I’d say Delong’s pessimism is rooted in some institutional biases among economists. What we’re seeing isn’t the end of the miracle, but the miracle having altered the conditions that necessitated...
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I’d say Delong’s pessimism is rooted in some institutional biases among economists. What we’re seeing isn’t the end of the miracle, but the miracle having altered the conditions that necessitated it’s tools and techniques.
In other words, for a long time people lived in general poverty such that the orthodox economist assumption that access to more stuff in aggregate means improvements to well being held well enough. But we live in so much abundance now that this heuristic has run its course. People’s well being now is held back by psychic factors like “sense of belonging” or “purpose.” When you’re under conditions of general privation everyone kind of knows what their purpose is. It’s to continue the traditions and ways of life you were raised in and be rewarded with the stuff you’re supposed to want like a family and food on the table.
But food is dirt cheap. What stops people from getting it now isn’t that we don’t make enough or even that logistics is difficult, it’s weird distributional politics. And everyone knows this instinctively so the idea that you can derive purpose from making a meal for yourself is kind of gone.
The problem is all our social and political infrastructure is still designed around maximizing the production of stuff all around rather than serving those psychic drivers of happiness that are actually holding us back. People just aren’t that into it and all we have are weird financialization schemes to suck the value out of anything people care about for the benefit of investors. Its a solvable problem, you just need to alter the balance of social, cultural, and political power away from financey/corporate people.
This does represent a big problem for economists and the economics discipline, though, because it is monomaniacally fixated on financial calculations as a proxy for well being and happiness. But that’s just going to be the wrong approach for the world we’re moving towards.
I think I'd need to read the book, or at least a real book review, to tell whether DeLong would disagree with that. (The Atlantic headline writer chose the word "miracle" but I don't know if he...
I think I'd need to read the book, or at least a real book review, to tell whether DeLong would disagree with that. (The Atlantic headline writer chose the word "miracle" but I don't know if he would?)
But I gather that he's not saying it's the end of history, but rather making some kind of claim that a particular era of high economic growth ended around 2010. But I don't know why he chose that year (versus, say, 2008) and I'm skeptical that the end of a historical era can be called without more years of hindsight.
I believe that economic growth will eventually be limited by energy. Maybe 2022 will turn out to be the end of the era of cheap energy? But it probably looked that way in the 70's, too. Oil and gas is cyclical and we won't know for sure for a while yet; maybe things will clear up and prices will come down one more time.
(Also, grain is not cheap, though prices have come down since grain exports started from Ukraine.)
Yeah he's definitely not. He's more saying that the good times are gone and we're settling into an era of more general stagnation. That's the part I don't fully buy. I think we may stagnate, as...
But I gather that he's not saying it's the end of history, but rather making some kind of claim that a particular era of high economic growth ended around 2010.
Yeah he's definitely not. He's more saying that the good times are gone and we're settling into an era of more general stagnation. That's the part I don't fully buy. I think we may stagnate, as measured by the metrics economists care about, but that the relationship those metrics have to social and individual health and well-being are also more attenuated than ever before so the jury is still out on whether we're going to be much worse off.
The end of high economic growth (as traditionally measured) would be a significant change, though. Perhaps Japan would be a good example? Japan’s GDP and GDP per capita are about where they were...
The end of high economic growth (as traditionally measured) would be a significant change, though.
Perhaps Japan would be a good example? Japan’s GDP and GDP per capita are about where they were in 1995. This is hardly the end of Japan, but it’s a change.
Also, Japan is a wealthy country. Many countries are not. If economic growth shut down in poorer countries, that would be a great tragedy.
But I started reading a sample of DeLong’s book and he doesn’t seem to focus much on the end date. He writes that he’s doing a grand narrative, and gist seems to be that all grand narratives are dubious but nonetheless useful to think with. He’s more interested in talking about the start of high economic growth and attributes it to the rise of the corporation and the modern research lab. The early industrial revolution was not enough to significantly improve people’s lives, he claims.
So far it’s too vague and abstract to keep my interest, but maybe it goes more in depth after the first chapter.
