Thinking about the future, at its best, is really just another way to process the present, and there’s never been a better time to do that. but what’s increasingly obvious to me is how this crisis will decisively divide the world in two along many different axes. Some of those fault lines are obvious, and were already splitting open: at-risk or healthy; hourly or salaried; manual laborer or knowledge worker.
I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).
Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
Find something that’s important to you in 2019 – social, political, economic, whatever – and with a little effort you can trace the roots of its importance back to World War II. There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding. To me, the war is fascinating to study not because of what happened, but what it went on to influence. What are the other Big Things – the great-grandparents – of important topics today that we need to study if we want to understand what’s happening in the world? The three big ones that stick out are demographics, inequality, and access to information. As America’s offices diversify faster than its retirement communities, the minority-white labor force will be supporting the majority-white retirees. The point is that we can’t just look at how rich the top has become, or at how stagnant the bottom is. It’s the gap between the two that causes one group to push back against the other. It’s almost certain that the educational system will be upended. The current arrangement of needing a college degree in order to have a good chance at becoming and staying middle class, but taking on life-changing amounts of debt to do so if you don’t have family assistance, can’t last. I have no idea how it ends. But there’s practically no chance that in 30 years the story is, “Everyone just kept taking on education mortgages at age 18, tuition kept rising at double the rate of inflation, and it was all OK.” It’s going to break somehow. The range of political opinions has always been extreme, but what we’ve seen over the last decade is what happens when the warm blanket of ideological ignorance is removed. The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. It’s one of the most important concepts in investing, where a few positions may account for most of your lifetime returns.
The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us
So the assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not. an echo of the very ethos that founded America: progress at all costs. and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.
Fast forward to 2019. My lunch routine is a rotating cast of fast casual concepts, with lost vowel names When I do go to a nearby deli, it’s impossible to ignore just how stark the socioeconomic contrast is to the Sweetgreen line. While the latter appears filled with people who stepped away from their WeWork desks, the former feels packed with the contractors underpaid to maintain that same WeWork. We're no longer constrained to the Banana Republic-Gap-Old Navy trichotomy. Every facet of our daily consumer lives can now be hyper-segmented. It's yet another area where technological know-how amplifies existing behaviors and practices. We've always signaled status with things like the little horse on your shirt or the expensive watch on your wrist (can you tell I worked in finance?) or the bag you carry or the shoes you wear. Those were social signaling table stakes. But now it's our lunch too. Just next time you get lunch, take a good look around you. We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where. But like in so many other areas of consumer life, we're slowly learning that mutually beneficial success at the micro-level just might have adverse effects in the macro.
That is why we need to stop discussing “the environment” and “nature” as if it was outside the world inhabited by humanity. If we are animals, evolving within the complex dynamic of our ecosystem, then our fate is about how well we function within that ecosystem, not about escaping to other planets after trashing this one. Today the global industrial economy is destroying ecosystems, leveling mountains, and spewing hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals into the air and water, and it is not doing all these things to magnanimously create “jobs” or to improve the lives of humans in general. It is doing these things to make profit for financial investors. This is not about civilizational “progress”, it is about justifying continuing inequality and ecocide.
In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future. It’s straightforward to measure a recession’s effects on employment and output. But what if the psychological impact of a recession is much more severe than we thought, to the extent that it could make a dent in long-term productivity growth This is the social risk: That the minds of many talented young people today will be permanently disfigured by this obsession with Trump embarrassments. have a vast base of knowledge to work with, when they’ll be able to make connections of facts on their own, instead of being taught some interesting rules and not enough content to practice them. The way to avoid this Girardian conflict is to direct our gaze outwards to the tangible things of the world.
