America is running on fumes

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-innovation-film-science-business/620858/

by paulpauper • 5 years ago

231 401 5 years ago

Miner49er2• 5 years ago

Maybe it's a result of wealth inequality and monopolization? If capital gets concentrated into less companies and less individuals, then it makes sense that investing and productivity will also be concentrated into less things. It will be focused on areas that those companies focus on and into areas that those individuals care about.

Take a look at the Nasdaq Composite. Of the 2700 companies in it, six tech companies make up 41% of its entire market cap [0].

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/22343/nasdaq-100-top-tech-com...

zepto3• 5 years ago

It will be focused on areas that those companies focus on and into areas that those individuals care about.

I think it’s not about what anyone cares about. It’s about what’s competitive. Even those at the top of the wealth pyramid are subject to these forces.

I think (extreme) wealth inequality is partly a consequence, rather than a cause her.

Creating a global competition through literal economic globalization and the collapse of distance brought about by the internet means we have the entire world competing in a small number of linked domains, rather the than many independent competitive realms that existed before.

dv_dt• 5 years ago

In systemic feedback loops, issues can be both cause and effect. As is the case for wealth inequality here imho.

estro01822• 5 years ago

I was just going to comment with something similar, but more focused on the individual's inability to think creatively because they're just trying to survive on an increasingly inflated-away income. Poverty has a profound effect on creative thinking, and increasingly more of America creeps towards poverty. The author throws one sentence out there on this, then moves on to top-down excuses for lack of innovation.

redisman3• 5 years ago

Wage growth has flatlined for 30+ years!

What happened to the middle class and the American dream? There it is.

ryandvm• 5 years ago

Moving out of the country is the new American Dream

dantheman2• 5 years ago

More people have moved up and out of the middle class, than down and out. I'd argue taxes and the bloat in industries such as education, healthcare, and real estate are the driving causes -- all heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.

nradov8• 5 years ago

Average total employee compensation has significantly increased over the past 30 years once you factor in employer contributions to health insurance premiums. Essentially our collective raises have been eaten up by increased healthcare costs. Now we do get some tangible benefits from that in terms of expensive treatments which weren't even available 30 years ago. But there's also a huge amount of waste and inefficiency.

clarkmoody• 5 years ago

Obligatory link to WTF Happened in 1971? [0]

TL;DR: many of these economic problems are tied to disconnecting the currency from gold, which screws up interest rates and incentives throughout the economy.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

old-gregg• 5 years ago

Maybe it's a result of wealth inequality and monopolization?

Well, the author did compare the current rate of innovation to the dawn of the 20th century, when (according to him) we had plenty of new ideas. But wealth inequality in 1900-1920 was comparable to, if not higher, than today. The raise of the middle class in the US didn't happen until after the WW2.

johndubchak3• 5 years ago

Additionally, and admittedly without evidentiary support, we could argue that two biggest suppliers of capital investment for innovation used to come from business and Government and largely still do.

However, business has focused on short-term gain for investors and concentrating wealth into the hands of its upper Executives.

Government, at least in the US, has worked itself into a position of partisanship such that deadlock and preventing the other side from doing anything seems to be more important.

These are both short-sighted views and approaches. Scientific discovery takes time, requires consistent investment and a longer-term vision. Quite honestly, I don't think it's a radical view to take to blame the current climate of business and Government in the US for many of the issues we see elucidated here. That being said, the solution is as complex as the problem and would require a major restructuring of both the economy and our Government, IMO.

sul_tasto2• 5 years ago

Our contemporary “captains of industry” don’t build universities, cultural centers or museums the way they did in the guided age.

dantheman2• 5 years ago

Maybe it's the mountains of regulation and just general nonsense.

bjtitus• 5 years ago

The problem with this theory is that the current top-weighting is not all that much higher than during previous historical periods. There's a decent overview [0] covering the historical S&P 500's highest concentrations of the top 10 stocks which ranged from a low of 17.5% in 2014 to a high of 25.5% in 1980. It's a little under 30% today. Needless to say, the returns over the decades following 1980 were some of the most consistently positive in history [1].

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/now/top-heavy-stock-indexes-nothing-09...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

larsiusprime• 5 years ago

This is basically Thomas Piketty's conclusion, but Rognlie shows that most of the outsized returns to "capital" are actually from housing/real estate once you properly factor in depreciation of capital assets:

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall... https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

narcraft• 5 years ago

It's almost certainly not a result of wealth inequality and monopolization

honkycat4• 5 years ago

Lol I came here to say this.

For many people, there is no comfort. For many people there is no hope for a future.

99% of Americans may be running on fumes, but the 1% are running on plutonium.

memling• 5 years ago

For many people there is no hope for a future.

What is the object of that hope? I.e., what are people hoping for in the future?

(Yes, this is a bit of a vague question that requires a lot of speculation. If you're willing, humor me?)

beauzero• 5 years ago

Death is their only challenge.

keewee7• 5 years ago

Take a look at the Nasdaq Composite. Of the 2700 companies in it, six tech companies make up 41% of its entire market cap

That is not saying much. NASDAQ Composite includes everyone and their grandma.

The rest is just Pareto's principle in action.

iriri8• 5 years ago

Of course it’s wealth inequality

Wealth is agency

Those who have it have diverse opportunities for agency at their disposal

Those that don’t have paycheck to paycheck and inflation concerns

When are the science minded going to look beyond cultural ephemera and realize the emotional depths at which relativity impacts life

Ignorant people can’t know to fight for healthcare if they’re never allowed to experience good healthcare

It’s such a joke this culture would call itself science minded while clearly building a traditional wealth caste

cturner• 5 years ago

fewer

thewarrior9• 5 years ago

There’s an angle that a lot of these discussions tend to miss. We are running out of easy energy. The step change in civilization we observed in the past 200 years was because we found an abundant source of energy.

Ideas don’t build sky scrapers energy does. If you don’t believe me you can look up the per capita energy consumption per American and observe that it is basically stagnant since 1970. Which is also curiously the date since when the American dream started to fade.

We got around this by outsourcing some activities to economies with a low energy intensity, loading up on debt and improving the energy efficiency of our devices. But these cannot result in the kind of step change improvements that we got used to over the last century.

Why have we seen such amazing progress in computing and the internet ? Moores law allows us to extract twice as much compute for the same energy every 18 months. The energy burned by a transistor scales with its area. This is nothing short of miraculous. It’s as if your car doubled its mileage every 2 years. This has allowed computing to cheat the stagnation in energy we have been seeing elsewhere. When compute gets cheaper transporting information gets cheaper as well as it is computers that transport the information. Hence the biggest growth industry continues to be technology and the internet. Batteries or solar panels do not double every 18 months. Batteries have barely moved in comparison. The newer iPhones feel heavier after they made the battery bigger.

There was a fear for a time that “Peak Oil” would lead to some kind of a total collapse. The reality is more of a slow burn stagnation as we wring the oil out of ever deeper deposits.

The much heralded green transition got a dose of reality this year in Europe as they realized how reliant they are on natural gas to not freeze to death.

Building tens of thousands of Nuclear plants is far from trivial although it is in theory possible.

We will in general struggle to maintain the standards of living we currently have especially as we expand it to the broader population. This is a harsh truth many don’t want to confront. Perhaps the elites realize this and have decided to squeeze every last drop out of the orange so they can experience the growth that was once the norm for all first worlders. The elites being the top 2-5 %.

The entire third world that was looted and colonized is also now stepping up to claim its fair share of global resources. The more they develop the higher energy prices will go. And yet it is inevitable.

Hence I struggle to see how first world living standards will not stagnate even in the presence of interesting new technologies and breakthroughs. The meta verse might be the answer as a simulation of prosperity may be cheaper than actual prosperity. It might also explain why everything is moving into the virtual world. Energy constraints apply a lot less here.

And don’t get me started on Climate Change.

Miner49er2• 5 years ago

This is a really interesting way of looking at it that I hadn't considered.

adrianN4• 5 years ago

We're not running out of easy energy at all. Renewable energy is quite easy and we'll never run out while the sun has hydrogen left. Economic growth has increasingly been decoupled from increases in energy use (at least in developed nations).

dntrkv2• 5 years ago

If you don’t believe me you can look up the per capita energy consumption per American and observe that it is basically stagnant since 1970

I think the more likely explanation for that is optimization. Look at cars as an example. In the first half of the century, we built cars without much of a focus on fuel economy. As we scaled up the amount of cars we produced and in turn, the oil resources we consumed, we began to optimize the efficiency of these cars. Compare a car from 1970 and 2020, and you see a much more reliable, efficient, safe, comfortable car. So the per capita consumption has been reduced by using less gas and also having to replace the cars less often while providing a better quality of life.

There are similar stories across every industry.

So I don't see how looking at our per-capita energy-use as a major contributor in this discussion. That's not to say energy prices have had no effect, but I could make the opposite argument that energy prices have forced us to innovate past burning things we find in the ground.

As far as renewables go, I'm not an expert in this space, but it seems like we have the technology and resources to implement a reliable green energy grid. We just don't have the political will to do so.

If we had the political cohesion to muster up an equivalent to the Interstate Highway System project, but for energy generation/transmission, it would propel us into a new era.

mensetmanusman7• 5 years ago

We aren’t running out of easy energy, $/kwhr solar is now the cheapest energy source ever developed by humanity.

Had the west actually supported building things instead of supporting NIMBY-isms, we would be even faster on our way to TWhr installations.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

I'm always up for an anti-capitalist take but I should remind you that Bell Labs was the spawn of an actual and massive monopoly. You'd have to explain that.

specialist• 5 years ago

Prior monopolies invested. Because of tax code. And corporate remits were limited. Probably a few other reasons.

All those guard rails were eliminated. So current monopolies do stock buybacks.

All that excess idle wealth, too much capital chasing too few investments, has to go somewhere. Causing asset bubbles. Stocks, real estate, cryptocurrencies, artwork.

