.) Digital technology doesn’t really like the nation-state. John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) sums it up well: the internet is a technology built on libertarian principles. Censorship-free, decentralised and borderless. And now ubiquitous.

This is an enormous pain for the nation-state in all sorts of ways. It’s now possible for the British National Health Service to be targeted by ransomware launched in North Korea, and there are few ways to stop it or bring perpetrators to justice. App technology such as Uber and Deliveroo has helped to produce a sudden surge in the gig economy, which is reckoned to cost the government £3.5 billion a year by 2020-1. There are already millions of people using bitcoin and blockchain technologies, explicitly designed to wrestle control of the money supply from central banks and governments, and their number will continue to grow. It’s also infusing us with new values, ones that are not always national in nature: a growing number of people see themselves as ‘global’ citizens.

If a nation cannot defend its border, it ceases to exist in any meaningful way.

That’s not even the worst of it. On 17 September 2016, the then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted: ‘A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We WILL Make America Safe Again!’ The outcry obscured the fact that Trump was right (in the first half, anyway). Borders determine who’s in and who’s out, who’s a citizen and who’s not, who puts in and who takes from the common pot. If a nation cannot defend its border, it ceases to exist in any meaningful way, both as a going concern and as the agreed-upon myth that it is.

Trump’s tweet was set against the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s offer, one year earlier, of asylum for Syrians. The subsequent movement of people across Europe – EU member states received 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2015 – sparked a political and humanitarian crisis, the ramifications of which are still unfolding. It certainly contributed to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. But 1.2 million people is a trickle compared to what’s coming. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and notoriously broad, but according to some estimates as many as 200 million people could be climate-change refugees by the middle of the century. If the EU struggles to control its borders when 1.2 million people move, what would happen if 200 million do? The lesson of history – real, long-lens human history – is that people move, and when they do, it’s hard to stop.

This is the crux of the problem: nation-states rely on control. If they can’t control information, crime, businesses, borders or the money supply, then they will cease to deliver what citizens demand of them. In the end, nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: we give up certain freedoms in order to secure others. But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us.

So what might replace it?

The city-state increasingly looks like the best contender. These are cities with the same independent sovereign authority as nations, places such as Monaco or Singapore. The city-state has recently been feted by Forbes magazine (‘A New Era For The City-State?’ 2010), Quartz (‘Nations Are No Longer Driving Globalisation – Cities Are’, 2013), The Boston Globe (‘The City-State Returns’, 2015) and the Gates Foundation-funded How We Get to Next (‘The Rebirth of the City-State’, 2016).

The trends that are pinching the nation-state are helping the city-state. In a highly connected, quasi-borderless world, cities are centres of commerce, growth, innovation, technology and finance. According to Bruce Katz, Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and co-author (with Jeremy Nowak) of the forthcoming book The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, the hub-like quality of large cities is especially valuable in the modern economy: ‘Innovation happens because of collaboration, and that needs proximity. You need a dense eco-system, and so hyper-connectivity is reinforcing concentration.’ Cities also have demographic weight on their side: for the first time in history, in 2014 the majority of humans live in cities.

‘Power in the 21st century belongs to the problem-solvers. National governments debate and dither. Cities act, cities do’

This is giving cities more political muscle than ever, which they are increasingly keen to flex. On the issue of climate change, for example – something at which nation-states have failed abysmally – cities are pushing ahead. Since 2006, the C40 initiative has brought together more than 60 cities to promote partnerships and technology to reduce carbon emissions, often going significantly beyond international agreements. In the US, where the federal government appears to have given up on climate change, leadership has fallen to cities.

This shift in power is visible in the way that the mayors of major cities are political heavyweights in their own right: think of Bill de Blasio in New York, Sadiq Khan in London, Virginia Raggi in Rome, Ada Colau in Barcelona. Cities as diverse as Indianapolis and Copenhagen are experimenting with ways of using their own physical, economic and social assets to self-finance city-level investment.

According to Katz, the world is moving beyond a nation-state world. ‘We’re entering a period where cities have new kinds of power. They have enormous chances to leverage their economic and financial advantages to augment their position and effect change,’ he told me. I’m used to thinking about power in binary terms: you either have it or you don’t. But according to Katz, we need to re-think because there is something in between, where cities are not fully independent of their nation-states, but not supplicant to them either: ‘Cities are not subordinate to nation-states, they are powerful networks of institutions and actors that co-produce the economy. Power in the 21st century belongs to the problem-solvers. National governments debate and mostly dither. Cities act, cities do. Power increasingly comes from the cities up, not handed down from the nation-state.’

For a very long time, power was always found at the city-level. For thousands of years, urban settlements with self-government and city walls provided protection, services in exchange for tithes and taxes, and a set of rules by which to live and trade.

The Hanseatic cities for example – with their own armies and laws – pooled their economic weight to improve their bargaining power with other nations in the early 13th century, and became an economic powerhouse in the Baltic trade route. These cities – which included Bremen and Hamburg – realised they shared much in common, and that their mutual interests might be best served by working together. As today’s centres of urban global capitalism, major cities are more similar to each other than the provinces of their own nation-states. They are all hubs of finance, tech innovation, culture, and characterised by high levels of diversity and inward migration. While the UK voted to leave the EU 52/48, London voted to remain 60/40. (Following this vote, there was a short-lived movement for London to declare independence from the rest of the UK.) London, as is often remarked by visitors, is nothing like the rest of the country. The same can certainly be said of the US east- and west-coast behemoths.

Fleeting around from one city to the next, as I sometimes do, feels more Hanseatic League than League of Nations: a system of powerful, trading, networked cities. And the Hanseatic League itself was hardly an oddity. Before that there was Venice of course, and that was merely the most well-known of many independent city-states dotted across what is now Italy in the 10th to 16th centuries, including Florence, Bologna and Turin. But even this is ‘recent’ in the lifetime of the ancient city-state, which reaches back to Jerusalem, before that Athens, before that Babylon, and all the way back to Ur. Only a few formal city-states still exist today (Monaco, Singapore and the Vatican are the completely sovereign city-states; others, such as Hong Kong, act like one but do not have full sovereignty). It is in fact a historical anomaly that so few of us live in city-states.

