Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class
When every decision is an expected-value calculation, the middle dies.
This is Part I of the essay series Midrange Jumpers for the Middle Class.
This chart made me sad. It’s the inexorable result of moneyball: when every decision is maximally maximized, when every choice is an expected-value calculation… you eradicate the middle. This is what power laws look like, and their application goes beyond jump shots.
It’s also the inevitable result of globalism.
Both moneyball and globalism are dominant-strategy-maximizing approaches to competitive domains. They solely understand players and citizens as productivity inputs, with all behaviors taken based upon their expected values. This mentality implicitly sees humans as variables placed into a machine that scores points and generates trinkets, nothing more. The guiding light is just one more point on the scoreboard, and one more point of gross margin. There is no higher-order value.
When a nation is seen only through the lens of utility calculations, and a society as a series of GDP factors: clustering occurs, power laws amplify, variance declines...
You curiously find yourself with no midrange jumpers, and no middle class.
Spreadsheet Brain
Excessive optimization eventually turns sports, supply chains, and the human spirit… gray. Unrelenting pursuit of 1% better margins or 1% greater chance of success in *insert competitive domain* is how the McKinsey consultant sees a country. It’s how the pedigree-touting economist understands every decision.
These are people trained to think unnaturally, inculcated to believe what the Excel sheet spits out is absolute truth. On questions of human existence, competition, and flourishing, there is a “right” answer, and that answer is what the data analyst says is right. The most noble pursuit to attain is that which increases the final score.
The Spreadsheet Brain vision of the world is cultivated in schools that exalt undermining the parochial, viewing their neighbors with disdain if they’re encumbering peak operating cashflows. Because, hear me out, if it helps gross margins, it MUST be what's best for everyone. If it makes the tchotchkes cheaper, it is pure and true and good: this is the holy crucifix of the trinket maximalist. Harvard Business Review is scripture, Keynes is canon.
Why build domestically when China has an underclass that exists on 1,400 calories a day and will do it for a fraction of the cost? The answer to this is obvious, if you assume society sees life through the same lens as your textbook. If the model says your middle class is best served by delegating their industries and jobs to a political adversary, then that’s just what the Bain and Co. gentleman does. Read a book!
As the shot chart empties its middle, so does the income distribution. To maximize efficiency is to maximize power laws, which is to necessarily vitiate the middle. But hey, your iPhone is 20% cheaper, so let's call it progress.
The consultant concludes the middle class has no desire for eudaimonism: fulfillment from a life that imbues purpose. This must be so, because my MBA says more is more and the Excel sheet doesn’t know how to quantify that, and if I can’t calculate it then it doesn’t matter (eudai-what? dude stop making up words and get in on this sale).
Lose Variance, Lose Color
When globocorp’s bottom line is the unwavering guiding light, when the expected value of each basketball possession is the only consideration, actions eventually converge on the same scoreboard-logic strategies. Tedium ensues. Stagnation creeps in. But the numbers… the numbers have never been better!
Mankind needs variance like lungs need air. Strip away the novel, the inefficient, the beautifully pointless, and watch him suffocate under his own finely tuned calibration. He breaks relationships, institutions, his own psyche, until the chaos he needs little sprinkles of comes back. We're not machines built for steady states; we're improvisational creatures who find meaning in struggle.
If you go too long without a life of purpose, without eudaimonism, something inside you begins to chafe. Grayness seeps in. Hedonism leads to a shadow-puppet existence, yielding a shell of your former self that only understands pleasure of the senses, not purpose of the soul.
Life needs color, which is to say that which you can’t always predict. You know what elevates predictability? Expected-value thinking. Moneyball. Globalism. You can push that colorful beachball underwater and transmute it for a while, but eventually the volatility tax must be paid.
A risk-adjusted payoff existence is empirically corrosive to the middle. The spreadsheet mind cannot comprehend this, but the NBA shot chart and the factory worker can.
Religion, Pretending to be Economics
Just as the priest only knows “Christ is King”, the Trinket Maximalist only knows “open trade open borders good”. It's religious thinking, masquerading as post-hoc, economic-presenting rationale. Because you cannot possibly conceive that the pinnacle priority of a society isn’t the cheapest gadgets possible. Unfathomable.
