Most of us would like the technology of 2024 and the social/cultural environment of 1960, at least on some metrics.
I see no reason to credit the people who fucked up the culture with the technological progress a bunch of nerds they probably hate made during that time.
I agree, I would prefer to live today rather than the 1970s. Yet I think there's something to the criticism. As you've pointed out, economics got overmathed and that has had some negative impacts. A couple recent items:
Deaton on his changing views. I agree with the first part very much, the second not so much. Econ too focused on optimization and not enough on philosophy/ethics
"If you spend any significant amount of your life around people with lower IQs than yours, you can't help but notice how many of them are better people than you in qualities that you value, including the virtues. This is not idealism. It is the empirical reality of life outside the cognitive elite's bubble."
"Economists say that your embrace of contemporary technology reflects “revealed preference.” You must get satisfaction out of it, or you would not be using it."
Well, there is satisfaction and there is satisfaction. If my lower leg itches (as it does now) and I scratch it, I will get satisfaction. But soon after, it will itch again. If I scratch again, I begin another cycle. In fact, if I scratch enough, I actually make the itch worse. My immediate satisfaction has turned into long-term dissatisfaction.
There's a hell of a lot in modern life that is like that, often on a much longer time period and often much less obvious. I suspect there have always been things like that. Today, technology is so advanced and we are so rich, we can experience more of that.
I have become increasingly annoyed at the way economists use the words "satisfaction" and "satisfy" as if the first meaning (immediate satisfaction) automatically leads to the second (long-term improvement in affect).
Economics does a good job of predicting how people behave (revealed preference). It does not do a very good job of predicting what makes people happy. But then psychology doesn't either; look at the literature on "subjective well-being".
What I cannot fathom about the human race is that we have all this economic and technical progress, but so many humans are "buying" bad ideas that just cause misery from the people who are selling bad ideas that just cause misery. The human race's wisdom is not improving.
"Something like this apparently has occurred. In 1970, there were 0.4 million people over the age of 90 in the United States. As of 2020, this figure was 2.8 million. That increase in people living to age 90 has been offset by adverse trends among younger people."
I had no grandparent living that long - three died in their 70s, one at 82 - and certainly never spoke to them about anything "heavy" nor do I make any great claims for them - but from the way in which they lived, I do not believe for a second that any of them would have been smugly content knowing that the younger generation was foundering, but it's all good because "medical tech has kept me going until past ninety".
The only other thing I would add - my elderly parents' brains have clearly deteriorated with age, but nonetheless I am thankful they don't have dementia. The number of their friends receiving dementia diagnoses seems to be growing apace. And yes, many if not most of the *numerous* friends (probably their total number of friends is fifteen times mine) over their lives have preceded them in death - but they always have new friends coming along. It's a 50s-teen thing, I think. Their generation were great socializers. They never stopped. It is their normal.
Excellent piece. Gioia is a wonderful music critic. But I find his economic and technologic concerns too pessimistic.
The truth is that technology has expanded exposure to the arts tremendously. I would never have imagined as a child being able to call up instantly virtually any recorded album of music or work of literature. Of course every technology has its downsides, but the question is ultimately whether those are outweighed by the benefits. And those decisions, in my view, should be a personal, not societal, ones.
Gioia has expressed concerns about where this leaves musicians economically. But in the past, distribution was concentrated in relatively few large record companies and only the chosen few who received contracts would prosper. Now, anyone with musical talent and a computer can produce their own music and get public access. I would call this progress.
On food, I cannot help but notice that many people do have a strong preference for organic, local, or otherwise unprocessed foods. Whole Foods has been around for awhile, farmer's markets have been around for awhile, and these tend to be more expensive than processed food. Given the prices and/or time commitments for these, it seems like a lot more people would like to afford organic food than are able to afford it.
As for medicine, while I have a lot of sympathy for the trials of medical professionals within the mess that is the US health system, I can pretty confidently say that I would prefer 1970s health care because I or my family members have received health care overseas and it has always been better than the US. Whether China, Costa Rica, India, Ecuador, or elsewhere, every...single...time we were seen, immediately, by a qualified doctor, given 30 minutes to 2 hours of treatment, at trivial cost. Meanwhile, in the US, with a great job and top-tier health insurance, I regularly spend over a hundred hours a year "screaming" on the phone to insurance reps trying to get my longstanding prescriptions refilled, to the point where it's become a question on job interviews: "Does you company provide insurance through X?"
