THREE GENDER PREDICTIONS

 

Prediction No. 1.  Women can do anything men can do. Everything can be learned. Women can become like men in almost every respect (except childbearing). Male and female will blend into a single culture: whether traditional-up-til-now male culture; or some new variant.

 

OR Prediction No.2.  Women are different from men: nicer, more nurturant, more sympathetic; more monogamous, less sexual drive, more family-oriented; more cautious, less risk-taking. Individual women range on a continuum of these qualities, and some women are not at all like this; but statistically, these are strongly marked differences from men (who also range on a continuum). These statistical differences will continue in the future.

 

OR Prediction No. 3.  It is possible to combine both positions: male and female behavior will converge so that women will fill all male jobs and social positions, but everyone will become like the ideal-type nurturant, risk-averse female.

 

Evidence for each prediction:

 

[1]  The proportion of women has gone up in almost all occupations since mid-20th century. In some jobs, it now exceeds men. There are substantial number of women in the elite professions and in high level management; if not yet equally with men, demonstrating that women have the ability to do it. Women have become prominent in high government positions; in some countries including the president or prime minister. It seems inevitable that this trend will continue upwards.

 

Even in the macho or muscle roles, there have been women in military combat, policing, and fire-fighting. There are token women as coaches and referees in male sports; and a proliferation of women's teams and stars.

 

If the job shapes the behavior and values of its incumbent, this supports the prediction that women are becoming more like men. This is apparent in women's sports like soccer and basketball, where rough and aggressive players are prominent.

 

[2a] Supportive and sympathetic vs. aggressive and competitive. A clue is trends in crime and violence. Males continue to be the majority of perpetrators in homicides, assault and battery, armed robbery, and sexual assault; though the proportion of females has increased, and is substantial in child abuse. Street gangs are almost exclusively male, although they may have female supporters (who contribute by carrying concealed weapons); so are drug smuggling and sex trafficking. Organized crime by all indications  is exclusively male. Violence against oneself is highly gendered; although females consider suicide as often as males, most methods of suicide fail (e.g. drug overdoses), while successful suicide methods-- guns and jumping from heights-- are heavily male.

 

In the USA, violent crime rates have fallen since their peak in the 1990s. One could argue that this shows the spread of female values among males. An alternative explanation is that the biggest declines are where police forces have adopted electronic street surveillance and mobile crime squads. [Jeffrey Lane, The Digital Street, 2019] In some respects, young women have become more like their male counterparts; as in the growth of violent hazing rituals in high school sororities and clubs, paralleling the potlatch-destruction of fraternity parties.

 

Women are more prominent in non-violent crimes, especially embezzlement, where women have many opportunities in financial and clerical positions, as well as protective cover by their reputation as supportive and trustworthy. It is not clear whether embezzlement by women has historically increased. Viviana Zelizer [The Social Meaning of Money, 1994] notes that women in the era of high gender segregation of work often stole money from their husbands by going through their pockets.

 

Electronic media have increased opportunities for non-violent crime. But hacking appears to be highly gendered. Virtually all known perpetrators of schemes for ransomware, political hacking, and just plain malicious hacking are males. To some extent this mirrors the continuing propensity for males to dominate in STEM skills. The spread of AI and image-generating tools has greatly increased opportunities for both malicious and gainful attacks. Substantial portions of students use AI to cheat on school assignments and exams. Is this a spread of male aggressiveness and non-conformity to females as well---  yet another contemporary arena where women share the male style? Gender proportions in cheating have not yet been well documented.

 

The social media era is dividing people into distinctive cultural spheres:  the stay-at-home, always on-line social butterflies at-a-distance, where males share a female pattern; the party animals and carousers who venture out to night-life districts where macho values set the tone for both sexes; on-line criminals, as well as real-life criminals, both predominantly male. Both male and female cultures are spreading to the opposite sex, but in different arenas.

 

[2b]  Sexual drive, monogamy, and family.  Sex surveys from the 1940s through the present show that men have more frequent sex than women, with more partners; males report more sexual desire, and view more pornography. Disparity in number of heterosexual partners is made up by a small number of women who are prostitutes or have many partners. Among homosexuals, gay men have more partners and more frequent sex than lesbian women; and compared to heterosexual partners, gay men are more sexually active in both respects; while lesbian couples are less sexually active than heterosexuals. Which is to say sexual preference does not override gender patterns; gay couples consist of two men and thus multiply their sexual frequency; lesbians couples intensify the female pattern. [Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, 1983]

 

But sexual behavior may have changed between the pre-COVID era, and the generation that grew up with the unibiquitous presence of social media in their daily lives. In this demographic cohort, both young males and females have become less sexually active, less likely to drive a car, less likely to gather socially. It appears that life on the social media is more permeated by female values: a convergence towards the female pattern of high sociability.

 

Traditionally, women have been more family-oriented than men: more likely to keep up contact with relatives; taking the lead in organizing family gatherings; spending more time on family gossip. Women have generally reported giving higher value to caring for children and home than to career success; whereas men, especially in the higher professions, give highest priority to career. This gender difference has apparently weakened in the vogue of  life/career balance; men have increased time in child care and home-making, but still lagging their female partners.

 

Trending in the other direction, propensity to marry or cohabit has declined; and the birth rate among women in the US and most modernized countries has fallen to below-replacement level. This is evidence for a decline in familistic orientation; as is a larger proportion of young people living alone-- a convergence towards the male pattern or a weakening in female culture.

 

[2c] Cautious and conformist vs. risk-taking and norm-breaking.  Gender differences in violent crime, as well as deaths from accidents, are consistent with male propensity for risk-taking and female avoidance of it. We also see this in career patterns. Women tend to follow regularized bureaucratic careers, stay in school longer, and seek degrees rather than dropping out. Men continue to be more likely to pursue careers that are physically dangerous as well as risky: military, combat sports, policing, and criminal enterprises like drug dealing or smuggling.

