This raises a question for me: assuming that most people are averse to external shocks to their station in life, and assuming that all those people vote to select representatives that on average reflect their views, is democracy in some level going to be averse to technological change past a certain point?
Whats to stop a large number of people from trying to do some version of what the longshoremen pulled off if they figure out that’s what works to at least maintain stability?
Related to this, what should be done for those whose work is completely outmoded? Assuming new technologies do prove a threat, throwing large numbers of people into economic irrelevance does not seem like a winning move socially or politically.
I think the answer to this (at least to me) is people like Pete Buttigieg and similar, who do a great job of explaining to the layman why their (currently comfortable) lives will not last long term if they don't support things like housing, transit, infrastructure, electric/energy technologies, R&D investment etc. The key is making a very clear and explicit connection between the two as well as emphasizing all the benefits to be gained by them.
Re: latter point, historically every new big technological revolution has resulted in more jobs, not less, however that is often of little comfort to these people. I think if we could, somehow, find a way to enact very basic Universal Basic Income, a lot more people would feel more comfortable with a more rapid pace of technological change. It's a challenge though, we already struggle with social security, and UBI is an even bigger economic lift, but not totally impossible.
Especially when many people with outmoded work are at the age of 40-50 (when it is hard to reskill and hard for companies to hire!)
You could just let them sit with welfare, but it would be unpopular as a domestic policy and they would still be unhappy, since work gives people meaning in their lives.
Another policy that could be done is just subsidize unprofitable companies, kind of what Russia under Putin did to make sure the people in faraway regions don't revolt: https://youtu.be/A-1n-05Xu6Y?si=3T3O6OhkEeaBV56z
> You could just let them sit with welfare, but it would be unpopular
This is actually what we do now. We just call it "disability" instead of welfare so that most people don't know what it really is. Almost 5% of working age adults are on disability, and in WV it's 9%! Most of these people are just long term unemployed and not actually too disabled for work. https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
The issue of state capacity and governance is highly relevant to this discussion of a "high-level equilibrium trap." A state that cannot meaningfully enact policy changes due to political dysfunction or sclerotic/litigation-averse bureaucracies sets the tone for broader society. People become more pessimistic, less confident in their capacity to enact change, and less eager to rock the boat, since the state is too rigid to respond to transformational technologies in a way that harnesses their effectiveness while shielding others from their less savory side effects.
I would also point out that the predominance of the service sector in American economic life sets a hard limit on how much growth we can expect. Productivity growth in the service sector is more challenging than in manufacturing or manufacturing-adjacent sectors like transportation and logistics. Theoretically, a country prioritizing manufacturing as a core part of its economy (like Germany or China) could find it easier to break out of a high-level equilibrium trap through technological innovation.
Agreed about state capacity and governance. America is no longer a serious country. We can't address serious questions and our governance is extremely dysfunctional.
On services, I think you'll find that there's more productivity gains possible, but maybe they aren't where you're looking for them. Here's one: telemedicine. Another: the expansion of Physicians' Assistants. I have others, but I don't want to give away all my secrets.
How about just removing doctors as gatekeepers for a lot of things? I have had a prescription for adderall for almost 20 years now and I have to pay a doctor every 3 months to get a new copy of exactly the same prescription. The appointments cost $150 so that's now a completely unnecessary $12,000 for a bureaucratic gatekeeper. Then there's the pharmacist to pay, who somehow makes six figures for counting my pills.
And this isn't the worst of it. Schools even require doctors notes for absences! So now a parent has to miss work to drag their sick kid to a doctor's office and the doctor says "he has a cold and will get better, here's your note." Total waste of productivity for two people.
The trick about increasing productivity in the service sector is that it usually involves reorganizing the way business operations are made. Like, say, developing the franchise model for fast food, or contracting out auxiliary services like cleanup instead of having an in-house janitorial staff, or shifting towards a dynamic scheduling system that schedules workers only as needed (instead of having preexisting work schedules). Problem is, this usually (not always, but more often than not) works by imposing new demands on service workers, which contributes to labor alienation as well as hindering service workers ability to organize collectively and improve their conditions through labor unions.