If we want more investment, we have to address idle wealth. Disincentivize hoarding wealth. Keep the money moving. Reduce the impedance mismatch between funds (too big) and investment opportunities (too small); like apply the YC strategy far and wide.

zepto3• 5 years ago

Horrible title, good article.

pohl• 5 years ago

The title's implicit "it's-not-too-late" optimism does take the edge off a bit, though.

sparrc2• 5 years ago

I feel the author sort of invalidates his own argument with this sentence (also he forgot to mention commercial space travel):

"What about all the cool new stuff?" you might ask. What about the recent breakthroughs in mRNA technology? What about CRISPR, and AI, and solar energy, and battery technology, and electric vehicles, and (sure) crypto, and (yes!) smartphones?

His defense of his thesis after this sentence doesn't make that much sense to me. Sure some things have "stagnated". Skyscrapers aren't really getting any taller, but why do we need even taller skyscrapers? Haven't we maybe simply reached the physical limits of gravity?

As for institutions, if we already have CMU and Stanford and MIT, why do we need more top-tier private universities? It seems to me we're seeing pubic universities become more prestigious and influential, which IMO is largely a positive development (UW, Cal, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, etc).

estro01822• 5 years ago

Yeah, this article seems like a pining for ye olden days of the industrial revolution rather than a substantive assessment of current innovation. I agree with some of the opinions stated, but holistically I don't buy what the article is selling.

xxpor3• 5 years ago

On the skyscraper point, at least in Chicago (I'd guess) and Seattle (where I live, so I'm sure), the limits on skyscraper height aren't about anything to do with the buildings themselves, the soil conditions, or anything like that. The issue is being to close to flight corridors, and so the FAA won't approve anything higher.

On the University point, I think I agree in theory, but not in practice. The percentage of their funding that's actually coming from the state has been dropping significantly over time. They're essentially private in everything but name and some slight discounts for in-state students. The demographics aren't that much different from similarly situated private universities. My sister went to a public school, which ended up costing more than my private school due to the scholarship I was able to get at the private university (I wasn't even that special, approximately 50% of the kids there got this scholarship).

If you go to UW, you have to apply to the CS program your freshman year. There's no guarantee you'll get in, due to space constraints. It's completely f'ed.

7thaccount• 5 years ago

Some places (Portland I think) deliberately limit the height of buildings so you don't feel like you're in a prison when walking around.

davemp• 5 years ago

They're essentially private in everything but name and some slight discounts for in-state students.

I'm not sure >$20k/yr is a slight discount.

sparrc2• 5 years ago

I certainly agree that UW should expand it's CS program even more. FWIW, they are doing it but probably not quickly enough:

- https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/hansen/2018/02/26/house-budget...

- https://www.cs.washington.edu/supportcse/building

I'd have to disagree on the "slight discount" argument. UW charges $12,000 per year for residents. This is 3.2x cheaper than non-resident tuition ($39,000). IMO $12,000 is still a very good value for what you get.

selectodude2• 5 years ago

Chicago has no building limitations due to the FAA.

nradov8• 5 years ago

Buildings in downtown San Jose, CA are limited to about 15 storeys due to the nearby SJC airport. In practice though that's not a major obstacle to development; most buildings there are still significantly shorter.

vikingerik• 5 years ago

For skyscrapers, what we've reached is the practical limit of interior space. You can't usefully add more floors because you consume that much space on the lower floors for more elevator shafts, support columns, and other infrastructure. It becomes more economically practical to build that space into another building instead.

There's a reason that most Manhattan skyscrapers range around 30 to 50 floors. Anything over that is mostly a stunt for visibility and publicity, not economic practicality. The main thing you gain from being taller is a tourist observation deck, but there's only going to be demand for a few of those per city.

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

exactly. the costs go up as floors increase.

pradn• 5 years ago

Construction costs increase exponentially going into the sky and also into the ground. Costs can be recouped via condo/office sales/rents. The height/depth vs cost line has to intersect with the line of economic activity. That's why the most prosperous cities can command the highest towers. And that's why Midtown NY has most of the new tall buildings - that's where dynamism is, not Downtown, which is a little outpost of Midtown at this point. For example, the Bank of America HQ is in midtown, not on Wall Street, in downtown NYC.

zaphod12• 5 years ago

The skyscraper point is tremendously silly. Sure, the max height has slowed it's march (though not stopped!), but far more supertall towers have been erected since 2001, than had been previously. This is because of cost decrease and technology improvements. (As an aside, a lot of this is owed to work resulting from the 9/11 attacks).

wrs• 5 years ago

You thinking his question was “why don’t we have taller skyscrapers” kind of demonstrates his actual point that we just seem to assume incremental improvements. His question would be “where is the next disruptive innovation in work/life housing, like skyscrapers were?”

nradov8• 5 years ago

The next disruptive innovation in work/life housing is technologies that enable remote work for many employees. This greatly reduces the need for dense housing and office space. All else being equal, the majority of people prefer to live in single family houses with some space and privacy rather than being crammed into skyscrapers. (Yes I understand that some prefer the skyscraper lifestyle but they're a minority.)

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

Skyscrapers are so difficult and expensive that corporations with tens of billions are the only plausible developers. With wfh and offshoring, commercial real estate is a difficult space to make profitable - nobody wants to go to congested city centers to work, so nobody wants to risk catering to a dwindling population when the margins on other locations and building styles make so much more sense.

tootie• 5 years ago

Height aside, I live in NYC and once all the cleanup and insurance claims and lawsuits were settled, the new 1 WTC was built just unbelievably fast. There was just a deep, sad hole for a few years, then they finally broke ground, starting construction and the building was 100 stories and open for occupancy in less than 5 years. The rate was about 1 floor per week once they got above ground.

njarboe• 5 years ago

A similarly sized building, the Empire State Building, was built in 1930-1931 in 13 months. Of course it was the depression, so when it was ready for occupancy they had a hard time finding tenets.

throwaway6734• 5 years ago

Agree. I think science fiction had completely warped the lay person's mind about technological progress. They've already seen examples of future tech functioning in media and have an idyllic view of what it should be.

superluserdo• 5 years ago

I hope you meant "public universities" :)

karaterobot• 5 years ago

This feels a lot like a headline that appeals to the prejudices of readers of The Atlantic. But, even setting aside whether I buy the statistics they gesture toward (without citation in most cases), they need to provide an argument that they are relevant. For example, might the lack of new colleges signal instead that colleges are less relevant in the age of the internet, or that existing colleges have expanded in size, or all the new college created in the last century were part of a post-war boom, rather than the baseline that the future should always be judged by? I'd also like to know why any of this is a uniquely American problem, and not a wider trend.

And, you can't get away with just saying "sure, CRISPR and mRNA and AI and solar energy and smartphones are cool, but if you ignore examples like that, there really hasn't been much innovation."

mayormcmatt• 5 years ago

And, you can't get away with just saying "sure, CRISPR and mRNA and AI and solar energy and smartphones are cool, but if you ignore examples like that, there really hasn't been much innovation."

What have the Romans ever done for us!

JohnWhigham2• 5 years ago

This feels a lot like a headline that appeals to the prejudices of readers of The Atlantic.

Objective reporting is dead (whether it was a thing to begin with is a different argument). Magazines/news outlets now are just products catered to their primary demographic. Overt bias is absolutely everywhere even though they pretend to be objective. It's virtually impossible to get a balanced take on an issue nowadays without doing a lot of research for oneself.

mtberatwork• 5 years ago

What's your point here? The Atlantic is a political commentary magazine.

scelerat• 5 years ago

First, "objective" reporting is a very subjective concept! Even if rhetorical bias is suppressed, there is always an editorial bias. What stories get run? What is the shape and focus of stories that do run? All news organizations have biases, and they are all more nuanced than "left vs right."

Second, The Atlantic magazine has functioned as a voice of commentary and analysis since its inception, so of course it's going to have more of an opinionated take than more "objective" outlets like AP or Reuters.

fnord77• 5 years ago

colleges are less relevant in the age of the internet,

Can I get a law degree or a chemistry degree from a MOOC?

Lately it seems like MOOCs are written off as failures

asdff• 5 years ago

Seems that state schools everywhere are expanding in the past few decades. UC added merced in 2005. More people are enrolled in a cal state school than ever before. Its almost a meme how common new dorm construction is on college campuses.

jeffreyrogers3• 5 years ago

AI and solar energy are decades old at this point (continually improving, but they aren't new ideas). Smartphones have definitely had a huge impact on the world but they are almost entirely a system integration problem.

Biology is maybe the one field that still has a lot of novel advances coming out of it.

The other thing is look at the number of people it takes to sustain those advances. There are probably 1000x more scientists and engineers in 2020 than in 1920. So even if the absolute number of technological advances is roughly constant, the productivity is way lower.

thehappypm• 5 years ago

Oddly enough we rode the highs of WW2 R&D for decades. Nothing even close to that level of R&D has happened since, even the moon missions are a fraction.

brandonmenc2• 5 years ago

Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?

Cinema as the high form of popular theater art is done - for better or for worse - just like vaudeville et al. before it.

The new form is the epic, original, streaming TV mini-series - some of which are good enough to be considered very long movies.

As much as I also bemoan the disappearance of an endless stream of great popular cinema, something new and interesting and evolving has taken its place. And cinema will continue to exist in a niche, just like vaudeville and theatre still do today.

rstupek3• 5 years ago

TV mini-series aren't a new thing though. They were all the rave in the 80s/early 90s but they stopped for some unknown reason.

jjtheblunt• 5 years ago

Pervasive computational special effects became widely available around the early 90s (Silicon Graphics, Pixar, ILM); maybe writers migrated towards movies around then, because they could tell visually compelling stories.

maybe (again, maybe) the expanding availability of high bandwidth cable access has shifted attention back to homes as theaters?

SuoDuanDao4• 5 years ago

I think it was for the same reason the Naked Gun series didn't do well despite people loving the movies - producers misunderstood how audiences watched television.