I don't want to completely demean US health insurance, AIDs seems to be effectively cured for example, but I cannot help but notice that no Mexicans are crossing the border into the US for healthcare while Americans frequently cross the border into Mexico for prescription drugs and procedures.
As for social media on your phone...I'm terribly sorry but every single human has a revealed preference for heroin as well if we're exposed to it.
I don't want to say Giola is right here, I sympathize with him but numbers are numbers, but I think he/this issue deserve a more serious response. This feels very...unserious and offhand.
Another stimulating post. I look at progress in a different way.
There is little doubt, despite Gioia’s misgivings, that humans have benefited from technological advancements. Of course, as you say, with the gains there are also some losses, e.g., automobiles greatly assist with transportation but they do emit pollution, etc. So, humans have mostly benefited from technology but have *we* progressed? For example, is our behavior as a species getting better towards one another? (Consider any set of positive behavioral attributes (kindness, truthfulness, compassionate, disciplined, honorable, etc.). Or are we basically the same creature that we were 50,000 years ago? A line chart showing human progress and technology progress up to present would have a hockey stick in the last 400 years for technology but the human line would essentially be flat, IMHO. Hooray for technology.
Josephine, Napoleon's first wife, had "poor dental health." It is unknown exactly how many teeth she was missing, but apparently, it was significant. At the time, tooth-extraction was performed with a "dental key," often by a Blacksmith. There is one on display at the Science Museum in London (picture in the link below). Josephine pre-dated anesthesia, but not sugar. Once you understand how the tool was used, you will never again disparage creative destruction!
On the "tech is flourishing, but humans are not" front, Instapundit links today to a piece about a research article entitled "Is it harmful or helpful? Examining the causes and consequences of generative AI usage among university students" that reports:
"Furthermore, our findings suggested that excessive use of ChatGPT can have harmful effects on students’ personal and academic outcomes. Specifically, those students who frequently used ChatGPT were more likely to engage in procrastination than those who rarely used ChatGPT. Similarly, students who frequently used ChatGPT also reported memory loss. In the same vein, students who frequently used ChatGPT for their academic tasks had a poor CGPA. The mediating effects indicated that academic workload and time pressure were likely to promote procrastination and memory impairment among students through the use of ChatGPT. Also, these stressors dampened students’ academic performance through the excessive use of ChatGPT. Consistently, the findings suggested that higher reward sensitivity discouraged the students to use ChatGPT for their academic tasks. The less use of ChatGPT, in turn, helped the students experience lower levels of procrastination and memory loss."
When I read about these students, I am reminded of the biological concept of trait loss and the eyeless cave fish. When we look around at how technology is changing us, perhaps we might do well to remember that " there is no inherent directionality in biological evolution: complexity can decline and traits can decay or become lost within a lineage when such changes provide a selective advantage in a given local environment at a particular time." (https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-011-0381-y ) Might the confusion about where progress stands in relation to the newest technology have something to do with natural selection? Are women not having babies because they just don't know which mate to select in this environment at this particular time?
In other words, does technological progress = human welfare progress? Of course not. But they are positively correlated because we are destined to question, explore, and invent, not only out of simple curiosity, but to improve our lives. Excellent post.
"People generally have the option of rejecting new technology." That may be the crux - the difference between the perceptions:
1. We would be better off without technology X.
2. I'd be better off without technology X, in a society where everyone else uses technology X.
People may feel 1 is true but 2 is false because of network effects. Or 2 may be regulated away (cheap healthcare or small houses) even if you want it.
That said we often do underestimate the benefits of progress, especially over the long run a la Tyler's crusonia plant.
Are We Making Progress? For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant......https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Most of us would like the technology of 2024 and the social/cultural environment of 1960, at least on some metrics.
I see no reason to credit the people who fucked up the culture with the technological progress a bunch of nerds they probably hate made during that time.
