I have finished my first pass through The Decadent Society. I had a hard time following the last quarter of the book, so I may have to re-read it. These are my current impressions:
On the plus side:
1. Many of his sentences and phrases sparkle, e.g. “roving tent-revivalism of TED talks” (p. 10)
2. Many of the data points that he cites are fascinating, e.g. that economic growth accounted for 92 percent of the increase in share prices from 1952 to 1988, but subsequently economic growth accounted for just 24 percent of the increase in share prices. Much of the remainder comes from “a reallocation of rents to shareholders,” according to a paper by Daniel L. Greenwald and others.
Note that I had to search for the paper in Google Scholar, as Decadent Society includes no footnotes or endnotes. Fortunately, Douthat mentioned the title of the paper (he does not mention the authors); elsewhere, he cites literature without giving a clue about where to find it.
On the minus side, I found myself troubled by questions that Douthat bypasses. One question I have is whether technology is moving too rapidly or too slowly.
Are self-driving cars not prevalent because (a) the technology is not up to expectations or (b) the culture is too resistant? I would argue that it is the latter. If we had the spirit that we had 120 years ago, self-driving cars would be on every road. If 120 years ago the culture had been what it is today, we would still be mostly using horses. Too many of us are middle-aged and old, and hence novelty-averse; and too many of the middle-aged and old do not have prospects for grandchildren, and that makes people lose interest in the future.
Folks like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen would say that technology is moving too slowly, and we are missing out on economic progress that otherwise might be obtained. On the other side, one could argue that technology is moving too quickly relative to our culture’s ability to adapt, and that is why we are seeing so much wealth inequality, populist discontent, and political derangement. Douthat wants to include both the too-rapid and too-slow theses under “decadence.”
Another instance where I wanted deeper thinking is when Douthat tries to draw out implications from a UN projection that Africa’s population will reach four and a half billion by the turn of the next century. He sees this leading to a large migration from Africa to an otherwise depopulating Europe. But first I would like to see the numbers compared–Douthat sees hundreds of millions of Africans migrating, but is the declining birth rate in Europe sufficient to provide space for hundreds of millions?
Also, I wonder how Africa manages to get to four billion without running into Malthusian constraints. Right now, they certainly don’t have the productive capacity to do it. And it’s not as if the developed world is going to be able to spare the output to support billions of Africans, when our dependency ratios will already be straining the ability of working people to support pensioners. I have difficulty believing a demographic projection that seems to require billions of people living in cities with no food.
With regards to
>> If 120 years ago the culture had been what it is today, we would still be mostly using horses.<<
I wonder whether this is due to the increasing influence of the lawyer mentality. Doctors practise "defensive medicine". Stockbrokers are too afraid of their legal departments to offer clients investment advice unless they are given complete control of the portfolio. Ordinary citizens often (mis)quote laws to each other when in dispute over relatively trivial matters such as what to grow in their gardens or the best way to manage horses.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
– Edgar Poe
Is it really the spirit of the population or the ill-advised surrender of agency to experts? Roger Klein’s analysis of the bungled caronavirus testing effort in the USA is emblematic of the failure of rule by expertise and its smothering weight crushing all prospects of progress: https://www.city-journal.org/overregulation-of-diagnostic-testing-coronavirus
People who made their money in the brief opening afforded the unregulated software industry seem to under-appreciate how the experts’ raj stifles innovation and extirpates opportunity.
“…the failure of rule by expertise”
That is not the point of failure, and demeaning expertise only makes things far worse. Experts rarely make important decisions. They provide information to people who do. You must know that.
Voters did not come up with the Rube Goldberg regulatory scheme that shackled political appointees from taking prompt and decisive action. Do you really think that the experts promulgating regulatory schemes are responsive to political leadership or place the public welfare above that of their little bureaucratic fiefdoms? In 35 years in DC, I never saw it. It was always the experts against the politicians. Like a sad rerun of Yes Minister.
It’s even worse when the politicians take the experts’ advice. See what is happening to energy in Virginia as a result of the politicians taking the “expert consensus” on carbon dioxide’s role in the atmosphere: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/04/virginias-clean-economy-act-will-have-dirty-results/
“Voters did not come up with the Rube Goldberg regulatory scheme that shackled political appointees from taking prompt and decisive action.”
No, Congress and the President did that, over decades. We have a Republic, and they make the judgement calls, not the voters and not the “experts”.
If we can’t develop hierarchies of expertise, and a little wisdom in properly weighing information and priorities, then we deserve what we end up with.
I’m somewhat mystified what you think will replace “expertise”. Do you prefer a President just work things out with a sharpie?
