“Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.”
― Arnold Toynbee
This blog tends to suffer as a diary when I'm up in New York these days, simply because the blessedly boring way in which I live up here doesn't lend itself to the telling of colorful stories. I eat breakfast with P, scan the papers online, shower, then work at the computer all day, taking breaks to check the mail or make a sandwich. P comes home and wants to visit, still only 2:30 in the afternoon back home, and I'm forced regretfully to shoo her down the hall for a few minutes so I can keep dictating for a little while longer. Then there's happy hour on the porch and maybe a walk around the neighborhood or up the hill to Hope Cemetery to visit Amo, then a gourmet supper whipped together by P to be enjoyed with a movie in the great room, then curled up in bed for an early night. Rinse and repeat.
But it's pretty nice, this way of living. No traffic. No pesky direct human interaction unless Chris the painter wants to talk.
And every now and then my muddled old brain pulls something together that's useful.
I walk around deep in my own thoughts most of the time, thinking about my cases and how best to get them across the finish line. Lately I've spent too much time pondering one in my file cabinet, a dispute over whether a minerals broker in fact had an enforceable contract for the purchase and sale of several thousand tons of what amounts to sand, but useful sand that one uses to manufacture concrete, paint, and lots of other things. Just as my guys, the buyers, were arranging shipping, the seller received a communication from another broker in Asia, offering to buy the same mound of stuff for substantially more money. Over weeks of mental contortions, the seller convinced itself that it had no contract with the first would-be buyer, sold to the later suitor, and this lawsuit resulted.
How to boil all that down into something a jury will understand? Well, it's 2022, old man. Surely there's an internet meme for this old, familiar story.
And yes, yes indeed there is.
So I'm patting myself on the back this morning, already thinking about the evidentiary hurdles I'll need to clear with a federal judge to put this image in front of the twelve in the jury box during opening statements. I'll figure it out. And they won't be able to get that image out of their heads as they sit through a week of evidence that this seller seemed satisfied with a good deal brought by my guys, until something prettier walked by.
Speaking of the rules of evidence, did you happen to see the debacle in the Alex Jones trial this week? Recall that Jones used his podcast platform, InfoWars, to spread the lie that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. Several of the parents of the dead kids sued him, and the first were in trial in Austin this week. The dramatic climax of the trial came with Jones on the stand for cross-examination, when plaintiffs' counsel pulled out copies of Jones's own texts to impeach his sworn testimony that he had no texts regarding the Sandy Hook massacre. Turns out he did. And plaintiffs' counsel was holding copies of those texts that had been inadvertently produced by Jones's own lawyer in discovery.
A part of me feels a little schadenfreude at this internet troll, a complete waste of carbon, getting caught committing perjury on the stand. It happens more often than you'd think, this lying under oath in court, and to see a guy like this taken down with his own texts warms my heart a little. At the same time, however, there's that little voice in my head murmuring, "There but for the grace of God go I."
Because this sort of screw-up is so, so easy to commit. In the digital age, we regularly produce thousands of pages of digital documents in most significant lawsuits, documents we try to police through search technology and eagle-eyed paralegals, as well as the lawyer's own final sifting through the production. But things slip through, more often than we'd like. Looking at it from the other side, on several occasions I've opened discovery responses to find attorney-client privileged communications, lawyer strategy memos, etc. Even before it became a rule, I always, always immediately emailed the lawyer on the other side, alerted him or her to what I perceived was a mistake, and asked how they'd like for me to handle the inadvertently produced documents. That's just the honorable practice of law.
In the Jones case the court had a rule, as do most courts now, mandating exactly the procedure I just described. Plaintiffs' counsel followed it, sat on his hands for the requisite time, and when he received no response the documents became fair game in court.
So Mr. Jones's $4 million compensatory damages verdict may end up being paid by his lawyer's malpractice carrier. Scary stuff.
Meanwhile, the morning's most interesting essay comes from the NYT (of course), pondering the societal benefits of taking a longer view of our place in human history, and the duties that perspective imposes.
Do we have a moral obligation to live our lives in such a way that maximizes the ability of future generations to live their best lives? Not to sound like some shaman, but that's always seemed pretty obvious to me. We exist to advance the species, and a life of purpose and morality must necessarily include consideration of how our actions will affect our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. Even if they're someone else's. We're all cousins, eh?
But what brought me up short and delighted me the most in this little essay, I have to admit, were the first few paragraphs placing our generation in the arc of human history. That's been done before, but always retrospectively in my experience. The notion that we occupy a temporal dot on a timeline that has barely started fascinates, and evokes the same sense of awe as the spatial depictions of our little planet in a vast, seemingly limitless universe. But unlike with regard to our place in space, our actions may largely control the length of the arc of human history that lies ahead.
One country that's earned a reputation for playing the long game is China. And yet, we're watching an incredibly dangerous situation develop as four decades of bad demographic policy come home to roost.
Remember back in 1979, when China responded to its growing, hungry population with a "one child" policy? Well, it seems to have been a tad too successful. Now China's population has hit stasis and begun to decline, and its economic miracle seems to be reaching a zenith as a result.
[If you're interested in the relationship between population growth and growth in GDP, and are having trouble falling asleep some evening, spend some time with Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argues persuasively that in the absence of technological innovation, economic growth over the last three centuries has been more--or-less pegged to population growth. More workers make more stuff.]
In the next thirty years, China's population will fall off a cliff, with over 200 million (let that sink in) fewer workers than today, and an aging population of mostly boys because if you're Chinese and only allowed to have one kid, you find a way not to have a girl.
And these realities are baked into China's society at this point; they can't be corrected any time soon. After forty years, it may take another forty to reverse course. In the meantime, places like the U.S. have immigration as a counterbalance to shrinking birthrates (that is, unless the red tide in November leads us to a suicidal closing of our borders), so most forecasts have our share of world GDP remaining relatively steady while China's basically collapses.
So, what could possibly go wrong with a nouveaux riche, authoritarian country that's always paid attention to what's ahead, populated mostly by young men with no women available to court but aging parents needing a diaper change, sitting at the high water mark of its economic relevance on the planet, with a massive military that's been the government's main hobby project for years now?
You can figure that one out. The whole Taiwan mess makes a lot more sense now, doesn't it? The Chinese regime can't stay in power without some nationalist side-show to keep its population distracted, and they're not going to allow themselves to sink into irrelevance as their economic fortunes decline along with their population. Places like France made that transition gracefully, but they got to live out their senescence in France. It's a harder sell if circumstances leave one stuck in filthy, smoggy Wuhan forever, hanging around with a bunch of middle-aged men.
Time to start dictating again. I've got a ton of stuff that needs to get out the door today before P gets home, with two hearings, a deposition, and a couple attorney conferences to break my concentration along the way. Here we go. Thank God it's the weekend.
Kommentare