I just listened to Sean Carroll's Mindscape interview with Brad DeLong and it was very interesting. Might need to pick up his book too. I definitely feel that something changed, directionally...
I just listened to Sean Carroll's Mindscape interview with Brad DeLong and it was very interesting. Might need to pick up his book too.
I definitely feel that something changed, directionally speaking, for humanity in the last 10-15 years or so. It's tough because these things don't have a single tipping point everyone can look at and say "that was the day it all changed." It's a vague, qualitative, gradual, undirected process. All I can say is anecdotally that I've been shocked to watch the (brazen, unapologetic) return of historical evils to the world stage, mindsets and politics I was sure had been relegated to the dustbin of history, not just where I live but seemingly everywhere in the world simultaneously.
Meanwhile our technological development has absolutely exploded but the expansion seems to have targeted all the worst parts of it specifically. We've got cyberwarfare, weaponized trolling/propaganda/disinformation at an insane scale, ML/AI advancements that completely erode both our privacy and our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. The zone is completely flooded with shit. Everyone's attention span, mine included, has been decimated. Public discourse is a bifurcated echo chamber full of spiteful bullies, grifters, and very loud idiots.
With fingers in our ears we're accelerating towards climate catastrophe. A pandemic is sweeping the planet and everyone everywhere seems, not just unable to do anything, but unwilling to try or even to pretend to care about it. The zeitgeist of optimism for the future has all but evaporated. I've never been a doom-and-gloomer but these days, apart from the very small joys of parenting some awesome kids, I don't have much happiness or hope for their future anymore. I very much hope that this is just a temporary phase mixed with my own depression. I miss the way I used to feel about the world and the people around me.
More to the point of Brad DeLong's economic arguments, the past century really has been a miracle. I learned plenty of history in school, but it wasn't until I was in my thirties that it really sank in how utterly crappy and miserable human existence has been for the vast, vast majority of it. Nasty, brutish, and short. Memorizing important names and dates doesn't really convey much about the quality of life of our ancestors. For all its many shortcomings, the 20th century brought staggering improvements to many parts of the world! And we (or I, I'll speak just for myself here) have taken that for granted. The comforts and conveniences I enjoy, imperfect as they are, are not guarantees, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel some existential dread about their erosion over the coming decades.
I don't think that's a fair. We focus on 'interesting' periods when we look at history. You could even argue we're in one of those periods now. But they don't make up the majority of human...
I learned plenty of history in school, but it wasn't until I was in my thirties that it really sank in how utterly crappy and miserable human existence has been for the vast, vast majority of it. Nasty, brutish, and short.
I don't think that's a fair. We focus on 'interesting' periods when we look at history. You could even argue we're in one of those periods now. But they don't make up the majority of human existence. By and large, humanity just kind of lives, like we do now just with less amenities. If it helps at all, we've had periods of peace before and we will undoubtably have them again. I like to think of it as an ebb and flow. People who lived through the hardship help steer us towards peaceful time, those who haven't steer us back towards difficult ones.
I think the idea that we have it better now is a perspective based off of modern preferences. I don't necessarily agree. I think the idea of modern exceptionalism requires us to see the past as a place of terror and hardship and brutality. I think of it as a place of abundance. Before we pillaged the land and seas and forests. Before we terraformed much of the world. It was definitely a different place, but I don't think it was worse.
Benjamin Franklin makes an interesting observation on humanity's preference for non-modernized life. It's anecdotal, but I think it provides some relevant insight.
“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural nearly as Indians but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard where the person was to be brought home to possess a good estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-coat, with which he took his way again to the wilderness.”
That quote doesn't prove what you think, because life in most "civilized" countries at the time was terrible for most people. Life expectancy was below 40 in most places. I'm not sure how...
That quote doesn't prove what you think, because life in most "civilized" countries at the time was terrible for most people. Life expectancy was below 40 in most places.
I'm not sure how well-sourced this is, but there were apparently some exceptions?
New England was perhaps the most healthful region in the world. After an initial period of high mortality, life expectancy quickly rose to levels comparable to our own. Men and women, on average, lived about 65 to 70 years, 15 to 20 years longer than in England. One result was that seventeenth-century New England was the first society in history in which grandparents were common.