Clearly, nation-states won’t go down tamely. Carving out a new form of sovereign authority from an existing one is extremely difficult, and is generally frowned upon by the UN. There’s a more prosaic reason too. In 2015, 2.1 million residents of Venice in Italy (89 per cent of those who voted) voted for independence in a non-binding referendum. Residents were annoyed that the city pays $20 billion more in tax than it gets back. But Italy will certainly not let Venice and its $20 billion tax go easily.

This is why some of the more exciting endeavours are about creating new cities entirely. Paul Romer, the chief economist at the World Bank, has long been an advocate of creating more chartered cities, essentially city-scale administrative zones that operate, to some extent, independently. Cities are the right size, he argues. Large enough to try something new, but not too big that all your eggs are in one basket. ‘A rule to create new rules,’ Romer said in a TED talk on the subject in 2009. A chartered city, built on uninhabited land would allow experimentation with new rules and systems to attract investment and people. His particular idea is for nations to work together, like China and the UK over Hong Kong. (Special Economic Zones, which have been around for several years, are similar: essentially geographic areas that are physically secure, and operate different economic laws to the host country, usually to encourage foreign direct investment.)

But even this is not easy, since it would require other countries leasing land, which wouldn’t even be full autonomy. There are some models, though, that don’t even need that.

Out on the swampy Croatian-Serbian border lies the 7 square kilometres of Gornja Siga. Although currently under Croatian control, this small patch of land is technically unclaimed since Croatia and Serbia both believe it belongs to the other. Due to its unusual legal status – terra nullius – this is where Vít Jedlicka, a 32-year-old libertarian from the Czech Republic, is at work trying to create a libertarian city-sized paradise of freedom, trade and prosperity called ‘Liberland’.

Liberland, which is uninhabited but has more than 100,000 online citizens ready to move if Croatia stops blocking inward access, already has the trappings of a city-state. A currency, a constitution, a president and even a football team. Everything has been designed to maximise individual liberty. For a start, anyone can join and leave as they wish. It would be the first state in the world where nothing would be compulsory, where you can do whatever the hell you like, as long as it doesn’t physically harm someone else. ‘It’s a tax heaven, not a tax haven,’ Jedlicka told me recently when I interviewed him for my book Radicals Chasing Utopia (2017). Schools, hospitals, pensions, roads, sewage works, rubbish collection and the rest will be provided by the market, if people decide that’s what they want and stump up the money.

Like most libertarians, Jedlicka loves modern digital technology, seeing it as extremely helpful to the libertarian cause, weakening the nation-states and helping new models such as his. It might seem like a pipe-dream – no other country has recognised this patch of swampland – were it not for the fact that several influential Silicon Valley-type investors share Jedlicka’s libertarian outlook, and are donating to his cause. ‘A completely novel situation,’ wrote the esteemed Chicago Journal of International Law in a detailed examination of Liberland in July 2016, suggesting it had ‘a shot’ at statehood.

In a world of seasteads, if you don’t like your system of government, simply sail off to another one you do like

The problem for Liberland is that the Croatian police could roll in any time they want, which is precisely what they did when I tried to reach the land while writing my book. This is why, as the American libertarian activist Patri Friedman told me recently when we met in Silicon Valley, the next new cities won’t be built on land at all. They will be floating in international waters, beyond the reach of the nation-state and its armies.

In 2008, Patri founded the Seasteading Institute, armed with half a million dollars donated by Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire who co-founded PayPal, and a plan to build island cities at sea in an experiment with how to live. ‘[Seasteading] is the market for countries,’ he told me. ‘You can only get so far patching and hacking the old system.’ And in a flourish worthy of his grandfather Milton, he told me that: ‘When you don’t have a start-up sector, existing countries suck … they give you crappy services and no change. You need a start-up sector to threaten them.’ In a world of seasteads, if you don’t like your system of government, it’s simply a matter of sailing off to another one you do like. Just as easy as switching series on Netflix, ordering an Uber, or meeting someone new on Tinder.

Patri thinks every seastead will be different and this will create a market in different types of systems of living that will force everyone to improve performance. Especially if the nation-state starts to crumble. (‘We don’t care if sea levels rise,’ he told me.)

Once again, technology is key: Patri is taking the Silicon Valley mindset and applying it to the nation-state. There are all these things you could now do that didn’t exist when our current system of government was invented, he told me. Constant online direct-democracy voting, building smart-cities, using crypto-currencies. And yet we still use a 19th-century model.

Google ‘Seastead’ and you’ll find fantastical designs of floating metropolises, fantasy worlds designed on laptops. It’s a pipe-dream. Even the Seasteading Institute’s modest target of 150 seasteaders by 2015 was missed.

And yet. This year, Patri together with his institute’s communications director Joe Quirk released an exhaustive book on seasteading, and signed a memorandum of understanding with French Polynesia to create the first semi-autonomous seazone in shallow waters off their coast for the first prototype city at sea. Patri told me that they’re starting to build very soon, and within a couple of years expect to have a few hundred people living on this floating metropolis just off the coast of Tahiti. I asked him if that was a realistic prospect. Of course! he replied. Look at the property prices in San Francisco. If you could live in a completely new country for less, lots of people would. He told me that he has a waiting list ‘of thousands’, and plenty of backers – mostly technology entrepreneurs – who see it as an investment opportunity. ‘These are people who look at a broken system and say: “What if we designed something better?”’

Nation-states are unlikely to collapse overnight. There are no barbarians at the gate. Even Rome did not collapse in a day. But it evolved during a time of industrialisation, centralised ‘command and control’ bureaucracies and national loyalty. Modern technology tends in the opposite direction: it’s distributed, decentralised and uncontrollable. If our political arrangements are a mirror of the modes of production and assumptions of the time, the future doesn’t look rosy for this 19th-century relic. It looks far brighter for the modern, connected, agile city, whether that’s on land, on borders, or out in the ocean. And anyway: doesn’t it pay to have some experiments going on, just in case?

Aeon

At the 22nd teleconference meeting of Nigerian Governors Forum, the 36 states governor took a decision to borrow N2 trillion out of the total N11.34 trillion cumulative balance in the account of National Pension Fund (NPF). This represents a whooping 17.6 percent of what workers in public and private sectors of the Nigerian economy have saved for more a decade to sustain themselves after retirement. The stated purpose for this and N15 trillion additional borrowing from other sources is for “infrastructural development” in states.

