Three Things #21: June 12, 2022

On the state of the world

I noticed recently that smart people seem to fundamentally disagree about the state of the world. Some are quite bullish and think that we’re on the verge of a new Renaissance. Others are bearish and think that we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves and our planet. I’m an optimist but given how high the stakes are, and how insane things have been the past few years, even I have struggled to maintain that optimism. I thought it would be interesting to look at the question from both sides.

Things are bad, but they could always get worse. In the meantime let’s try not to panic. Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash

Thing #1: The Bear Case

The period of time between the end of WWII and the current century was exceptional by historical standards. Trade and globalization flourished, peace and prosperity rose at a faster pace than ever before, and billions were lifted out of poverty. Education improved and overall things were good under Pax Americana and the Washington Consensus. We built massive, trusted institutions and enormous corporations, from the UN to NASA to giant media companies. It was a period of hypergrowth of all the things: a maximalist, fiat century. Our parents and our grandparents had stable, well-paying jobs and they could afford healthcare, education, and a home. The stock market cranked out regular 8% annual returns, and everyone was happy.

But all of that came to an end sometime in the past 20 years, a period that has seen the breakdown and dismantling of so many of the ideas and institutions built during the previous century. America became embroiled in multiple “forever wars” with muddled missions and purposes. We spent trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives (to say nothing of non-American casualties), and in the end we have basically nothing to show for it. The 20th century saw the invention of commercial flight, the radio, the television, the air conditioner, the telephone, the automobile, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone, to name but a few. By comparison the 21st century has so far only given rise to morally ambiguous technology like social media and cryptocurrency, and forever up and coming technologies like AIML and VR. It feels as if innovation has slowed down quite a bit.

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, Covid caught human societies and institutions with their metaphorical pants down and showed us how bad we are at coordinating to solve hard, complex problems, especially collective action problems that require putting society before self. Meanwhile climate change, the true white walker, is relentlessly and inexorably approaching. Global temperatures continue to rise, floods, storms, and other extreme weather events are getting both more frequent and more deadly, and we seem to be asleep at the wheel and unable to do anything about it. Overall trust in institutions globally, both supranational and international, is crashing, freedom and democracy are on the decline, and authoritarianism is on the rise. Authoritarian leaders and governments are increasingly assertive, leading to bad economics, repression and genocide, widescale disinformation campaigns, and even outright kinetic war. There are more guns than people in the USA and gun violence is increasing while we seem unable to come together politically and perennial issues like racial justice and abortion are more divisive than ever. The US congress is completely dysfunctional and trust in even the Supreme Court, the last pillar of decency in the US federal government, is now rapidly eroding.

In the wake of American disengagement and internal strife, the global economic order is fraying. The petrodollar is in retreat while China and Russia do more global deals in their own currencies, nation states begin to adopt Bitcoin to replace the USD, and it seems like, everywhere, inequality is on the rise.

Social media is making everything worse. No one seems to know where to turn to learn the truth. The mainstream media are in complete freefall, talented, independent journalists are thriving but aren’t interested in saving us, and we’re living in a “post-truth” era where no one seems to know what or whom to believe. The very tools we use to communicate and share information are spying on us constantly, feeding our most sensitive data to authoritarians and rapacious corporations alike, and even the most well-intentioned corporate leaders seem hamstrung by the system. Companies are too busy kowtowing to woke cancel culture to make the necessary, painful changes. Our wealthiest, most powerful citizens seem more interested in fleeing to Mars than they do in fixing the problems on the ground.

As bad as Covid has been, with tens of millions of deaths globally, its knock on consequences will be even worse. During the pandemic hundreds of thousands died of starvation and TB, and many millions more children missed out on routine vaccinations. Children around the world missed a year or more of school, and many are facing behavioral health conditions that won’t go away.

Rich world consumers are cutting back because prices of food and fuel are rising rapidly, and supply chain failures mean they’re unable to buy the things they want anyway. Poor countries around the world are reeling from the effects of Covid and the Russia-Ukraine war, unable to spend their way out of the mess as rich countries have done, and are nevertheless also facing rapidly rising inflation and massive debt burdens (Sri Lanka and Pakistan are the two most recent examples) coupled with crippling supply chain failures. Food shortages, and unrest, are increasing.

Meanwhile, Western companies, which have the resources to help address many of these problems, are run by out of touch boomers. Rather than engage in real, painful, necessary reforms, they’re in thrall to woke cancel culture, absurd ESG one-upmanship and vanity metrics. Crime is rising in cities across the country, from San Francisco to New York.

The fact that we got as far as we did as a complex, globalized human society does not mean we have a hall pass to suddenly get lazy for a generation or two. Societies, even complex, pluralistic, globalized ones, have destroyed themselves before and even managed to take their technology with them. We’re on the verge of that happening again, and given the tools and weapons at our disposal, this time it could be for good:

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. - Einstein

Thing #2: The Bull Case

Open any newspaper and you’ll immediately be assaulted by tragic news. This has always been true and is true now more than ever given the broken incentive system of mainstream media. But it doesn’t mean that that society is getting worse, or more violent, or that more tragic things are happening.