I hear you, I'm not arguing that folks lived a particularly long time, though that seems to be up for debate as well. I'm strictly talking quality of life. I think this is going to be a pretty...
I'm strictly talking quality of life. I think this is going to be a pretty subjective perspective, and one where I differ from most people. I'm not trying to apply rose colored glasses to other eras, but rather give some hope to @balooga that while the future will definitely be different, it won't necessarily be worse. How you interpret the quality of anything is highly personal.
I also really enjoyed @Naravara's contribution. I think they summarize my perspective in a much more nuanced way.
I agree. Sidestepping 'quality of life' since it comes with a lot of modern associations, and instead thinking about things like satisfaction, community, love, meaning, accomplishment... of course...
I agree. Sidestepping 'quality of life' since it comes with a lot of modern associations, and instead thinking about things like satisfaction, community, love, meaning, accomplishment... of course a lot of people, at any age of human history, achieved those things (or whatever else they wanted).
During most of human history, it really was a nightmare by modern western standards. But that's not a fair way to judge those lives, they had a very different set of expectations than we do, and a different set of skills to go with them
For example, if you expect 50% (or whatever much larger than now percent) of your children to die young, if you grew up witnessing that reality, it hits a lot different than it would for a modern couple.
I think lots of people, during periods that would break many modern humans, lived rich lives they were deeply grateful for.
In that scenario, would you include the 50% of the children who died young under people who "lived rich lives they were deeply grateful for?" Seems like this is literally survivorship bias; you're...
In that scenario, would you include the 50% of the children who died young under people who "lived rich lives they were deeply grateful for?" Seems like this is literally survivorship bias; you're considering it from the point of view of people who lived somewhat longer.
Also, this isn't even including all the other suffering from war, famine, and disease. There's no reason to believe that people suffered any less from these things than they do today. Probably they suffered more because they had fewer ways to deal with disabilities.
Being able to focus on high-level concerns like meaning and accomplishment is a sign of wealth, because your time isn't occupied by material concerns. For example, concerns about having enough clothing now seem quaint. At one time it was not; clothing was so expensive that people wore it until it disintegrated.
I just don't buy that human life was largely miserable because they didn't have all the amenities and leisure time we do. People still dreamed and loved and wondered. I thought the Franklin quote...
I just don't buy that human life was largely miserable because they didn't have all the amenities and leisure time we do. People still dreamed and loved and wondered.
I thought the Franklin quote about Native Americans was apt because it speaks of a way of life people found appealing despite lacking most of the things we think we need.
Meanwhile in modern times, suicide rates keep rising.
Dreamed and loved and wondered, but also the average person was 8-9 cm shorter than us due to poor nutrition and illness. This isn’t about amenities, it’s about lacking the basics for material...
Dreamed and loved and wondered, but also the average person was 8-9 cm shorter than us due to poor nutrition and illness. This isn’t about amenities, it’s about lacking the basics for material existence.
In contrast to these advantages that American Indians enjoyed, many whites living in cities - particularly the poor - couldn't afford food for a healthy and complete diet. These large cities and towns were densely packed and lacked modern sanitary practices, meaning they were breeding grounds for disease. In addition, many poor had no safety net to help them in times of need and suffered from a lack of proper nutrition and medical care, Steckel said.
"The Plains Indians had a remarkable record of nutritional and health success, despite the enormous pressures they were under," Steckel said. "They developed a healthy lifestyle that the white Americans couldn't match, even with all of their technological advantages."
One reason why native americans might have preferred to go back to their tribes, besides the usual ones around culture, might have been because they lived healthier lives?
I’d say Delong’s pessimism is rooted in some institutional biases among economists. What we’re seeing isn’t the end of the miracle, but the miracle having altered the conditions that necessitated it’s tools and techniques.
In other words, for a long time people lived in general poverty such that the orthodox economist assumption that access to more stuff in aggregate means improvements to well being held well enough. But we live in so much abundance now that this heuristic has run its course. People’s well being now is held back by psychic factors like “sense of belonging” or “purpose.” When you’re under conditions of general privation everyone kind of knows what their purpose is. It’s to continue the traditions and ways of life you were raised in and be rewarded with the stuff you’re supposed to want like a family and food on the table.