There isn’t any doubt that all the states in Nigeria have huge infrastructure deficits. Very few roads are passable everywhere in Nigeria, except in Abuja metropolis. Pipe-borne water reaches less than 5 percent of the people in the best of the 36 states. Health facilities are as few as they are poor. The vast majority of Nigerians are outside of the national electricity grid, with those served living more in darkness than in the light of the staccato of power supply. Given this huge infrastructure gap, any talk of looking for funds to bridge it is more like saying the obvious.

But the reality of poor and decayed infrastructure in the states is mostly due to the corruption and incompetence of political authorities administering the states than lack of funds. Not only do the governors, down the line to the least political office holders and the bureaucrats steal the money, they have proven grossly incompetent in managing and maintaining infrastructural projects inherited or even executed by themselves. Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo state on September 5, 2019 via his verified Twitter handle, in an obvious reference to the administration that preceded his, stated as follows: “What we met on ground is a situation where a project for which money is allocated, gets only about 10% of the total funds for execution. Because as we were told, 50% goes back to the Governor, 30% to the appointee who allocated the project out of which 10% goes to the Governor’s wife.”

The grave allegation above by a sitting governor merely echoed what everyone knows about the pillage that is going on in Nigeria. Where government projects get value at all, they rarely get more than 10 percent of real market value. This general practice in present day Nigeria is an inversion of First Republic corruption of pocketing 10 percent of project cost while 90 percent went on the actual project, according to the allegations levied against politicians of that era by the military putschists. Now it is 90 percent in the politicians’ pockets, 10 percent on the project. This is the reality against which we must see the plan by governors to borrow from the Pension Fund and other sources. This issue of corruption is perhaps the most compelling reason why the filthy fingers of the governors must not be allowed in the workers’ pension savings.

Second, the competence level among state governors is so low that none of them has demonstrated even a modest capacity to invest in infrastructural projects that can pay for themselves, self-sustain and pay long term dividends to their states. Just to increase their internally generated revenues in any substantial manner has proven to be rocket science to these state CEOs who are satiated with the handouts from Abuja.

Third, the Pension Act of 2004 and the Pension Reformation Act of 2014 prohibit borrowing from the pension funds. Besides the the illegality of it, it is absolutely immoral for the governors who fail to remit pension deductions of their workers to seek to borrow from the funds contributed by others, mostly by private sector and federal government workers. In some states, the pension deficit is as much as 12 years backlog.

Fourth, not less than 30 out of the 36 states have found it burdensome to pay back the loan given by the federal government between 2016 and 2018 to support them in paying backlog of workers salaries in their different states. This is so even after the facility was rescheduled for repayment for over a period of 30 years. Several representations have been made to the federal government by the governors requesting suspension of the monthly loan deductions. Those who can’t pay back a combined facility of less than N700billion are the very ones requesting for a loan of N17 trillion!

Fifth, and related to fourth above, is the question of what happens to the pension benefits of workers if the states become bankrupt and unable to pay back the loan. Except for three or four states, about 80 percent of states’ revenue comes from statutory monthly allocations from Abuja, much of which comes from oil revenue. We all know what is happening to oil internationally and how it has become less reliable as a guaranteed income. Even in jurisdictions like the United States where sub-national governments get most of their revenues from taxes, public entities have been known to go burst. According to one report, “In 2016, more than 60 cities in the US did not have enough money to pay all of their bills, racking up a grand total of $335.4 billion in unfunded municipal debt ...” (See link: https://www.lovemoney.com/galleries/91578/us-cities-that-went-bankrupt). If gold rusts, what will happen to iron, as the saying goes? It gives little comfort to say that the loan will be secured by the federal government of even the Central Bank of Nigeria. Signing Irrevocable Standing Payment Order with the Federal Ministry of Finance by which loan liabilities are deducted at source from federal allocations answers none of the queries raised herein.

It is our belief that much can be done by way of bridging the infrastructure deficits in states if the governors and other political authorities would drastically lessen corruption, improve transparency in the financial processes of their states, be more creative in the drive for IGR, and look more in the direction of projects that are both socially beneficial and economically viable. There’s a lot of potentials in the creative use of Public Private Partnership. Borrowing and increasing the debt burden is the line of least resistance. In the instance to borrow from the hard savings of poor workers in Nigeria, the plan should not be supported by the federal government and the workers who own the money should vehemently resist the illegal and immoral move.

• Laoshe, is former Member and Deputy Whip (AD) of the House of Representatives, National Assembly; while Kawonise, former Commissioner for Information, Ogun State, is publisher/Editor-in-Chief, NewsScroll newspaper.

Thirty five years after the late Dele Giwa lamented that Nigerians have been shocked into a state of “unshockability”, we must now wonder whether the limits we thought were the limits then were really the limits.

Nobody ever imagined that what we are witnessing was possible in the history of modern Nigeria. The shock absorbers have finally come off the vehicle.

It is surely going to be a noisy and bumpy ride to wherever.

But as scary as this may appear, it should be the least of our problems. Neither is the fact that even the authorities appear to be so enfeebled and disoriented by the monumental mess that registering a minimal protest at the utter devastation of our post-independence of hopes is too much of a concession.

Never in the history of this country has so much in your face stealing and looting of state resources meant for the amelioration of the piteous condition of the populace accompanied by such impudence, such impunity and such psychotic grandstanding.

If anybody had thought that because of the history of suffering and degradation of the landscape the Niger Delta elite segment would be different from the national elite group of which it is a mere sub-national formation, it is now obvious that such a person has been living in a fools’ paradise. No straight furniture can be procured from crooked timber.

Despite all the noise, the huffing and puffing in the creeks and the armed critique of the Nigerian post-colonial state, it is now clear that the Niger Delta sub-elite formation takes its character, inspiration and ideological outlook from the national elite formation.

Nigeria is hostage to different elite groups sworn to extractive predation who merely resent the hegemonic group that has captured power at the centre through superior wiles.

Consequently, the Nigeria political and economic jungle plays host to a posse of predatory elite hunting squads bent on imposing a radical kleptocracy on the nation with the attendant rubbishing of all institutions standing in the way.

