I made a list, including
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, 1995. In this science fiction novel, Stephenson depicts a world in which nanotechnology, as described in Eric Drexler’s monograph “Engines of Creation,” has matured. As a result, no one lives in hardship. Any standard product can be made cheaply by a “matter compiler,” what we would now think of as a 3D printer with superlative capabilities. Machines have substituted for labor to the point where a lower class, called “thetes,” enjoys a coarse consumer lifestyle without having to work. An upper class, called “Vickies,” has skills that complement the machines, and this elite indulges in a taste for old-fashioned hand-crafted goods.
From the link: “We are now in the midst of what many economists call the Second Industrial Revolution.”
Question: nanotechnology, the IoT (internet of things), AI, driverless cars, machine learning, cost effective solar power, new drug therapies, etc. For decades, we’ve been promised that these disruptive technologies were right around the corner. Any updates? When is it going to happen? WHERE’S THE BEEF? I’m starting to get very skeptical.
In light of this, on my personal list, I would replace Cowen’s “Average is Over” with “The Great Stagnation”:
“All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. We have built social and economic institutions on the expectation of a lot of low-hanging fruit, but that fruit is mostly gone.”
“The old understanding was that the world broke through a barrier with the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and that we can grow economically at high rates forever. The new model is that there are periodic technological plateaus, and right now we are sitting on top of one, waiting for the next major growth revolution.”
Also, I would add Murray’s “The Bell Curve” to my personal list:
“Our thesis is that the twentieth century has continued the transformation, so that the twenty-first will open a world in which cognitive ability is the decisive dividing force.”
“Social class remains the vehicle of social life, but intelligence now pulls the train.”
“Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about: An increasingly isolated cognitive elite. A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent. A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution. Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose.”
“People in the bottom quartile of intelligence are becoming not just increasingly expendable in economic terms; they will sometime in the not-too-distant future become a net drag. In economic terms and barring a profound change in direction for our society, many people will be unable to perform that function so basic to human dignity: putting more into the world than they take out.”
WHERE’S THE BEEF?
https://youtu.be/Ug75diEyiA0
Arnold, your point about the First IR should be expanded to take into account the extraordinary increase in population and therefore in the number of workers whose living standards today are hundreds of times higher than the 1800 world average. Yes, it was thanks to the extraordinary investment in the new machines invented since 1800. And don’t be sorry about horses because today the smaller population is having fun.
We can talk about the Second IR in terms of an extraordinary increase in our mental power. I don’t like the books you selected because they fail to explain how the large majority (well over 80% of the world population) will benefit from that increase (and by extension what could be the main obstacles to that outcome). The explanation requires good knowledge of the history of the First IR, the one that neither Dickens nor Marx was able to anticipate or at least to dream about. So, please go back, and tell us what you think are the five books we must read to understand the First IR.
During the Obama years the government invested a lot of money in lithium battery research. One of the sayings of the people who worked in this area was that “There is no Moore’s Law for batteries.”
Moreover, there are studies showing that the scientific payoff per dollar of research is going down, so we will need to spend increasing amounts of money to keep the rate of scientific innovation constant.
Visions of a technological “singularity” come from applying Moore’s Law to all other areas of science. Theranos is a good example of what happens when you try to apply a Silicon Valley mindset to other areas of tech.
There is nothing wrong with incremental progress. It will get us there eventually.
Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Fortnightly_Review/Volume_49/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialism ) comes to mind as remarkably modern and contemporary, perhaps a clear summation of the present day magical thinking surrounding labor that so dominates elite thinking:
“Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”
Wilde believed socialism would lead to a happy Maslow hierarchy state of self-actualized individualism for all. Nobody would need be concerned with anyone else. No marriage, no charity. Just arts and leisure:
“The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.”
But one wonders whether this degree of isolation would produce more people like Keats or monsters. Turning to Hannah Arendt:
“In this atmosphere of the breakdown of class society the psychology of the European mass man developed. The fact that with monotonous but abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individuals did not prevent their judging themselves in terms of individual failure or the world in’ terms of specific injustice. This self-centered bitterness, however, although repeated again and again in individual isolation, was not a common bond despite its tendency to extinguish individual differences, because it was based on no common interest, economic or social or political. Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation. Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the expression of individual idealism but a mass phenomenon. The old adage that the poor and oppressed have nothing to lose but their chains no longer applied to the mass men, for they lost much more than the chains of misery when they lost interest in their own well-being: the source of all the worries and cares which make human life troublesome and anguished was gone.”
Perhaps a middle way can be found. The great economist and civil rights leader B.R. Ambedkar successfully fought caste discrimination (an increasingly important problem that must be addressed in the USA civil rights laws) while ennobling the victims of caste discrimination. He recognized, like Adam Smith, that both individualism and contribution to society are needed for individual fulfillment:
“Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man’s life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self too.”
As the people of the USA struggle to open the country to non-Brahim castes, perhaps many other lessons from Ambedkar will be learned.
The more we grow rich in material goods, the more the struggle for positional goods will increase. And the biggest positional goods are tied to values, politics, religion, social preferences, and local culture — especially language. See Nye’s essay on this. https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Nyepositional.html
Of course, the net result of this will not be “protests.” It will be war, especially those between the leading powers and rival nations, like China.