But food is dirt cheap. What stops people from getting it now isn’t that we don’t make enough or even that logistics is difficult, it’s weird distributional politics. And everyone knows this instinctively so the idea that you can derive purpose from making a meal for yourself is kind of gone.
The problem is all our social and political infrastructure is still designed around maximizing the production of stuff all around rather than serving those psychic drivers of happiness that are actually holding us back. People just aren’t that into it and all we have are weird financialization schemes to suck the value out of anything people care about for the benefit of investors. Its a solvable problem, you just need to alter the balance of social, cultural, and political power away from financey/corporate people.
This does represent a big problem for economists and the economics discipline, though, because it is monomaniacally fixated on financial calculations as a proxy for well being and happiness. But that’s just going to be the wrong approach for the world we’re moving towards.
I think I'd need to read the book, or at least a real book review, to tell whether DeLong would disagree with that. (The Atlantic headline writer chose the word "miracle" but I don't know if he would?)
But I gather that he's not saying it's the end of history, but rather making some kind of claim that a particular era of high economic growth ended around 2010. But I don't know why he chose that year (versus, say, 2008) and I'm skeptical that the end of a historical era can be called without more years of hindsight.
I believe that economic growth will eventually be limited by energy. Maybe 2022 will turn out to be the end of the era of cheap energy? But it probably looked that way in the 70's, too. Oil and gas is cyclical and we won't know for sure for a while yet; maybe things will clear up and prices will come down one more time.
(Also, grain is not cheap, though prices have come down since grain exports started from Ukraine.)
Yeah he's definitely not. He's more saying that the good times are gone and we're settling into an era of more general stagnation. That's the part I don't fully buy. I think we may stagnate, as measured by the metrics economists care about, but that the relationship those metrics have to social and individual health and well-being are also more attenuated than ever before so the jury is still out on whether we're going to be much worse off.
The end of high economic growth (as traditionally measured) would be a significant change, though.
Perhaps Japan would be a good example? Japan’s GDP and GDP per capita are about where they were in 1995. This is hardly the end of Japan, but it’s a change.
Also, Japan is a wealthy country. Many countries are not. If economic growth shut down in poorer countries, that would be a great tragedy.
But I started reading a sample of DeLong’s book and he doesn’t seem to focus much on the end date. He writes that he’s doing a grand narrative, and gist seems to be that all grand narratives are dubious but nonetheless useful to think with. He’s more interested in talking about the start of high economic growth and attributes it to the rise of the corporation and the modern research lab. The early industrial revolution was not enough to significantly improve people’s lives, he claims.
So far it’s too vague and abstract to keep my interest, but maybe it goes more in depth after the first chapter.
I just listened to Sean Carroll's Mindscape interview with Brad DeLong and it was very interesting. Might need to pick up his book too.
I definitely feel that something changed, directionally speaking, for humanity in the last 10-15 years or so. It's tough because these things don't have a single tipping point everyone can look at and say "that was the day it all changed." It's a vague, qualitative, gradual, undirected process. All I can say is anecdotally that I've been shocked to watch the (brazen, unapologetic) return of historical evils to the world stage, mindsets and politics I was sure had been relegated to the dustbin of history, not just where I live but seemingly everywhere in the world simultaneously.
Meanwhile our technological development has absolutely exploded but the expansion seems to have targeted all the worst parts of it specifically. We've got cyberwarfare, weaponized trolling/propaganda/disinformation at an insane scale, ML/AI advancements that completely erode both our privacy and our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. The zone is completely flooded with shit. Everyone's attention span, mine included, has been decimated. Public discourse is a bifurcated echo chamber full of spiteful bullies, grifters, and very loud idiots.
With fingers in our ears we're accelerating towards climate catastrophe. A pandemic is sweeping the planet and everyone everywhere seems, not just unable to do anything, but unwilling to try or even to pretend to care about it. The zeitgeist of optimism for the future has all but evaporated. I've never been a doom-and-gloomer but these days, apart from the very small joys of parenting some awesome kids, I don't have much happiness or hope for their future anymore. I very much hope that this is just a temporary phase mixed with my own depression. I miss the way I used to feel about the world and the people around me.
More to the point of Brad DeLong's economic arguments, the past century really has been a miracle. I learned plenty of history in school, but it wasn't until I was in my thirties that it really sank in how utterly crappy and miserable human existence has been for the vast, vast majority of it. Nasty, brutish, and short. Memorizing important names and dates doesn't really convey much about the quality of life of our ancestors. For all its many shortcomings, the 20th century brought staggering improvements to many parts of the world! And we (or I, I'll speak just for myself here) have taken that for granted. The comforts and conveniences I enjoy, imperfect as they are, are not guarantees, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel some existential dread about their erosion over the coming decades.
I don't think that's a fair. We focus on 'interesting' periods when we look at history. You could even argue we're in one of those periods now. But they don't make up the majority of human existence. By and large, humanity just kind of lives, like we do now just with less amenities. If it helps at all, we've had periods of peace before and we will undoubtably have them again. I like to think of it as an ebb and flow. People who lived through the hardship help steer us towards peaceful time, those who haven't steer us back towards difficult ones.
I think the idea that we have it better now is a perspective based off of modern preferences. I don't necessarily agree. I think the idea of modern exceptionalism requires us to see the past as a place of terror and hardship and brutality. I think of it as a place of abundance. Before we pillaged the land and seas and forests. Before we terraformed much of the world. It was definitely a different place, but I don't think it was worse.
Benjamin Franklin makes an interesting observation on humanity's preference for non-modernized life. It's anecdotal, but I think it provides some relevant insight.
That quote doesn't prove what you think, because life in most "civilized" countries at the time was terrible for most people. Life expectancy was below 40 in most places.
I'm not sure how well-sourced this is, but there were apparently some exceptions?
I hear you, I'm not arguing that folks lived a particularly long time, though that seems to be up for debate as well.
I'm strictly talking quality of life. I think this is going to be a pretty subjective perspective, and one where I differ from most people. I'm not trying to apply rose colored glasses to other eras, but rather give some hope to @balooga that while the future will definitely be different, it won't necessarily be worse. How you interpret the quality of anything is highly personal.
I also really enjoyed @Naravara's contribution. I think they summarize my perspective in a much more nuanced way.
I agree. Sidestepping 'quality of life' since it comes with a lot of modern associations, and instead thinking about things like satisfaction, community, love, meaning, accomplishment... of course a lot of people, at any age of human history, achieved those things (or whatever else they wanted).
During most of human history, it really was a nightmare by modern western standards. But that's not a fair way to judge those lives, they had a very different set of expectations than we do, and a different set of skills to go with them
For example, if you expect 50% (or whatever much larger than now percent) of your children to die young, if you grew up witnessing that reality, it hits a lot different than it would for a modern couple.
I think lots of people, during periods that would break many modern humans, lived rich lives they were deeply grateful for.
In that scenario, would you include the 50% of the children who died young under people who "lived rich lives they were deeply grateful for?" Seems like this is literally survivorship bias; you're considering it from the point of view of people who lived somewhat longer.
Also, this isn't even including all the other suffering from war, famine, and disease. There's no reason to believe that people suffered any less from these things than they do today. Probably they suffered more because they had fewer ways to deal with disabilities.
Being able to focus on high-level concerns like meaning and accomplishment is a sign of wealth, because your time isn't occupied by material concerns. For example, concerns about having enough clothing now seem quaint. At one time it was not; clothing was so expensive that people wore it until it disintegrated.
I just don't buy that human life was largely miserable because they didn't have all the amenities and leisure time we do. People still dreamed and loved and wondered.
I thought the Franklin quote about Native Americans was apt because it speaks of a way of life people found appealing despite lacking most of the things we think we need.
Meanwhile in modern times, suicide rates keep rising.
Dreamed and loved and wondered, but also the average person was 8-9 cm shorter than us due to poor nutrition and illness. This isn’t about amenities, it’s about lacking the basics for material existence.
There are exceptions though.
One reason why native americans might have preferred to go back to their tribes, besides the usual ones around culture, might have been because they lived healthier lives?