This relentless onslaught on all institutions of the modern nation-state is the surest route to modern savagery and a stark regression to the Stone Age of human infancy.

Unlike panic buying which can occur in even the most advanced societies as a result of actual or imagined scarcity, panic stealing is attributable to congenital greed arising from a primitive psychosis which is a throwback to the hunter-gatherer stage of human existence where nothing could be taken for granted and where the next meal could not be guaranteed.

In the ensuing free for all stealing, anything and anybody is “game” in all the senses of the word.

The primitive hunter-gatherer of human antiquity was a victim of himself and of historical circumstances. Existing in the liminal zone between animal barbarity and the advent of true human civilization, his only notable achievement at that point in history was that he had exterminated rival hominids in competition with him for scarce resources while he had managed to subdue the bigger animals with his superior brains.

But hunting down animals and defending himself with his primitive tools even as he relied on the bounties of nature which sometimes played the spoiling mother, the urge to return to the pure state of nature often proved irresistible.

At least by so doing, he could free himself from all attempts to rein him in and force him to comply with evolving human institutions.

That we have to reach back to antiquity and the childhood of humankind to find a comparison with the tragedy of anomic free fall that is unfolding in Nigeria is an indication of just how dire the situation has become.

As we have seen with many modern nations that fell by the wayside, the utter destruction of a nation is normally preceded by the destruction of extant state institutions built with blood, sweat and tears.

It is profoundly ironic that a nation containing many nationalities that had created famous empires, notable kingdoms and remarkable traditional institutions on their way to a version of modernity should find themselves in the middle passage of a journey back to the Hobbesian state of nature. It is a consuming tragedy for Nigeria and the entire Black populace.

But it did not start yesterday. It has been a long haul. In order to get a sense of where we are and how we arrived at this dire strait, it is necessary to go back and pull out some memorable milestones and benchmarks on the journey to perdition.

It is almost fifty five years since that memorable morning when Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu famously proclaimed that Nigeria’s principal enemies were the ten-percenters: corrupt politicians who creamed off ten per-cent of every contract awarded.

The irate major, burning with patriotic but misguided indignation, went on to add with chilling resolve that he and his colleagues were ready to waste one percentage of Nigeria’s population in order to instil the fear of the Lord in the populace.

He could have been talking to himself. Exactly seventeen years after in the aftermath of a popular military coup that ousted the corrupt and profligate regime of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a London-based Nigerian magazine proclaimed in loud banners: The End of a Lootocracy. It was a summary decapitation of the misbegotten legacy of the NPN and its band of looters.

The irony of it all was that the coup was led by the current head of state, the then Major General Mohammadu Buhari who was to be ousted by his military colleagues a year and several months later.

So despondent and desolate had Nigerians become that the military had to reassure the populace that they would make sure that Nigerians were proud of their country once again.

But ten years later the military had exhausted its historic and political possibilities. After mismanaging the economy and its own advertised transition to democracy programme in what would be described as the greatest exercise in political chicanery ever visited on a people, the military were at that point in time regarded as the greatest obstacle to the economic development and political emancipation of the nation.

In what was described as an apt epitaph to misbegotten military messianism, a retiring Chief of Army staff, Ibrahim Salihu, widely regarded as one of the finest products of the Nigerian Army ever, publicly dismissed the military as “an army of anything goes”.

It was perhaps one of the most damning indictments ever slammed on an institution by one of its outstanding officers.

Twenty one year into post-military rule and fifty five years after Nzeogwu’s famous excoriation, Nigeria is in virtual institutional ruins, overtaken by the worst kind of state larceny imaginable and panic-stealing everywhere.

In retrospect and in contrast, the First Republic of the frugal and parsimonious Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, the fiscally prudent Obafemi Awolowo and the royally Spartan Ahmadu Bello seems like a faraway dreamland, a mesmerizing paradise.

The sordid revelations of the past fortnight are an eye-opener to how far we have travelled and how low we have sunken.

No arm or faction of the ruling class has been exempt from the corrosive rot, not even the so-called professoriate. It is said that the intellectual class is just a subordinated faction of the dominant faction.

Of the three professors that have held sway so far in NDDC and its OMPADEC predecessor, one has permanently absconded from justice hiding away in the creeks, another has only recently been disgraced and disrobed while the third has just fainted in full public glare. It doesn’t get more professorial than that.

In sixty years of post-independence existence, we have rubbished all the vital institutions, all the pillars of state integrity and all the principles of political and economic praxis that would have stood the nation in good stead in its march to authentic and organic nationhood. Now the nation is naked against the onslaught of hostile modernity.

To take only two examples, just think of all the vibrant banks that have been burgled out of existence as a result of panic stealing by Nigeria’s post-colonial elite in the sixty years after independence: Bank of the North, Africa Continental Bank, National Bank, Savannah Bank, Oceanic Bank, Intercontinental Bank etc. Even the People’s Bank was eventually destroyed by “people”. Rodents had not started swallowing money.

All the durable organs of the state have been decimated in an attempt by factions of the elite to secure the High Table at the state banquet of engorgement: the military, the judiciary, the legislature, the traditional institution and the bureaucracy.

This is not discounting the fate of numerous Nigerian heroes and avatars from all parts of the nation and all walks of life whose careers and life have been destroyed in the epic struggle against the rise of modern savagery.

In a moment of clairvoyant lucidity, Ibrahim Babangida once wondered aloud why the Nigerian economy had managed to survive despite the damnedest efforts of the political elite.

The same cry of wonderment should now be extended to Nigeria as a nation. It is a miracle that Nigeria is still limping on, like a shell-shocked survivor of the worst human atrocities imaginable.

But this legendary luck cannot continue forever. Events of the past fortnight suggest a nation that is at the end of its historic tether.

Many have ascribed the permanent rush on the treasury and the rise of panic stealing among Nigeria’s post-colonial elite to a declining loss of faith in the continuous viability of the nation as a single entity.

It is said by many who should know that the hegemonic faction of the ruling class, aware of its many infractions against the spirit of the nation, its serial injustice against the constituting nationalities and above all its murderous rapacity, has been stocking up against that inevitable day of judgement.

So are many factions of the dominated classes who are trying their best to bring the nation speedily to heel rather than prolonging its miseries.