 

Especially striking is the gulf between men and women in high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. The digital revolution of the 1990s, along with the huge growth of financial speculation and ease of investment via the Internet, created opportunities for rapidly building huge fortunes. Almost all high-tech entrepreneurs have been men; many of them starting their businesses while students, and dropping out of school in order to seize the opportunity. Not to say that success was guaranteed; the large number of competitors ensured many would fail, or have their start-ups taken over by the more aggressive players. The same risk-taking and aggressiveness is found in the earlier generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as in the generation of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Their formula for success combines cutting-edge technological ventures, flamboyant public relations, and aggressive financing.

 

Call this techno/financial macho. They boastfully announce their intention of transforming industries and everyday life, staging spectacular product launches, whipping up consumer enthusiasm and attracting investors. The big financial payoffs eventually come on a roaring bull market; but the main tactic is to operate through  personal networks, rather than traditional banking and investment firms. Their milieu is an unregulated world of frenemies, making and breaking alliances, driving each other out and inviting them back in; skirting the legal edges of new forms of banking, bill-paying, and finance. They steal each other's technologies and poach their technical talents. They work secretively but continue to hang around together, looking for an opportunity or a deal. It is, so to speak, an "old boys" network, except instead of the traditionalism of old families and school graduates, it is a hyper-macho world of financial and technological risk-takers.

 

A similar style of predatory entrepreneurship existed before the digital era.  Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot [From Predators to Ikons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, 2009] analyze the tactics by which the largest fortunes were made in consumer products (IKEA, Walmart,  LVMH, etc.):  driving out weak competitors like traditional furniture stores by assemble-it-yourself chains, or mom-and-pop markets by warehouse-style bulk sales. (A similar tactic was used by Bezos in launching Amazon, driving out independent bookstores.) They stalk successful competitors, offering to finance them when in difficulties, then taking ownership. Again we see the strategy of network-building, monitoring one's rivals, pretending friendship until the moment comes to swallow them up. Villette notes that virtually all the successful empire-builders went through hard-ball lawsuits, stone-walling financially weaker opponents and wearing them down.

 

Like the American high-tech entrepreneurs, Villette's empire-builders started in business when young, rather than pursuing educational credentials. All were from entrepreneurial families, rather than parents in bureaucratic careers. Successful enterprises can become large and more bureaucratic; but aggressive entrepreneurs like Jobs, Musk, and Bezos preferred to run them hands-on, and push their employees to keep up a high-pressure atmosphere of extreme competitiveness.

 

To be clear, hyper-masculine behavior is not characteristic of all men. The majority of men today, and in the past, have followed routine lives, whether in bureaucracies or in small-market businesses or professions. Men, like women, are distributed across a continuum; both sexes are represented among the "female" qualities of caution, supportiveness, and family orientation; just as some women are aggressive and risk-taking. Male and female distributions overlap, though their central concentration differs. I estimate about 10% of males are at the extreme end of the distribution of high risk-taking and aggressiveness. [This is my conclusion about various kinds of violence: Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, 2008. The literature on entrepreneurship, although not statistical, gives the impression of a similar distribution:  Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 2011; Elon Musk, 2023. Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of Silicon Valley. 2025]

 

[3] Will male and female converge on a shared culture?  What we see is a mixture of trends. Women are in virtually all jobs and positions, in some exceeding men. The biggest exceptions are violent crime; electronic hacking; and entrepreneurial empire-building -- areas heavily dominated by men. The recent on-line generation shows convergence towards female sociability and diminished sexual activity; but family orientation is challenged by the declining birth rate and living alone. Women's values dominate increasingly in the bureaucratic arena, while traditional male patterns continue for the risky, violent, and action-oriented arenas.

 

Trends can shift, sometimes quite abruptly. Merely charting the statistics across the years does not reveal the underlying causes. Here I will focus on a meta-cause: efforts to socially engineer the direction of change. Efforts to change the culture of both males and females can be made by political action, laws, ideologies taught in schools and by compulsory re-education in work places.  This is the result of social movements.

 

Research in the sociology of social movements has uncovered many of their mechanisms: mobilizing activists through networks, getting material resources to keep their organization going, generating waves of public emotion through protest demonstrations and  mass communication. What has not yet been established are the conditions that make a movement succeed or fail in its goals; including the struggle between movements and counter-movements.

 

In general, the most successful social movements are those that have made a multi-pronged attack: combining public demonstrations, with a violent fringe to convey their seriousness, together with political campaigns, elections, passing laws, getting favorable court decisions, and institutionalizing the new doctrine in the culture of schools and the mass media. At the same time, these multiple arenas can be places where counter-movements find their issues around which they mobilize.

 

The MAGA movement draws on a number of counter-movements over the decades: against affirmative action in hiring and school admission (seen as reverse discrimination); against perceived denigation of people who are religious, small-town, pro-natalist, patriotic, or heterosexual; against "language police" who enforce terminology in pronouns and identities; against "political correctness" in what is permissible to say or joke about, the breach of which can cause a scandal that gets one banned from jobs and public life. Trump's electoral victory in 2024 was helped by a counter-mobilization to bring out young males against political correctness-- the macho, frat-boy, carousing, aggressive culture celebrated in cage fights.

 

Do sociologists have any way of predicting which movement or counter-movement will be successful, and on what issues? I will focus on one point: whether statistical equality in jobs can be achieved by the pressure of social movements or by laws requiring the hiring of a particular target of women, non-whites, homosexuals, etc. Such rules are possible in bureaucratic   organizations: those that have well-established job categories, pay scales, and promotions. But not for illicit organizations, which operate informally or clandestinely: street gangs, cartels, and mafias are generally all-male and ethnically exclusive, and it is unlikely this segment of the economy (where lower-class social mobility takes place) could be pressured to engage in affirmative action.