Quite the contrary. While the past decade or two have been rough, the long-term trends are quite positive. Poverty is at its lowest point in human history. For around 99% of the history of human civilization, 99% of people were desperately poor. It’s only in the past 200-300 years, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that this began to change, and change it has. Along with increased wealth, lots of other figures are on the uptrend. Education is up, and malnutrition is down, as are infant and maternal mortality. War happens less often, and when it does, it’s less violent.

Human society is more complex than ever before, and that complexity is something to be celebrated. So much of the success and conveniences of modern life is due to specialization, from airplanes to software and the Internet to advances in medical technology. This level of complexity is unprecedented, and astounding when you stop to think about it. As bad as things may feel, we still build airplanes that mostly fly and supercomputers that mostly work.

A lot of the worrying trends described above can be described as growing pains, as humanity transitions from an industrial age to an information age. That transition is underway today but it’s far from complete. Many of these trends, such as the lack of trust in institutions, the rise of social media, and the breakdown of coherence are actually positive insofar as they augur the decentralization of the control of knowledge and public sentiment, out of the hands of governments, large institutions, and corporations and into the hands of everyday people. No large scale “macro political” transition was ever quick or easy, but we have reason to believe that this one will be a lot easier (and less bloody) than the one that preceded it.

Democracy and freedom may be on the decline in the short term, but the long term trend is that ordinary people everywhere have access to far more powerful tools, and more information, than ever before. This trend gives me great hope for the future because while I share public mistrust of big institutions, I firmly believe that the vast majority of people are fundamentally good and will use these newfound powers for good. Things will be bumpy for a few more years, a few decades even, but when this transition is complete human society will flourish as it never has before. We’ll eventually arrive at a new Renaissance.

We’ll put the political squabbles of the past behind us. War will no longer make sense since, rather than humans firing weapons at one another, it’ll be robots and AIs attacking one another, which is bound to end in stalemate and a novel form of mutually assured destruction. Anyway war will become too expensive and we’ll be too intertwined socially and economically to war with one another. For all of the differences between modern US and Chinese culture and politics, over the long term we are moving closer together and nothing can stop that trend.

Technology will not stop improving. It will continue to bring humans around the world closer together. Life will, on average, continue to get better, cheaper, and safer. Medicine will continue to improve. And we’ll eventually solve climate change, too, just as we’ve solved so many other existential crises before it. Because that’s what human society does. It adapts, survives, and thrives.

Thing #3: The Realist Case

The hallmark of modern society is complexity. Human society is getting more complex every day. In general, that complexity is something to be celebrated. Complexity makes lots of desirable things possible: it means we have airplanes that fly, incredible medicine, and information technology. It enables humans all around the world to be constantly connected, instantly and more or less for free. It’s caused a rapid increase in diversity as people spread out all around the planet. Complexity has made modern life more safer and more comfortable than ever before. People are healthier, wealthier, and better educated than ever before. We live longer than we used to. We have more things to keep us busy, more content to consume.

But complexity has a downside. For one thing, it also makes bad things possible: information and biological warfare, more powerful weapons, novel forms of terrorism. It enables the spread of misinformation and disinformation, wider and faster than ever before. In general, it also makes the artifacts of modern life harder to understand, which has contributed to the breakdown of coherence. Our tools are more complex, our lives are more complex, and our social systems and institutions are more complex. We’re drowning in complexity.

Complexity is also the driving force behind the disintermediation, and gradual disintegration, of existing institutions. This is happening for three reasons. First, existing institutions are in many cases totally failing to keep up with the pace of change and degree of complexity inherent in modern society. Second, we have more information at our disposal now, which means we’re more aware of the failings of these institutions and the so-called elites behind them. Finally, we also have new tools, like Bitcoin, blockchain, and DAOs, that offer alternatives.

Our modern technology gives us the power of gods, but our brains are not wired to handle this amount of complexity, and our institutions are failing us. E. O. Wilson put it best:

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

Nearly all of the failures outlined above, all of the major issues facing humanity and human society, can be boiled down to coordination failures and the failure to grapple well with complexity.

The social and political response has so far been populism and extremism, of both the right and the left variety. On the one hand, there are libertarian escapists who would prefer to build a Martian colony for elites. On the other hand, there are those who would like to replace capitalism with communism, abolish private property, and reduce freedoms.

Of course, the safe course lies at neither extreme and is somewhere in between. We need evolution, not revolution. We need to embrace change, make painful reforms, and look to the same ideas and technologies that got us here in the first place to find a path forward. We need to use these tools to build modern institutions that are up to the challenge of handling complexity and addressing the sorts of complex coordination crises we increasingly face.

We have to recognize that these tools, things like blockchain, are not mature yet. They’re not yet ready to replace existing institutions, flawed as they are. We should embrace these new tools and use them selectively, starting with smaller scale, less complex problems with less diverse sets of stakeholders, and increase scope and complexity over time. Recent experiments run by RadicalxChange, with liquid democracy, and by the G0v initiative in Taiwan are excellent examples.

We have to be realistic about the fact that things are going to get worse before they get better. They can and will get better, but until they do, the most important thing is to recognize our shared humanity, be kind to one another, and promote liberty at every opportunity.