The outlandish scale of theft and the sheer mindless heist that have taken place in the NDDC is said to be part of this strategy of saving and face saving for the anointed hour of dismemberment.

The whole sordid theatre is encapsulated in the Yoruba saying that what the bird eats is what the bird takes off with.

There are many others who have traced the nation’s fundamental problem and the phenomenon of panic stealing to the toxic pathologies released by the reality of being unequally yoked together, a situation in which nationalities at different stages of human development are boxed into the explosive ambit of a single nation.

Yet it is obvious that it is the absence of the will or visionary impetus to fashion and forge an organic nation out of the disparate entities that has made looting such a fashionable alibi for hard work and nation-growing.

Despite realising that Nigeria is a mere geographical expression exactly seventy five years ago, Awolowo never gave up on the Nigerian project until his last breath over thirty years ago.

It is important to make this point as a precautionary reminder to those who believe that Nigeria’s problems will be solved once the constituting nationalities decide to go their separate ways.

To be sure, no proud people with a sense of history and where they are coming from will allow themselves to be subject to the permanent feudal blackmail of those who do not want to develop and who do not want others to develop without something giving eventually.

But it should be clear that were Nigeria to splinter in the current circumstances of institutional meltdown and political normlessness, it is more likely to produce the two Sudans rather than Czech and Slovakia republics.

It will be recalled that the two were separate national entities before their forcible merger by their European overlords.

For the time being, Nigerians may yet have the British colonialists to thank for whatever drove them to create Nigeria as a nation-state.

If Nigeria were to be a feudal monarchy, all the noise about looting and stealing would have been tantamount to treasonable utterances attracting capital punishment.

In ways that may be unknown to its denizens, the spirit of the modern nation-state in Nigeria has always asserted itself at critical moments. It will do so yet again sooner than later.

The Nation

George floyd was not famous. He was killed not in the capital of the United States, but on a street corner in its 46th-largest city. Yet in death he has suddenly become the keystone of a movement that has seized all of America. Still more remarkably, he has inspired protests abroad, from Brazil to Indonesia, and France to Australia. His legacy is the rich promise of social reform. It is too precious to waste.

The focus is rightly on America. The protests there, in big cities and tiny towns far from the coasts, may be the most widespread in the country’s long history of marching. After an outburst of rage following Mr Floyd’s death, the demonstrations have, as we hoped last week, been overwhelmingly peaceful. They have drawn in ordinary Americans of all races. That has confounded those who, like President Donald Trump, thought they could be exploited to forge an electoral strategy based on the threat of anarchy. What began as a protest against police violence against African-Americans has led to an examination of racism in all its forms.

The marches outside America are harder to define. In Mexico and South Africa the target is mainly police violence. In Brazil, where three-quarters of the 6,220 people killed by police in 2018 were black, race is a factor too. Australians are talking about the treatment of aboriginals. Some Europeans, used to condemning America over race, are realising that they have a problem closer to home. Angela Merkel has asked Germans to take the chance to “sweep outside their own front doors”. Several countries are agonising over public monuments.

It is hard to know why the spark caught today and not before. Nobody marched in Paris in 2014 after Eric Garner was filmed being choked to death by officers on Staten Island—then again, hardly anyone marched in New York, either. Perhaps the sheer ubiquity of social media means that enough people have this time been confronted with the evidence of their own eyes. The pandemic has surely played a part, by cooping people up and creating a shared experience, even as it has nonetheless singled out racial minorities for infection and hardship.

The scale of the protests has something to do with Mr Trump, too. When Mr Garner was killed, America had a president who could bring together the nation at moments of racial tension, and a Justice Department that baby-sat recalcitrant police departments. Today they have a man who sets out to sow division.

But most fundamentally, and most happily, the protest reflects a rising rejection of racism itself. The share of Americans who see racial discrimination in their country as a big problem has risen from 51% in January 2015 to 76% now. A YouGov poll last week found that 52% of Britons think British society is fairly or very racist, a big rise from similar polls in the past. In 2018, 77% of the French thought France needed to fight racism, up from 59% in 2002. Pew Research found last year that in most countries healthy majorities welcome racial diversity.

America is both a country and an idea. When the two do not match, non-Americans notice more than when an injustice is perpetrated in, say, Mexico or Russia. And wrapped up in that idea of America is a conviction that progress is possible.

It is already happening, in three ways. It starts with policing, where some states and cities have already banned chokeholds and where Democratic politicians seem ready to take on the police unions. On June 8th Democrats in the House of Representatives put forward a bill that would, among other things, make it easier to prosecute police and limit the transfer of armour and weapons from the Pentagon to police departments. Congressional Republicans, who might have been expected to back the police, are working on a reform of their own. Although the general call for “defunding” risks a backlash, the details of redirecting part of the police budget to arms of local government, such as housing or mental health, may make sense.

There is also a recognition that broader change is needed from local and federal government. The median household net wealth of African-Americans is $18,000, a tenth of the wealth of white Americans. The ratio has not changed since 1990. An important cause of this is that many African-Americans are stuck in the racially monolithic neighbourhoods where their grandparents were allowed to settle at a safe distance from whites. Houses in these places are very cheap.

This separation helps explain why inequality endures in schooling, policing and health. The government has a role in reducing it. Federal spending worth $22.6bn already goes on housing vouchers. Schemes to give poor Americans a choice over where they live have Republican and Democratic backing in Congress. With better schools and less crime, segregated districts become gentrified, leaving them more racially mixed.

Business is waking up to the fact that it has a part, too, and not just in America. The place where people mix most is at work. However, just four Fortune 500 firms have black chief executives and only 3% of senior American managers are black. No wonder anxious ceos have been queuing up to pledge that they will do better.

Firms have an incentive to change. Research suggests that racial diversity is linked to higher profit margins and that the effect is growing—though it is hard to be certain which comes first, diversity or performance. It has also become clear that a vocal share of employees and customers will shun companies that do not deal with racism. Platitudinous mission statements are unlikely to provide much protection. A first step is to monitor diversity at all levels of recruitment and promotion, as do Goldman Sachs and Intel—hardly known for being sentimental.