I have some sympathy for the tech skepticism in the US. I think it's counter-productive, but I think that Americans are slowly recognizing that social media is very bad for us as a country, and are turning on the people they see as the purveyors of it. It's not ridiculous for them to have soured on companies like Meta, who are seen as mostly making money on the backs of sowing discord in society and among family members. Twitter and Facebook together seem to be premised on "let's make money by making everyone mad at each other all the time"; to the extent there's a political divide it's mostly over "Social media had a big role in making Trump president". Smartphones coupled to social media have played a big role in making people unhappy. Advertising has gotten incredibly intrusive. In a lot of ways, the tech industry has set itself up as the replacement for Big Tobacco, in exploiting addictions to rake in cash. There's a lot of bathwater with that baby.
At the same time, it's maddening, because tech -- which is really just another word for "human ingenuity" of which software is in some ways the purest form -- is making peoples' lives way better. We have knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips that autodidacts like Benjamin Franklin would sell his own grandmother for. We have barely to wish for delicious foods and a wealth of material goods, and they show up on our doorsteps at trivial cost; we don't even handle cash or talk to human beings, we make magic incantations on the little glowing rectangle that usually just makes us mad all the time. Modern American society is objectively amazing, and we seem utterly unable to appreciate it, because we have so much luxury time that we fill with being mad at each other.
Perversely, I think it's precisely because we are so pampered that we as a culture are so inclined to doomerism: none of it feels real. It's a truism in academia "the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low" and that's what our whole society has become. If you've got a reasonably stable job with a reasonable income, you can live a better life than Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great ever dreamed of. We have the luxury of being mad at each other all the time, so we are: there's nothing forcing us to set aside our differences. I think that the partisan divides are just different manifestations of the same malaise; it's how each team finds it acceptable to express their discontent. The left might be mad at software, but that software is mostly just a reflection of us as a society.
Well said, and I was about to instinctively be annoyed at this anti-tech comment until I read past your first sentence, thinking it was going to be a defense of the anti-tech ideas to Noah mentioned in the post. 😂
Personally I deleted all social media apps except Instagram and even that one is only a few changes from getting the axe too if they end up like Facebook did (Meta owning both doesn't inspire confidence). I keep my accounts but have a strict policy of only looking up stuff on the rest of the platforms if I have a specific thing I need to check (i.e. an event or something, to get in touch with a specific person, etc).
Reddit might be the most insidious of them all, it's been taken over by a mix of far left crazies, terrorists (excellent article by PirateWires(1) about how Hamas operatives built up an entire astroturfing operation on the biggest subreddits on the site), and bots (usually foreign, Chinese/Russian, pushing their narratives and/or anti-western ones), combined with the upvote system enforcing echo chambers, you have an extremely destructive platform.
But Facebook too, when I decided to delete the app entirely, I did an experiment where I just scrolled down my homepage for 10+ minutes straight to count how many items that I saw were things or people I explicitly followed. That entire time was maybe 4-5 people/posts total, the rest was just algorithmic garbage. Compared to when I first got on Facebook (and Myspace before it) it was pure, 100% value add and usefulness, it was ONLY people or pages I followed in my feed, that's it. We used it for social meet ups and study groups/tips in high school and college, and it was insanely useful for that. Now a days, you have to wade through the 99% of garbage to get to the 1% of useful stuff on the site.
The sooner people get off these platforms the happier they'll be and the healthier we'll be as a society, for that matter.
Notably the increase in mentioning "caution, worry and risk" didn't stop after the 30 years of post-WW2 economic expansion, or during the 90s and 2000s (when the economic growth in the West was much higher!)