Now however, people's viewing habits have changed. Are there mini-series from that era you'd recommend? I'd be curious how they hold up.

nradov8• 5 years ago

Production quality and acting in most of those earlier TV mini-series were abysmal compared to recent content. Stuff that I had enjoyed years ago seems unwatchable now.

dredmorbius2• 5 years ago

Novelty isn't the question, quality and originality of the series is.

I'm no fan at all of television generally. But the quality of programming available since the year 2000 absolutely dwarfs virtually everything that came before. Shows such as Miami Vice, Moonlighting, and Hillside Blues were considered landmarks of their time. They're at best mediocre by current standards against The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Firefly, etc. The remake of Battlestar Gallactica towers above the original in all aspects --- production, casting, writing, effects, complexity.

There remains a great deal of dreck on television, but the best that there is exceeds virtually all that came before it.

(I'm partial to some earlier PBS and BBC programming, as possible exceptions.)

treis• 5 years ago

Because they were seen as lesser artistic outlets than cinema due to the rigidity of television schedules and advertising. These days, it's the Netflix series that gives you the most artistic freedom. You can make any number of episodes of any length to tell your story and you're free to appeal to a niche audience. Movies are forced into a relative narrow length window and business constraints force you to appeal to an international audience.

The creativity is still there. It's just in a different place.

namelessoracle• 5 years ago

the unknown reason was that technology gave Hollywood a big spike of spectacle that TV mini series didnt have the budget/resources to match. (green screen technology, CGI advances, 3D animation) But technology has improved so the gap is less, and the resources being allocated now matches movie production.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

One thing though, a movie theater is still a special place. It makes the experience different than at home.

Now it's true that big tv shows have funds and tech to match the high grade results that only movies could afford.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

Home TVs have gotten bigger, and higher resolution. Theaters are still better, but they're not as much better as they used to be.

caymanjim• 5 years ago

Some of the newer, fancy movie theatres with comfortable reclining chairs and great sound systems are indeed a nice way to watch movies, except the part where other people are around. Film viewing is not a good team sport, with the possible exception of comedies where the live laughter can enhance the experience (although still easily ruined by people who yell back at the actors).

ericmcer2• 5 years ago

Good movies are still readily available, they just don't make it as huge blockbusters because people want a visual spectacle in theaters, not an action-less drama. I just watched "Worth" and it was great, easily comparable to an acclaimed movie from 30 years ago, but if I was gonna pay 20 dollars to go to a theater I would choose Dune.

nickthegreek• 5 years ago

Its not really blockbuster movies that are gone, its the mid-budget movies that thrived in the 90's and early 2000's that I miss.

RubberbandSoul2• 5 years ago

The analyses on why movies looks like they do today has been done to death already.

What happened was that piracy and other forms of commodification gutted the entire middle segment of movie making. What remains today is indie movies and Marvel-style blockbusters and very little in between.

It's not just that people would spend less on watching movies or watch pirated content for free. It's that they would rather spend their entertainment money on streaming services, computer games, etc.

You could in fact make the exact opposite creativity argument by looking at computer games. Since the late 90's we have gone from Half Life to Half Life: Alyx.

gniv• 5 years ago

Great point. And just to reinforce it, I find the 16-episode pre-produced korean drama format very compelling. It's some of the best TV content I've watched lately.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

The new form is the epic, original, streaming TV mini-series

While there are some of those, and they might have been the height for a while, I think the new high form is the epic, original, streaming TV series, not particularly “mini” (i.e., half-/full-/multiple season series instead of smaller ones.)

ravedave5• 5 years ago

Original content is on youtube now.

snowwrestler• 5 years ago

I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

This mood excuses a lot of behavior that would otherwise seem off limits. If the end is near, why worry about consequences? Get yours before it’s too late!

Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming. Either you understand the science and implications, or you think it’s a global hoax being perpetrated to excuse oppression. Either way it sits in the background every day like a tick tock clock of impending doom. It’s huge and so far totally unresolved.

A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically. It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

frockington14• 5 years ago

People have been preaching the end of times for ages. "Miami Beach will be underwater in 5 years!" has been a headline my entire life. There was also "PEAK OIL" where people thought the world was going to end because we would run out of energy, turns out we found more. Journals like the Atlantic will print anything that generates clicks

aksss6• 5 years ago

This is true, and I’m not sure that culturally we have acknowledged the consequences of involving kids in these apocalyptic concerns. Anxiety seems to be a chronic condition affecting more kids in quantity in my community than I ever recall years ago. But what do you think is going to happen when parents are constantly on about end of the world, end of democracy, the second coming of hitler and other enormous hyperbole. Of course kids take that shit more seriously than most adults, of course that will affect them when the few people they have absolute trust in are preoccupied by it. Parents/teachers have sense of existential dread = chronically anxious kid.

IMO, one of the primary jobs of a parent is to create a sense of security for a developing human. Even if you believe the end is nigh, help your kid ignore it for (quite) a while, be a kid, develop and retain a sense of hope. It doesn’t help that the media is in the business of keeping the population scared about something and in a constant state of worry. This is why part of that job involves shielding kids from poisonous media for a large part of their development. Formative years should be positive experiences.

nouveaux• 5 years ago

I agree that it is problematic for the media to be so hyperbolic. However, are you saying that Florida is not having regular and more historical flooding? If so, why is articles about frequent floodings[0] wrong?

Regarding peak oil, geologists pretty much know where all the oil is. Finding a little more oil did not solve the problem. What solved the problem was the shift to electric cars and fracking for gas. These two things triggered a reduction in drilling[1] that caused the collapse of Venezuela.

[0] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-key... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-oil-rigs/

jmeister2• 5 years ago

The Death of God and the End of History.

The rest is noise.

apocalypstyx3• 5 years ago

Slamming Nietzsche and Hegel together and expecting a peanut-butter-chocolate moment might be ... more so a fried-chicken and used-panty vending machine.

SuoDuanDao4• 5 years ago

Oh come on, you can't just tease us like that. What are you doing to try and win the next decade?

bob1029• 5 years ago

If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

This is what is keeping me motivated and above all the bullshit. I have a really good team at a small company with a ton of latitude to do the right thing by our customers. We are on track to capture a huge chunk of our target market. Our competition seems to be idle/nonexistent right now. I like to believe its a combination of this "apocalyptic mood" you describe combined with the complexity of our customers' businesses. No one wants to mount an effective battle against bank core logic from 1990 when they think society is about to fall apart.

I think a big part of this path is avoiding [social] media as much as possible. Hackernews is about as much as I can stand these days.

saila• 5 years ago

they better grab what they can now

Is there a time in history when it wasn't like this? Didn't we get to this point precisely because people have, more or less, always been doing this? I don't think people suddenly changed in the last half century or so.

The difference in modern times just seems to be that we found resources (oil, etc) that could be burned on a massive scale for a variety of purposes.

sleepysysadmin3• 5 years ago

I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling broke me out of this a few years ago. This apocalyptic mood is completely untrue and is being pushed by political ideologues. We are in a fantastic time.

This mood excuses a lot of behavior that would otherwise seem off limits. If the end is near, why worry about consequences? Get yours before it’s too late!

It's not quite that. We are at a major inflection point in politics and economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

We are at the end of a saeculum which usually ends with a very bloody war or something to the level of killing a huge proportion of the world population.

Ray Dalio has talked about the long term debt cycle which also matches up exactly with these saeculums. We are there.

When socialism died in 1989, it took time for this to truly die. Neo liberalism and the culture wars is basically over. This was the last hurrah of communism/socialism. We are here. What seems to be happening now is that politically socialism is dead, it is becoming a religion. Super exciting to see a new major religion forming.

Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

It's known, everyone is pulling up contemporary writers to Marx who predicted exactly what happened. The problem is the socialists don't think they've lost. So instead of acknowledging socialism failed, it's just apocalypse. Everything needs to be torn down and start over.

It's worse for socialists. If they acknowledge socialism failed, let it fail. How do they work within capitalism? Oh they do exactly what capitalism perscribes. Socialists could use robotics, ai, automation, etc to produce goods at virtually no cost and destroy capitalism from within.

My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming. Either you understand the science and implications, or you think it’s a global hoax being perpetrated to excuse oppression. Either way it sits in the background every day like a tick tock clock of impending doom. It’s huge and so far totally unresolved.

About to blow your mind. Yes capitalism won, neoliberalism is king. But that doesn't mean climate change isn't real. Yes technically the losing camp are the people in the climate change camp.

The other problem politicians like al gore pushed the climate change hoax to further his political agenda. So you now need your thinking cap on to figure out where the hoax starts and climate change ends. Where is that line? You can see the hoax for your own eyes on wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

Look at IPCC RCP8.5 bubbles for 2050 and 2100 years. Now read what 8.5 is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...

8.5 isn't happening. It's not going to happen. So why would this graph use only the worst prediction? One that isnt even happening? Because the true path doesnt look bad. It looks less bad than the Eemian spike.

So is this the hoax line? Where they outright misrepresent threats and risks? If we dont mispresent the science, will we not act and climate change kills everyone?

Or crazy yet? What if we don't act and nothing bad really happens? So far that's what has happened.

A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically. It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

Did you know there's actual correlation between economic depression and psychological depression?

Kind of going back to ray dalio's long term debt cycle. When the cycle peaks, those who are significantly in debt have stress because of their debt. We don't know, but the probability we had significant psychological depression during the great depression is so high.

I like what you said, it's a great time to start building something. It doesn't matter if climate change is a problem. We have a limited resource that will increasingly become scarce and become more expensive. Staying on oil is a very dumb idea.

So it's super simple to see where all these ideas are. Build anything that replaces oil and you will win. Plastics, airplanes, trains, etc. Someone needs to come around and do this.

NotSammyHagar2• 5 years ago

The idea of the 80 year generation related cycles is interesting. But your tangent about you don't like some narrow climate change 8.5 scenario means it's just some kind of a scam is just wrong. And you kind of go back and forth on whether climate change is real or not. I can't follow your arguments.

lambdaba3• 5 years ago

Thank you for writing this, I could've written this word for word.