 

The most important bulwark of male dominance is pathways into the upper class. Today these are entrepreneurial start-ups, put together by young men in networks of tech-savvy peers, who aggressively gobble up opportunities for world-transforming inventions; expanding their nets into the slew of financial operators with speculative money in their hands. One could complain retrospectively about the lack of women in Peter Thiel's networks, or Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, but there is no way to enforce a gender quota in a volatile sector where moving as fast as possible determines whether you will be in the tiny fragment that makes a great fortune. You can enforce rules of gender equality (or any other criterion) in an organization that already exists; it is impossible to enforce it until it comes into existence. Given the huge wealth, power and prestige of successful entrepreneurs in today's financial mega-markets, it is unlikely that a social movement will be able to enforce identity quotas on the upper class.

 

Some gender equality happens later on. Wives and daughters of the mega-rich share in the money, if not in the dynamics that generates the wealth.

 

The only way I can envision the male upper class will become feminized, would be if they stop being entrepreneurial. Which is not out of the question, if the entire capitalist system collapses. Perhaps we will see in a few decades, when and if AI destroys human work as we know it.

 

GATSBY versus TRIMALCHIO

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald almost ruined his best novel by titling it "Trimalchio."  It is a literary allusion to Petronius's Satyricon, which contains a long description of a Roman dinner party given by Trimalchio, an ex-slave who is now a millionaire. Trimalchio is depicted as a vulgar show-off boasting of his possessions and trying to impress his guests with elaborately fancy food and entertainment.

 

It is true that The Great Gatsby story launches with descriptions of the parties given by a mysterious millionaire in an old-rich neighbourhood of Long Island. The coming and going of drunken fun-seekers attracts the attention of accidental neighbour, straight-laced Nick Carraway; and we gradually start unraveling the mystery as we find out why Gatsby befriends Nick and that Gatsby wants his old flame Daisy to come and be impressed that he too has made the upper class. Gatsby's parties are so central in the book that Fitzgerald, casting around for a catchy title, thought Trimalchio would expand its cultural resonances.

 

Here are two reasons why it would have been a bad title. One is that it makes Fitzgerald sound pretentious and old-fashioned, just the opposite of his actual reputation as the poet of the 1920s Jazz Age. Only a highbrow literary audience would recognize the allusion. I doubt whether Trimalchio would have a shot at being the most famous American novel of the 20th century.

 

The other reason is that Petronius's Trimalchio is not at all like Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Petronius, who was the Emperor Nero's master of ceremonies and arbiter of taste, knew a lot about lavish entertainments, and satirizes Trimalchio and his guests as a drunken ignoramus surrounded by sychophants. But Gatsby is Fitzgerald's hero-- immensely charming, sincere, and self-sacrificing. His only fault is having been born on the wrong side of the tracks; if now he is a front for bootleg gangsters, that doesn't matter in the moral scheme of the Prohibition era.

 

You have only to look at the films made of the two books: Fellini's Satyricon presents Trimalchio as fat, belching and farting, drooling wine, while his guests are ugly, painted, gluttons applauding and laughing on cue. Gatsby has been filmed in a series of blockbusters, famed above all for the party scenes with their elegance, sexyness, and hot-dancing fun. Fellini's Satyricon more or less accurately depicts ancient Rome as full of grotesque superstitions and sadistic cruelty. Gatsby is one of the rare great books that come across even better in film, because the visuals are so stunning. Unless you are a prude one can hardly help wishing you could be at one of Gatsby's parties when you see it on the Technicolor screen.

 

Petronius, of course, is an ultra-snob; and he must have been a sycophant to get along with Nero. His main charge against Trimalchio is that he is an ex-slave; and that such a person should now have a lot of money and give dinner parties like the hereditary aristocracy is self-evidently a matter for contempt. In fact, Trimalchio's one virtue is what Petronius scorns the most: Trimalchio makes a drunken speech in which he says, he is proud to invite freedmen (i.e. ex-slaves) to his dinners; that he intends to set all his slaves free when he dies; that slaves are humans too. For Petronius, this blasphemy against Roman values is so blatant that it needs no comment. *

 

* How, one might ask, could an ex-slave in First Century Rome become a millionaire? Trimalchio tells us that he was an accountant; took care of the books for his master's estates; was freed at his death; and expanded into shipping imports and exports for the Mediterranean-wide imperial economy. In a society so permeated with slavery, including educated people enslaved by conquests in Greece and the Middle East, the Roman landowners with their military traditions relied on slaves to do all the work that in modern times would be considered the professions and business management.

 

Gatsby, on the other hand, is everything a hero should be. He is extremely good-looking (whether cast by Alan Ladd, Robert Redford, or Leonardo di Caprio)-- a point that comes out more clearly on film than in the book. Why should Daisy have fallen in love with a penniless young army lieutenant in the first place? Because he is so good looking, so magnetically charming. Daisy is tearfully quoted as saying "rich girls don't marry poor boys"; but she omitted to say they can fall in love with a poor boy if he's good-looking enough. Hence the real-life fairy tale quality that Fitzgerald captures. Gatsby is a plausible fairy tale that rises to serious literature because it builds into classic tragedy, ending with the hero killed and the wealthy escaping into their "vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mass they had made."

 

Calling his book Trimalchio would have lowered its literary resonance, not raised it. Petronius's Satyricon consists of fragments of a wandering novel with little plot, no dramatic scenes or memorable characters. Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is at the opposite end of the spectrum, tightly plotted with two interlocking adulterous triangles, memorable, iconic.

