I read Kevin Drum’s review, and one quibble I have with it is that, in support of his argument that 1870 was particularly special, he lists a number of significant inventions of earlier date that figured prominently in later prosperity. This seems sideways to your thesis. You aren’t positing that nothing important was invented before 1870. As I understand it, you are asserting that three circumstances that first coexisted around then fed unprecedented pie-growing thenceforward.
As for technology, Drum’s focus, the new era created an environment in which existing technology could be fully exploited to an unprecedented extent and new and follow-on technology could be discovered and commercially developed with much greater intensity than had previously been possible.
So, Drum’s point can be accepted without undermining your larger thesis. Similarly, as to his point that “people being people” is a sufficient explanation for inequitable wealth sharing, we have over the centuries nonetheless gotten inarguably “better” in various respects, notwithstanding our plains-ape inheritance. I believe your question is, why have we not gotten better, faster in this respect.
As far as I can see, Kevin and Brad are easy to reconcile. Kevin is objective: it's been relatively smooth (if you squint) exponential growth, with no obvious inflection point. Brad is subjective: smart people in 1870 started to believe that this exponential growth could beat Malthus. Both statements can be true at the same time.
It might be worth saying that most of the smart people who so realized this called themselves socialists. The Communist Manifesto was quite clear about this in 1848, and Bellamy published in 1888.
I suppose I should stop procrastinating and read your book. I have a stack of 20 or 30 books I've been meaning to read, but even as I spend a lot of time reading, the stack manages to keep growing.
Meanwhile, I keep going back and forth over what happened around 1870. There had to be more than the suppression of the Paris Commune. There was a phase change in science and technology where our senses and intuitions grew less and less useful and we needed to rely more and more on mathematics, instruments, inferences and unseen objects and forces.
Did this free us from the Malthusian trap? That's hard to say. There were some anniversary updates on the Club of Rome report, and we still seem to be approaching the limits of our resource envelope as was forecast. I expect that new technologies will carry us past some of the limits. Meanwhile, population growth is being limited by a combination of social and economic forces, perhaps by enough to avert disaster.
This puts me in a middle camp. Something did change around 1870, but an awful lot of things haven't changed much at all.
That Dan Wang tweet points out something very important. Starting with the New Deal, the US was extremely pragmatic. What mattered was what worked. Americans were notably non-ideological, unlike Europeans and folks elsewhere. When Revel wrote Without Marx, WIthout Jesus back in the early 1970s, his whole point about America's success was that it was focused on results, not methods or purity of thought. This was a big thing for the a lot of French authors who spent the 1960s analyzing the rise of America as a superpower. There was Servan-Schreiber's American Challenge and several books by Sanche de Gramont who took American citizenship and changed his name to Ted Morgan.
By 1980, America was willing to sacrifice economic success for ideological purity. There was a fetishization of the free market, private property and other mysticism. It took over public debate. I assume it grew strong in the chaos of the 1970s, supported by well bankrolled political actors. We have been hamstrung by ideology since, and we have paid dearly for it in terms of growth and living standards.
Interestingly, China took that American approach as Wang noted. Socialism was no longer a fixed set of doctrines, but whatever worked. A major figure behind this was Qian Xuesen who had been part of Von Karmann's group at JPL before losing his security clearance and moving back to China where he started the Chinese rocketry and space program and developed its atomic bomb program. He also brought the use of system theory to China to support industrial, urban and economic planning. System theory is extremely pragmatic. Try something, measure, adjust, repeat. There is a museum about him in China where you can see his old couch among other things.
Still not convinced that human history has to have (or indeed can have) a single hinge that one might think of as The Singularity.
Human society has, occasionally, changed profoundly in ways that render all previous reckonings irrelevant. Sometimes that's a change in the availability of energy (fire, farming, industrialisation), sometimes it's a change in the availability of information (speech, writing, the printing press, the internet).
I'm pretty sceptical about AGI (1), but I'm happy to add it to the list - if it happens - as a potential future singularity.
There is something profound about breaking out of the Malthusian trap, but each of these big transition points is, literally, profound in that it changes the fundamentals.
(1) Or rather, I think we're doing quite well at developing aspects of artificial intelligence but are a long way off getting to artificial sentience and without the latter the former remains effectively an atlatl for the mind: a device for extending our reach, not an independent intelligence with an agency of its own.
I am half way through your book so I will wait to read Mr. Drum’s critique in full. But if his point is that by nature we share too much of the common inheritance with chimps in order to apply our abundance to the betterment of all (sounds plausible to me), I can’t conceive how AI will change our brutish natures. (AI meaning, what? Robots and algorithms doing all the “work” that needs to be done? Or deciding what work needs to be done? Whatever…) I mean, if I loose my job as a business lawyer because clients who want to do a deal just sign onto a website that spits out the perfect contract for them to sign digitally, are they really going to trust it? Are they going to abide by it? AI, Sigularity.etc. It all sounds more like religion than history to me.
The link to the interview with Ms. Kendall-Taylor was much appreciated. Also, ultimately, depressing. So what else is new?