Large-scale social change is hard. Protest movements have a habit of antagonising the moderate supporters they need to succeed. Countries where the impulse for change is not harnessed to specific reforms will find that it dissipates. Yet anyone who thinks racism is too difficult to tackle might recall that just six years before George Floyd was born, interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 American states. Today about 90% of Americans support it. When enough citizens march against an injustice, they can prevail. That is the power of protest.

The Economist

Nigeria’s elections – and politics - stopped being one of ideas and ideals a long time ago; gone were the days when manifestoes and programmes of political parties swayed voters one way or another. Our elections and politics these days are basically those of what is now derisively and euphemistically referred to as “stomach infrastructure” believed by many to have been introduced by an ex-Lagos governor (the Jeun s’oke kingpin and Area Father par excellence) and made popular by another erstwhile governor, this time of Ekiti state. Nigerians have suffered in the hands of governors! Gone were the days when the likes of Awo traversed the length and breadth of this country, from village to village, from nooks to crannies campaigning and canvassing for votes, unfolding his party’s cardinal programmes and explaining how he would implement them and make life better for citizens. No more!

These days, brainstorming on and developing cardinal programmes, preparing manifestoes and printing flyers is a waste of precious time and resources. Buhari as presidential candidate ran away from debate and it changed nothing! Atiku, likewise; nothing spoil! Many of today’s politicians do not have the intellectual capacity for politics that is cerebral. Experience has taught everyone that the stuff you have upstairs can as well be your good grief. Those who, like Awo, set store by intellectualism, what did they benefit? Didn’t nincompoops run away with the prize? Desecrating quality materials again and again and choosing or imposing incompetent people have a way of discouraging and demoralising reasonable people and locking them down in self-imposed “siddown look”. Political apathy sets it and ragamuffins and their likes ride roughshod over the polity.

Who lays much emphasis on party manifestoes, policies and programmes these days? Not the politicians themselves; and not the electorate, either! If politicians print manifestoes these days, it is to fulfil all righteousness, not that they seriously think it amounts to much. I witnessed many campaigns where the people demanded money instead of flyers detailing a candidate’s character, qualifications, plans and programmes. “Na paper we go chop?”; “Give us money” “E fun wa l’owo” “After today, we won't see you again”! Getting into power, didn't Buhari and the APC deny and denounce their campaign promises and party manifestoes (restructuring, etc)? Still, nothing spoil!

In a sense, the electorate may be right. Experience has taught them that today’s politicians are not trustworthy; are not public-spirited; and serve only their own selfish interests. So, whatever you cannot get from them when they need your services, forget it! I have experienced this myself again and again. Strike the iron when it is still hot! Never extend credit to the Nigerian politician! He will not pay back! This is one reason loyalty is scarce and betrayal plentiful amongst politicians. So, the lazy electorate, thinking they should get the little they can by making hay while it shines, make it “cash-and-carry”. Sadly, this hare-brained “solution” short-changes and runs them into a bind in the end.

We have seen all manner of vote-buying schemes. From the “amala” politics of Lamidi Adedibu, we graduated to more asinine politics of Ondo State’s “d’ibo ko s’ebe” and “Ekiti state’s “see and buy”.

As the Edo and Ondo governorship elections gather momentum, we wait to see what new surprises the politicians will spring. These days, however, the electorate is fast losing relevance as supposedly election umpires, security officers, and judges are the new beautiful brides of Nigerian politics (apologies, Nnamdi Azikiwe)! Candidates who were not voted for; who were not on the ballot; who did not vote at all; who even voted against their party; who came last in an election, now are returned as elected! Wonders will never end!

So, the first problem is that many of those who sit in office brandish illegitimate mandate. They were not elected and they know it. They were not the choice of the people and the people know it. They were rigged into office in diverse ways and the people who perpetrated the shenanigans for them know it and have the dossiers. The insiders are ready to blackmail, to squeal; and to reveal how the “victory” was procured. Virtually everyone who gets a governor elected does so for their own selfish reasons; only a few do so to serve public interest. When the anticipated benefits fail to materialise or delay in coming, they will not mind bringing the roof down upon everyone. So if you look carefully, you will see that many of the disagreements amongst politicians centre on “I”, “I” and “I”. Public interest is rarely mentioned and where it is at all, it is to fulfil all righteousness.

Please note that, here, the foundation of virtually all elective offices is corruption. As our people will say, “isale oro l’egbin”, meaning that the foundation of how a man came about his stupendous wealth is usually sordid. How many governors can swear that they did not rail-road themselves – or were not railroaded - into office? That is why corruption – like the poor, as the scripture says - will not cease from the land. What is got by corrupt means will have to be maintained by corrupt means. Those who were in office before got there through corrupt means and sustained themselves in office by the same corrupt means. Virtually all those in office now got there through corrupt means and are sustaining themselves there through corrupt means.

Those who are angling to displace or replace those in office today will also almost certainly get there through corrupt means and will thereafter proceed to sustain themselves in that same office through corrupt means. Do not be deceived by their sweet talk of the moment: It is meant to demonize the incumbents; it is nothing short of giving a dog that already has a bad the worst of names to hang it fast.  They mean to deceive you into supporting them. If they get into office using the same means or methods, they will not perform differently from those who are there now. You cannot do the same thing the same way and expect a different result, except a miracle happens. Since the motive generally is self-enrichment and or personal aggrandisement, expect corruption to loom large. In the event that the governor tries to play smart or break loose, he might get the Ngige/ Ambode treatment!

Once in office, the first hurdle Mr Governor must scale is how to take care of all those who made the “victory” possible. Unfortunately, there are usually too many people who contribute in such ventures than available appointments. The demands and or expectations of “political investors” are usually over and above available resources. Usually, a governorship aspirant/candidate is surrounded from Day One by family, friends, and close associates who helped him to plan before his ambition is made public. Usually, he starts from his home base since all politics is local. When he begins to make appointments, these are the same people that swarm the whole place before consideration is given to others. If you look carefully, you will see that this problem happens to them all – and will still happen to those coming behind. It is the selfish nature of our politics where people do not contribute for the public good but for what is in it for them. For as long as that mentality persists, the problem, too, will persist.

• Bola Bolawole

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The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

“You cut the turkey without me?” he cries. “Your own flesh and blood! … You cut the turkey?” The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. “The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect,” Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. “That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse.”