 

Why then did Fitzgerald think Trimalchio was the right title? Fitzgerald did a lot of revising texts and changing his narratives. After publishing  Gatsby in 1925, Fitzgerald started another ambitious novel called The Boy Who Killed His Mother (alternatively titled The World's Fair and Our Type); in a major revision, it became The Drunkard's Holiday, then Doctor Diver's Holiday, before Fitzgerald retitled it Tender is the Night just before publication in 1934. [Mizener 1959: 10, 206, 232, 251] The manuscript during those nine years went back and forth between 400,000 words and cutting to a quarter that length. [Cowley 1953: iv] Fitzgerald was not a spontaneous writer; he made elaborate outlines and kept notebooks strategizing what he should write. The best excuse for all the indecision is that he was drunk so much of the time.

 

"The Great Gatsby" was one title among many; others considered were "Gold-hatted Gatsby", "The High-bouncing Lover", as well as "Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires", "On the Road to West Egg", and (what was he thinking?) "Under the Red, White, and Blue". Corresponding with his editor at Scribners, Fitzgerald initially called it The Great Gatsby, but a few weeks later instructed him to title it Trimalchio in West Egg. Maxwell Perkins and the other editors didn't like the title. Fitzgerald wavered throughout the publication process, and wrote from Europe that "Trimalchio might have been best after all." [West 2000: xvii] But it was too late; the book was already printed, and acquired fame as The Great Gatsby.

 

In fact the resonance is exactly right. At the end of the book, we find that the hero's father is named Gatz-- a middle-European immigrant name. Jay changes it to Gatsby, for its ring of the English aristocracy. The title captures the ethnic as well as class snobbery that is the setting for this romance of failed social climbing. Gatsby manages to be the romance of money and true love, and what the world is really like.

 

References

 

Malcolm Cowley. 1953. Introduction to Tender is the Night.  Three Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner's.

 

Arthur Mizener. 1959. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Random House.

 

James L.W. West III.  2000. Introduction to Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Cambridge Univ. Press.

 

 

A GENERAL THEORY OF LONGEVITY AND DEATH

 

Medical expenses for an individual in their last year of life are approximately equal to their medical expense during the rest of their life. The same pattern exists for automobiles. When your car is continually in the shop, breaking down more frequently, one thing after another to be fixed, your car is approaching the time it ends up in the junk yard.

 

The fact that this pattern of accumulating breakdowns happens both to humans and machines shows that the process is more general than biological life and death.

 

One implication is that dying is not just a medical problem. Cause of death is conventionally attributed to some particular disease or injury. But the inference that once the major diseases and hazards are conquered, people will live enormously longer, is incorrect. Longevity cannot be produced merely by curing diseases. 

 

Look at the leading causes of death across the centuries. Pre-historical people had an adult life span of about 30, if they survived childhood.  Plagues and epidemics such as cholera became major causes of death when populations grew through intensive agriculture, and even more so in urban places, which is to say when they become more densely settled and geographically networked. Public health measures raised longevity, making it possible for people to die of diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia. Hygiene, medicine, vaccines, diet and exercise allowed 20th century people in wealthy societies to live to their 60s and 70s. These advances have kept people alive long enough so that they most frequently die of heart disease, cancer, and increasingly as they live into their 90s, dementia.

 

Progress in health and medicine have extended the life span, letting people  live longer while their bodies are breaking down, just like their cars.

 

The pattern of breakdowns increasing with age is universal, applying to all material entities. It is the basic principle of geology. Old mountain ranges are lower and less jagged, losing height and shape over millions of years. New mountain ranges and coastlines are produced by relatively sudden tectonic shifts; after which movement of air and water, along with chemical reactions, plant penetration and decomposition, carve them into monuments; on their way to becoming planes and basins. 

 

The Buddha, dying around 560 B.C. at age 80, allegedly said: my body is falling apart like an old cart. Death certificates in our bureaucratic world are filed under a specific cause, but for most deaths it is co-morbidity. Even when we say cancer, this just pushes the problem further back in the causal chain: why did that person get that cancer at that time? The underlying process is things fall apart, and the older they are the more ways there are to fall apart.

 

Systems theory enables us to say more about the pattern of when things fall apart. The more moving parts there are, the more interconnections and linkages, the more possibilities there are for local breakdowns. And the more complicated the entity, the more likelihood that local breakdowns will interact with other breakdowns, resulting in a concatenation of failures throughout the system.

 

Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents shows disasters result from a combination of minor accidents, each of them random, plus randomly happening at the same time. For example, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant leaked radiation and nearly melted down in 1979. The flow-chart of the plant is very complicated to describe, which points to the main ingredient of the problem. In one chamber, the uranium core was cooled by water under high pressure; in a second chamber, steam filtered for radiation was used to run electric generators. On that day, four different failures occured: a clogged line measuring moisture sent a false signal; a water-flow valve had become blocked; human operators told a relief valve to close, but it was stuck; a dial showed it had been shut when it wasn't. The end result was that operators-- at a huge control panel, with lights flashing, alarms sounding, and phones ringing-- initially thought the danger was  pressure and temperature were falling, when the opposite was happening. They soon realized that some dials or controls weren't working, but which ones? The complexity of the system, combined with the coincidence of small failures, made the situation incomprehensible for the operators. Other failures and breaks multiplied as the reactor overheated; later investigators never agreed on what caused all the problems.

 

Two main dimensions affect the likelihood of concatening breakdowns. First: the amount of complexity in the system. This is at its extreme when two complicated computer systems are combined; for example when two airlines merge their scheduling systems. Or when a highly computerized system of hardware is repeatedly updated during several decades of development. The Air Force F-35 was designed to handle all kinds of combat missions, previously carried out by different aircraft, and to automate everything human pilots could do. In addition, computer architecture was repeatedly changing during this period, so that different generations were interacting in unpredictable ways. This became a vicious cycle, with numerous failures in testing prolonging the process and generating more mismatches.

 

Conversely, the simpler the entity, the more durable it is. The model-T Ford was famed for its simplicity and longevity. The Kalashnikov automatic rifle was develped to make it as simple as possible, with the fewest parts. Invented in 1947, it continues to be widely used more than 70 years later.