I read Kevin Drum’s review, and one quibble I have with it is that, in support of his argument that 1870 was particularly special, he lists a number of significant inventions of earlier date that figured prominently in later prosperity. This seems sideways to your thesis. You aren’t positing that nothing important was invented before 1870. As I understand it, you are asserting that three circumstances that first coexisted around then fed unprecedented pie-growing thenceforward.
As for technology, Drum’s focus, the new era created an environment in which existing technology could be fully exploited to an unprecedented extent and new and follow-on technology could be discovered and commercially developed with much greater intensity than had previously been possible.
So, Drum’s point can be accepted without undermining your larger thesis. Similarly, as to his point that “people being people” is a sufficient explanation for inequitable wealth sharing, we have over the centuries nonetheless gotten inarguably “better” in various respects, notwithstanding our plains-ape inheritance. I believe your question is, why have we not gotten better, faster in this respect.
As far as I can see, Kevin and Brad are easy to reconcile. Kevin is objective: it's been relatively smooth (if you squint) exponential growth, with no obvious inflection point. Brad is subjective: smart people in 1870 started to believe that this exponential growth could beat Malthus. Both statements can be true at the same time.
It might be worth saying that most of the smart people who so realized this called themselves socialists. The Communist Manifesto was quite clear about this in 1848, and Bellamy published in 1888.
I suppose I should stop procrastinating and read your book. I have a stack of 20 or 30 books I've been meaning to read, but even as I spend a lot of time reading, the stack manages to keep growing.
Meanwhile, I keep going back and forth over what happened around 1870. There had to be more than the suppression of the Paris Commune. There was a phase change in science and technology where our senses and intuitions grew less and less useful and we needed to rely more and more on mathematics, instruments, inferences and unseen objects and forces.
Did this free us from the Malthusian trap? That's hard to say. There were some anniversary updates on the Club of Rome report, and we still seem to be approaching the limits of our resource envelope as was forecast. I expect that new technologies will carry us past some of the limits. Meanwhile, population growth is being limited by a combination of social and economic forces, perhaps by enough to avert disaster.
This puts me in a middle camp. Something did change around 1870, but an awful lot of things haven't changed much at all.
That Dan Wang tweet points out something very important. Starting with the New Deal, the US was extremely pragmatic. What mattered was what worked. Americans were notably non-ideological, unlike Europeans and folks elsewhere. When Revel wrote Without Marx, WIthout Jesus back in the early 1970s, his whole point about America's success was that it was focused on results, not methods or purity of thought. This was a big thing for the a lot of French authors who spent the 1960s analyzing the rise of America as a superpower. There was Servan-Schreiber's American Challenge and several books by Sanche de Gramont who took American citizenship and changed his name to Ted Morgan.
By 1980, America was willing to sacrifice economic success for ideological purity. There was a fetishization of the free market, private property and other mysticism. It took over public debate. I assume it grew strong in the chaos of the 1970s, supported by well bankrolled political actors. We have been hamstrung by ideology since, and we have paid dearly for it in terms of growth and living standards.
Interestingly, China took that American approach as Wang noted. Socialism was no longer a fixed set of doctrines, but whatever worked. A major figure behind this was Qian Xuesen who had been part of Von Karmann's group at JPL before losing his security clearance and moving back to China where he started the Chinese rocketry and space program and developed its atomic bomb program. He also brought the use of system theory to China to support industrial, urban and economic planning. System theory is extremely pragmatic. Try something, measure, adjust, repeat. There is a museum about him in China where you can see his old couch among other things.
Still not convinced that human history has to have (or indeed can have) a single hinge that one might think of as The Singularity.
Human society has, occasionally, changed profoundly in ways that render all previous reckonings irrelevant. Sometimes that's a change in the availability of energy (fire, farming, industrialisation), sometimes it's a change in the availability of information (speech, writing, the printing press, the internet).
I'm pretty sceptical about AGI (1), but I'm happy to add it to the list - if it happens - as a potential future singularity.
There is something profound about breaking out of the Malthusian trap, but each of these big transition points is, literally, profound in that it changes the fundamentals.
(1) Or rather, I think we're doing quite well at developing aspects of artificial intelligence but are a long way off getting to artificial sentience and without the latter the former remains effectively an atlatl for the mind: a device for extending our reach, not an independent intelligence with an agency of its own.
I am half way through your book so I will wait to read Mr. Drum’s critique in full. But if his point is that by nature we share too much of the common inheritance with chimps in order to apply our abundance to the betterment of all (sounds plausible to me), I can’t conceive how AI will change our brutish natures. (AI meaning, what? Robots and algorithms doing all the “work” that needs to be done? Or deciding what work needs to be done? Whatever…) I mean, if I loose my job as a business lawyer because clients who want to do a deal just sign onto a website that spits out the perfect contract for them to sign digitally, are they really going to trust it? Are they going to abide by it? AI, Sigularity.etc. It all sounds more like religion than history to me.
The link to the interview with Ms. Kendall-Taylor was much appreciated. Also, ultimately, depressing. So what else is new?