We cannot successfully outsource the solutions to the problem of how to live wisely and agreeably well to markets, bureaucracies, & parasocial algorithm-driven media feeds. We need, rather...
The permanent problem wouldn't be such a problem if some of the productivity gains of the last 50 years or so had been realised as more leisure for prime-age workers. A shift to a four-day week is manageable now, and would capture most of what the current crop of AI models is likely to deliver, as well as clawing back a bit of the declining wage share.
I don't see any evidence that people find working 2000 hours a year find more meaning in work than those who work 1200 or 1500.
Yes, a necessary part of the solution seems to be raising the floor, providing everyone with the ability to meet a decent standard of living, and then they'll have the freedom to make meaning and be creative in ways that make sense to them.
Unfortunately, as you note, over the past 50 years productivity gains have gone to fueling concentrated wealth, rather than broader well being.
A four-day-week would be a good start indeed, concrete enough to organize and create a movement around. (And there are many other things we could do, many discussed in "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman).
I thought this post was so relevant to so much of our issues today that I decided to forward it to my (adult) family under a heading something like, “A prof of the Dismal Science lifts his gaze.”
But first I had to confirm the etymology of the phrase, Dismal Science. And Wikipedia did not disappoint:
It “…first appeared in ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849), in which Carlyle claimed that emancipation had wrecked the economy of the West Indies by putting blacks in a position to demand unaffordable wages, thus depriving plantation owners of their labour supply. He argued for a return to some kind of forced labour system…”
Modern Liberalism may not be the best of all possible worlds, but IMO Fukuyama correctly that its fundamental values of freedom produce a framework that's light-years better than the authoritarians' prescriptions for a better world.
I want astounding produtvity to free more of us to explore the fractle boundry of the known and unknown.
I'm reading the The Golden Road by Dalrymple and am astonished by how much I did not know. Every paragraph demands scores of historians and archeologists and pilologists to strike out in various directions and report back to me.
And the geologists! All we have is a few snapshots; I want a detailed moving picture of plate tectonics and why they move this way and not that?
How many paleontologits would it take to scratch the surface of billion years of life on Earth. And how did it form how diferent is it from life on Enceladus?
I think there is another dynamic that has also taken place, namely that with more and more basic needs attainable without social interaction, people lose practice at the basic steps of engaging in social interaction and thus don't end up creating communities. Also the demise of philosophy, the mechanistic models of psychiatry all point at a kind of anti-humanity, anti-appreciating the uniqueness of the people you interact with all the time. But sadly I am not well read enough to have good thoughts on the matter.
I like Brink's list of what humans need. I am a "retired" guy. Almost every day I think about what I can do to advance any little sliver of the world along one of those axes.
The thing I think works in my favor is that humans like the things on that list. They are attracted to them. The thing that works against it is that most of the good solutions don't involve billionaires making more money. Facebook, which I despise, works against some of those goals, not for them. But it makes lots of money.
I don't feel I have a great answer, but the search for one is worth it.
The rule everywhere, it seems, is this: You get the money, you kiss the ring, you lick the boot (or the ass, depending on the tyrant's kink). You don't do it, no money for you. The only way not to be at best a lickspittle, at worse a slave, is to not want or need what the asshole of the moment is dangling in front of you. Like the Black Panthers used to say, self-sufficiency is the foundation of true freedom. Or, in the case of absolute extremis, there's this from Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici: "He forgets that he can die, who complains of misery: we are in the power of no calamity, while death is in our own." Coraggio, amici!
I think the solution is to get everyone to agree to the principles that are synthesized in the following work. This is one long video, separated into chapters in a playlist:
1. New principles of non-market economics, to stand alongside the market.
2. In a new integrative language, understood instantly.
3. Proves the case for universal healthcare single-payer.
4. Teaches market economics better than anybody.
5. Aim of video playlist: a political change.
I think that you are correct: our task is to re-orient society to engage the "permanent problem of the human race," as posed by Keynes. I would pose the task as, how to change the "norm-institution" of our psychological relation to work and leisure. This will be an enormous reorientation. The simple, easy way to start is to show that there are many kinds of growth, enabled in the many examples of non-market organization. (See especially Chapters 4-7 in the playlist.) Real growth is not only market growth.