 

The second dimension is the degree of physical proximity of different systems to each other. Perrow gives the example of a passenger plane which has a small fire in the kitchen galley. This is a local problem, easily managed; but it becomes serious if there exists wiring to other electric systems in the nearby panels-- a problem that increases when many things are crammed into a limited space.  The amount of space that constitutes crammed is relative to the reactiveness of the moving parts. When there are a large number of big ships passing through narrow straights-- especially large warships, oil tankers or container vessels-- their huge momentum allows them to change course only slowly. Furthermore, in a confined waterway, they affect the currents pushing each other in unpredictable ways. Hence, even in the era of high-tech sensors and communications, collisions continue to happen both among US Navy warships and commercial and tourist vessels.

 

On the continuum of propensity for "normal accidents" or concatenation of breakdowns, systems designed by humans with their advance sciences are at the high end. One might say that the highly computerized, mechanized, and globalized world of machinery is analogous to human populations responding to advances in health and medicine by falling prey to new diseases:  our successes in recovering from our problems increases the complexity and connectedness of the system, thus increasing the conditions for further concatenating breakdowns.

 

At the other end of the spectrum are entities which have few specialized parts and linkages.  These can be of extremely large size, like mountains and other geological formations; or extremely small, such as self-replicating viruses of extreme simplicity, closer to crystals than to most living species. Viruses are among the oldest life forms; geological formations undergo the longest attrition.

 

The human body is at the high end of the spectrum of complexity, above all in the brain, nervous system and chemical pathways throughout the body, entwining emotions with signals. What we call psychosomatic processes (among which we might count current developments like autism and depression) have grown along with the complexity of how we program our brain pathways, including our social and physical linkages with our environment. And all this is crammed within one's body, where random breakdowns happen right next to all sorts of inner linkages. It is not surprising that, over a period of years, the interlocking breakdowns become more and more frequent.

 

I have already sketched the historical trajectory of diseases emerging into greater prominent as earlier diseases have been controlled. It is in this context that we should view current longevity science. Are there specific aging or anti-aging genes? Does gene therapy, or ingesting supplements containing molecules or other building blocks, make living creatures live longer? Experiments on yeast, worms, and flies are a long way from dealing with the concatenating breakdowns of complex organisms, let alone aging humans.

 

Even giving the benefit of a doubt and a hope for further discoveries, consider the practical and social implications of a large proportion of people living for decades past age 100. If longevity medicines of some kind are successful, is there any reason to believe that the fraction of one's lifetime medical expense in one's last years will decline? The weight of medical care has loomed increasingly larger precisely in the wealthier and more scientifically advanced economies. As noted, modern medicine is good at keeping people alive longer when they're sick.

 

From an objective point of view, we retire and eventually die, making room for others. From a subjective point of view, at some point dying is not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody who lives into the 80s and 90s notices that you get shorter, losing flesh, muscle and contour. Like mountains losing their sharp edges, faces and bodies lose their shape. What would we expect to look like if we lived to 130 or 150?

 

It is other people who do not want you to die; who do not want to lose you. But losing happens anyway. Death is a subtype of something more encompassing. Better to say: hope you had a good life. And wish the same for those who are younger.

 

 

ELON MUSK'S MANAGEMENT STYLE

Elon Musk is the world's most controversial business manager, following the example of Steve Jobs. Both their lives are detailed in biographies by Walter Isaacson, full of information on how they interacted with people, built their networks, and succeeded by iconoclastic behavior. I will summarize this information, together with research by Michel Villette on the ruthless tactics of making the big fortunes in the late (pre-Internet) 20th century. The sociology of micro-interaction will help explain how Musk generates emotional energy and spreads it to his hard-core followers. Clarity about the past can shed light on the turmoil of the present.

 

Growing up in the Wild West-- South Africa

 

Part of Musk's iconoclasm is that he is not a modern person at all; more of a Huckleberry Finn translated into the world of the digital revolution. His father was an engineer with a string of business ventures, a bush pilot in the borderlands of decolonizing Africa, trading off-the-books and running an unregistered emerald mine to avoid shakedowns by local authorities. Growing up, Elon rotated among living with his divorced mother (a fashion model with a career of her own), his father, and other relatives where he played with his brother and cousins and adventured together into the night life of dangerous cities. The opposite of the helicopter parents of contemporary America, the boys grew up unsupervised. Working with his father on construction projects in the wild, he carried a gun, learned about dangers the hard way, and got a head start on the adult world before his early teens.

 

Elon went to school but was essentially self-educated. In elementary school he liked to work out problems in his head, tuning out from the others while following his own thoughts. This made him unpopular for a while, but he grew up to six foot two inches, and did a lot of no-holds-barred fighting with his gang of cousins.  Like his father, he followed his own interests; reading through encyclopedias, collecting technical manuals, taking apart old equipment to see how it works.

 

One might say Elon Musk was an unusually intelligent child. But that is hardly an adequate explanation of his success. There are many millions of people in the world who are in the top 1% of IQ, but only a handful who are pathbreaking innovators and build vast business fortunes. What else does it take? One ingredient is emotional energy-- a sociological concept that means not only passion for hard work, but also self-confidence and taking the initiative. A second ingredient is spreading emotional energy to other people--- getting other people enthusiastic about your project, and creating a self-propagating network of enthusiasts. A third ingredient is pointed out by Michel Villette: of the entrepreneurs who made great fortunes from the 1950s onwards (the creators of IKEA, Walmart, LVMH, etc.), none came from families of bureaucratic employees; their parents ran businesses (small or large), and encouraged their children to start their own money-making enterprises from an early age. They are less concerned about credentials than seizing opportunities. They acquire an entrepreneurial ethos that is aggressive and even predatory, with little respect for rules and traditions that get in the way of success.