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there’s no extended family at Thanksgiving. It’s just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”

“In my childhood,” Levinson told me, “you’d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories … Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families’ stories.” The main theme of Avalon, he said, is “the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.”

This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

Part I

The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today’s standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at University of Minnesota, calls these “corporate families”—social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.

Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900, and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

During the Victorian era, the idea of “hearth and home” became a cultural ideal. The home “is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,” the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.

The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s, the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.”

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.

In his book The Lost City, the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt describes life in mid-century Chicago and its suburbs:

Finally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity—all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.

A study of women’s magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that from 1900 to 1979, themes of putting family before self dominated in the 1950s: “Love means self-sacrifice and compromise.” In the 1960s and ’70s, putting self before family was prominent: “Love means self-expression and individuality.” Men absorbed these cultural themes, too. The master trend in Baby Boomer culture generally was liberation—“Free Bird,” “Born to Run,” “Ramblin’ Man.”

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally. Fewer relatives are around in times of stress to help a couple work through them. If you married for love, staying together made less sense when the love died. This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s, the American family didn’t start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been “coming apart for more than 100 years.”

Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so—the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it’s not just the institution of marriage they’re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

Over the past two generations, families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did.

Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. Before, sisters-in-law shouted greetings across the street at each other from their porches. Kids would dash from home to home and eat out of whoever’s fridge was closest by. But lawns have grown more expansive and porch life has declined, creating a buffer of space that separates the house and family from anyone else. As Mandy Len Catron recently noted in The Atlantic, married people are less likely to visit parents and siblings, and less inclined to help them do chores or offer emotional support. A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home.

Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound, Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have “increased income inequality by 25 percent.” If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”

When you put everything together, we’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They’ve tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable—especially children. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father (though in some cases that’s because the father is deceased). American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.

We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

It’s not just the lack of relationships that hurts children; it’s the churn. According to a 2003 study that Andrew Cherlin cites, 12 percent of American kids had lived in at least three “parental partnerships” before they turned 15. The transition moments, when mom’s old partner moves out or her new partner moves in, are the hardest on kids, Cherlin shows.

While children are the vulnerable group most obviously affected by recent changes in family structure, they are not the only one.

Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family, and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men.

For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures—they have more freedom to choose the lives they want—many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely. Many older people are now “elder orphans,” with no close relatives or friends to take care of them. In 2015, The New York Times ran an article called “The Lonely Death of George Bell,” about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time police found him, his body was unrecognizable.

Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. Black single-parent families are most concentrated in precisely those parts of the country in which slavery was most prevalent. Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

In 2004, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs published her final book, an assessment of North American society called Dark Age Ahead. At the core of her argument was the idea that families are “rigged to fail.” The structures that once supported the family no longer exist, she wrote. Jacobs was too pessimistic about many things, but for millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster.

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; “go live in a nuclear family” is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people—and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would “freak out.” In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn’t graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.

The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old.

Part II

Redefining Kinship

In the beginning was the band. For tens of thousands of years, people commonly lived in small bands of, say, 25 people, which linked up with perhaps 20 other bands to form a tribe. People in the band went out foraging for food and brought it back to share. They hunted together, fought wars together, made clothing for one another, looked after one another’s kids. In every realm of life, they relied on their extended family and wider kin.

Except they didn’t define kin the way we do today. We think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease—the life force found in mother’s milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: “My sibling from the same canoe”; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin. On the Alaskan North Slope, the Inupiat name their children after dead people, and those children are considered members of their namesake’s family.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together—and therefore presumably lived together—34,000 years ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another. In a study of 32 present-day foraging societies, primary kin—parents, siblings, and children—usually made up less than 10 percent of a residential band. Extended families in traditional societies may or may not have been genetically close, but they were probably emotionally closer than most of us can imagine. In a beautiful essay on kinship, Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says that kin in many such societies share a “mutuality of being.” The late religion scholar J. Prytz-Johansen wrote that kinship is experienced as an “inner solidarity” of souls. The late South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as “mystically dependent” on one another. Kinsmen belong to one another, Sahlins writes, because they see themselves as “members of one another.”

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside Native Americans’ very communal culture. In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes what happened next: While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families. Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come live with them. They taught them English and educated them in Western ways. But almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans during wars and brought to live in Native communities. They rarely tried to run away. This bothered the Europeans. They had the superior civilization, so why were people voting with their feet to go live in another way?

When you read such accounts, you can’t help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

We can’t go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. We may even no longer be the kind of people who were featured in the early scenes of Avalon. We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We’ve seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: “Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns.”

From Nuclear Families to Forged Families

Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

Usually behavior changes before we realize that a new cultural paradigm has emerged. Imagine hundreds of millions of tiny arrows. In times of social transformation, they shift direction—a few at first, and then a lot. Nobody notices for a while, but then eventually people begin to recognize that a new pattern, and a new set of values, has emerged.

That may be happening now—in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.

In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans—64 million people, an all-time high—live in multigenerational homes.

The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents. In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.

Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Immigrants and people of color—many of whom face greater economic and social stress—are more likely to live in extended-family households. More than 20 percent of Asians, black people, and Latinos live in multigenerational households, compared with 16 percent of white people. As America becomes more diverse, extended families are becoming more common.

African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do. “Despite the forces working to separate us—slavery, Jim Crow, forced migration, the prison system, gentrification—we have maintained an incredible commitment to each other,” Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up, told me recently. “The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of ‘the village’ to take care of each other. Here’s an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother’s house, their grandparents’ house, and their uncle’s house and sees that as ‘instability.’ But what’s actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child.”

The black extended family survived even under slavery, and all the forced family separations that involved. Family was essential in the Jim Crow South and in the inner cities of the North, as a way to cope with the stresses of mass migration and limited opportunities, and with structural racism. But government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive. I began my career as a police reporter in Chicago, writing about public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green. Guided by social-science research, politicians tore down neighborhoods of rickety low-rise buildings—uprooting the complex webs of social connection those buildings supported, despite high rates of violence and crime—and put up big apartment buildings. The result was a horror: violent crime, gangs taking over the elevators, the erosion of family and neighborly life. Fortunately, those buildings have since been torn down themselves, replaced by mixed-income communities that are more amenable to the profusion of family forms.