When the entirety of your beliefs and motivations can be distilled down to “what gives the best margins?”, you implicitly worship the material. Because the material is all you value when you think this way. You project this value onto others when you treat global trade as Christ 2.0.
This is the religion of consumption (hedonism), not salutary purpose (eudaimonism). If it doesn’t facilitate profligate intake, I’m going to have to kindly ask that you go to college.
What’s more, this fetishization of trade being “open” and “free” only manifests positively if it’s reciprocated. Comparative advantage exists in the exchange of goods, not their production. The purpose of exports is more imports, and yet a massive asymmetry in the Balance of Payments persists…
If trade is persistently incongruous, as it is now, someone is exporting more than just trinkets, they’re exporting their own industrial policies onto you. Other nations do not reciprocate US openness, that means their will is being imposed on us and we just accept it, deluding ourselves that we’re winning. You ought to reevaluate your priors if your counterparty is strong, competent, and keeps running the same play against you… maybe it’s you who’s missing something, not them.
The question isn't whether optimization creates material abundance, but whether human beings can survive on material abundance alone. We are running that experiment right now.
Midrange Variance
If a couple more basis points of gross margin is the North Star, and one more point on the scoreboard is all the strategy knows, you're left with no midrange jumpers, and no middle class. Everything converges on the same dominant strategies, because “dominance” is conceptualized in solely one domain: the realm of the numerically measurable. Producing a current account deficit, and spiritual bankruptcy.
Remember Rip Hamilton? Kobe? They lived in the midrange. Jordan did everything, everywhere, all at once. Now you know what you do in the modern NBA? You either get a sniper to shoot a foot behind the 3-point line, or you throw it to the post.
Listen, we ran the numbers, and the Monte Carlo analysis says what it says: no more 15-footers or you’re benched. No more domestic manufacturing, or you’re out of business. Diversity? Lol, yeah not that kind. Have you seen the NBA’s ratings lately? You get what you fucking deserve. Globalism is about to get the same.
I really hope they eventually try something like this to illustrate the idiocy of it all…
Who cares about all the action in between the 1st quarter and the final buzzer. The sport whose very reason for existence is to entertain and excite. The event we gather in big stadiums for and have our identities tied to. Meh, you see, all that matters is just one. more. point. than the other guys.
Who cares about a population’s sense of identity and esteem. A blue-collar existence of dignity and self-sufficiency. The men who derive their sense of worth and autonomy from their ability to provide. It’s fine if we rob them of their agency, because the doodads are that much cheaper for it. You don’t need a sense of independence, you need a smartphone that folds!
Boy you’re really laying it on thick for those flyover-state peons! All we want is just one. more. point. of gross margin bro. Chill. You clearly don’t read Harvard Business Review.
The spreadsheet cannot capture what the human condition requires. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This vacuous worldview produces grayness. Variance degrades. Fragility seeps into your supply chains and your soul when all is reduced to sterile measurement. The satisfaction of a well-executed 15-footer and holistic domestic prosperity incrementally eradicated… the inefficient beauty of a life lived between extremes continually eroded.
The NBA shot chart is a proxy for much of modernity. They're X-rays of civilizations that optimized away their own humanity. No midrange jumpers. No middle class. Disemboweling the center, where life actually happens.
Sooner or later, we always revert to the mean.
Thanks for subscribing and sharing. If you enjoyed this essay, give it a like
To show your support you can become a paying subscriber or donate here: 0x9C828E8EeCe7a339bBe90A44bB096b20a4F1BE2B
"Remember Rip Hamilton? Kobe? They lived in the midrange. Jordan did everything, everywhere, all at once. Now you know what you do in the modern NBA? You either get a sniper to shoot a foot behind the 3-point line, or you throw it to the post."
It's even worse. The post game also went the way of the midrange jumper. The entire game is 80% played beyond the 3 point line now. Those shots in the paint? The product of guards being pick-and-rolled from the 3 point line and into the paint to collapse defenses. Nobody posts up anymore.
A brutally true analysis. I've been thinking about some of this in terms of how board gaming and other "fun" activities have turned into spreadsheets. But how the "middle" gets removed is a unique take.
https://waverings.substack.com/p/optimizing-the-trains-to-auschwitz