This huge "norm-institution" has changed before, at least once. For millennia up to early modernism, the norm was to live the status of your born place in society, whether farmer or king, and to be the best king or farmer you could be, and to take your leisure as god's grace in the world provided it. This changed in the mind's eye over a few centuries (i.e. rather rapidly) until by the middle of the 18th Century the three strands of individuation, scientific & technological discovery, and the market system had been completely combined. The new norm centered itself upon the idea that individuals could (and should) strive for greater material rewards and to improve their own conditions.
Of course this new norm suffered various reactions through the next three centuries, defeating some, and coming to terms with others. At any rate, our present conundrum is how to ensure discovery, invention, material growth & increasing abundance, while allowing the spread of a new "valued social identity" of being engaged in the pursuit of many other kinds of growth.
I think the way to do that is to get everyone to understand why we must take care of very basic needs in an explicit, bare-bones list, and fund it out of current taxes. This is not an argument for socialism. It argues for accepting a large set of non-market organizations, to exist alongside the market, to take care of specific issues. Why it is now necessary, and how it would work.
"now algorithmic systems—are extraordinarily productive but structurally inhuman, dissolving the intermediate associations that people who live at human scale need to believe that they are leading lives worth living."
Is this necessarly true? Could this be "lump of meaning" falaicy corresponding to the "lump of Labor?"
I grew up in the world with only a few electronic devices between myself and my tools. My engineering education required learning to use every tool in a machine shop where there were no electronics between me and the controls for the cutting tool. I learned how to weld and run a transit. It was the world of WW2 and the bomb and rockets. Calculations were done with a Friden or Marchant. It was an era of hands on. It was an era where you grew up building your own model airplanes and watching your father and mother build a house by themselves. It was the era where you did all the maintenance on you car or household appliances. I am not sure all that gave me any sense of purpose beyond keeping the family fed, clothed and sheltered.
Our autistic son did make some social interrelations difficult and thus isolating. As he matured that became less isolating.
I am pondering the 4 things society does not produce and think; JFK! society sure did at for me.
The permanent problem wouldn't be such a problem if some of the productivity gains of the last 50 years or so had been realised as more leisure for prime-age workers. A shift to a four-day week is manageable now, and would capture most of what the current crop of AI models is likely to deliver, as well as clawing back a bit of the declining wage share.
I don't see any evidence that people find working 2000 hours a year find more meaning in work than those who work 1200 or 1500.
Yes, a necessary part of the solution seems to be raising the floor, providing everyone with the ability to meet a decent standard of living, and then they'll have the freedom to make meaning and be creative in ways that make sense to them.
Unfortunately, as you note, over the past 50 years productivity gains have gone to fueling concentrated wealth, rather than broader well being.
A four-day-week would be a good start indeed, concrete enough to organize and create a movement around. (And there are many other things we could do, many discussed in "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman).
It's a good Monday when I see a Monty Python reference embedded in an important discussion
I thought this post was so relevant to so much of our issues today that I decided to forward it to my (adult) family under a heading something like, “A prof of the Dismal Science lifts his gaze.”
But first I had to confirm the etymology of the phrase, Dismal Science. And Wikipedia did not disappoint:
It “…first appeared in ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849), in which Carlyle claimed that emancipation had wrecked the economy of the West Indies by putting blacks in a position to demand unaffordable wages, thus depriving plantation owners of their labour supply. He argued for a return to some kind of forced labour system…”
Modern Liberalism may not be the best of all possible worlds, but IMO Fukuyama correctly that its fundamental values of freedom produce a framework that's light-years better than the authoritarians' prescriptions for a better world.
Ended up writing, “…tries to lift our gaze”
I want astounding produtvity to free more of us to explore the fractle boundry of the known and unknown.
I'm reading the The Golden Road by Dalrymple and am astonished by how much I did not know. Every paragraph demands scores of historians and archeologists and pilologists to strike out in various directions and report back to me.
And the geologists! All we have is a few snapshots; I want a detailed moving picture of plate tectonics and why they move this way and not that?
How many paleontologits would it take to scratch the surface of billion years of life on Earth. And how did it form how diferent is it from life on Enceladus?
The Golden Road is a fascinating book and one that is squarely in Brad's wheelhouse. But, alas, he has a day job. Perhaps he should retire!
I think there is another dynamic that has also taken place, namely that with more and more basic needs attainable without social interaction, people lose practice at the basic steps of engaging in social interaction and thus don't end up creating communities. Also the demise of philosophy, the mechanistic models of psychiatry all point at a kind of anti-humanity, anti-appreciating the uniqueness of the people you interact with all the time. But sadly I am not well read enough to have good thoughts on the matter.