 

Science-fiction and the window of opportunity

 

Like many other children, Elon grew up reading science fiction. It had a special appeal to him because it is about adventures in the world of future technology-- and technology was what his father made him familiar with. Elon tried to envision what the technology of space travel would be like, as a practical matter--- going beyond the fiction writers who assume future technology as a premise of the plot. So far this is little different from millions of kids who make model rockets. Elon took seriously the possibility that the earth might become uninhabitable-- from nuclear war, from climate change-- and reasoned that the solution would have to be living on another planet. Already endowed with an entrepreneurial mentality, Elon recognized that the first step must be to create a business that would make it financially feasible to build interplanetary rockets. He took it for granted that it had to be done by private initiative-- his own-- since governments are bureaucratic, embroiled in politics, and not to be trusted to do it right.

 

So his first problem was to make money. Having left South Africa just at the time when civil war was being fought in the transition from apartheid, he found himself in the dot-com explosion of the 1990s. While still an undergraduate at University of Pennsylvania, he started a company to compile an on-line version of the Yellow Pages-- the old unwieldy phone book of business addresses. Elon gained experience with Internet-based business, acquired some like-minded collaborators, and got to know-- and distrust-- financial investors. Venture capitalists sold the company and Elon ended up in 1999 with $22 million. 

 

His next venture was to create an on-line alternative to the stodgy process of getting bank loans, depositing income and clearing checks. He quickly recognized that the banking industry was hopelessly old-fashioned-- a window of opportunity to exploit someone else's weakness.*

 

*Villette's research found this was the chief strategy of fortune-making entrepreneurs. For instance, IKEA's founder recognized that old-fashioned downtown furniture stores were expensive and inconvenient, stealing their market with do-it-yourself assembly furniture sold from a warehouse.

 

Elon pivoted to an on-line version of newspaper Want Ads and For Sale Ads with payments by email. But rivals had spotted the same opportunity. Musk found himself in a race with Peter Thiel, for essentially the same universe of users. Recognizing that whoever came in second would be squeezed out, they negotiated a merger. Negotiations were tricky and hostility continued during their partnerships as PayPal. Thiel suspected Musk was overstating his number of accounts, and tried to keep him from contacting his executives for fear of Elon overwhelming them with his energy and persistence. Within three years, Musk was pushed out. Soon after, PayPal was acquired by E-bay and Musk got $250 million.

 

The pattern on Musk's dealings was established. He would leverage one business venture to start the next, generating money to invest and establishing financial contacts who recognized the prospects of his technological vision and his contagious enthusiasm. And he was willing to make enemies, yet come back to them later when they could work together for mutual advantage. To cite one example: Musk sized up Donald Trump as a con man and opposed him in 2016 [Isaacson: 262]. By the time of the Twitter acquisition and its aftermath, Musk was open to an alliance.

 

Targeting Pentagon contracting practices and building Space X

 

Now Musk was ready to start sending rockets into outer space. He located another big window of opportunity, actually two windows. NASA had essentially ceased operations for deep space exploration; no launches to Mars were being made or planned. Musk would do it privately.

 

The other open window was presented by the government's policy for funding military procurement. The government contracted for aircraft, weapons, vehicles etc. by selecting an established provider like Boeing and guaranteeing to pay the cost of production plus a guaranteed profit. The cost-plus system had been adopted out of concern that the mega-companies of the defense industry could not be allowed to fail, leaving the US without a ready source of supply. In practice, the system allowed for regular cost overruns; all the more so in the era of high technology, where innovations are constant and complex components (like the ultra-computerized F-35 fighter) are hard to integrate. There were scandalous examples of expense-- a toilet seat cover costing thousands of dollars-- which arose out of the layers of production: the lowest level billing its cost; the next level of assembly adding another slice of cost; on up through the final product passed on to government accountants. Of course there are reports to be made and permissions to be obtained; anyone who has worked as an employee for the Federal government knows that it is often quicker and cheaper to buy something at a hardware store than to go through the required acquisitions process. The procurement system has some concern for cost, but its method of dealing with it is to add still more layers of administration that increase cost more than reduce it.

 

Musk decided to take an entirely different approach to the cost of building rockets. What is the cost of a rocket in materials, electronics, and fuel? He calculated that a rocket could be built for one-fiftieth (2%) of what NASA had been spending. [99] He offered to contract with the government to produce rockets at a fixed price; furthermore, to launch them, take their payload into space; and in a more advanced phase, land the rocket and reuse it. * His company, SpaceX, would be paid for its successful launches; or otherwise take the loss. It was a gamble; Musk's business model was to take risks, based on his calculations of the science involved, and pushing the margin of error.

 

* Re-usable rockets became possible by equipping them with visual sensors, like backup cameras when parking your car.

 

Musk had another big advantage over what NASA and the Defence Department had been doing. Their procedure was to compile a lengthy list of specifications and requirements for the hardware they were purchasing; and eventually to check up on whether they had been met. This not only increased the layers of bureaucracy, but put the designers at a distance from the people doing the production. Musk was confident he could do better by retaining control. He questioned whether official requirements were based on physics and practicality, and would not accept the bland assertion of anonymous authority. Instead of taking his rockets through a lengthy process of testing, he preferred to let them explode, discovering their limits, make corrections, and move on to the next round. (In his business model, materials were the cheap part of the enterprise.) He started with small, relatively cheap rockets instead of huge payloads. Within a year, SpaceX had its first contract with DOD, launching tactical communications satellites for ground commanders to get battlefield imagery. It coincided with another window opening: the Iraq war was just starting, and the Pentagon was in its RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), Secretary Rumsfeld's effort to computerize warfare. From here, Musk would pivot to blanketing the planet with low-altitude satellites to improve Internet access, and to other projects where cheap rockets could be deployed.