I agree, I would prefer to live today rather than the 1970s. Yet I think there's something to the criticism. As you've pointed out, economics got overmathed and that has had some negative impacts. A couple recent items:
Deaton on his changing views. I agree with the first part very much, the second not so much. Econ too focused on optimization and not enough on philosophy/ethics
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton
And Charles Murray on cognitive elites:
"If you spend any significant amount of your life around people with lower IQs than yours, you can't help but notice how many of them are better people than you in qualities that you value, including the virtues. This is not idealism. It is the empirical reality of life outside the cognitive elite's bubble."
https://x.com/charlesmurray/status/1772383210455880151
Too much efficient sorting of society.
"Economists say that your embrace of contemporary technology reflects “revealed preference.” You must get satisfaction out of it, or you would not be using it."
Well, there is satisfaction and there is satisfaction. If my lower leg itches (as it does now) and I scratch it, I will get satisfaction. But soon after, it will itch again. If I scratch again, I begin another cycle. In fact, if I scratch enough, I actually make the itch worse. My immediate satisfaction has turned into long-term dissatisfaction.
There's a hell of a lot in modern life that is like that, often on a much longer time period and often much less obvious. I suspect there have always been things like that. Today, technology is so advanced and we are so rich, we can experience more of that.
I have become increasingly annoyed at the way economists use the words "satisfaction" and "satisfy" as if the first meaning (immediate satisfaction) automatically leads to the second (long-term improvement in affect).
Economics does a good job of predicting how people behave (revealed preference). It does not do a very good job of predicting what makes people happy. But then psychology doesn't either; look at the literature on "subjective well-being".
Well said. To mention just one thing that stood out for me - I was very happy to leave behind vinyl records and turntables.
What I cannot fathom about the human race is that we have all this economic and technical progress, but so many humans are "buying" bad ideas that just cause misery from the people who are selling bad ideas that just cause misery. The human race's wisdom is not improving.
"Something like this apparently has occurred. In 1970, there were 0.4 million people over the age of 90 in the United States. As of 2020, this figure was 2.8 million. That increase in people living to age 90 has been offset by adverse trends among younger people."
I had no grandparent living that long - three died in their 70s, one at 82 - and certainly never spoke to them about anything "heavy" nor do I make any great claims for them - but from the way in which they lived, I do not believe for a second that any of them would have been smugly content knowing that the younger generation was foundering, but it's all good because "medical tech has kept me going until past ninety".
The only other thing I would add - my elderly parents' brains have clearly deteriorated with age, but nonetheless I am thankful they don't have dementia. The number of their friends receiving dementia diagnoses seems to be growing apace. And yes, many if not most of the *numerous* friends (probably their total number of friends is fifteen times mine) over their lives have preceded them in death - but they always have new friends coming along. It's a 50s-teen thing, I think. Their generation were great socializers. They never stopped. It is their normal.
I like not always having to walk everywhere
Excellent piece. Gioia is a wonderful music critic. But I find his economic and technologic concerns too pessimistic.
The truth is that technology has expanded exposure to the arts tremendously. I would never have imagined as a child being able to call up instantly virtually any recorded album of music or work of literature. Of course every technology has its downsides, but the question is ultimately whether those are outweighed by the benefits. And those decisions, in my view, should be a personal, not societal, ones.
Gioia has expressed concerns about where this leaves musicians economically. But in the past, distribution was concentrated in relatively few large record companies and only the chosen few who received contracts would prosper. Now, anyone with musical talent and a computer can produce their own music and get public access. I would call this progress.
I think Giola deserves a more serious response.
On food, I cannot help but notice that many people do have a strong preference for organic, local, or otherwise unprocessed foods. Whole Foods has been around for awhile, farmer's markets have been around for awhile, and these tend to be more expensive than processed food. Given the prices and/or time commitments for these, it seems like a lot more people would like to afford organic food than are able to afford it.