I also strongly resonate with the sentiment this is the golden age for optimists, it has always been a key for innovation and vitality, but in today's world it it a superpower. It is tricky though, and requires one to sidestep the culture in a way that can't be taught.

f00zz2• 5 years ago

My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming.

Back when I were a kid people were afraid of nuclear winter, or getting fried by UV radiation because of aerosols, or 10 billion people in 2010. The sense of impending doom is hardly a new thing.

lambdaba3• 5 years ago

But was it so constant? I can't recall the exact number but a huge percentage of Gen Z are persuaded they are likely to die of global warming. I can't say, I'm a millennial, but definitely remember being infused with information about environmental destruction since a small child.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

That's a great frame/empathetic connection I haven't thought of!

I personally experience this existential dread and anger from not being able to force any action on the scale we need on climate change. Kind of feel silly that I've never really put together that people in your generation felt similarly about an impending nuclear winter, population growth starvation etc.

Sadly a lot of that generation are the least likely to want dramatic efforts to fight climate change/most skeptical. Some points almost 2X less likely to want immediate action.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/05/26/gen-z-millenn...

s1artibartfast4• 5 years ago

I think there is a difference in intensity with respect to climate change fears.

Climate change is being taught as an existential threat that will certainly destroy your future if action is not taken.

This is taught and messaged to young elementary school children. My friends third graders class recently held climate policy protests with picket signs and everything.

This is a level of pervasive fear is higher than I remember with nuclear winter/UV/ or the fear of the day when I was growing up

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

I think people are just bored.

Compared to the 2000s and 2010s it seems like there is less innovation. Much more significant, we have smartphones and technology which deliver fast dopamine and make everything easy.

People are getting ADHD-like symptoms and becoming desensitized to everything. They want novelty and intense stimulation. Events like the Capitol Insurrection, GME / cryptocurrency “lottery”, off-the-rails politicians - those provide novelty and intense stimulation. A global apocalypse or war, even though it would be awful, provides novelty and intense stimulation.

Just the thought of a global apocalypse and imagining the consequences gives people motivation. Predicting it on the news gets the news channels attention and ratings. Even if it never happens, the idea of a global apocalypse itself is capturing people’s attention.

bmitc3• 5 years ago

I think technology addiction is a real thing and a real concern. I'm young enough to have had a Nokia brick cell phone that stayed in my car in high school and was only used for parental conversations. I just did things, explored, played. Now, I am stuck on my computer, phone, or iPad all day. Yes, I tend to read a lot of non-fiction and interesting things there or I'm doing work, but it's an endless onslaught of surface-level material and not deep and exploratory thinking. And I don't even play phone games or watch TV. We even see a change in how people watch things. The days of something like an hour-long Letterman show is over. Everyone wants little clips and bits to gnaw on. If one goes back to old radio and TV interview programs, they had real intellectuals on there with real questions. Now we simply have drivel.

I have personally become worried about my own addiction, which I would wager is pretty light relatively speaking. It's been helping for me to get out and do yard work, it's amazing how simply touching dirt grounds yourself. I've also been trying to get a work setup conducive to just sitting down and actually getting through some books I've surrounded myself with and get back to playing music and also exploring electronics.

JohnWhigham2• 5 years ago

It's the Internet. I hold it as humanity's greatest invention. The amount of effort from all the different entities over the decades it took for it to coalesce into what it is is nothing short of extraordinary, awesome (in the original sense of the word). Civilization-changing in the span of only several years.

However as each year goes by, I think its negatives are fast outweighing its positives. Society...humanity is not equipped to be a global community. We didn't evolve that way. Everyone having a voice in everything is not a good thing because nothing ever changes or gets done. We are desensitized by an endless deluge of information, and we lose track of what is physically around us.

_hypx• 5 years ago

For most of us here, the 2000s and 2010s were the pinnacle of innovation of our respective fields. Anything that follows would seem like a downturn. Likely, if we want to see innovation it will be in a field that we're less familar with.

bmitc3• 5 years ago

the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things. If you can get the resources and talent, you could build something to win the next decade while everyone else is scrambling to grab what is sitting right in front of them.

I have been having some thought experiments on company models that I think would be interesting. I've used the phrase "I like to move fast to move slow" to describe to people worried about rate of progress or deadlines on how long term thinking is actually faster in the end. Someone also recently reminded me of Phil Dunphy's "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". Another thing is that I think it would be interesting if a company acted almost as a non-profit in spirit, adjusting for sustainability of the company, quality of products, livelihood of its employees and customers, and not for growth and short term goals.

However, I am stuck for lack of good, concrete ideas. Some things that have become interesting to me are conservation, recycling, the ocean, social programs, etc., but I don't yet understand how to turn these around as businesses. One thing I see is the explosion of space companies, but I don't understand their business model outside of government contracts. So I can imagine a parallel of ocean-tech companies, although I don't see where the rubber meets the road. The idea of a recycling company is interesting to me, because I like the view that the company's goal should almost be to make the company shrink and not grow in that it should provide backwards pressure against the amount of stuff needing to be recycled at the end stage (e.g., providing companies with more sustainable products or materials that can be reused or recycled upstream).

Do you have any ideas? Who is thinking and writing about this? How does one capture the excitement and hype of space to the actual importance of the ocean?

It evens seems like a law to me that anything actually worth doing that will actually help people and the environment is not something that will make money.

sleepysysadmin3• 5 years ago

Do you have any ideas? Who is thinking and writing about this? How does one capture the excitement and hype of space to the actual importance of the ocean?

Bioplastics are probably a big factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

Dont need to clean up plastic in the ocean if it properly biodegrades. We need to get it to scale and costs low enough to replace oil based plastics. Which might be virtually impossible because if oil stops being used for fuel, it'll end up increasing and becoming cheaper for plastics. Eventually though the scarcity of oil and the extensive availability of corn and potatoes means you win.

SuoDuanDao4• 5 years ago

I'm so glad you asked! I have two or three, I'd love to have any of them critiqued or stolen.

First one or two are not ocean-based but might be intrigueing all the same. Essentially, people flip houses, but there's not much flipping of land itself. And yet, a lot of land can be bought for relatively little money because of either nutrient degradation or soil contamination. So the business model would be slow but simple - buy distressed or contaminated land, practise slow but inexpensive means of remediation[1], flip it for a profit once it's remediated, and use that to buy more distressed land. There's actually a company in South America named Adecoagro that does this as one of their business segments. From what I could gather via their investor reports, the major bottleneck to this business is finding people with the expertise to do it. Adecoagro works on quite large farms, but I have the idea that if one did it with smaller parcels and combined the remediation efforts with hosting permaculture or similar courses, it might be a better way to bring in the necessary expertise.

Possibly the same or possibly an adjacent idea is phytomining[2]. Find land that either has been mined out and is distressed, or that a local community will sell cheap rather than have it go to a conventional mining company. Mine the soil via phytomining over a longer period of time, possibly in tandem with other regenerative land management techniques.

And the ocean one - there are techniques for recycling plastic for a fairly low cost[3]. With a basic plastic shredder and press, it should be possible to clean up the seas and make artificial islands[4] in situ. Combine with an ecotourism or seasteading brand and it should be quite interesting to people with money.

Like I said, I'd welcome any feedback! They're all very early-stage ideas (besides the land-flipping one, which exists but has an early-stage twist on the standard execution) so I'd be very interested in hearing how others would modify them.

[1] e.g. https://www.amazonmycorenewal.org/ [2] e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43258437_Method_for... [3] e.g. https://preciousplastic.com/ [4] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Island

tw042• 5 years ago

Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

It's happening because of the widening wealth gap. There was a time when the average American only had to compare themselves to the folks in their neighborhood. Now they see how the actual wealthy are living and are angry about it and for a large portion of them they direct their anger at immigrants or China or insert boogeyman because they work hard and deserve to live like that. It's never the rich guy's fault though... as best I can tell from talking to a couple folks in that mindset their theory is we shouldn't increase taxes or re-implement actual estate-taxation because "when they make it big" they don't want to become poor again because of high taxes. They don't understand what a progressive tax rate is, and they haven't the faintest idea that taxes are literally the LAST thing that is going to cause someone who is wealthy to ever become poor.

That's ignoring the entire generation just entering the workforce that also sees those ultra-wealthy on Instagram and feel that if they can't obtain that wealth working hard, they want to work as little as possible. And I can't entirely blame them.

chiph• 5 years ago

I for one, am not going to blame it on an actual wealth gap. Shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and "MTV Cribs" were around long ago and didn't cause financial angst. Probably because watching a weekly tour through some poorly decorated Beverly Hills mansion wasn't that big of an influence. We knew that a fair number of the homes were staged and the musician didn't live there (from how awkward the "tours" were). [0]

However, we usually watched those shows with someone around us (family/friends), but social media is typically consumed while alone and no one else is there to laugh at the absurdities. If the people in their feeds aren't explaining that all the new clothes, cars, houses, and so on were given to them for free by their sponsors - that may be the real problem. Resulting in a perceived wealth gap.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ-Z7aFgDPk

carom2• 5 years ago

Now they see how the actual wealthy are living and are angry about it and for a large portion of them they direct their anger at immigrants or China or insert boogeyman because they work hard and deserve to live like that. It's never the rich guy's fault though... as best I can tell from talking to a couple folks in that mindset their theory is we shouldn't increase taxes or re-implement actual estate-taxation because "when they make it big" they don't want to become poor again because of high taxes. They don't understand what a progressive tax rate is, and they haven't the faintest idea that taxes are literally the LAST thing that is going to cause someone who is wealthy to ever become poor.

It must be tiring talking to so many strawmen. I'm imagining being someone who has a problem illegal labor and the government taking 20% of my pay, then talking to someone like you who just thinks I'm the biggest moron in the world.

jeffreyrogers3• 5 years ago

It's because economic growth is slowing down and society is predicated on a higher rate of growth than we're likely to get.