I like Brink's list of what humans need. I am a "retired" guy. Almost every day I think about what I can do to advance any little sliver of the world along one of those axes.
The thing I think works in my favor is that humans like the things on that list. They are attracted to them. The thing that works against it is that most of the good solutions don't involve billionaires making more money. Facebook, which I despise, works against some of those goals, not for them. But it makes lots of money.
I don't feel I have a great answer, but the search for one is worth it.
The rule everywhere, it seems, is this: You get the money, you kiss the ring, you lick the boot (or the ass, depending on the tyrant's kink). You don't do it, no money for you. The only way not to be at best a lickspittle, at worse a slave, is to not want or need what the asshole of the moment is dangling in front of you. Like the Black Panthers used to say, self-sufficiency is the foundation of true freedom. Or, in the case of absolute extremis, there's this from Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici: "He forgets that he can die, who complains of misery: we are in the power of no calamity, while death is in our own." Coraggio, amici!
I think the solution is to get everyone to agree to the principles that are synthesized in the following work. This is one long video, separated into chapters in a playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT-vY3f9uw3Dkgnj72Ydks7ExEiUrPcMD
Features:
1. New principles of non-market economics, to stand alongside the market.
2. In a new integrative language, understood instantly.
3. Proves the case for universal healthcare single-payer.
4. Teaches market economics better than anybody.
5. Aim of video playlist: a political change.
I think that you are correct: our task is to re-orient society to engage the "permanent problem of the human race," as posed by Keynes. I would pose the task as, how to change the "norm-institution" of our psychological relation to work and leisure. This will be an enormous reorientation. The simple, easy way to start is to show that there are many kinds of growth, enabled in the many examples of non-market organization. (See especially Chapters 4-7 in the playlist.) Real growth is not only market growth.
This huge "norm-institution" has changed before, at least once. For millennia up to early modernism, the norm was to live the status of your born place in society, whether farmer or king, and to be the best king or farmer you could be, and to take your leisure as god's grace in the world provided it. This changed in the mind's eye over a few centuries (i.e. rather rapidly) until by the middle of the 18th Century the three strands of individuation, scientific & technological discovery, and the market system had been completely combined. The new norm centered itself upon the idea that individuals could (and should) strive for greater material rewards and to improve their own conditions.
Of course this new norm suffered various reactions through the next three centuries, defeating some, and coming to terms with others. At any rate, our present conundrum is how to ensure discovery, invention, material growth & increasing abundance, while allowing the spread of a new "valued social identity" of being engaged in the pursuit of many other kinds of growth.
I think the way to do that is to get everyone to understand why we must take care of very basic needs in an explicit, bare-bones list, and fund it out of current taxes. This is not an argument for socialism. It argues for accepting a large set of non-market organizations, to exist alongside the market, to take care of specific issues. Why it is now necessary, and how it would work.
And the way to begin, is to show all of the principles of market and non-market organization, together. That is what this playlist does. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT-vY3f9uw3Dkgnj72Ydks7ExEiUrPcMD
More pondering: To feel you really have agency, you need to be where the money is allocated and where the laws and rules are written.
That is the political world. Those who are in it are consumed by it.
"now algorithmic systems—are extraordinarily productive but structurally inhuman, dissolving the intermediate associations that people who live at human scale need to believe that they are leading lives worth living."
Is this necessarly true? Could this be "lump of meaning" falaicy corresponding to the "lump of Labor?"
I grew up in the world with only a few electronic devices between myself and my tools. My engineering education required learning to use every tool in a machine shop where there were no electronics between me and the controls for the cutting tool. I learned how to weld and run a transit. It was the world of WW2 and the bomb and rockets. Calculations were done with a Friden or Marchant. It was an era of hands on. It was an era where you grew up building your own model airplanes and watching your father and mother build a house by themselves. It was the era where you did all the maintenance on you car or household appliances. I am not sure all that gave me any sense of purpose beyond keeping the family fed, clothed and sheltered.
Our autistic son did make some social interrelations difficult and thus isolating. As he matured that became less isolating.
I am pondering the 4 things society does not produce and think; JFK! society sure did at for me.
Sounds like the problem is one (or several) of alienation. :)