You two might be talking past each other. Rule by Experts generally refers to the idea that there is one best answer, experts can find that answer, and then design the system such that the rest of us behave in accordance to that answer. Whether or not the experts actually can do that, or even try, is irrelevant. So long as enough people agree that the rule by experts works, those deemed experts get to rule. Whether or not it works is largely irrelevant so long as people agree that it does (or should, if only we got the right experts in power.)
You might want to check out “Illiberal Reformers”, or “Seeing Like a State”. Both look at the history of Rule by Experts, and make the point that both ends of the traditional political spectrum have their experts. The alternative is to let people rule themselves, recognizing that designing social-rule systems to achieve a certain end state is nearly impossible.
Why do you say Africa doesn’t have the productive capacity to feed that many people? That’s an empirical question and matter of arithmetic, and it seems to me the numbers support the possibility.
The old “We are the World” African famines were due not to lack of capacity but a perfect storm combination of rare climate events, wars, human rights abuses, and ‘man-caused disasters’ deriving from various socialist schemes such as state farms in Ghana or villagization in Ethiopia or everything Mugabe did in Zimbabwe leading to near total collapse of production of many commodities. Today Ethiopia’s population is three times larger, having doubled to 115 million in only the last 25 years, expected to surpass Mexico and Japan soon to become the 10th largest country in the world. They weren’t close to the limit then, why think they are now?
Sub-Saharan Africa is simply huge and nowhere near Malthusian conditions in terms of being tapped out of either (1) additional supplies of rain-irrigated arable land not currently under cultivation, and (2) transition to more intensive agricultural methods which produce more calories per acre.
See, e.g., McKinsey Global’s “Lions on the move” from only 10 years ago and which says, “600 million hectares of potentially suitable land not currently under cultivation, representing 60 percent of the world’s total available cropland … major crop yields are currently well below world averages, with the potential to rise.”
If one can double land use and double yields – both perfectly plausible – one quadruples food supply and supportable population. With the highest in the world fertility rates, a steady stream of domestic production of more mouths to demand and eat that food does not seem implausible either. Thus, the Four Billion.
Africa could be a lot more heavily populated than it is, in the sense that the it is technically feasible to grow a lot more food.
It’s difficult to generalize. A big challenge is that most farmers want to diversify their household income stream by moving some offspring into trade and the urban sector. The incomes are higher there, as is the “lottery of personal connections” that might lead to joining the better connected middle class with opportunities for travel and the consumption of luxury imported goods.
A few other observations…
* Income stability in the face of drought is a big issue. mostly it’s rain fed extensive agriculture.
* As a generalization, Africans don’t tend to settle in one place and intensify production agricultural production over generations–when conditions change they move. That’s my sense. There are exceptions–the “Kano close settled zone” is a good one. See the research by Polly Hill, now 3 or 4 decades old.
To add to Handle’s and Charles’ fine points, I’d like to emphasize the hard constraints geography imposes on Africa in terms of infectious disease and transportation. One only has to look at the maps associated with Malaria to appreciate that William H. McNeill’s “Plagues and Peoples” is not a book of history but an ongoing challenge.
Transportation is a gigantic hurdle throughout the continent. Cape Bojador was perhaps one of the most important technical challenges ever solved by humanity (thanks to Henry the Navigator et al). Is it feasible to build a deep water port anywhere along the Atlantic coast of Africa? Is it possible to connect the inland economic zones to each other or the coast? Can a continent be competitive economically without navigable inland waterways, rail, and highway systems? Africa is best compared to an island archipelago than a continent. Based on geography, would anyone bet on East Timor even making it to middle-tier GDP levels even with full access to the busiest shipping lanes in the world?
In the face of the mayhem caused by COVID-19 in temperate climes and the enormity of the challenge China faces in building out urban centers at a pace that matches economic growth, Africa seems to be saddled with a persistent comparative disadvantage. State Capacity is not the main challenge.
I am glad you brought up transportation and logistics. My biggest takeaway from the Jeff Sachs Millenium Village debacle is that aid workers should be building roads and cargo trains. It seems like every attempt to improve farm output and other income sources runs aground on “how can I get my goods to markets, or bring things back from market?”
I suspect there is a huge opportunity for factories to site near rural villages and attract labor. But how do you get the materials, or for that matter the factory, there? How do you get your goods out to market?
Yet, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in building roads. I wish I knew why; hopefully there is a better reason than “not sexy enough to raise money”, one that can actually be addressed.
Four things I see Ross is struggling:
1) He looks at the 1930s, 1970s and 2010s (all recessionary times) and has trouble defining why things are going wrong today. There is probably something to kids are better behaved today because they spend more time playing Fortnite versus getting into trouble. However, he does diagnosis they are not as prepared for adulthood as past generations and there is stagnation of family formation.