The return of multigenerational living arrangements is already changing the built landscape. A 2016 survey by a real-estate consulting firm found that 44 percent of home buyers were looking for a home that would accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent wanted one that would accommodate their returning adult children. Home builders have responded by putting up houses that are what the construction firm Lennar calls “two homes under one roof.” These houses are carefully built so that family members can spend time together while also preserving their privacy. Many of these homes have a shared mudroom, laundry room, and common area. But the “in-law suite,” the place for aging parents, has its own entrance, kitchenette, and dining area. The “Millennial suite,” the place for boomeranging adult children, has its own driveway and entrance too. These developments, of course, cater to those who can afford houses in the first place—but they speak to a common realization: Family members of different generations need to do more to support one another.

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin, a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

These experiments, and others like them, suggest that while people still want flexibility and some privacy, they are casting about for more communal ways of living, guided by a still-developing set of values. At a co-housing community in Oakland, California, called Temescal Commons, the 23 members, ranging in age from 1 to 83, live in a complex with nine housing units. This is not some rich Bay Area hipster commune. The apartments are small, and the residents are middle- and working-class. They have a shared courtyard and a shared industrial-size kitchen where residents prepare a communal dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. Upkeep is a shared responsibility. The adults babysit one another’s children, and members borrow sugar and milk from one another. The older parents counsel the younger ones. When members of this extended family have suffered bouts of unemployment or major health crises, the whole clan has rallied together.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. “I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity,” she told me. “We consider all of our kids all of our kids.” Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. “Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him,” Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can’t buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don’t.

As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial  difference between the old extended families like those in Avalonand the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today’s extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

And yet in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That’s because they are chosen families—they transcend traditional kinship lines.

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.”

She continues:

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls “forged families.” Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, “fictive kin.”

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what.”

Two years ago, I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin—the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.

Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver. One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.

She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, “You were the first person who ever opened the door.”

In Salt Lake City, an organization called the Other Side Academy provides serious felons with an extended family. Many of the men and women who are admitted into the program have been allowed to leave prison, where they were generally serving long sentences, but must live in a group home and work at shared businesses, a moving company and a thrift store. The goal is to transform the character of each family member. During the day they work as movers or cashiers. Then they dine together and gather several evenings a week for something called “Games”: They call one another out for any small moral failure—being sloppy with a move; not treating another family member with respect; being passive-aggressive, selfish, or avoidant.

Games is not polite. The residents scream at one another in order to break through the layers of armor that have built up in prison. Imagine two gigantic men covered in tattoos screaming “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” At the session I attended, I thought they would come to blows. But after the anger, there’s a kind of closeness that didn’t exist before. Men and women who have never had a loving family suddenly have “relatives” who hold them accountable and demand a standard of moral excellence. Extreme integrity becomes a way of belonging to the clan. The Other Side Academy provides unwanted people with an opportunity to give care, and creates out of that care a ferocious forged family.

I could tell you hundreds of stories like this, about organizations that bring traumatized vets into extended-family settings, or nursing homes that house preschools so that senior citizens and young children can go through life together. In Baltimore, a nonprofit called Thread surrounds underperforming students with volunteers, some of whom are called “grandparents.” In Chicago, Becoming a Manhelps disadvantaged youth form family-type bonds with one another. In Washington, D.C., I recently met a group of middle-aged female scientists—one a celebrated cellular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, another an astrophysicist—who live together in a Catholic lay community, pooling their resources and sharing their lives. The variety of forged families in America today is endless.

You may be part of a forged family yourself. I am. In 2015, I was invited to the house of a couple named Kathy and David, who had created an extended-family-like group in D.C. called All Our Kids, or AOK-DC. Some years earlier, Kathy and David had had a kid in D.C. Public Schools who had a friend named James, who often had nothing to eat and no place to stay, so they suggested that he stay with them. That kid had a friend in similar circumstances, and those friends had friends. By the time I joined them, roughly 25 kids were having dinner every Thursday night, and several of them were sleeping in the basement.

I joined the community and never left—they became my chosen family. We have dinner together on Thursday nights, celebrate holidays together, and vacation together. The kids call Kathy and David Mom and Dad. In the early days, the adults in our clan served as parental figures for the young people—replacing their broken cellphones, supporting them when depression struck, raising money for their college tuition. When a young woman in our group needed a new kidney, David gave her one of his.

We had our primary biological families, which came first, but we also had this family. Now the young people in this forged family are in their 20s and need us less. David and Kathy have left Washington, but they stay in constant contact. The dinners still happen. We still see one another and look after one another. The years of eating together and going through life together have created a bond. If a crisis hit anyone, we’d all show up. The experience has convinced me that everybody should have membership in a forged family with people completely unlike themselves.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

That chart suggests two things, especially in the American context. First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs. Second, when people who are raised in developed countries get money, they buy privacy.

For the privileged, this sort of works. The arrangement enables the affluent to dedicate more hours to work and email, unencumbered by family commitments. They can afford to hire people who will do the work that extended family used to do. But a lingering sadness lurks, an awareness that life is emotionally vacant when family and close friends aren’t physically present, when neighbors aren’t geographically or metaphorically close enough for you to lean on them, or for them to lean on you. Today’s crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life.

I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme—the loneliness. It’s the empty suburban street in the middle of the day, maybe with a lone mother pushing a baby carriage on the sidewalk but nobody else around.

For those who are not privileged, the era of the isolated nuclear family has been a catastrophe. It’s led to broken families or no families; to merry-go-round families that leave children traumatized and isolated; to senior citizens dying alone in a room. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart. Eventually family inequality even undermines the economy the nuclear family was meant to serve: Children who grow up in chaos have trouble becoming skilled, stable, and socially mobile employees later on.

When hyper-individualism kicked into gear in the 1960s, people experimented with new ways of living that embraced individualistic values. Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism—which left many families detached and unsupported—and people are experimenting with more connected ways of living, with new shapes and varieties of extended families. Government support can help nurture this experimentation, particularly for the working-class and the poor, with things like child tax credits, coaching programs to improve parenting skills in struggling families, subsidized early education, and expanded parental leave. While the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices, family life is under so much social stress and economic pressure in the poorer reaches of American society that no recovery is likely without some government action.

The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”

The Atlantic