 

Rescues and take-overs

 

Buyouts gave Musk money to plough back into other ventures. He also benefitted from another window of opportunity: the stock market was on a historic roll during most of this time. Contagious enthusiasm among investors was rampant in the technology sector, where startups could leap to huge valuations, debt and current profitability being assumed to take care of themselves down the road. Once Musk established a personal network among the big players, he could add his energy and persuasiveness to get the backing for further enterprises. No longer starting from scratch, he took over failing or troubled ventures in areas where he understood the technology.

 

The big acquisition was Tesla. It had begun in 2003 as an amalgamation of three start-ups for cars powered by lithium batteries connected in large arrays. Musk was approached for funding, and became Chairman of the Board. He was personally committed to EVs as a solution to climate crisis, but also attracted by the thrill of a sports car with acceleration beating the Ferraris and McLarens of the gasoline-powered era. Musk intended to spend most of his attention on SpaceX, but he became increasingly critical of two failings at Tesla: The startup execs thought that EVs would reach the market faster if they used existing supply chains-- the body from Lotus, electric engine and other components from elsewhere. [133] This ran contrary to Musk's conviction that producing as many components as possible in-house was cheaper, and more reliable than leaving oneself at the mercy of suppliers and their iffy standards. He was also upset by ugly and uncomfortable car design: if we are going to create a buzz for a $100,000 car, it had better be dazzling. Musk grew increasingly involved in decisions as Tesla floundered financially. He used his position as payer of bills to fire quarreling managers, and in 2008 took over as CEO.

 

Getting Tesla to financial viability would be a roller-coaster over the next 10 years. On the favorable side was another window of opportunity: climate change was becoming a popular movement among affluent, upper-middle class liberals. Favorable tax policies and government rebates to EV buyers kept the company afloat. Musk copied Steve Jobs' strategy with Apple: a product that was not only technologically advanced, but beautifully designed, and above all, cool. The fan experience of Apple's product launches and Apple Stores was replicated as Teslas hit the market. A futuristic silhouette, door handles sunk flush and operated by wireless, computerized sensors scanning all directions, allowing quasi-autonomous driving with a promise to become fully autonomous in future upgrades; repairs and upgrades sent remotely. And sporty: electric motors at the wheels eliminating the drive train and making possible unbelievable acceleration (zero to sixty under 2 seconds). A Tesla became a mobile computer, much as Apple's iPhone became a handheld computer.

 

Apple had won out in the highly competitive personal computer market by selling products that were fashionable, getting consumers to pay a premium for their elegance and prestige. Musk similarly led off Tesla production at the high end, selling cars with big expensive batteries (and home battery-charging cables) with a large roaming distance. Mainstream rivals like GM had the opposite strategy, selling small cheap cars with limited mileage range. But small cars make small profits; and they never acquired a wave of enthusiasm to make up for it. Big luxurious cars bring big unit profits. The problem was to get over the hump: shaving costs while bringing production up to scale. Cheaper models of the Tesla would come later.

 

Musk understood that an innovative product was not enough; the enterprise could only become successful if the manufacturing process was the most efficient in the market. Here Musk could bring to bear his own predilection for getting involved with the practical details of making equipment work.

 

Hands-on, do-it-now

 

Already in the days of SpaceX, Musk and his team scavenged and improvised, taking the low-cost route to producing a cutting-edge product. Since NASA launches were in abeyance, they found unused launch sites-- an atoll in the Pacific; an abandoned launch pad in Texas; eventually taking over decaying sites at Cape Canaveral. He salvaged parts from failed predecessors. Concerned with how thin the steel walls of a rocket could be (thinner is lighter, requiring less thrust and less fuel), and not satisfied with a conventional standard, he asked the welders how thin they could go-- and pushed them even thinner. If it explodes, then we'll know, he said. [328] When a crucial orbital launch was on the line (a failure would doom future funding), a rainstorm left the antenna that provided flight guidance too wet to operate. The solution: find a hair-dryer, and get an engineer up on top of the rocket blowing the sensors dry. Next morning the radio frequencies were not quite right, but Musk decided it was good enough to launch. It turned out to be so. [210]

 

As his enterprises became more far-flung, Musk would continue using whatever was available to get around anything holding up the works. Having acquired Twitter, he found that its servers were in danger of being cut off by a rental property in rural California where they were warehoused. Arriving at night with a small crew, and brushing aside a watchman, Musk took a flashlight and crawled under a server rack to see how they could be disconnected. Jimmying panels with a knife, he found they could be manually detached-- half expecting they might explode. He immediately sent out to rent all locally available vans, while he and his crew cut the connections and, ignoring seismic stability precautions, loaded the servers to move to his own location. [582-5] Recently the richest man in the world by market valuation but once again on the financial brink, Musk was still taking matters literally into his own hands.

 

During the crucial phase of expanding Tesla's factory production, Musk moved his desk to the factory floor, to be near the production line. Unlike traditional companies that compartmentalize R&D and other functions at disparate locations, Musk wanted his designers close to where the product was being made, taking feedback and modifying immediately. He wanted his best engineers to be speeding the production process. He would walk around the factory floor, not just to question the managers but to see for himself what was holding things up. They found an assembly-line bottleneck where a robot was misaligned. Instead of spending time re-aligning the robot, they decided on the spot to see how fast a human could do the robot's task. It turned out that the human was faster and more reliable. Musk promptly unleashed his team to check every robot in the factory, and remove all robots whose work could be done better by humans. [271-78] Himself an advocate of the most advanced mechanization, he was not caught in that box either; willing to reverse himself where results were concerned. High-tech or low-tech, whatever works.

 

Hardcore team

 

Musk aimed to surround himself with a team who shared his enthusiasms: space travel, pouncing on opportunities to innovate, rethinking the basic science instead of conventional best-practices. And above all, energized by their work, carried along by their trajectory towards the unattainable goal and the impossible deadline. Musk was repeatedly setting target dates and missing them; pragmatically, a formula that generated productivity leaps along the way. But he had to have the right people: technology nerds, sci-fi geeks, who were simultaneously hands-on mechanics, programmers, and backwoods adventurers. He was not looking for people skills. In a job interview, Musk would pepper the candidate with specific questions about a technology, one detail-freak to another.