In that way, WW1 could be considered as the catastrophe that forever broke the Western world, notably their optimism in the world shattered, because "how can civilization also lead to industrial mass-slaughter?" was never considered before!
Also, the rise of mass media, and as people know, its tendencies of highlighting negative news headlines, contributed to this issue though.
You simply cannot will a technological shift out of existence, or make the world go back to the way it used to be, no matter how big and powerful your country is. In 1793, a British mission to China (which was then ruled by the Qing dynasty) offered the emperor various technological marvels from the West. The emperor was unimpressed, and expressed utter disinterest in the wonders he was being shown, uttering the famous line: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Noah, I like your theory about the decline in manufacturing employment being somewhat an artifact of how we count. Outsourcing means that manufacturers' payroll departments go away and ADP does everyone's payroll. All those jobs shifted from manufacturing to service, even though nothing really changed.
Another brilliant column. You're right about EV and electric batteries, should not have been sold as a climate de-changer, which it really isn't, but the key to future growth and national defense
I am hearing a great deal of anxiety about the future in my world of futurists and academics, plus science fiction creators, all mostly in the US. Relatively little excitement and hope.
This same effect happens in companies too. Large companies grow complacent an inefficient. (This is what Jeff Bezos refers to as "Day 1 and day 2". https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders). It's a very common pattern that new innovations happen in small startups rather than large established companies even though the large companies have easily 100x the resources to try to compete in the new market. e.g. of the companies that dominate the internet today, none of them existed 40 years ago. It's strange when you think about it, because if Microsoft had wanted to build a search engine in 1998 they could have put hundreds of highly paid engineers on the project, but they got beat out by two guys who started in a garage. Silicon Valley as we know it was started by a man who founded a semiconductor startup in Palo Alto when any of the large manufacturers could have out spent him 100:1.
IMO the best piece of writing out there on this organizational dysfunction and decay is the series of blogs called "The Gervais Principle" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ which describes, among other things, how an organization inevitably gets gummed up with useless bureaucracy and middle management and loses all its productive capacity. This is about companies, but clearly applicable to governments as well, and it dovetails very nicely with Ezra Klein's observations of procedural paralysis and also Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction.
Jerry Pournelle and I disagreed about many things, but I think frequently of his Iron Law of Bureaucracy. From his website,
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Personally, I'd have used police unions as my example, but the principle holds up remarkably well.
Noah you are spot on, we are hopelessly pedaling backwards now and the gap will be too big to be overcome in just a few years. Pathetic. I wonder if Americans will lash out in an angry nihilism once they finally realize what has happened or just slip further into a solipsism?
There was a young man who bombed a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, CA. (He was killed in the attempt) He left behind writings describing himself as “anti-life” and claimed he was doing a good deed preventing future children from being born without their consent. We’ve seen many a “pro lifer” commit violence to “save the precious children” but a self-proclaimed ANTI-lifer is a new one on me. (I do know that the arr antinatalism exists on Reddit, but I never thought of it as anything more than a circle jerk.)
American standards of living have not grown at 2% a year, but much lower than that. Your previous article was about this. It has gone up 50% over 50 years, which is about 0.8% a year. People would probably be more optimistic if the growth rate was 2%.
Americans are pessimistic about many things other than just economics though. I live in the San Francisco bubble so maybe it is better in other places but people here are profoundly shell shocked and depressed.
Also, looking about AI...it's normal for people to be worried about AI though, since it has already (and will continue to) create philosophical questions about the meaning to be humans, and about human intelligence though.
AI companies marketing themselves as "replacing human in their jobs" did not do themselves a favor!
Loss aversion is a well known concept in behavioral economics and now it seems to have spread from individuals to our entire nation. Many are more pessimistic about new and emerging technologies rather than excited about their potential. And politicians have been preaching "American exceptionalism" for so long that most Americans don't realize how rapidly other countries are advancing. Since the underlying premise of MAGA is that American was once greater than it is now, they seem more interested in turning back the clock than moving forward. Unclear if Trump and his acolytes in Congress think the golden age was the 1890s or the 1950s but they are doing their best to undermine scientific progress with cutbacks to NIH, NOAA, EPA, DOE, NSF, etc.
