Robert Service Conquest is supposed to have suggested that the second edition of his book The Great Terror, with new material from the Soviet archives, be entitled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. Rationalists like to look back and rate their own predictions, so as to discipline the temptations of rank punditry. I take a slightly less individualist approach: I throw ideas out there and pump them, in the hope that society, starting with my readers, will sort the dross from the diamonds. I also think that many ideas are not absolutely right or wrong, but right for some contexts and not others. (Jon Elster talks about “mechanisms” in the social sciences, which are a bit like this.) So the question is “how widely does this idea apply? What contexts can it be made to fit?” In short, I am selling you a can opener, and demonstrating what cans it can open. The management can accept no responsibility if you decide to try it out on the cat.
With that in mind, here are some updates about topics I have written about before, mostly focused on how right I was, and more or less ignoring cases where I was wrong.
End of big tech?
Original: is the big tech era ending?
Tech disruptors lose their luster:
One [trend] we’ve observed lately is how a number of older companies, in fields such as ad-supported media, retail, personal lending and shoes, are now trading at a premium to the venture-backed firms that were trying to disrupt their businesses…. Nike is pricier than Allbirds, while Visa is trading at a premium to Affirm…
Coase everywhere
Originals here, here, and here.
War
What surprised you most as you did this tour?!
A: The degree to which volunteers and volunteer-purchased and delivered food and materials are part of the supply system to regular army units. There is, effectively, a giant volunteer-run supply chain servicing what looks like every combat unit in the country, parallel with the army/government supply system. Some of the volunteer-supposed units that are supposedly territorial defense/local fighters, are demonstrably better-equipped than similar regular army units. That’s the exception, but still, wow.
In June, Ukrainian TV personality Serhiy Prytula asked his fans to buy him a Turkish-made drone priced at $5 million. He ended up raising $55 million…. Prytula used the funds he raised to purchase a reconnaissance satellite for Ukrainian intelligence.
As of July, Ukraine's National Bank reports to have collected $530 million in donations for the Ukrainian military — mostly from people rounding up at shop cash registers and fundraisers in the country. On Tuesday, residents of the small western Ukrainian town of Dubno raised $866.55 at a bake sale and flea market for the military.
Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on Coasean war:
Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri, and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well….
Sponsor your own artillery shell.
Unions and strikes
My original:
Unions are back, with recent campaigns to unionize Apple stores and Amazon warehouses… A large slice of monopoly rent pie is there waiting to be seized by the resurgent workers…
Strikes: UK rail strikes, tube strikes, dockers’ strikes, Royal Mail, BT, Arriva, Stagecoach. Strikemap UK, with a helpful “find my nearest strike” function. Links are not endorsements, you godforsaken Commies. Statistics in the UK:
In the US, days lost are at a 35-year high:
Habermas
Jürgen Habermas on a “new structural transformation of the public sphere”. Google translate. The original Structural Transformation was the book that made him famous. Article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Google translate.
The Dawn of Everything and social media
So if we take the heart of the message of The Dawn of Everything seriously, perhaps entering a new tribe in Africa at 50,000 BC would not involve a bunch of mysterious rituals in the jungle enacted by solemn actors with dirt smeared across their faces. Maybe it was a bit more like the infamous lunch table scene from the movie Mean Girls…
… gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years….
… if we lived in a gossip trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to that gossip trap?
Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.
Of course we gravitate to cancel culture—it’s our innate evolved form of government.
Low fertility
Original article: malaria. This article in the Economist falls into the “embrace failure” genre; I think it is serving the market for comfortable illusions.
Average utilitarianism
… the average welfare metric is indifferent to the number of people alive. A hundred people with average welfare of X counts the same as a thousand people with average welfare of X, or a million. That’s not plausible! We should care whether people are alive or dead…. Not doing so is just intuitively weird, and it leads to paradoxes….
Thinking of the past as “10,000 years of misery till the 1950s” is bad in two ways. It is dismissive of our own history, and it subtly devalues the people we are talking about.
Here’s a great example of why this matters in practice. From Brad Delong, who has a new book out:
Think of something like $900/year—the living standard of the poorest half-billion of our eight billion today—as the living standards of a typical human back before 1870. Then, after 1870, everything changed.
I cannot believe that: surely technological progress made life better off over time?
For the élite who benefit from the exploitation-and-extraction machine, yes. But for the rest? Perhaps: to the extent that the taste for “luxuries”—production and consumption that does not raise your biological fitness to reproduce but that makes you happier—grows over time, yes….
Otherwise?
Otherwise the benefits of technological advance show up as greater human numbers—and hence the benefits of technology in raising living standards are offset by greater resource scarcity—or are restricted to the élite of thugs-with spears (plus their accountants and their propagandists).
One of my working hypotheses is that every American, no matter how sophisticated, no matter how knowledgeable, never mind his PhD, ultimately has the US public school version of human history in the back of his mind. Everything sucked and people were oppressed — but then America came along!
As a first order approximation of human history, this isn’t the worst! Throughout the last three centuries, people have immigrated to the US in order to get away from oppressive regimes and/or places without opportunity. Unsurprisingly they see the logic of the above view.
But fatally for serious history, it ignores the very large differences between anywhere, 8000 BC, and Europe, 1700 AD. The idea of law. Nascent science. Rulers’ need to justify themselves, no matter how hypocritically, as servants of their people — an idea that goes back at least to Roman political thought. And the GDP-per-capita view of human history enables this, because it is indifferent between a population of 1 to 10 million, and a population of 600 million to a billion. These are not the same things! If you think they are the same, you will
make evaluative mistakes, because you think that the huge progress before 1870 doesn’t really matter;
make descriptive mistakes, because you and your regressions won’t notice the forms of economic growth that are cashed out in more people being alive rather than in people being richer;
and you will end up with a history where life only starts getting better in 1870 — funnily enough, just when the US starts to become the world’s biggest economy.
This argument is nuts! It is nuts to think that states before 1870 were nothing more than an “exploitation-and-extraction machine”; and it is based on the equally nuts argument that the vast majority of people in 1700 did not benefit from being alive.
Slouching Towards Utopia is out now, and I look forward very much to reading it. Just getting my first shots in.
Hustle
If you click through one of my links, you may end up on an Amazon page for a book. As of today, I’m trying out associate links. So, if you buy one of these books, I will get paid one zillionth of Jeff Bezos’ massive doubloon hoard.
That said, really I’d prefer you to buy my book:
which you can read about here. And of course you can subscribe:
And share:
Robert Conquest?