Links from Last Week
Optimism, Pessimism, Eugenics and Web 3
Nellie Bowles’ weekly column has become my favorite of the week. It’s like this little post I write except way better. I’d highlight the section from the link on optimism. As usual, everyone thinks everything is getting worse, when every statistical indicator suggests the opposite. I’m always reminded of this classic comedy bit.
So why is everyone pessimistic? I’d say some portion of the political left has been pessimistic since the late 1960s (maybe longer?). That’s when the environmental movement really began in force and one of the core tenants was modern life was a mistake and we should get back to nature. I recently read “Where is my Flying Car?” — that book and similar ones (“More from Less” comes to mind) pinpoint the late 60s as a turn in American history, where a significant part of the country started questioning progress. This led to some positive developments, to be sure, but a general skepticism of progress filters through culture and ultimately a lot of invention and innovations are lost as bright young people focus their energies elsewhere (becoming lawyers/activists instead of scientists/engineers).
1a. Now the environmental movement has some wins to be sure, clean air is great and pollution is a lot worse than we’ve thought previously. But this excellent post from Wally Nowinski makes the case that environmental groups may actually be hurting climate change now. Environmental groups actually harming the environment seems to be a bit of a trend lately: plastic bag bans may hurt the environment (and plastic straw bans are stupid), opposing nuclear and natural gas power leads to more coal power, opposing coastal development means housing goes in more energy intensive locales instead of places where homes use less heat and A/C.
So the political left is pessimistic because despite being “progressive” they are skeptical of progress and growth (sometimes with good reason). This isn’t new. What is new is that the right is now pessimistic and increasingly fatalistic. I’d argue that this comes from the Right’s lack of control over the progress generating institutions in the U.S.— The Left controls the America’s dynamic companies, its universities, and Hollywood.
So from the Left to the Right, there’s less optimism. The piece’s best quote on why you should be optimistic is this part:
“One other piece of “America is great” evidence: way more people move from other developed countries to the U.S. than vice versa.
There are 674,000 Brits in the U.S. (Only 171,000 Americans are in the U.K.)
There are 162,000 French in the U.S. (While there are 62,000 Americans in France.)
There are 320,000 Japanese in the U.S. (Compared to 58,000 Americans in Japan.)”
A simple heuristic for how a country is doing is to ask: are more people trying to leave it or go to it? If more people are trying to come to a country than leave it, well it’s preferable to many countries. When we have more people here from “developed” countries than the reverse, that’s a good sign.
And immigration has long been America’s engine of growth. Since the 1600s, waves and waves of risk takers came here. These are the “doers,” the innovators and entrepreneurs (see this data on billionaire founders). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the year there was a collective loss of faith in progress (1970) was also the year that had the lowest percent of foreign born Americans in U.S. History (the US had essentially shut down immigration from the mid 1920s to 1965).
A hyperbolic, alarmist, perhaps made-up, now deleted thread on worker morale in Tech, (h/t marginal revolution).
I’m focusing on the work from home stuff in the thread not the anti-woke stuff.
I think work from home without a concrete plan to create community (frequent retreats/ one or two days in person) doesn’t really work long term. It’s great for people and firms on autopilot, but for innovation and creativity, I don’t see it working, you need moments of serenity, free flowing lunches and post work hangs. Innovation doesn’t happen alone. Further, it feels like many institutions/companies are on the verge of maybe not collapse, but complacency. I’d include universities in this. They seem to be coasting, drifting away from actively creating value to just maintaining, maybe that describes all of us 2 years into a pandemic…
This article set the web3 world on fire. For web3 optimists, the response to it was encouraging. Many of the leading voices of web3 (like Vitalik Buterin) didn’t shout the author down or attack his character, instead they essentially said, "thank you for pointing out a number of problems, we will get to work fixing them.” Very reasonable.
Freddie DeBoer is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. One of the things highlighted in the link is the relationship between the coddled and the pandemic. People from coddled backgrounds are not used to bad stuff just happening, so they are constantly looking for villains to explain the pandemic (of course, the truly enlightened know the villain is the FDA /s ), when it’s just a bad thing that happened.
Podcast recommendation: I’ve been listening to the Fifth Column since around 2018. It has gotten better and better and it’s replaced Slate’s Political Gabfest as my weekly politics podcast (even though the Fifth Column is more of media criticism podcast). Recommended.