When it comes to blocking change and creating negative attitudes to change, the political power of oligarchs should not be overlooked.
For example the anti green energy attitudes that so many Americans have would not exist if not for the efforts of Big fossil fuel to deceive the public and rig the political process. There is nothing inherently conservative about being anti solar and wind. The only reason it has become so is that the right wing press and the republican party has been brought by big fossil fuel and its allies.
It's not just Big fossil fuel. Any great concentration of wealth in any field will compel the people who control it to do the same... rig the game by any and every means at their disposal.
It should be looked at as a form of "rent seeking".
Texas Republicans have just passed legislation that will gut their solar and wind industries.
Critics of the left who blame, and mock certain liberals and their concern over the power of Concentrated Wealth's ability to rig the game to the detriment of the common American for nation's lack of progress have loved to point out how conservative Texas beats liberal California at solar and wind.
Well, now maybe they will recognize and admit that the Anit-Oligarch, anti monopoly wing of the Democratic party have a point ? That it's not just class resentment that motives them ?
There is no doubt we have a system that makes development and progress too difficult. We need to re-regulate. We need to get rid of choke points at every turn and streamline processes. But that doesn't mean that the outsized political power that the super wealthy have, and that is exasperated by a growing wealth gap, should go ignored and unaddressed.
This raises a question for me: assuming that most people are averse to external shocks to their station in life, and assuming that all those people vote to select representatives that on average reflect their views, is democracy in some level going to be averse to technological change past a certain point?
Whats to stop a large number of people from trying to do some version of what the longshoremen pulled off if they figure out that’s what works to at least maintain stability?
Related to this, what should be done for those whose work is completely outmoded? Assuming new technologies do prove a threat, throwing large numbers of people into economic irrelevance does not seem like a winning move socially or politically.
Good question...and I don't have a good answer
I think the answer to this (at least to me) is people like Pete Buttigieg and similar, who do a great job of explaining to the layman why their (currently comfortable) lives will not last long term if they don't support things like housing, transit, infrastructure, electric/energy technologies, R&D investment etc. The key is making a very clear and explicit connection between the two as well as emphasizing all the benefits to be gained by them.
Re: latter point, historically every new big technological revolution has resulted in more jobs, not less, however that is often of little comfort to these people. I think if we could, somehow, find a way to enact very basic Universal Basic Income, a lot more people would feel more comfortable with a more rapid pace of technological change. It's a challenge though, we already struggle with social security, and UBI is an even bigger economic lift, but not totally impossible.
Especially when many people with outmoded work are at the age of 40-50 (when it is hard to reskill and hard for companies to hire!)
You could just let them sit with welfare, but it would be unpopular as a domestic policy and they would still be unhappy, since work gives people meaning in their lives.
Another policy that could be done is just subsidize unprofitable companies, kind of what Russia under Putin did to make sure the people in faraway regions don't revolt: https://youtu.be/A-1n-05Xu6Y?si=3T3O6OhkEeaBV56z
> You could just let them sit with welfare, but it would be unpopular
This is actually what we do now. We just call it "disability" instead of welfare so that most people don't know what it really is. Almost 5% of working age adults are on disability, and in WV it's 9%! Most of these people are just long term unemployed and not actually too disabled for work. https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
The issue of state capacity and governance is highly relevant to this discussion of a "high-level equilibrium trap." A state that cannot meaningfully enact policy changes due to political dysfunction or sclerotic/litigation-averse bureaucracies sets the tone for broader society. People become more pessimistic, less confident in their capacity to enact change, and less eager to rock the boat, since the state is too rigid to respond to transformational technologies in a way that harnesses their effectiveness while shielding others from their less savory side effects.
