In late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest. For three days, a heat dome hovered over Multnomah County, Oregon, broiling Portland’s drizzly landscape of evergreens and ferns with temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit—much hotter than any resident, even the centenarians, had ever experienced there. Along the rocky ocean shore, sea stars and clams cooked alive in the tide pools. The heat buckled highway lanes and melted the cables that route power to the light-rail network. Not everyone had air-conditioning, and as the days wore on, getting an ambulance or a hospital bed became more and more difficult. Sixty-nine locals died.

At the county’s administrative headquarters, in East Portland, the board of commissioners got to thinking that someone should pay for all of this damage and loss of human life. Until recently, it would have been absurd to hold a person or company financially responsible for a sweltering spell of summer weather. Heat waves were like storms or fires: acts of God or products of chance, depending on your metaphysics. But climate scientists’ understanding of Earth’s atmosphere is getting only more sophisticated, and a growing number of them have come to believe that specific local weather events are traceable to human actions. They say that, with state-of-the-art computer models, they can now link a stifling heat dome like the one that settled over Multnomah County all the way back to the derricks, refineries, and glass office towers of specific oil companies thousands of miles away.

The scientists who launched this field knew that it could have legal ramifications, and hoped that it would. Now their work—still new, and not without its challenges—is being put to the test. During the past five years, dozens of American cities, counties, and states have used it in claims filed against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and scores of other companies, demanding not only payment for disasters that have already happened, but also mitigation funds for those that are bound to strike in the future. At a Multnomah County board meeting in June 2023, the commissioners voted to join them. Only a few hours later, the county filed a claim for more than $51.5 billion against 17 defendants: 14 fossil-fuel producers and sellers, two industry trade associations, and one management consultancy, McKinsey & Co. No such case has yet made it to trial in the United States, but legal experts told me that the Multnomah suit is among the most promising of its kind.

These lawsuits represent a new front for the climate-change movement, and they’ve arrived at a time when the movement is desperate for one. President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, dashing all hopes of a near-term global effort to limit emissions. His administration has not only refused to regulate atmospheric carbon, but actively encouraged Americans to vent more of it into the sky. Trump’s appointees have reversed fuel-efficiency standards, slashed investments into solar and wind, and, just last week, proposed the removal of all greenhouse-gas emissions limits on the nation’s power plants.

Meanwhile, summers keep getting hotter. A new environmental nihilism is setting in among Americans: Although a record number of us now see global warming as a “serious threat,” more than 60 percent tell pollsters that humanity won’t do what’s necessary to prevent the planet from careening toward a once-in-an-eon catastrophe. Against this backdrop of despair, the cases brought by Multnomah County and other plaintiffs like it could seem like a godsend for those who are desperate for some kind—any kind—of action. They sidestep Congress and the president and take the fight directly to the prime polluters. With jury awards that might conceivably run into the tens of billions of dollars each, a successful run of these lawsuits could function like a carbon tax on steroids. They could force energy companies to make more urgent investments in renewable energy, if only to limit their own liability. The more extreme climate-change scenarios would become less likely.

But that’s only if the science holds up.

When Noah Diffenbaugh was first starting graduate school in Earth sciences, in the year 2000, everybody already knew that human beings were heating up the planet. Climate scientists had discovered a smoking gun of sorts in the vertical layers of Earth’s atmosphere: The warming was distributed through them in exactly the way that you’d expect if our carbon emissions were the culprit. But no one dreamed of finding human fingerprints on a single weather event, such as a heat wave. “The posture was just: That’s not something we do,” Diffenbaugh told me.

A few years later, in 2003, that posture would change. In an editorial for Nature called “Liability for Climate Change,” Myles Allen, an atmospheric scientist at Oxford, argued that the attribution of extreme events to global warming was not only scientifically possible, but an urgent priority for the field. He urged his colleagues to pursue the idea precisely because it could be useful to future litigants. Epidemiologists had already shown the way. They’d long ago stopped asking whether smoking caused a person’s cancer; instead, they asked by what fraction it raised a person’s risk of getting the disease. Allen argued that climate scientists should do something similar by asking how smokestacks and other sources of atmospheric carbon had raised the planet’s risk of experiencing a flood or heat wave.