I doubt most people think about global warming at all. Most people have more immediate problems going on: paying rent/mortgage, raising their kids, dealing with a spouse or parent's health problems, etc.

heliodor2• 5 years ago

The Roman empire declined too. It wasn't because they were worried about global warming. Decay is inevitable.

Plenty has been written and argued about the rise and fall of civilizations and how their political systems and culture played into it.

You'll probably find possible causes that are much more satisfying if you look in that direction.

tomjen3• 5 years ago

The glory that was Rome is nothing to the glory that is today. Rome was good at extracting wealth and so created some awesome science and statues, but it does not a stable society make, because if you want more stuff you have to take it from somebody else.

We are good at creating wealth. That means that if you want more stuff, you are better of creating something that others value that you can then trade for. Not always, not for everyone and not for everything, because the system isn't perfect. But often enough that the standard of living is rising around the world, and has only partially declined in some sectors in the US and other advanced economies.

But if you compare the US with Rome, Persia, the Greek states or anywhere else, beware of the fundamental difference.

carom2• 5 years ago

Parroting that we are in decline is definitely a contributor to the mood of doom.

munificent3• 5 years ago

A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically.

Not even metaphorically. People literally behave like the time horizon for the consequences of their choices is shrinking. This explains so much of the zeitgeist:

- Hustle culture. Better climb to the top of the hill fast because the metaphorical/literal floodwaters are rising.

- The doom and gloom of progressive culture, which used to be much more positive. If we don't fix these cultural problems right now, it means we'll never fix them because there's no future, and if we'll never fix them, we lost. Therefore, we failed and should feel morally miserable.

- The plummeting birthrate. Who would want to bring a child into a dying world?

- Dropping rates of marriage. Why make a long-term relationship commitment when "long-term" doesn't even mean anything?

- Anti-work. Why work hard now to save up for a retirement or future stability when you won't be there to enjoy it? (There are other entirely valid reasons to be critical of capitalism, of course.)

It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things.

This is an incredible insight. Now is a perfect time for long-term bets because everyone else is undervaluing them.

Also, it's just straight up more psychologically healthy and objectively likely to believe in a positive future.

b9a2cab52• 5 years ago

If you follow Ray Dalio, he hypothesizes a lot of what we're seeing is due to decadence. Specifically, newer generations expect a high living standard but are not actually as rich as prior generations to support that living standard. At the same time, the population spends on decadent luxury goods instead of productive goods (which you can see in deindustrialization and the rapid expansion of low quality goods on Amazon).

If you look at the history of the Roman Empire you see a lot of similarities. Increasing living standards means people aren't willing to work as hard as their predecessors because they already have it pretty good. That leads to a loss of competitiveness, loss of competent political leadership (because why struggle in politics when you don't have to?), and increasing corruption. At the same time, people continue to purchase luxury goods to maintain their living standard rather than re-invest in productive assets that might decrease their living standard.

markwkw• 5 years ago

Your comment reminded me of 'fin de siecle' mood of the end of 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_de_si%C3%A8cle

The triggers were different then perhaps (rapid industrialization, urbanization?)

There was widespread discussion of social degeneracy, decadence, loss of spiritual values. Quoting wikipedia: "England's ideological space was affected by the philosophical waves of pessimism sweeping Europe, starting with philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's work from before 1860 and gradually influencing artists internationally. R. H. Goodale identified 235 essays by British and American authors concerning pessimism, ranging from 1871 to 1900, showing the prominence of pessimism in conjunction with English ideology."

nineplay• 5 years ago

Why is this happening? Well if you can explain it, then you’ve got a good shot for at least a Ph.D. in sociology. The global pandemic obviously doesn’t help, but I think it just exacerbated a mood that was already there.

I blame clickbate. It's new, it's extortionary popular, it's making a whole lot of money for media outlets which had previously been on life-support.

Anger sells, outrage sells, victimization sells, especially when everyone feels like their generation is uniquely screwed and it is everyone else's fault.

I don't know how to stop it. I wish there was a voice in everyone's head that said "maybe this article is confirming all my beliefs because it wants to sell ads, not because it contains anything truthful or insightful".

That voice seems absent so far. People believe everything they read, even if they crow loudly about how perceptive they are and how everyone else believes everything they read.

The advertisement industry has been successful beyond its wildest imagination. Don Draper would be mind blown.

nostrademons2• 5 years ago

I think it's the confluence of three major trends that are all going to hit concurrently, within the 2020s.

Global warming, as you mentioned, which is going to cause widespread droughts and crop failures, a redistribution of habitable land, mass migrations, and increased frequency of natural disasters.

A demographic bulge that is all hitting prime young adult & family formation age right now. Historically, societies get more violent when there is an excess of young unmarried men with poor prospects for finding a mate or raising a family. And this is exacerbated by...

Systems and institutions that have become rigid, complex, and too inflexible to change. The rational response to a large number of young adults reaching family-formation age is to build more housing. Zoning laws prevent that. The next best response is for all these young people to move to new cities and settle new land, building their own housing. You can't do this when all the land is already owned, and you need a job to have any hope of getting enough money to buy it. That forces all the people to cluster where the good jobs are, but the good jobs don't want to leave areas where skilled workers already are, and those are the same areas with a shortage of housing.

Perhaps the reason people are acting like the party is going to stop soon is because they're right. People aren't stupid; even if they haven't studied enough history to rationally analyze it, they emotionally know that something's wrong. When you switch from an abundance to a scarcity mentality, the rational response is to grab whatever you can personally, because by definition, there isn't enough to go around. And unfortunately this results in chaotic behavior that is very difficult to plan around. It'll be a great time to build long-term things after the crisis reaches a climax and everybody who's going to die and every institution that's going to fail already has. Until then, the priority is surviving to that point.

spurgu4• 5 years ago

My own theory is that the root cause is decades of wide-spread awareness of global warming. Either you understand the science and implications, or you think it’s a global hoax being perpetrated to excuse oppression.

Nope, there's more nuance to it than that. I see it as humanity has painted itself into a corner. We're running out of cheap oil, fracking didn't turn out too well and that combined with climate change has put us in a giant pickle. The low EROEI of renewables make the transition (decoupling from fossil fuels) borderline impossible without some serious ramifications. I think humanity is in for a shock. If you go by real inflation (not the government made-up numbers) the world economy has pretty much stalled already for the past decade or so, and the energy transition is going to cause it to collapse in a way where there's no return. Either the human population is drastically reduced (in one way or another), or a drastic change in lifestyle will be required.

Global warming is just a slight inconvenience in comparison to that. I suppose a number of "climate change deniers" are aware of this and would like to keep the world going as it is for just a little while longer. Others are aware of the cost of the transition and think it's cheaper to just keep going and deal with it as it comes - sea levels won't rise that fast, there's ample time to migrate out of the way, even if some cities will be lost. They however don't take into account that oil depletion is inevitable sooner or later, and when that time comes they won't have the resources to achieve a transition to renewables anymore (which is doubtful to work out even now).

How about that for some doom?

margalabargala4• 5 years ago

I have trouble believing this when nuclear exists and isn't anywhere close to utilized. Sure, the political will to build nuclear doesn't exist currently, but give everyone a taste of the sort of energy crunch you're describing and I bet it'll manifest pretty quick.

spurgu4• 5 years ago

Also - to elaborate - it doesn't actually cost billions of money to build nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines, or solar panels for that matter. Ultimately it costs energy. You could argue that money is a claim on future energy. EROEI is the ratio between energy input and output. This goes back to humanity starting to use horses. This positive EROEI allowed some people to not have to work all day long anymore and could instead become blacksmiths and other professions. Fastforward a bit and the EROEI of coal and oil supercharged the growth/economy. That's the wave we've been riding so far, up until now, allowing us to get to almost 8 billion people on the planet. But with a lot of external costs.

We've depleted all the easy to extract oil resources and the golden age of abundant EROEI is over. Since a good while ago (EROEI for oil started dropping in the 70's or 80's IIRC). And this is what we should have been preparing for, for decades already. But oil companies fought tooth and nail against policymakers even bring it up, and tried to refute it by stating that there is tons of oil still left to be extracted (without bothering to mention the cost).

It's not a popular talking point if you're a politician but climate change on the other hand is something people can easily grasp and get outraged about and policy makers can't avoid. It's simple: The world heats up, sea levels rise, weather becomes increasingly aggressive and erratic - we're fucked if we don't do something. But that's not the whole picture. We'd be fucked anyways.

When the EROEI sinks below a certain threshold the economy (that runs on human brains and external energy inputs) starts shrinking. This has arguably been going on for a while already (even though economists have been trying hard to doctor the numbers to look favorable). And if it drops enough it's a death spiral (the negative logarithmic curve).

People end up blame policy, the economy, the capitalists, globalization, immigrants or racism, but what it actually boils down to is that energy is becoming more expensive to extract, and the whole thing is hitting us from behind (well some alarmists have for decades but have been considered fringe or "conspiracy theorists").

Nuclear is our best bet at this point, but it seems somewhat of a pipe dream. Throw some China into the mix where they are ramping up coal plants, or Russia, and there's no way we're going to be reaching any CO2 targets. We'd have to actually change society, people's behavior, how we live.

One simple example is public transportation. We're frantically expending a ton of resources at converting existing transportation to electric, but we're not thinking it through. Instead of converting existing ICE vehicles to electric we should (somehow) be shifting to public transportation (not an attractive proposition in the middle of a pandemic). High efficiency vs counting on limitless abundant cheap energy. But people like their cars, and won't change their habits unless they are forced to. And this is why I think we're doomed.

typon• 5 years ago

I think the world has been seized by an apocalyptic mood. Everyone is acting like the party is going to stop soon so they better grab what they can now.

People have been working like dogs with no end in sight, while the super rich become ultra rich and wealth accumulates in smaller and smaller enclaves. Why would you NOT be acting this way if there is no vision of the future held by your democratically elected politicians of how to make this stop.