I would also point out that the predominance of the service sector in American economic life sets a hard limit on how much growth we can expect. Productivity growth in the service sector is more challenging than in manufacturing or manufacturing-adjacent sectors like transportation and logistics. Theoretically, a country prioritizing manufacturing as a core part of its economy (like Germany or China) could find it easier to break out of a high-level equilibrium trap through technological innovation.
Agreed about state capacity and governance. America is no longer a serious country. We can't address serious questions and our governance is extremely dysfunctional.
On services, I think you'll find that there's more productivity gains possible, but maybe they aren't where you're looking for them. Here's one: telemedicine. Another: the expansion of Physicians' Assistants. I have others, but I don't want to give away all my secrets.
How about just removing doctors as gatekeepers for a lot of things? I have had a prescription for adderall for almost 20 years now and I have to pay a doctor every 3 months to get a new copy of exactly the same prescription. The appointments cost $150 so that's now a completely unnecessary $12,000 for a bureaucratic gatekeeper. Then there's the pharmacist to pay, who somehow makes six figures for counting my pills.
And this isn't the worst of it. Schools even require doctors notes for absences! So now a parent has to miss work to drag their sick kid to a doctor's office and the doctor says "he has a cold and will get better, here's your note." Total waste of productivity for two people.
The trick about increasing productivity in the service sector is that it usually involves reorganizing the way business operations are made. Like, say, developing the franchise model for fast food, or contracting out auxiliary services like cleanup instead of having an in-house janitorial staff, or shifting towards a dynamic scheduling system that schedules workers only as needed (instead of having preexisting work schedules). Problem is, this usually (not always, but more often than not) works by imposing new demands on service workers, which contributes to labor alienation as well as hindering service workers ability to organize collectively and improve their conditions through labor unions.
I have some sympathy for the tech skepticism in the US. I think it's counter-productive, but I think that Americans are slowly recognizing that social media is very bad for us as a country, and are turning on the people they see as the purveyors of it. It's not ridiculous for them to have soured on companies like Meta, who are seen as mostly making money on the backs of sowing discord in society and among family members. Twitter and Facebook together seem to be premised on "let's make money by making everyone mad at each other all the time"; to the extent there's a political divide it's mostly over "Social media had a big role in making Trump president". Smartphones coupled to social media have played a big role in making people unhappy. Advertising has gotten incredibly intrusive. In a lot of ways, the tech industry has set itself up as the replacement for Big Tobacco, in exploiting addictions to rake in cash. There's a lot of bathwater with that baby.
At the same time, it's maddening, because tech -- which is really just another word for "human ingenuity" of which software is in some ways the purest form -- is making peoples' lives way better. We have knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips that autodidacts like Benjamin Franklin would sell his own grandmother for. We have barely to wish for delicious foods and a wealth of material goods, and they show up on our doorsteps at trivial cost; we don't even handle cash or talk to human beings, we make magic incantations on the little glowing rectangle that usually just makes us mad all the time. Modern American society is objectively amazing, and we seem utterly unable to appreciate it, because we have so much luxury time that we fill with being mad at each other.
Perversely, I think it's precisely because we are so pampered that we as a culture are so inclined to doomerism: none of it feels real. It's a truism in academia "the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low" and that's what our whole society has become. If you've got a reasonably stable job with a reasonable income, you can live a better life than Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great ever dreamed of. We have the luxury of being mad at each other all the time, so we are: there's nothing forcing us to set aside our differences. I think that the partisan divides are just different manifestations of the same malaise; it's how each team finds it acceptable to express their discontent. The left might be mad at software, but that software is mostly just a reflection of us as a society.
Well said, and I was about to instinctively be annoyed at this anti-tech comment until I read past your first sentence, thinking it was going to be a defense of the anti-tech ideas to Noah mentioned in the post. 😂
Personally I deleted all social media apps except Instagram and even that one is only a few changes from getting the axe too if they end up like Facebook did (Meta owning both doesn't inspire confidence). I keep my accounts but have a strict policy of only looking up stuff on the rest of the platforms if I have a specific thing I need to check (i.e. an event or something, to get in touch with a specific person, etc).