As for medicine, while I have a lot of sympathy for the trials of medical professionals within the mess that is the US health system, I can pretty confidently say that I would prefer 1970s health care because I or my family members have received health care overseas and it has always been better than the US. Whether China, Costa Rica, India, Ecuador, or elsewhere, every...single...time we were seen, immediately, by a qualified doctor, given 30 minutes to 2 hours of treatment, at trivial cost. Meanwhile, in the US, with a great job and top-tier health insurance, I regularly spend over a hundred hours a year "screaming" on the phone to insurance reps trying to get my longstanding prescriptions refilled, to the point where it's become a question on job interviews: "Does you company provide insurance through X?"
I don't want to completely demean US health insurance, AIDs seems to be effectively cured for example, but I cannot help but notice that no Mexicans are crossing the border into the US for healthcare while Americans frequently cross the border into Mexico for prescription drugs and procedures.
As for social media on your phone...I'm terribly sorry but every single human has a revealed preference for heroin as well if we're exposed to it.
I don't want to say Giola is right here, I sympathize with him but numbers are numbers, but I think he/this issue deserve a more serious response. This feels very...unserious and offhand.
Another stimulating post. I look at progress in a different way.
There is little doubt, despite Gioia’s misgivings, that humans have benefited from technological advancements. Of course, as you say, with the gains there are also some losses, e.g., automobiles greatly assist with transportation but they do emit pollution, etc. So, humans have mostly benefited from technology but have *we* progressed? For example, is our behavior as a species getting better towards one another? (Consider any set of positive behavioral attributes (kindness, truthfulness, compassionate, disciplined, honorable, etc.). Or are we basically the same creature that we were 50,000 years ago? A line chart showing human progress and technology progress up to present would have a hockey stick in the last 400 years for technology but the human line would essentially be flat, IMHO. Hooray for technology.
Josephine, Napoleon's first wife, had "poor dental health." It is unknown exactly how many teeth she was missing, but apparently, it was significant. At the time, tooth-extraction was performed with a "dental key," often by a Blacksmith. There is one on display at the Science Museum in London (picture in the link below). Josephine pre-dated anesthesia, but not sugar. Once you understand how the tool was used, you will never again disparage creative destruction!
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co98254
On the "tech is flourishing, but humans are not" front, Instapundit links today to a piece about a research article entitled "Is it harmful or helpful? Examining the causes and consequences of generative AI usage among university students" that reports:
"Furthermore, our findings suggested that excessive use of ChatGPT can have harmful effects on students’ personal and academic outcomes. Specifically, those students who frequently used ChatGPT were more likely to engage in procrastination than those who rarely used ChatGPT. Similarly, students who frequently used ChatGPT also reported memory loss. In the same vein, students who frequently used ChatGPT for their academic tasks had a poor CGPA. The mediating effects indicated that academic workload and time pressure were likely to promote procrastination and memory impairment among students through the use of ChatGPT. Also, these stressors dampened students’ academic performance through the excessive use of ChatGPT. Consistently, the findings suggested that higher reward sensitivity discouraged the students to use ChatGPT for their academic tasks. The less use of ChatGPT, in turn, helped the students experience lower levels of procrastination and memory loss."
Open access full text available at: https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-024-00444-7
When I read about these students, I am reminded of the biological concept of trait loss and the eyeless cave fish. When we look around at how technology is changing us, perhaps we might do well to remember that " there is no inherent directionality in biological evolution: complexity can decline and traits can decay or become lost within a lineage when such changes provide a selective advantage in a given local environment at a particular time." (https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-011-0381-y ) Might the confusion about where progress stands in relation to the newest technology have something to do with natural selection? Are women not having babies because they just don't know which mate to select in this environment at this particular time?
In other words, does technological progress = human welfare progress? Of course not. But they are positively correlated because we are destined to question, explore, and invent, not only out of simple curiosity, but to improve our lives. Excellent post.
I would happily return to 1970, but only as 4 year-old me- not as 58 year old me.
"People generally have the option of rejecting new technology." That may be the crux - the difference between the perceptions:
1. We would be better off without technology X.
2. I'd be better off without technology X, in a society where everyone else uses technology X.
People may feel 1 is true but 2 is false because of network effects. Or 2 may be regulated away (cheap healthcare or small houses) even if you want it.
That said we often do underestimate the benefits of progress, especially over the long run a la Tyler's crusonia plant.
Are We Making Progress? For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant......https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress