Lecture at (Virtually) St. Stephens College, Delhi, India :: 2022-02-11/12 Fr/Sa: I was hanging out with my one-time student, Ohio State University professor Trevon Logan. We were outside on the lawn on a beautiful summer’s evening in America’s Pacific Northwest. Trevon reminded me of something that the late economic historian Robert Fogel liked to say: "The killer app of social science is counting things..." Yes, we need to have “thick descriptions”, and empathy and imagination to enter into the minds and world views of those we are attempting to understand. Yes, we need to have narratives with protagonists; beginnings, middles, and ends; and cause-an-effect—if only because our not-very-smart East African Plains Ape brains find it very difficult to think in any other way. But, most of all, we need to count, so we can tell which stories and which anecdotes are strange and unrepresentative Outliers in which capture for us common occurrences and major trends. Thus the overwhelming bulk of this lecture is going to be me trying to count things. And along the way I will try to draw out the implications of that county. In the process, I am going to try to count things that are difficult to count, and perhaps some things that are uncountable, and perhaps some things that should not be counted, and perhaps some things that are the wrong thing to count. I leave that to you to judge...
I don’t think you even have to resurrect Bacon to get a take on the letdown of our technologically advanced modern world. Many of us are supremely disappointed that the best we have done since walking on the moon is a battery operated car, auto-tuned pop divas, and an app that makes your face morph into funny hieroglyphs that disappear soon after posting. Sigh.
1. Dog poop, wealth and Utopia. A frequent thought of mine walking in the parks in the East Bay hills, but promoted again today by this story about dog poop in Tahoe:
Dogs and their food are a mark of significant wealth, and for dog people, among whom I am not counted, they obviously bring great pleasure. However, picking up fresh, warm dog poop does not. Understandably.
Solution: don’t. This is okay when you’re the only one with a dog. But it quickly becomes a problem when a lot of other wealthy people do the same. Also a problem for people without dogs. But like many such problems it requires private virtue in circumstances nobody else can observe, or it requires an onerous security state, or a ban on dogs. But no amount of wealth available today can allow you to take a walk alone with your dog and not have to pick up dog poop.
For dog poop we can substitute many other externalities. Or we can say that the leisure and material wealth to attempt to summit Everest cannot stop it being rendered a deadly farce by having to line up with hundreds of others to wait your turn.
This is a real problem. We see tech titans try to escape it by moving to New Zealand or buying their own swathe of Hawaii. But inherently we can’t all do that. We could all own dogs (were we to want to) but we can’t make everyone privately virtuous enough to pick up poop that was recently inside a dog.
2) The many false Utopias of drugs, or resentment, or domination. I drive past the notorious High St encampment in Oakland all the time. Obviously some people there are just down on their luck. But many, visibly, have what they need for maximizing their personal happiness right at hand: basic shelter, drugs and just enough money to buy them, and non-judging companions to do them with.
I am not unsympathetic, nor do I think it’s really about moral failings. What it is is that those people are at the tops of local albeit low happiness peaks, surrounded by mazes of deep valleys separating them from the steep foothills of the taller peaks we would consider closer to our idea of Utopia.
Those people have what many addicts of rhe past have always dreamed of. We disapprove, I certainly do, but I’m not sure what the principled basis is. We can afford them, manifestly, and many of the aesthetic issues stem from our social disapproval. “Warehoused” but free to get high, they could be out of sight and mind. I don’t like that, needless to say. But why?
I don’t think you even have to resurrect Bacon to get a take on the letdown of our technologically advanced modern world. Many of us are supremely disappointed that the best we have done since walking on the moon is a battery operated car, auto-tuned pop divas, and an app that makes your face morph into funny hieroglyphs that disappear soon after posting. Sigh.
You should fudge the numbers to make the answer 42.
Very good. A couple of thoughts:
1. Dog poop, wealth and Utopia. A frequent thought of mine walking in the parks in the East Bay hills, but promoted again today by this story about dog poop in Tahoe:
https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Dog-poop-piles-in-Lake-Tahoe-16791009.php
Dogs and their food are a mark of significant wealth, and for dog people, among whom I am not counted, they obviously bring great pleasure. However, picking up fresh, warm dog poop does not. Understandably.
Solution: don’t. This is okay when you’re the only one with a dog. But it quickly becomes a problem when a lot of other wealthy people do the same. Also a problem for people without dogs. But like many such problems it requires private virtue in circumstances nobody else can observe, or it requires an onerous security state, or a ban on dogs. But no amount of wealth available today can allow you to take a walk alone with your dog and not have to pick up dog poop.
For dog poop we can substitute many other externalities. Or we can say that the leisure and material wealth to attempt to summit Everest cannot stop it being rendered a deadly farce by having to line up with hundreds of others to wait your turn.
This is a real problem. We see tech titans try to escape it by moving to New Zealand or buying their own swathe of Hawaii. But inherently we can’t all do that. We could all own dogs (were we to want to) but we can’t make everyone privately virtuous enough to pick up poop that was recently inside a dog.
2) The many false Utopias of drugs, or resentment, or domination. I drive past the notorious High St encampment in Oakland all the time. Obviously some people there are just down on their luck. But many, visibly, have what they need for maximizing their personal happiness right at hand: basic shelter, drugs and just enough money to buy them, and non-judging companions to do them with.
I am not unsympathetic, nor do I think it’s really about moral failings. What it is is that those people are at the tops of local albeit low happiness peaks, surrounded by mazes of deep valleys separating them from the steep foothills of the taller peaks we would consider closer to our idea of Utopia.
Those people have what many addicts of rhe past have always dreamed of. We disapprove, I certainly do, but I’m not sure what the principled basis is. We can afford them, manifestly, and many of the aesthetic issues stem from our social disapproval. “Warehoused” but free to get high, they could be out of sight and mind. I don’t like that, needless to say. But why?