 

Musk had no sympathy with a trend that had taken hold in the decades of success in the high-tech industries: striving for work-life balance. Working from home, family-friendly schedules, on-site spaces for relaxation and games, were to his mind the opposite of hard-core. He wanted fanatics like himself. It was another of Musk's off-beat bets that turned out to be correct: there were quite a few technology fanatics eager to join a team led by one of themselves.

 

Musk's takeover of Twitter was a confrontation of work philosophies. It didn't necessarily make sense financially; the company had a problem with advertising revenue, which would become worse after the takeover. It appealed to Musk in part because it revived his early scheme to create a universal on-line hub where all manner of transactions would take place; and it converged with his vision that Tesla was not just an electric vehicle company but an advanced computer/ robotics/ AI company that would make science fiction real. It was another one of Musk's quick decisions, a gamble but what the hell; he knew where to raise the money.

 

It would prove fateful because it brought a pivot in Musk's politics. He had rebelled against COVID-era restrictions while he was struggling to bring Tesla into profitability; and aligned him with conservatives accusing social media companies of censoring political opinions. Like a number of other technological innovators in the past (Henry Ford, Steve Jobs), Musk flipped from left to right as they became successful. Political polarization speaks the language of binary oppositions; but the careers of radical innovators are more like worm-holes in hyper-space.

 

Musk's takeover of Twitter was a lightning-strike. Existing top management were cut off from access and locked out of their offices. The rest of the work force was to be drastically culled; a soft spot of work-life balance was about to be reduced to hard-core. Musk and his posse set out to locate who was doing a lot of work and who wasn't. How could this be done in a hurry? As expert programmers themselves, Musk's team seized upon computerized records: which engineers had written the most code in a year, and which had written the least? The posse found a fraction were doing the bulk of the work. Half the company's employees were fired. But how to ensure the loyalty of those who remained? Musk decided to take a bet: among high-productivity personnel, how many would opt to stay on "to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0" as "extremely hardcore-- working long hours at high intensity"? Those who did not opt in by the next day would receive 3 months severance. Surprisingly, almost 70 percent chose to be enrolled in the hardcore. [518-20, 550-51]

 

If this sounds familiar as of February 2025, it is much the same tactic as DOGE in the early Trump administration.

 

Party animal, perennial teenager

 

Musk's ownership of former-Twitter X turbo-charged his habit of posting anything that comes into his mind, multiple times a day. On-line, he is jokey, sardonic, opinionated, spitting out puns and insults. He treats his high-tech peers (Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman) like a trash-talking teenager. But Musk is not a chatty or sociable person. He is not a good public speaker, as is apparent from call-outs at Trump rallies. Musk is not an extrovert, although the distinction between extrovert and introvert has been overdone in psychological tests. Like many people who are immersed in a particular specialty and expertise, he can be outgoing and spontaneous in the presence of like-minded people.

 

In his youth, Musk was far from being the popular kid or fraternity boy. As he became the center of his hard-core business teams, he frequently got into arguments over what was feasible.  He developed a pattern of how to get beyond tense standoffs: suddenly changing the tone of the conversation, to silly or outlandish joking. His own version of work-life balance was to interrrupt the intensity of work with wild parties and escapades: smoking drugs during a recorded interview; inviting a sumo wrestler to his forty-second birthday party and taking him on in a match (thereby throwing out a disk in his own neck); challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. These are macho fantasies of boys; but if you become wealthy enough, and remain free of ties to respectability, you can go on being a teenager at any age. Musk is an extreme example, but this appears to be an historical trend, at least in America since the late 20th century. *

 

* Perhaps this helps explain why the diagnosis of autism has mushroomed in recent decades.  Musk himself has joked about being on the spectrum. The sociological question is: what causes what?

 

Into the future

 

Can Musk's management style be imitated and applied elsewhere? Musk himself imitated some aspects of Steve Jobs' style.  So did many others in high-tech industries, although mainly his showy product launches. Can hard-core intensity and hands-on direction go on forever? Obviously not. Tim Cook, Jobs' successor at Apple, has a much calmer style. In any organization, routinization and burnout occur after a certain number of years. Perhaps this is a reason why Musk keeps shifting to new ventures.

 

Can Musk's style work in all arenas, especially those not involving business profits, or those not producing tangible hardware? A blitz through the workforce at Twitter may be a template for a blitz through the Federal government, but blitz means a lightning strike. It is a gamble and a drama, things that Musk likes and has been successful with in the past. But:

 

Government is not primarily designed to be efficient. Historically, bureaucracy was promoted by kings to keep rebellious aristocrats under control. American democracy was designed to be decentralized, cross-cutting checks and balances, with an important role for law courts, in order to keep any particular faction or emotional movement from sweeping everyone else before it. Of course politics can also struggle over financial expenses and culture wars. These become part of the mix, not necessarily the determining part. What works in high-tech business cannot be simply replicated in government.

 

There is a still larger picture. High-tech trends can bring new crises, spilling over everywhere. As I have been writing for some years, artificial intelligence has the potential to eliminate much of the white collar work force, just as factory mechanization has done to the manfacturing labor force. Government employment at all levels (not just Federal but state and local) has been a Keynesian mechanism keeping the economy going. Without sufficient employment, people cannot buy what technology produces. Letting AI eliminate the surviving sources of employment is a formula for a terminal crisis of capitalism itself. The future may yet take another lurch in a socialist direction.

 

References

 

Walter Issacson. 2023. Elon Musk.  Simon and Schuster.

 

Walter Issacson. 2011. Steve Jobs.  Simon and Schuster.

 

Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot. 2009. From Predators to Icons. Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero. Cornell University Press.

 

Randall Collins.  2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press.