As if on cue, within months of Allen’s editorial, a singularly lethal week of extreme heat struck Europe. In France and Italy, tens of thousands of people died. In the aftermath, Allen joined up with Peter Stott, a climate scientist with the United Kingdom’s national weather service, and a young Oxford researcher named Dáithí Stone to analyze the heat wave’s potential link to climate change. The team looked at European temperature records for every June, July, and August going back to 1851, and found that 2003 had indeed been an outlier. For a large swath of the continent, the mean summer temperature had been 4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal. The team used a computer model to calculate the probability of that kind of spike in two different worlds: one with human carbon emissions and one without. By simulating summers in both worlds, the researchers determined that in ours—the one with emissions—the risk of Europe’s brutally hot summer was at least twice as high.

[Read: Climate change is moving mountains]

With that paper, a new science was born. “It’s now a recognized subfield with dozens of research groups and hundreds of papers,” said Diffenbaugh, who is currently a professor and senior fellow in Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. In July, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report on the state of climate-attribution research, after more than 20 years of scientific work. Efforts to link extreme weather events to climate change had markedly improved, it said, thanks to more sophisticated models. Some extreme weather events are still difficult to attribute: Wildfires and hurricanes are tricky because they involve lots of different factors beyond just heat. But the report made clear that for heat waves, such as the one that hit Multnomah County, climate-attribution science is now on solid ground.

Indeed, if all the county had to do was prove that its brutal summer weather in 2021 was attributable to human-caused climate change, that would be a cinch. But the county’s lawsuit wasn’t filed against the whole of humankind; it names specific energy companies. To succeed in court, the plaintiffs will need to prove not one but two connections: first, between the heat wave’s death and destruction and industrial activity writ large, and second, between that industrial activity and individual polluters.

Proving the second link requires input from a different line of research—a tedious accounting project that unfolded over the very same period in which climate-attribution science went mainstream. In 2003, the same year that Allen published his Nature editorial, a geographer named Richard Heede was asked to prepare an unusual report. An environmental lawyer, Peter Roderick, wanted Heede to quantify every ton of CO₂ that Standard Oil had put into the atmosphere, beginning in 1882 and continuing through the company’s merger-enabled transformation into ExxonMobil. By then, humanity’s total carbon contribution to the atmosphere had already been estimated at about 400 billion tons. Heede’s work was meant to show what percentage of that mind-bending total could be traced back to the operations of a single large company.

Heede was able to retrieve most of the data that he needed from Exxon’s own records. After the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 was passed, publicly traded firms began to report their annual production of oil, gas, and coal to shareholders. To get the remaining pre-1934 records, Heede tracked down early histories of Standard Oil in dusty library collections in different parts of the country. Some of the early years remain a mystery. “I don’t think even the company itself has that full record,” he told me. But fossil-fuel production was relatively minuscule during those decades anyway, so omitting that had little effect on the final total.

[Read: What climate change will do to America by mid-century]

After adding up the numbers for Exxon, Heede told Roderick that the company had likely contributed about 5 percent of all the carbon that humans have ever pumped into Earth’s atmosphere. Roderick had commissioned Heede’s study because he’d had a hunch that it would be useful in a lawsuit against the company, but that end result seemed too small to get traction in court. So Heede set out to run the same analysis on other companies too.

In 2013, he submitted his results—a database completed with the help of volunteers and colleagues around the world who visited libraries on his behalf—to a scientific journal called Climatic Change. His manuscript reported that a full 63 percent of the world’s industrial CO₂ and methane emissions could be traced to just 90 entities. When Multnomah County filed suit for heat-wave damages in 2023, its attorneys cited this research; almost all of the named defendants appear on Heede’s list.

Climate scientists had achieved a remarkable bit of planetary detective work. They’d found the human hand in global warming, traced its effects all the way to specific weather events, and then apportioned blame for those events among the Exxons and Chevrons of the world. But not all of those links are straightforward—and in a courtroom, reasonable jurors may find them to be abstract or otherwise unconvincing.

For one thing, whatever advances that climate-attribution scientists have made, their work will never be definitive. They can’t run randomized controlled trials on extreme weather events: No one has access to a second Earth, identical to ours in every respect except for the extra carbon in its atmosphere. So instead, they give us probabilistic analyses that compare the weather that we see today with what we would have expected to see without human emissions, based on records from the time before we pumped so much carbon into the sky. The problem is, scientists have at most a century’s worth of good weather data, and that’s only for North America and Europe. That may not be enough to capture the whole range of natural variation, and even if it were, the data would still describe only one of many possible ways that Earth’s atmosphere might have behaved in an emissions-free universe.

To get around these limitations, scientists try to simulate a host of possible scenarios. They use climate models to generate thousands of ways the weather could have unfolded over time, either with or without human-generated carbon emissions in the mix. Then they count how often an event like the one they’re trying to attribute—a historic heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for example—appears in each pile of simulated worlds, and analyze the difference.

But a lot depends on how the researchers define what they’re looking for in those piles. To complete their studies, scientists must set parameters for the heat wave that they’re trying to attribute—an exact peak temperature, a number of days, a geographical area—and then search for these across existing data, or in their pile of simulations. They take steps to control the risk of bias in the ensuing analysis, but by defining the event in a certain way, researchers could, in theory, make it look more unusual—and thus more attributable to human emissions.

Even setting that aside, an attribution analysis can say only that climate change makes a certain kind of heat wave more likely to occur. It can’t say whether climate change actually caused each and every such event. Roger Pielke Jr., a climate-policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that to slide from one to the other is like saying that a high batting average caused a home run.

Ted Shepherd, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, in England, who has been critical of this mode of attribution, has been pushing the field toward what he calls “storyline” attribution. In this method, scientists re-create a specific weather event by doing their best to put the details of its atmospheric mechanics into a model. Then they watch how it plays out, with and without human greenhouse gases in the mix. These storyline attributions avoid some of the issues that plague the other type, but they have their own simplifications and potential biases.

In the Multnomah County case and others like it, judges will have to evaluate whether attribution science, however it’s done, is admissible in court. Robin Craig, an environmental-law professor at the University of Kansas, told me that she’s not sure whether every one of them will reach the same conclusion. Even some of the researchers who are working in this field are wary of its use inside a courtroom. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at UCLA who has done important work on attributing wildfires and droughts to climate change, told me that studies of this kind are impossible to verify. In a sense, the research methods themselves will be on trial in these cases.

Climate science is already politically contested. For most of its history, researchers have been able to argue, accurately, that when they describe the need to reduce carbon emissions, they’re just following what the data indicate—and offering neutral counsel as to how a planetary disaster can be avoided. But from the very start, extreme-weather attribution has been pitched as a tool for activist lawsuits: Allen’s editorial from 2003 began by asking, “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?” This intermingling of research work and legal practice has been a driving force for the whole endeavor.

One of the original members of the committee that reviewed the state of climate-attribution science for the National Academies was the lead scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Science Hub for Climate Litigation. (After Pielke pointed this out in a Substack post, she was removed from the review panel.) Oil-funded advocacy groups have besieged the remaining committee members with public-records requests, presumably to ferret out any other conflicts of interest or embarrassing exchanges. Organizations connected to major oil companies have similarly criticized Heede’s database of individual polluters as having been specifically created to enable litigation. They also point out that even going by Heede’s own data, the carbon emissions of individual American companies are dwarfed by those from nationalized oil producers, including those in the former Soviet Union and in China.

When I asked Ryan Meyers, general counsel for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade association for the oil industry, about the attribution-science litigation, he responded with an emailed statement calling it an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry.” He added: “Climate policymaking belongs in Congress, not in a patchwork of courts.”

What if it works? What if U.S. courts accept the science of climate attribution, with all of its tortured counterfactuals? What if some jury somewhere is inclined to see the oil companies as villains and wants them brought low? A single successful claim could inflict astronomical liability; in a warming world, almost every town and county in America might eventually be eligible to file one, and each would have the prospect of producing an enormous verdict.

As satisfying as that outcome would be for the beleaguered climate movement, it may not represent justice in full. By suing companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, Multnomah County and the other plaintiffs are blaming climate change and extreme weather on the companies at the very top of the energy supply chain. This makes a certain kind of sense; the companies that extract and sell fossil fuels have certainly enriched themselves while Earth has warmed, and they can afford to pay a lot of damages out of their extraordinary profits. The plaintiffs will argue—as climate activists have for more than a decade now—that these companies understood the damage they were doing and deceived the public about it. This was the strategy that worked against the tobacco companies. When those companies were sued, the discovery process shook loose internal documents showing that they had long known that nicotine was addictive and cigarettes caused cancer, and had concealed this knowledge.

But if energy giants did understand global warming’s risks and hide them from the public—and some evidence that this is true has already been made public—would that let the rest of us off the hook? For decades now, we’ve all had good reason to believe that carbon emissions are heating Earth, and very few of us have renounced the use of fossil fuels, no matter how much we profess to care about climate change. We fill up our gas tanks, heat our homes in winter, and board cross-country flights to see family. The construction of our built environment would not have been possible without fossil fuels, nor would the functioning of our agricultural system. The lesson of attribution science might be that climate change is attributable to all of us.

Oil companies don’t want to pay for their share of it, but neither do most people. Degrowth arguments that call for humans to consume less or embrace a future with fewer people are woefully unpopular, and so are policies that would require Americans to pay more to burn carbon or compensate developing countries for the carbon that we have already burned.

Even supposing that energy companies are not just responsible for climate change, but uniquely so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be held liable for all the harms that flow from it. “Disasters are never just weather,” Greg Lusk, a philosopher at Durham University, in England, who has written extensively about the epistemology of climate models, told me. They’re also a function of human choices about infrastructure and emergency response. During the ultra-lethal European heat wave of 2003 that killed nearly 15,000 people in France alone (and went on to be the test case for the first climate-attribution paper), many health workers happened to be away on holiday, which reduced France’s capacity for dealing with the crisis. Similarly, if more of Multnomah County’s residents had owned air conditioners in 2021, its heat dome would have had a much lower human cost. Our global conversation about who precisely ought to be held accountable for events like these, and to what extent, is likely only just beginning.

Either way, in the here and now, the energy companies are fighting these cases as if their survival depends on it. “There is a view that if you can get one to trial, you can make the fossil-fuel companies look bad and sway a jury,” Jonathan Adler, a law professor at William and Mary, told me. But whether Multnomah County’s lawsuit, or any other like it, ever gets to trial is an open question. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether federal law preempts a claim that Boulder, Colorado, filed against several oil giants in state court for the costs of adapting to wildfires and drought. The plaintiffs in Portland will be watching closely. “A broad ruling from the court in the Boulder case could make a lot of the others go away,” Adler said.

Oil-and-gas companies may be able to weather a few losses. They could end up shelling out billions in damages, and still make enough profit to allow fossil-fuel production to survive and thrive. Whatever happens, this wave of climate lawsuits likely won’t be the last of its kind. The legal context for these cases will evolve. Company records will keep piling up, and courts may come to recognize new harms. Scientists will get better at measuring all the ways that Earth is changing. The weather will very likely worsen: People will experience more lethal heat domes hovering over cities that were once known for their mildness; more floods that wash away homes; more wildfires that orange the sky and fill it with lung-damaging smoke. More people are going to want someone to pay.

The Solow model has its uses, but it fails when it comes to major changes stemming from AI.  Consider instead an economy with (at least) two factors of production:

1. Intelligence.  Yes, formal smarts.  Playing chess, proving math theorems, and doing well on evals.  Don’t forget humans can do those things too, though AIs are now a huge boost here.

2. Polanyi knowledge.  Michael Polanyi, that is.  This refers to knowledge of time and place, inarticulable knowledge, custom and habit, and many other particularities that you can read about in Hayek and Polanyi and in many other social scientists, anthropologists too.

Humans specialize in this.  The AIs can aid in its production, but at least so far there is no way you can “bring an AI into your office and have it figure out how that office works.”  At least not in the human rather than the purely mechanistic sense.

In the model, intelligence and Polanyi knowledge combine to produce output.

Substitutability is fairly limited.  For instance, if you have problems of norms in your office, a mere dose of AI-drenched technocratic knowledge does not usually solve those problems.  Sometimes it even can make those problems worse, by empowering rent-seekers further.

Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are not quite Leontief complements, but they are mostly complements.

Now recently the U.S. economy has experienced a huge positive shock to its Intelligence, with more to come.

The core prediction is that this increases marginal returns, employment, and real wages in the Polanyi knowledge sector.  All of a sudden, the inputs into that sector are relatively scarce, compared to the now-larger quantity of Intelligence.

There will also be some transitional unemployment in the Intelligence sector, at least once Centaur models fade.  But so far Centaur models are holding, for instance mathematicians did the prompting to do the new math work.  Nonetheless some of these Centaur employments will fade, just as they have in chess.

Note that the Polanyi sector cannot be boosted very quickly or with direct and simple efficacy.  It is messy by its nature, to cite a term from Luis Garicano.  So the wage and employment gains there are slow in coming.  But they keep on coming for a long period of time.  There are further AI/Intelligence advances on tap, plus absorbing the advances to date, and exploiting them, takes a long time.

In this model, if someone or something could “commandeer” the Intelligence sector, their power over society would be much more limited than it might appear at first.  The world does not change that much at first, because the necessary complements are lacking.

The Solow model usually does fine by ignoring these features of the world, in part because it is rare for the Intelligence sector to take such a rapid swing upwards.  So the ratios and complementarities across these two sectors usually are fairly constant in the short run, though not in 2026 or in the next years to come.

I recall talking through this model, and debating it with people, when I was seventeen years old.  The impetus for that was the Soviet preoccupation with cybernetics, central planning, and possible supercomputers.  We were all wondering what kinds of economic improvements that might lead to, or whether it could make central planning successful (no, basically, but that involves some yet further arguments).

Of course this very simple model can be improved upon in many ways, but it is a start.

This very simple model so far is matching up to the data, namely that we have shocking AI and tech advances, the job market is doing fine, markets do not see high risk, and economic growth is robust, not exploding, but likely will rise in the future.  These predictions change somewhat as the Polanyi sector, slowly, catches up to and incorporates the Intelligence explosion.

In the meantime, this is the best basic framework for understanding our current situation.

The post A simple model of AI-aided economic growth appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

“What would Howard say?” This question, which Dave Zirin reports being “asked repeatedly” while he was working on his new biography of Howard Zinn, underscores how unusual a figure his subject cut in contemporary American life. Most historians live and die in relative obscurity. But 16 years after Zinn’s death, many people still look to him, not just as a scholar but as a kind of sage.

Zinn first became famous—and, in some circles, infamous—after the 1980 publication of his best-selling work A People’s History of the United States. The book advanced an ambitious and unrepentantly radical reimagining of the nation’s past. Zinn rejected the conventional organization of history around “the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders” and declared, “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.” What emerged was a new grand narrative, one that promised to reveal what mainstream history had long concealed and to offer a new moral framework for the past. In Zinn’s telling, the powerful were almost always up to no good, and ordinary people were the heroes of the American story. They courageously built movements for justice and sometimes even won, though it never took long for the oppressors to regroup. The fight was never over.  

Unlike most best sellers, A People’s History never stopped selling. Each year during its first three decades in print, it sold more copies than the last. The book’s fans applauded its bottom-up, justice-minded approach to history, while its detractors dismissed it as a leftist morality play masquerading as a story about the past. No one could doubt that it changed the conversation about American history, not to mention the trajectory of Zinn’s life. By the time he died in 2010, he was an archvillain for the right and a secular saint for the left.

Zirin’s fast-paced biography, The People’s Historian, is an answer to the most interesting version of “What would Howard say?” One hardly needs to squint to imagine what Zinn would have thought of the current regime in Washington, and readers curious only about that can put this book down after page 4, where Zirin declares, “Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.” But Zirin himself is after something more. He knew Zinn personally and collaborated with him on projects; he admires him deeply. Zirin believes we need more than Zinn’s opinions today; he argues that we need the deeper wisdom that emanates from his life and work.

Zinn’s many gifts developed in the course of what was, by any estimation, a remarkable journey. He was born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. In his early 20s he rushed to enlist in the fight against fascism, serving in the Air Forces during World War II. He would long regret his short tenure as a bombardier who dropped artillery shells on behalf of a compromised colonial power—as he would later come to see the United States—from such heights that he could not be sure where exactly they landed. Zinn’s willingness to admit he was gravely wrong is part of what Zirin loves about him. The people’s historian was a radical, but he was also a “happy warrior” who believed that people could change, and so could societies.

[Read: The new history wars]

As a participant in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, Zinn witnessed such transformations firsthand. He organized alongside his students at Spelman College as well as with famous activists, including Ella Baker and Daniel Berrigan. Together, in the 1960s and ’70s, they fought to change a country whose past and present were steeped in violence and white supremacy. The going was never easy, because, as Zirin tells it—very much in Zinnian fashion—they bumped up against so many villains in power. Sometimes it was the director of the FBI; other times, a reactionary university administrator. But the people could be powerful too. Any given campaign might be stymied, but the march went on. However dreary the news, the hope persisted for a better day.

Zirin argues convincingly that Zinn’s life story vindicates one of his deepest convictions: that ordinary people and “small acts” can change the world. Zinn was right about this, and Zirin concludes the book with a quote from him that draws out the optimistic implications of his faith in bottom-up movements: “We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising.” This is a compelling message for the current moment—and any other. Yet one can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom.

“Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” Zirin relates that some of Zinn’s devotees—“those politically raised on his ideas”—have asked him this question, in addition to the one about what he might say in any given situation. Zirin takes up the second query but answers it far less satisfactorily than the first. He acknowledges that “in 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again,” and moreover that Trump “won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men.” But Zirin does not wrestle with the meaning of these developments. Rather, he waves them away with invocations of the “tech oligarchs” and “autocrats” who are driving “our global descent into authoritarianism.” This is an homage in a way, a vintage Zinn move—evading tough questions about who “the people” are and what they really want.

A People’s History of the United States appeared the same year Ronald Reagan was first elected president. In later editions of the book, Zinn would cast Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him and George H. W. Bush after—as a creature of “the Establishment,” elected by a majority of voters but by a minority of the voting population and, hence, hardly the people’s choice. Zinn wrote something similar in 2003 amid the travails of the early War on Terror: “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over.” The following year, of course, George W. Bush won the popular vote.  

[Read: What if our ancestors didn’t feel anything like we do?]

Zinn was hardly the only academic to be thrown by this turn of events. The 2004 election left no doubt that the Reagan Revolution had been more than a blip; in its aftermath, American historians redoubled their efforts to understand the sources of the right’s surprising resurgence. What they have uncovered in the past two decades flies in the face of a central tenet of Zinnian orthodoxy. The sustained success of the modern conservative movement cannot be explained away as the outcome of establishment machinations or a top-down takeover. Its energy and vitality came in no small part from the grassroots: from stay-at-home moms and car mechanics, from the suburbs and the Sun Belt, from evangelicals and Catholics and more. The revival of the Republican Party’s national fortunes at various moments, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, confirms Zinn’s faith in the power of bottom-up movements, even as it confounds his almost mythic sense of “the people” as inevitably on the right side of history (that is, the left side of the political spectrum).

And if ordinary folks are more complicated than Zinn and Zirin recognize, perhaps those who wield power can be too. What made the right’s political comeback so surprising, after all, was that in the mid-1960s the liberal-left coalition was winning not only in the streets but also on Capitol Hill. In those years, progressives leveraged grassroots energy into breakthrough policy change. The leaders of major civic and political institutions were rarely out in front of progressive activists, but at least some of them chose to pull levers that made the United States more equal and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with sweeping bipartisan majorities.

After an outrageous assault by law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson memorably proclaimed—before a joint session of Congress, Cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, and more than 70 million Americans watching on television—that “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.” His invocation of a beloved civil-rights anthem brought a tear to Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye. None of this impressed Zinn. In A People’s History, he framed both the speech and the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as “concessions.”

Then and now, such unrelenting suspicion springs from genuine patterns of institutional failure and betrayal. Villains are, alas, not just a figment of our collective imagination. And yet, in 2026, with the Democrats on the outside of power looking in, progressives might nevertheless ask whether the Zinnian propensity to demonize anyone and everyone wielding authority has served their cause well. Dismissing landmark legislation as mere concessions can miss the fact that there is no path forward from righteous protest to lasting change that does not run through better—if imperfect—public policy. However “exhilarating” Zinn’s counternarrative can be, it may have encouraged millions of well-meaning readers to be skeptical of the possibility that any good could come through the slow, messy institutional work that is central to pluralistic democracy. Coincidental or not, this much is true: During the same period when Zinn’s influence was rising meteorically on the left, the right became much more adept at channeling populist enthusiasm into deliberate campaigns to reshape the major institutions of American life.  

“I wanted to change the world, and I thought history might be helpful,” Zinn liked to say, lightheartedly. His biographer is right to argue that Zinn, an ordinary person, did change the world—though perhaps he didn’t do it only in the ways that either of them hoped he would.