2) Yea his technology sections are to understand and has trouble defining as moving too slow. Space travel especially the Space Shuttle programs were not economical viable so Gen X stopped caring about it. At the heart of technology change is there is limited impact of new products but there is a lot of labor saving ones occurring.
3) His Africa section is spending why too much Social Conservatives obsession with Camp Of Saints book. (He is reading Dreher here.) Sure Africa could reach 4B in 2100 but this is an exponential function where small changes in assumptions makes 4B into 3B or 2.5B or even 2B. (The UN had the same charts of India in 1970.) His book just assumed Immigration is bad for natives as well. (Very Debatable and as socons completely miss the impact of small business growth.)
4) I do wonder what happens when China and India reach closer to US/European wages and we have been experienced rising working class wages the three years. Will this post-GR stagnation views change? (Note some of this labor activism of increase strikes and minimum wage but there is a labor supply issue here)
One aspect I do appreciate is Douthat thesis of Decadence Modern society at least view positives narratives of history with true realities of history. Modern society has a lot less crime, divorce, and teen pregnancy than any other Post-WW2 period but is troubled how society improved these measurements. (ie more video games, etc.)
Can self driving cars work reliably in abnormal conditions (weather, etc) without a human behind the wheel sufficiently well. If yes, then if they aren’t on the road they are being held back. If not, nothing game changing is being held back. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone on this.
UN projections assume places like Nigeria drop from current fertility to something like 2.8 in the future, but you still get billions of people even if that turns out correct. The answer is that they will come to the West, but the West won’t have the resources to pay for it, and people in the west will have lower living standards. Some people will object, but they won’t get anything done. It will never be called “Open Borders”, but any kind of effective immigration controls won’t be allowed, so it will happen de facto.
My guess on driverless cars is four things can be true:
1) They would be very reliable with roads in great condition.
2) Driverless cars would be a lot more valuable with bad driving conditions
3) People need dependable transportation in all driving conditions.
4) Driving is skill that needs continuous performing and without regular driving they lose their skills slowly.
So why would you pay a huge premium to have a driverless car if you have drive under the worst conditions? Or Uber can build a fleet of driverless cars but how do you get a fleet of drivers when bad driving conditions occur? It is Excel circular function that has no equilibrium yet.
Does this mean Driverless cars will never happen? No but like the internet it will a long time for all aspects to come together.
or (c) Expectations are not aligned with reality.
People tend to confuse tasks they find easy or hard to perform with the ease or difficulty they assume is involved in solving the technical challenge. LIDAR is the critical technical challenge. It is too expensive despite the massive Deep Learning advancements made recently in vision systems. We underappreciate how good our brains are at building a spatial map of our environment.
I suspect that when self-driving cars switch from LIDAR to arrays of inexpensive cameras/ML-Controllers then we can worry about cultural optimism/pessimism but we are not there yet.
The reality a lot of new technology takes years or decades to fully be accept or have growth to them. The internet was invented in 1969 before I was born! And I remember having friends in High School 1980s that it was cool that they could connect to other computers.
But it was until 1993/1994 was it that the internet was the next big thing! I suspect driverless are still 15 years out there but a some point it will feel like an Overnight thing.
That is because what came in 1994 was not The Internet but The Web (HTML via HTTP) which happened to work on top of The Internet. I owned Douglas Comer’s two volumes “Internetworking with TCP/IP” several years before 1994 and was adept at packet analysis and Cisco router configuration but I was not prepared for the perfect storm that occurred after Netscape released their browser on Windows (even without a TCP/IP stack). I was not anticipating a revolution when I purchased Comer’s books, they were just another set of references in my collection of books about network protocols. The Web was a technological tsunami and it re-ordered the world rather quickly.
Arnold seems to ignore the cultural consequences of mass migration from Africa into Europe, as if all humans were interchangeable ciphers, or exemplars of a generic humanity, rather than practitioners of particular cultures which may be utterly incompatible.
As someone who has insider knowledge of several self driving car projects, I can assure you that the regulatory environment is not (currently) the bottleneck. Working 90% of the time is just not enough to be practical.
Arnold’s point may be (or may be interpreted as) that working 90% of the time, or something close to it, was more acceptable to the culture 120 years ago — that a higher risk of injury/death was acceptable in pursuit of breaking boundaries, etc.
Then again, airplanes are generally accepted to have taken about a decade to gain acceptance. On that clock, self-driving cars probably have another few years to go.
It took over 10 years to be accepted and to find practical economic uses but also airplanes found this when World War 1 started.
There was a sudden practical reason for it.
How acceptable a failure rate is depends on what the consequences of failure are. If a failure result is catastrophic, 99% might not be good enough.