Reddit might be the most insidious of them all, it's been taken over by a mix of far left crazies, terrorists (excellent article by PirateWires(1) about how Hamas operatives built up an entire astroturfing operation on the biggest subreddits on the site), and bots (usually foreign, Chinese/Russian, pushing their narratives and/or anti-western ones), combined with the upvote system enforcing echo chambers, you have an extremely destructive platform.
But Facebook too, when I decided to delete the app entirely, I did an experiment where I just scrolled down my homepage for 10+ minutes straight to count how many items that I saw were things or people I explicitly followed. That entire time was maybe 4-5 people/posts total, the rest was just algorithmic garbage. Compared to when I first got on Facebook (and Myspace before it) it was pure, 100% value add and usefulness, it was ONLY people or pages I followed in my feed, that's it. We used it for social meet ups and study groups/tips in high school and college, and it was insanely useful for that. Now a days, you have to wade through the 99% of garbage to get to the 1% of useful stuff on the site.
The sooner people get off these platforms the happier they'll be and the healthier we'll be as a society, for that matter.
1: https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline
I think economic reasons (slower growth) would be only one of many reasons behind the sentiment of fearing the future, as John Burns-Murdoch argued last year: https://www.ft.com/content/e577411e-3bf2-4fb4-872a-8b7d5e9139d3
Notably the increase in mentioning "caution, worry and risk" didn't stop after the 30 years of post-WW2 economic expansion, or during the 90s and 2000s (when the economic growth in the West was much higher!)
In that way, WW1 could be considered as the catastrophe that forever broke the Western world, notably their optimism in the world shattered, because "how can civilization also lead to industrial mass-slaughter?" was never considered before!
Also, the rise of mass media, and as people know, its tendencies of highlighting negative news headlines, contributed to this issue though.
You simply cannot will a technological shift out of existence, or make the world go back to the way it used to be, no matter how big and powerful your country is. In 1793, a British mission to China (which was then ruled by the Qing dynasty) offered the emperor various technological marvels from the West. The emperor was unimpressed, and expressed utter disinterest in the wonders he was being shown, uttering the famous line: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Did this emperor have orange hair????😆
I bet his palace, his wardrobe and his harem were all bigly yuge. I doubt he played golf, though.
Noah, I like your theory about the decline in manufacturing employment being somewhat an artifact of how we count. Outsourcing means that manufacturers' payroll departments go away and ADP does everyone's payroll. All those jobs shifted from manufacturing to service, even though nothing really changed.
Another brilliant column. You're right about EV and electric batteries, should not have been sold as a climate de-changer, which it really isn't, but the key to future growth and national defense
I am hearing a great deal of anxiety about the future in my world of futurists and academics, plus science fiction creators, all mostly in the US. Relatively little excitement and hope.
Shamelessly off topic, but please write about the fiscal cliff we are about to fall off of. Do you see any way to avoid it?
Well, unless Republicans magically rediscover their commitment to fiscal austerity from 50 years ago...no.
If Americans are risk averse towards technology, why do they keep voting for the "change candidate" when it comes time to vote for POTUS?
This same effect happens in companies too. Large companies grow complacent an inefficient. (This is what Jeff Bezos refers to as "Day 1 and day 2". https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders). It's a very common pattern that new innovations happen in small startups rather than large established companies even though the large companies have easily 100x the resources to try to compete in the new market. e.g. of the companies that dominate the internet today, none of them existed 40 years ago. It's strange when you think about it, because if Microsoft had wanted to build a search engine in 1998 they could have put hundreds of highly paid engineers on the project, but they got beat out by two guys who started in a garage. Silicon Valley as we know it was started by a man who founded a semiconductor startup in Palo Alto when any of the large manufacturers could have out spent him 100:1.
