with Richard Reinsch. Douthat says,
So I start the story in 1969, in part because that particular peak of achievement, the leap to the moon also coincided with the moment or the period when the trends that I’m describing as decadence really began in earnest. So it coincides with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the ’70s and has defined the American economy, with a few exceptional periods ever since. It coincides with the first great wave of public disillusionment with government that peaked with the Watergate scandal, but then has sort of defined the country’s relationship to its government ever since. It coincides with the beginning of the birth dearth, with the Baby Boom generation giving way to a period of the low replacement fertility that has again, extended itself across the developed world ever since.
I recommend the interview. You might get more from reading it than from reading The Decadent Society as a whole.
Near the end comes this:
There’s more discontent, there’s more ferment, I think, than there was five or seven years ago. The question is, can that escape the internet and really affect the real world? Or is the internet itself just a great machine for taking people’s creativity and perversity and making sure that neither of them have that much effect on the actual institutions of society? And the Trump presidency I think has somewhat suggested that it’s more that, and if we get a Sanders presidency, we’ll get another test of the hypothesis.
…But, a Biden presidency will just be sustainable decadence all the way. I think that’s fair to say.
Just don’t leave virus-containment comments on posts that aren’t primarily about virus containment–ed.
Start with the Nixon Shock end with the Virus Shock, call that the Boomer generation. They did OK, killed less than a million, never dropped a nuke on anyone.
But the default amount, the amount the millennials will write off is about a third of the debt. I think Nixon wrote off a third of our gold obligations (it was a gold standard). A third seems to be a target, each generation allowing itself to blunder away a third of the spending, the next generation restructuring the central bank and defaulting..
The Douthat interview sounds like Tyler Cowen’s “great stagnation” idea plus some wishful thinking about culture. It was too boring so I had to stop listening after 20 minutes. To Cowen, Douthat, and Thiel who complains that 140 character tweets is not as impressive as flying cars I want to say that progress in growing real GDP is not measurable. It’s not measurable because of quality changes. Note that I didn’t even use the phrase “quality improvement” because I don’t have to. My claim is made even more defensible by use of the phrase “quality changes”. I need not have an opinion about whether the changes we see are improvements. The cost of our (Gross Domestic) Product or the cost of an individual service or the cost of an individual product is inseparable from the context in which it is made. When people lament progress in some area they often contrast it to great progress in electronics. It is said that the 1960 television set is inferior to the 2020 television set because some people believe in the fictitious concept of a television set. There is no such thing as a television set. There is a 1960 television set and it is incomparable. There is a 2020 television set and it is incomparable. That the market price of a 2020 television set is greater than the garage sale price of a 1960 television set tells you nothing. It would actually cost more to make the 1960 television set today because we are not making them anymore. The cost of a thing is inseparable from the economic context and the cultural context. In other words, inseparable from preferences and the evolution of preferences. We would have flying cars by now if that is what we valued as a culture and they would be affordable or expensive depending upon what the culture wanted to make cheaper. Information is not being destroyed so there is only progress. Be discontent with the pace of progress if that pleases you. That discontent is acceptable to me but stagnationists don’t have to say progress has slowed. It might make sense to consider that people who think progress has slowed need to re-calibrate how they form their expectations. It is invalid to compare the cost of a product from one year to the next because of quality changes and economic context changes and cultural context changes. If we cannot compare costs then we cannot measure inflation. If we cannot measure inflation we cannot measure real GDP. If we cannot measure real GDP we cannot lament that progress has slowed. Stagnationists lament that the 787 doesn’t fly much faster than the 747. Power required is proportional to speed cubed. That’s daunting so re-calibrate expectations. We should want to accelerate progress for the sake of human comfort. Talk of stagnation sounds like nonsense. All of the foregoing are facts until, with your help, I decide that they are not.
Douthat says…
“the post World War II era in the United States was conditioned on the belief that we were … that the frontier wasn’t actually closed that the language of John F. Kennedy, the new frontier, the language of Star Trek, the language of the 60s. The optimistic language assumed a human story that would continue beyond the earth and we haven’t found a way to do it. And then that means that we are stuck here with ourselves having fulfilled the admonition in Genesis, we have filled the earth and we don’t really know what to do next.”
It would be more true to say Douthat and many other people don’t know what to do next. Wall Street, consulting, accounting, human resources, teaching, generic websites, music, television, film, journalism, advertising, marketing, social commentary, fiction writing. There are many forms of making a living in the “ideas space” that don’t involve science and engineering. We get as much or as little science and engineering progress as we decide to incentivize. People do not want to do science and engineering if other things might be fun and cool and high status. Progress cannot be separated from the economic and cultural context.
For a while nobody knew batteries would get to be very good very fast because nobody knew that laptop computers would be much more fashionable than the utilitarian eminently useful but suddenly un-cool desktop computer, thereby creating a multi-billion dollar market to pay for battery improvement. This is why the very old idea of electric cars finally became marketable. Progress in electric cars can be very disappointing for decades and then suddenly become quick. We could have had electric cars sooner but we didn’t want them enough to pay for battery improvement if non-electrics were acceptable to many people. We decided we wanted laptop computers and suddenly cellphones and electric cars became more attractive. Progress cannot be separated from the economic context and cultural context so to lament the lack of progress may be to misunderstand how lumpy and sudden and unexpected progress can be.
I want to be more explicit about the earlier topics.
To be explicit: if people lament stagnation I wonder if they are wrongly assuming incentives were unchanged since the time when there was greater progress.
To be explicit: if progress is lumpy it is fraught with risk to use short term data to draw conclusions about middle term and long term progress. If the short term is less than the human life expectancy there can be significant progress within the human life expectancy.
About the airplanes…
To be explicit, it takes acceptance of real world constraints to form appropriate expectations about the real world. An airplane has a set of qualities, not only speed, and needs to be considered as a whole.
“What you mean ‘we’, kemo sabe?”
“We” can no more magically “make batteries very good very fast” because we want to than we can make hypothetical 797s cheaply go mach 3 because we want to. When want (represented by willingness to pay) meets possibility, there is progress. But want cannot create possibility.
Search for the text:
“battery improvements require magic and definitely not research”
You will find that I never said it.
You certainly did not. What you said was,
“For a while nobody knew batteries would get to be very good very fast because nobody knew that laptop computers would be much more fashionable than the utilitarian eminently useful but suddenly un-cool desktop computer, thereby creating a multi-billion dollar market to pay for battery improvement. … We could have had electric cars sooner but we didn’t want them enough to pay for battery improvement if non-electrics were acceptable to many people.”
A naive reading of that would be that the only thing holding back battery improvement was a willingness to pay for the improvement, as if there were some law: put in money, get out guaranteed technological improvement. But of course, there is no such law. To what extent money can drive technological progress is different at different times and for different technologies. Your March 30, 2020 at 11:57 am comment indicates that I was not getting what you really meant and that we actually agree. (Sorry to put my March 30, 2020 at 11:57 am comment in the wrong place.)
Yes. Physics matters for airplanes. Chemistry matters for electric cars. Progress and obstacles at the physical level are over-looked when people measure real GDP so then economists get worried and start to look for an economic fix. I think this is an echo of your point that money is not everything that matters.