A self driving car breaking isn’t really catastrophic by 1900 standards. It would likely seriously injure someone, and might kill someone, but back then I think that was more ‘normal.’ I think Arnold is right that people are far more risk averse today; society reacts far more to a single death or a few deaths than then. I suspect it has more to do with us being richer than being older, but it does seem likely that if we had the same willingness to tolerate the occasional death to experiment with something imperfect, self-driving cars (and perhaps gene therapy and some other things) would progress faster.
So my Dad used to drive a truck. If we want to replace truck drivers with autonomous vehicles, how often are they going to “break” (get in an accident, get stuck on the side of the road, etc).
Because it doesn’t take that many instances of them breaking for the economics to stop working. If you’ve got to have a guy in the truck to be there when it breaks, you’re paying a driver all the same and you’ve gained nothing.
So I’m asking a basic question here. Do self driving cars work well enough that it’s economical not to have a human driver behind the wheel. If yes then its revolutionary. If not it’s a novelty.
Nobody can seem to give me math on this, but the people that could make a ton of money if the answer is yes aren’t moving forward.
asdf, “Nobody can seem to give [you] math on this” because it is a non-linear problem, the kind of problem that is the bread-and-butter of engineering. At best one can make an estimate based on a project of current trends given a set of assumptions; the kind of projection “futurists” like Ray Kurzweil are famous for. The most grounded estimates look at the cost trends of Lidar, which costs $75K per vehicle in every experimental self-driving fleet we read about. This projection will get thrown out the door if the trend hits a hard technological limit or if it is disrupted by a higher value (normally lower cost) alternative.
Lidar is only important in ground transportation but that is because our aerial transportation system has a built-in assumption about the existence of a coordination system. Innovation is sometimes about recombining existing systems in novel new ways.
It is also important to consider your own baked-in assumptions. Is the ability to land commercial aircraft a key feature of auto-pilot systems?
Food energy requirements is a very low bar to meet. There is no reason why Africa has to be self-sufficient with its food staples. I’m not worried about free-market Africans starving though it is getting harder to supply the growing global middle-class with inexpensive protein. Let’s leave Malthus in 1798 where he belongs.
Contrary to anything you might hear, no large state in Africa has a functioning semi-free market nor is it likely that Africa will transition to anything close to a free market in the next half century. Having a couple of nations evolve to a worse form of Mexico would be a huge step up.
The still current failure of voice-communication with the PC is indicative that tech is slowing down.
And that various of ’50s Sci-Fi ideas have far different levels of difficulty and commercial viability.
Human error and ergonomics remains a barrier — cars can go 165 mph, but people aren’t ready to drive safely at those speeds, except maybe in Germany, a bit. It might well be that the age of the Hindenberg blimp might be more receptive to the dangers of self-driving cars, and thus accept more risk, more deaths, and faster development.
Avoiding deaths in new tech is very very expensive in terms of opp costs & time. With the huge amount of tech churn making many think that tech is already changing too fast, slowing it down for more safety seems reasonable.
I like Douhat’s more expansive decadence definition.
Most journalists are particularly exposed and sensitive to big-hype tech promises, in part because they get attention and eyeballs by reporting on “cool and sexy”, and the “too good to check” incentive kicks in when repeating cool claims. That’s makes them vulnerable to (or passively complicit with) fake-it-til-you-make-it con artists, trying to pump up stock or attract cheap investment, and who specifically target those members of media institutions and their biases to amplify free press marketing.
So, there’s a kind of selection effect at work. Someone in the “flying cars!” – “self-driving cars!” – “cheap and profitable electric cars!” – “blood tests with a single drop!” – “strong AI automation of everything!” line of fire is obviously going to experience a lot of emotional boom-and-bust cycles, since the majority of those efforts are pure hype without foundation and thus doomed to disappoint, and the accumulated effect of seeing a lot of disappointments in a row is a sense of civilizational stagnation and decay, wholly apart from any real-world issues involving the low-hanging fruit having all been picked, and so forth.
It’s also true that the journalist lifestyle doesn’t expose them to many rapid improvements in other fields. The software they use in their own production doesn’t change much or fast, though things like instant online translation and Amazon logistics have made some parts of their lives and jobs a lot easier but somehow failed to register emotionally as “living in an age where some things show amazing progress”.
I am not entirely certain technology is not advancing rapidly, at least when compared to the past. The revolutionary aspects of it might be more passe, but the differences between life in the 1980’s to now seem immense. Air conditioning everywhere was a huge deal for me, at least 🙂 We couldn’t afford one till the early ’90’s, and even then it was a window unit in the living room. Having central air in the same house 20 years later almost seems like cheating.
I am sympathetic to the idea that culture and the regulations it produces, not to mention litigation, are holding innovation back, however. People used to do a lot of crazy stuff that would be a nightmare today, but some of that crazy stuff worked out well. Lately it seems more and more that one has to ask for permission before trying things, rather than forgiveness for failing. That’s not a good sign.