IMO the best piece of writing out there on this organizational dysfunction and decay is the series of blogs called "The Gervais Principle" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ which describes, among other things, how an organization inevitably gets gummed up with useless bureaucracy and middle management and loses all its productive capacity. This is about companies, but clearly applicable to governments as well, and it dovetails very nicely with Ezra Klein's observations of procedural paralysis and also Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction.
Jerry Pournelle and I disagreed about many things, but I think frequently of his Iron Law of Bureaucracy. From his website,
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
Personally, I'd have used police unions as my example, but the principle holds up remarkably well.
Noah you are spot on, we are hopelessly pedaling backwards now and the gap will be too big to be overcome in just a few years. Pathetic. I wonder if Americans will lash out in an angry nihilism once they finally realize what has happened or just slip further into a solipsism?
There was a young man who bombed a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, CA. (He was killed in the attempt) He left behind writings describing himself as “anti-life” and claimed he was doing a good deed preventing future children from being born without their consent. We’ve seen many a “pro lifer” commit violence to “save the precious children” but a self-proclaimed ANTI-lifer is a new one on me. (I do know that the arr antinatalism exists on Reddit, but I never thought of it as anything more than a circle jerk.)
This was Palm Springs, not Van Nuys.
Corrected - wrong SoCal city!
MAGA is as nihilistic as it gets.
American standards of living have not grown at 2% a year, but much lower than that. Your previous article was about this. It has gone up 50% over 50 years, which is about 0.8% a year. People would probably be more optimistic if the growth rate was 2%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
Americans are pessimistic about many things other than just economics though. I live in the San Francisco bubble so maybe it is better in other places but people here are profoundly shell shocked and depressed.
Also, looking about AI...it's normal for people to be worried about AI though, since it has already (and will continue to) create philosophical questions about the meaning to be humans, and about human intelligence though.
AI companies marketing themselves as "replacing human in their jobs" did not do themselves a favor!
Loss aversion is a well known concept in behavioral economics and now it seems to have spread from individuals to our entire nation. Many are more pessimistic about new and emerging technologies rather than excited about their potential. And politicians have been preaching "American exceptionalism" for so long that most Americans don't realize how rapidly other countries are advancing. Since the underlying premise of MAGA is that American was once greater than it is now, they seem more interested in turning back the clock than moving forward. Unclear if Trump and his acolytes in Congress think the golden age was the 1890s or the 1950s but they are doing their best to undermine scientific progress with cutbacks to NIH, NOAA, EPA, DOE, NSF, etc.
When it comes to blocking change and creating negative attitudes to change, the political power of oligarchs should not be overlooked.
For example the anti green energy attitudes that so many Americans have would not exist if not for the efforts of Big fossil fuel to deceive the public and rig the political process. There is nothing inherently conservative about being anti solar and wind. The only reason it has become so is that the right wing press and the republican party has been brought by big fossil fuel and its allies.
It's not just Big fossil fuel. Any great concentration of wealth in any field will compel the people who control it to do the same... rig the game by any and every means at their disposal.
It should be looked at as a form of "rent seeking".
Texas Republicans have just passed legislation that will gut their solar and wind industries.
Critics of the left who blame, and mock certain liberals and their concern over the power of Concentrated Wealth's ability to rig the game to the detriment of the common American for nation's lack of progress have loved to point out how conservative Texas beats liberal California at solar and wind.
Well, now maybe they will recognize and admit that the Anit-Oligarch, anti monopoly wing of the Democratic party have a point ? That it's not just class resentment that motives them ?
There is no doubt we have a system that makes development and progress too difficult. We need to re-regulate. We need to get rid of choke points at every turn and streamline processes. But that doesn't mean that the outsized political power that the super wealthy have, and that is exasperated by a growing wealth gap, should go ignored and unaddressed.