The answer is that people's lives are materially stagnant with no improvement in sight.

Can I have my PhD now?

afiori• 5 years ago

contextually while global warming is very bad and could kill way too many people it is not a apocalyptic threat by any mean

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on...

claytongulick• 5 years ago

Or is the "American Decline" a self fulfilling prophecy without real evidence? [1]

It brings to mind the "kids these days... (smh)" sort of comments that we have recorded history of going back to Roman era.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/not-fade-away-against-the...

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

I don't agree at all with the thesis

In terms of GDP, stock market gains, innovation, STEM research, the US is probably ahead of the rest of the world. Look at how US companies pioneer the Covid vaccine for example. The biggest and largest of tech companies are based in the US.

One explanation is that none of this is our fault. We picked all the low-hanging fruit, solved all the secrets, invented all the easy inventions, told all the good stories, and now it’s genuinely harder to keep up the pace of idea generation.

In some ways this is probably true. Science and technology are much more complicated than they were in the 1890s, or in the 1790s. But the fear that nothing is left to discover has always been misguided. In the mid-1890s, the U.S. physicist Albert Michelson famously claimed that “most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” in the physical sciences. It wasn’t even 10 years later that Albert Einstein first revolutionized our understanding of space, time, mass, and energy.

This is probably the answer to why it seems like things have stagnated, but it doesn't not means there is stagnation or that America is running on fumes.

Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays.

But many movies were still based off of real life events or books. Truly original screenplays that are not based off a historical event or a book are rare, afik.

What sort of innovation do people expect to see for things to not be stagnating? I think expectations are too high.

iso16315• 5 years ago

Look at how US companies pioneer the Covid vaccine for example.

In descending order of doses made:

Astra Zeneca (UK)

Sinovac (China)

Pfizer-BioNtech (Germany)

Sinopharm (China)

Moderna (US)

Sputnik V (Russia)

Johnson + Johnson (Belgium)

frockington14• 5 years ago

Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson + Johnson are traded on US Exchanges. It was a global effort with the vast majority of financial power coming from the US.

tharne5• 5 years ago

You can produce a boatload of a junk vaccine like Sinovac, that doesn't reflect much of anything, other than low standards, possibly. Objectively speaking, Moderna is the best vaccine out there and was one of the first. That doesn't even take into account the fact that it's the first vaccine of it's kind, mRNA, which will likely lead to tons of other good vaccines.

jspaetzel2• 5 years ago

If the author of this believes what they wrote then I feel sorry for them, they're seeing the worst in a good situation and they're substantiating it with an opinion piece that's purported as scientific. Ironically the paper quoted in this article is a victim, or maybe a symptom of the citation issue it points out.

You don't need to be a genius to see the innovations of the last 5-20 years however they are so much more complex that they're harder to understand. It's a LOT harder to explain Amazon (the global teleportation of goods and services) then it is to explain electricity.

fragmede• 5 years ago

We were promised cold fusion, flying cars, and 2-day work weeks. Instead we got side-hustles driving other people around, delivering stuff for other people, and a faster mail-in catalog. The world's most advanced machine today isn't some science experiment to further our knowledge of the universe (although we certainly have those); no, the world's singular most advanced machine is the one that delivers advertisements to us because we're all too cheap to pay $70/yr for Facebook because none of us have enough money.

Sure, the machine behind Amazon is too complicated for any one person to know, but it's a glorified mail-in catalog. That's the crowning achievement of humanity in 2021? That or NFTs? I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that.

dsabanin• 5 years ago

I'm very grateful for my Prime membership but forgive me for wanting better than that. The world is eagerly awaiting for your contribution. In this regard I believe rules of open source projects apply. You want something? Work on it or help those who work on it.

jspaetzel2• 5 years ago

We all want better, and in so many ways we're getting there.

aksss6• 5 years ago

$70..none of us have enough money.

C’mon - a) none of us likely see $70/yr in personal value in Facebook; b) Facebook thrives on participation. It’s not like ads and PII harvesting are a consequence of people not paying, it’s the other way around.

To put in perspective, most of us would spend $70 on dinner with partner or friend because that one-hour experience, during a single day, has so much more silly value than a whole year of Facebook. Consider that.

Nobody “promised” anything, or if you listened to some futurist high on their own farts, joke’s on you. Those people still exist, btw, and are presently telling you fully autonomous cars will be ubiquitous in five years, and alternative energy can replace fossil fuels by tomorrow.

Global supply chain improvements have a far greater impact than providing you a “glorified mail-in catalog”. I think the attitude you expressed in this comment is a case in point of not seeing the submerged portion of the iceberg and thereby not appreciating the truly remarkable changes in the last thirty years.

elliottkember• 5 years ago

We were promised

We really were not promised these things. We imagined them and got carried away.

caconym_• 5 years ago

In the frame of the article, I think the innovations of the last few decades need to be measured by the economic growth they've created, not their essential complexity. So how is our economy doing, then? Corporate profits and shareholder value are soaring, and a lot of these recent "innovations" (gig economy, Amazon warehouses and the broader logistics sector, etc.) seem to be creating many new jobs.

And yet, we're looking at vast swaths of [young] American adults in their productive prime who (by the metrics I've seen) own less of America's wealth than ever before, who can barely afford to rent housing and certainly not to buy their own property, and who are—for some mysterious reason, hmm, I wonder what it could be?—not having kids. From a job creation perspective, at least, I can tell you why these new "innovations" are not the economic boon they look like on paper: they create jobs, but many of those jobs are worthless because they don't pay a living wage. In many cases (looking at you, Walmart) it's an open secret that employees essentially must supplement their meagre incomes via welfare programs.

I don't know if I totally follow the author's sketch of innovation as a cause of economic growth, but I think the two are at least related. Propertyless, shackled to intractable debt and pecked to the bone by rent-seeking parasites like corporate landlords (natch) and the healthcare industry, most Americans do not have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to pursue innovation and/or entrepreneurship^[1]. They might have the essential hunger, but the aforementioned factors suppress it. Corporate feudalism is rising, and these new barons are using every tool at their disposal to grow their fiefs and maximize the extraction of wealth therefrom.

^[1] Possibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship".

germinalphrase• 5 years ago

“ ossibly I'm going against the grain here, but I don't count e.g. driving for Uber as "entrepreneurship”

Does anyone? How is setting your own schedule at all akin to owning your own company?

rhacker• 5 years ago

When news outlets run out of interesting, they try to manufacture it.

okareaman• 5 years ago

This article echoes a major theme of Peter Thiel these days. The Atlantic is owned by Steve Jobs widow Laurene. I wonder if they are in each other's circle? I don't buy it. For example, we don't make blockbuster films because the focus has shifted to making great and bingeable series on streaming services.

edmcnulty1016• 5 years ago

The same thing happened pre-enlightenment during the dark ages.

All of the capital was tied up in the hands of the royalty.

The black plague came along and killed 50% of the world and the whole system was shaken up and it's theorized that reduced the inequality enough to the elightenment to happen.

Its possible that World War two did the same thing for the mid 20th century post great Gatsby roaring 20s levels of inequality. But apparently according to the article there was a lot of innovation during the early 20th century though. So who knows?

Walter Sciedel, I think it is, posits the idea that only four things can upend inequality and that's war plague and revolution and governmental collapse.

Note that legislation is not included in that list.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/open-future/2...

l33t23285• 5 years ago

There was a lot of scientific advancement during the so called “dark ages.”

jiveturkey42• 5 years ago

Christian monasteries maintained and improved on technology after the absolute collapse of the Roman empire

edmcnulty1016• 5 years ago

I mean are historians wrong for calling it the "dark ages"?

I'm not disputing that there's always 'science going on' but at what quantity and how much impact did it have?

It seems like scientifically the needle wasn't moved as much in the 900 years of dark ages as in the 70 years of the enlightenment.

However, it may have, in all seriousness, been hype, from a few major breakthroughs and charismatic characters during that time, that gave it a much more visible place in history than deserved.

I'm not a scholar in this stuff...and could be saying completely wrong boneheaded stuff so please feel free to correct me, if I'm off base. :)

jjk166• 5 years ago

But those advancements were not used to improve quality of life substantially. Only with the dramatic decrease in population due to the black death did it become necessary to improve the output of the remaining workers. New tools became widespread, previously idle lands were improved, the population began consistently rising for the first time in 1000 years (a trend which has continued to today), and per capita GDP likewise began to rise above subsistence.

lurquer• 5 years ago

The article spent surprisingly little time discussing what motivates innovation in the first place.

It may be that the needs (psychological, financial, etc) that innovation fulfilled in the 1910s are being met in different ways.

300bps• 5 years ago

I think a lot of the things that we take for granted today exist because people in the past were bored out of their minds and the only way to alleviate that boredom was to discover or create things.

When I turned on my Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old it did nothing. As a consequence I would spend all day manually typing in BASIC and Assembler source code from magazines. I quickly became an expert at BASIC and Assembler programming.

10 year-olds today flip a computer on and in a matter of minutes can play Minecraft, have access to unlimited videos on YouTube and an almost infinite array of boredom-busting games and other entertainment. Everyone in our society is impacted by this to varying degrees steering us from the role of creators to consumers.

honkycat4• 5 years ago

I also think turning our schools into jails for young people doesn't help. It was dystopic during my time in school and it has somehow gotten even worse.

Most schools at this point are also running on fumes. It is constant triage and really exists as day-care more than actual education for many students.

My experience growing up: You sit in a room full of other young people while listening to a burned-out teacher drone on for 8 hours a day. 9 hours if you want to do extracurricular. Add on organized sports, homework, volunteering, standardized test prep, and all the other things you need to do to get into a good college these days, and what time are young people actually supposed to create things?

Personally, I am tired after 8 hours of a pretty great job every day. Imagine how exhausting SCHOOL is.

GordonS• 5 years ago

When I turned on my Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old it did nothing. As a consequence I would spend all day manually typing in BASIC and Assembler source code from magazines. I quickly became an expert at BASIC and Assembler programming.

Heh, I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was something like 6 years old, typing in reams of code from a magazine, the name of which has been lost to time. I was absolutely fascinated that I could get this new and exciting piece of technology to do my bidding - even if what I was doing was laughable simple compared to what is possible now.

I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if my dad hadn't bought that C64...

complianceowl• 5 years ago

I think the Federal Reserve/fiat system is at the heart of a lot of our problems.

bicx• 5 years ago

This kind of topic always reminds me of this quote from Asimov's Foundation:

-----

Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"

Again the note of near-pleading in his voice.

Again no answer. He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad.. We sit here, considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power."

And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!”

― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

dougmwne2• 5 years ago

I was recently reading Foundation at the same time that I visited Vienna’s technical museum, an amazing collection of industrial revolution artifacts. At the same time I am digging through a legacy data warehouse with half a million fields trying to figure out how to prevent a meltdown. This passage rang incredibly true to me.

beaned• 5 years ago

Maybe there's something in here that's going over my head, but recently it's seemed our culture wants more than anything to destroy its past. We do not seem to hold it in very high regard.

crooked-v• 5 years ago

I'd be curious to see more specific examples of what you mean.

delusional2• 5 years ago

You don't give any specific examples, but is this really true? Is there anyone out there saying we should ignore the past and just move on? I think you'll find a lot of people saying that we shouldn't glorify and worship it, but none saying not to remember it.

MomoXenosaga2• 5 years ago

Agree. Yes we have all the world's accumulated knowledge of the past 1000 years at our fingertips but does anyone ACTUALLY give a shit?

No we prefer Twitter because everything can be boiled down to three sentences from my favourite prop agitator.

monopoledance8• 5 years ago

Is the book really good, or just worth a read?

I've recently seen the TV series and I liked some of its scifi ideas, but wonder if the bad parts are down to the original material or Apple's writing. Is it much influenced by the past's societal norms, or visionary enough to foresee at least the now?

jhawk28• 5 years ago

The show has very little to do with the book.

hvs2• 5 years ago

The books (especially the early ones) are really an anthology of stories about the collapse of the galactic empire and its recovery than a specific story. It is completely different from the show. Think more "I, Robot" (again, the book not the movie).

And, yes, I think they are really good but they are idea-driven not character-driven.

pbronez• 5 years ago

The book (really, the series) is absolutely worth a read. I'm only a few episodes into the show, but so far they're not at all comparable. They're different stories with some common touch points.

The original Foundation books are an epistemology treatise masquerade as a sci-fi epic.

tw042• 5 years ago

The books (it's a series) are amazing, well worth it.

The TV show is at best the equivalent of a 9th grader who picked up the cliff's notes, got bored halfway through those, and then wrote a book report. Some of the characters are there, and it's sci-fi, and that's about where the similarities end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

Stranger433• 5 years ago

The first book in the original trilogy is a masterpiece, the remaining two is still good but not to the same high bar, and the same is true for the later additions i personally really enjoyed the first Prequel.

In terms of morality Asimov is quite forward for his time and still very relevant but there are sections that dates him a bit.

I haven't watched the show so i cant say if they are related.

d0mine• 5 years ago

It depends on what you want to get from them. If you consider reading a book as a conversation exploring various ideas, you' ll like it very much.

pkdpic• 5 years ago

Liked this quote more than the original post, thank you for sharing!

ericmcer2• 5 years ago

This paper seems to be mourning people no longer willing to take risks. So why are we so risk-averse now? I think taking a risk involves some courage, but also some desperation, and we just aren't that desperate anymore. There are no existential threats like foreign enemies, we have pretty great means for coping with boredom, and our best minds have a university pipeline that will safely funnel them to an upper-class corporate life.

lpa22• 5 years ago

I think this is spot on. There’s something to be said about the availability of incredibly high-quality entertainment from things like Netflix and AAA games.

Enginerrrd• 5 years ago

I actually wonder about this a lot. On the one hand, there's more tinkerers and access to open source libraries and information than ever. On the other hand though, it feels like there a lot more engrossing and ubiquitous entertainment that just takes the form of consumption instead of creation. I think about that a lot when it comes to video games.

They satisfy that great human urge to expand, enhance and optimize their sphere of influence, only it's in a virtual world that matters very little. I know many of the brightest people I know still talk, in their 30's, mostly about video games.

nobodyandproud• 5 years ago

tl;dr;

“Boomer vs Zoomer” cultural war, but worded nicely.

lotsofpulp2• 5 years ago

I think it is more of a resource war. Old people want younger people's labor, and have assets and/or votes. Young people want assets. The change in the scenario is the ratio of people wanting labor to people providing labor is increasing due to reduced birth rates and longer lifespans.

With 3+ kid birthrates, you have greater and greater younger age populations so it can offset the need for increased demand for labor and keep prices relatively steady. But prices have to rise if supply of labor cannot keep up, and hence there must be a new allocation of society's resource.

Climate change also serves as a backdrop in the negotiations where younger people are cognizant that they are playing for a different timeline than old people are.

VirusNewbie• 5 years ago

JFC this is basic math everyone:

When you increase the money supply, anyone/anything leveraged into assets with debt will have an outsized return compared to those who are not leveraged.

Corporate debt is quite a lot more than consumer debt, and the upper middle class and rich own the majority of corporate shares.

US Monetary policy for the last 50 years have been to transfer wealth from the poor and working class to the upper class. Everyone, democrats, socialists, republicans push for policies that do this. This is not a secret mystery.

fdgsdfogijq• 5 years ago

I agree and think it really is this simple. The elite created instability through complex financial products and risk taking, which caused crashes, which has been resolved through money printing that essentially debased the currency. Everyone holding assets that are not US dollars, but are based in the USA, made out like a bandit. Everyone else lost a ton of money, and their wages lost purchasing power. The metrics through which they measure inflation are completely misleading.

Brendinooo• 5 years ago

If your anchoring point of innovation is 1875 to 1900 as it is in this article, you're going to be disappointed by the rate of innovation in just about every other historical period in the history of mankind.

If you take the long view on this, we had the Industrial Revolution, and just as that started to taper off we got computers, and then the Internet gave that revolution a boost. It's been an incredible run of advancement, and there's no inherent reason why we must believe that it continues forever.

czhu12• 5 years ago

Trying to unify Art, Science and Politics into a grand theory about American stagnation seems dubious. Each one of these are complex and can be broken down into more meaningful interpretations.

Art: It seems we are in the golden era of Television. We have solidly left the world of sitcoms and into shows with arcs, beginnings and endings. In the past most shows didn't want to invest in characters only to have the show end, thats how you end up with 20 season sitcoms. There is more innovation in TV than there ever has been. Does this counteract the narrative of cultural stagnation?

Science: Theres been plenty of theories on this, but in general, most economists seems to view technological progress as random, spurious, and fundamentally unpredictable. However, there is no doubt there are more papers and researchers now than ever.

Politics: Gerrymandering seems to be a primary driver of this, which is Ezra Klein's theory (who is actually quoted in this article). Is this really a fundamental truth rather than just a quirk of the system?

Anytime someone tries to pull together multiple disparate threads into a unifying narrative, the analysis becomes watered down.

edmcnulty1016• 5 years ago

Maybe science has just picked all of the low hanging fruit? Internal combustion is a lot easier than fusion.

Queens Gambit the show was amazing and original screenplay/book.

Maybe streaming has taking so much of the resources away from Hollywood movies so that the only movies that are relevant are the fast food of movies.

Maybe the author of the article isn't looking at the full picture.

basedgod• 5 years ago

counterpoint, everything worth discovering has already been discovered. the guy urging the closing down of the parent office was right, but 150 years too early.

everything left in particle physics is minor bookkeeping that will never have any practical relevance to our lives. we've shooken down all the low hanging fruits from most other trees of knowledge, and at this point it requires a multi year international team to gleam further fruits

the world we'll live in, in 50 years (scientifically) will look virtually identical to today's world. there's nothing that can be done about this, and it isn't a symptom of societal decay, but rather thar humans are rapidly approach the asymptote of knowledge possible by humans. ai isn't going to swoop in and save us, and Moore's law is all but dead

the death of scientific advancement doesn't mean progress can no longer be made. we've reached a world where we have the technical ability to solve nearly any problem, but our social and political problems prevent us from doing so. it's time to focus on that instead of celebrating capitalism and advancement above all else

dougmwne2• 5 years ago

I’d say this is what it looks like to be in one of the longest running economic expansions and eras of peace and security in modern history. Necessity is the mother of invention and destruction is its father. It’s perhaps not a bad trade and we can still go to the old art to learn about the depths of humans sorrow and heights of joy. Still, this too shall pass.

danShumway• 5 years ago

Ah... this isn't a bad article, there's some good stuff here, but it is also really frustrating to read.

But rather that something in the air—something in our institutions, or our culture—was constraining the growth new ideas.

I mean... no, not in our air. Consolidation. Making movies costs a lot more today and a larger percentage of the big films that are promoted the most heavily are made by rapidly consolidating companies that keep buying their competitors.

After AT&T bought HBO, a month later it said the company wasn't profitable enough and should focus more on mass-market media[0]. Really hard to have a conversation about why we're producing less interesting stuff without acknowledging that the biggest companies in our country who are buying other media companies don't like that kind of content.

----

Some of the author's ideas are interesting, but there are two really large factors here that the author dances around a lot but doesn't ever really dig into, and it feels so weird given that they have such a public impact on how content is created vs recycled:

1. Consolidation and stagnation of competition decreases innovation. Media/news consolidation has been a large trend across the entire market. As that consolidation continues, companies find that they are mostly competing on how they monetize and structure themselves, not on the content they produce.

2. An increased focus on unbounded and predictable sources of company growth leads to innovation in market consolidation/consumer predation, not innovation in content. See the AT&T article mentioned above, market investors and company heads are much less tolerant of niches and have a much larger expectation that companies they invest into need to rule the world. It is not good enough for you to make something that is profitable, you need to make a Marvel equivalent.

I'm not saying that none of this is culture, I think culture does play a role in how content (and products in general) innovate. But the market forces themselves are so much more demonstrable than the cultural aspects, and the author feels like they are so close to understanding that -- they're putting out quotes like, "new ideas simply don’t fuel growth the way they once did" -- but the article isn't really connecting those quotes to a larger idea.

So it feels weird to go from saying "new ideas simply don't fuel growth the way they once did", to "is the culture wrong?" No, you just said it. It's about fueling growth, and about who is willing to fund innovative ideas given that they often don't fuel massive growth.

I mean, fine, maybe the reason Marvel movies do well is because consumers have less imagination, whatever. But maybe it's also because those movies have giant advertising budgets and the biggest, most powerful companies spend a lot of time promoting them. Is movie stagnation really being caused by everyone getting old? Or is it caused by having hundreds of billboards about Spiderman thrown in our faces all the time? Is it potentially caused by the sources of our media being consolidated down into a few app stores and streaming platforms, all of which are designed to push users towards popular media and first-party content?

----

From that AT&T article again, an illuminating exchange:

"Also," Mr. Stankey said, "we've got to make money at the end of the day, right?"
"We do that," Mr. Plepler responded, to scattered applause.
"Yes, you do," Mr. Stankey said. "Just not enough."
"Oh, now, now, be careful," Mr. Plepler said.

----

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/att-w...

twofornone• 5 years ago

One of America’s most important sources of entrepreneurship is immigration—because immigrants are far more likely than native-born Americans to start billion-dollar companies—but the U.S. is in a deep immigration depression at the moment

What is with this obsession in journalism with turning to immigrants to solve all of our problems? Why can't we look to supporting our existing countrymen to innovate instead of brain draining the developing world and leaving large swaths of the US population to languish in uncertainty? Has nationalism really become such a dirty word?

RubberbandSoul2• 5 years ago

I would like to see how this kind of immigration is defined. I once worked for a company that was founded and went through the startup phase outside of the US.

Once it was somewhat mature and had a steady income stream the CEO moved to the US and put the new head office there.

This was because the US was the biggest market and it was vital to be close to the biggest customers.

Would this CEO count as an immigrant who started a profitable business in the US?

iAm25626• 5 years ago

https://archive.ph/c943x

beepbooptheory• 5 years ago

If the free market alone can't reliably provide innovation, what other arguments are left for it?

digitalsushi• 5 years ago

I'm not qualified to have an expert opinion on this, but I have wondered how much good it has done to have the modern measurements.

I can write a new application or website and get real time data from my users on how 'good' it is. So I start to steer my creation to make that goodness a bigger number. Instead of what my vision was.

Goodhart's Law and its ilk. I can drive a car by watching the road or watching the GPS. I can edit my facebook posts to get more likes if I just change my point. People go to my movies when I keep telling the same story. I caused ten years of tech debt for a 4 figure bonus. I forgot what my face looks like because of real time filters.

People who make things shouldn't ever hear how people received it. But now a muse whispers in their left ear, and a real time analysis of their failure in their right. It's already my hell.

throwvirtever2• 5 years ago

Did people during the period(s) of high innovation have as much personal debt (especially home mortgages) as people do today? A lot of people have too many bills coming in every month to devote time and effort to things too weird to "attract investment".

aksss6• 5 years ago

People living in periods of high innovation (Han dynasty, 19th century West) didn’t have near the luxury your average person in America enjoys today. Less debt, but also a dramatically lower carbon footprint reflecting a far lower standard of living and opportunity. They would consider you lucky for having the opportunity to get and carry a mortgage by comparison. Especially to do so with such ease and lack of social standing. The food you eat, the air travel you can enjoy, your figurative and literal mobility, etc.

You can still live as they did if you want to. Rent a dwelling, live with another family or more relatives, eat largely the same food except on holidays, perhaps live and die without traveling outside your town, do some military service.

Nobody makes you take on massive personal debt. Ideally you’re doing it as an investment with a plan for return. Also, the world won’t end if you stop getting nickled-and-dimed by monthly subscriptions. Shut it down for a while.

throwvirtever2• 5 years ago

Of course it's possible to live in a more basic, debt-free way, but my suspicion is that in the USA (which is the scope of the article) most people do not, which reduces the pool of people with enough time and energy to do something interesting.

lkrubner• 5 years ago

Two things:

1. Left out of the essay is how much this is a world-wide phenomena. This suggests that the world is more homogenous than before. Europe, China, India used to be truly different civilizations. Now the children of the wealthy all go to the same universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc) and go home with the same set of ideas. To the extent that we can model "bias against change" as a mental virus, clustering all the elite young, of all the nations of the world, into a few elite institutions probably helped incubate a global pandemic of intellectual stagnation.

2. One small part of the overall problem, and the part that I've studied the most, is a recurring pattern, that happens to all civilizations, that knowledge expands to a point where increased specialization becomes necessary. And at certain points what is needed is not just more specialization, but a general reorganization of the professions, and of how each specialty and sub-specialty engages in certain key tasks:

a. how is entry to the profession determined?

b. how do peers recognize peers?

c. how much should the influence of government or corporate powers have, versus how much should professions be self-governing?

d. when should new layers of oversight or management be introduced to organize the increasing complexity? Of this last, I wrote a bit here, as it impacts health care:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/regarding-the-death-of-my-f...

More recently I've been studying this issue as it effects government. The general trend goes like this:

In 1749 Montesquieu publishes "The Spirit Of The Law" suggesting that the government should consist of 3 branches, an executive, a judiciary and a legislature, and the 3 branches should be independent and should act as "checks and balances" on each other.

The 1700s/1800s sees the emergence of this kind of government in Britain and the USA and a few new republics around the world. The legislature initially takes on all of the work of deciding new laws, and each member of the legislature is presumed to be knowledgeable of all the necessary facts of politics and economy.

By the late 1800s society has become too complex for the legislature to work without aides from more specialized groups. In an ad-hoc and chaotic fashion, the first specialized committees appear.

By the early 1900s, it is understood, in all Western democracies, that all important work must happen in a specialized committee. Such committees make it easier for a few legislators, who have committed to learn a lot about one topic, to interface with experts on that subject. It is increasingly understood that the general legislature needs to act as a rubber stamp for whatever comes out of a committee, because it is simply impossible for the general legislature to discuss every issue with the level of care and detail that is made possible in the specialized committees.

In the USA, the committee system achieves its peak of power, prestige, and intellectual coherence with the Congressional Reorganization of 1946:

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...

If you follow the trend line, then it is clear, somewhere around 1970 or 1980 there should have been a constitutional amendment to take the process to the next step: all traditional legislative powers should have been transferred to the committees, and the old legislature should have given up all power except for the power to appoint people to committees. The goal would have been to keep technocracy under effective democratic control.

But that never happened. Instead, government became less effective, more stagnant, and more vulnerable to populist arguments against the "damned elites."

The general stagnation we've seen these last 50 years is at least partly a failure to correctly adjust to the modern need for a new level of specialization, and reorganization of how power is delegated among the specialties, and how those specialities should engage in "checks and balances" of each other. And we are seeing that failure to specialize in every part of life. In the places where specialization proceeds, such as medicine, it is being driven in an ad-hoc and chaotic manner, with the emphasis on controlling costs rather than specialization based on knowledge.

jrm4• 5 years ago

What is really being measured by things like "growth?" Yes, we have fewer high-profile attention-grabby things. Is that because we have fewer genuinely great inventions, or because the mechanism that brings the news of such things has been drastically changed because of internet decentralization? I think the latter.

Thrymr• 5 years ago

This is also one of the premises of Kurt Anderson's book "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History". Although the scope of the book is large and argues that American's irrationality runs deep, he points out that since the 1970s or so American popular culture has become more and more inward looking, obsessed with reviving the past and remaking the old rather than creating new things (very much along the lines of what is described in the opening of this article).

On the technological and economic side, this also reminds me of the arguments in David Graber's article "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit".

It is hard to argue with the fact the scope of truly new things is smaller than it was in say, the 1960s, when space flight and supersonic travel started, and popular culture was barely recognizable from the beginning of the decade to the end. People growing up in that era truly believed that at that rate of change, they would be living on Mars and working 15 hours a week and have a totally new organization of society by the early 2000s.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/209776/fantasyland-...

[1] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...

6gvONxR4sf7o• 5 years ago

Here's another take that I don't know if I believe, but is interesting. What if we aren't running out of new ideas, and it's just hard to classify all the new stuff so we bucket it together too much? If 'fantasy' is a respectable genre to innovate within, then complaining that there's no innovation because we aren't seeing new genres misses the mark. But once upon a time, fantasy would all be categorized as Tolkien rip offs. Same with 'phone app' or 'super hero movie' as things that innovation can happen within.

Maybe over time, old branches become commonly accepted enough that we can finally recognize innovation within them, but until then that innovation just looks derivative. And those branches have their own branches, repeating the process where most everything always looks incremental without hindsight.

zaphar• 5 years ago

There have always been inflection points in history. It's unreasonable to assume that there won't be any. Everytime society comes out of an inflection point there is a field of critics bemoaning the fact that we are no longer in an inflection point. But that's because inflection points are by definition state changes.

In a way I think the assumption that growth is always a smooth curve up and to the right is inadequate. During every single inflection point people think this time is different this kind of growth is permanent. Every single time that turns out to not be the case. It's just society running it's normal course. The next inflection point is coming. In the meantime we'll have to content ourselves with the benefits of the last inflection point.

ghostbrainalpha• 5 years ago

The Hollywood arguments are out of touch. Just because every big movie is a Franchise doesn't mean creativity is dead.

But Hollywood has a better business model, there is amazing creativity happening, but new ideas are tried in the places that didn't exist before. On streaming services, and the internet.

It's like a startup, the good ideas grow. But Billion dollar movies made for a global audience will no longer take on unnecessary risk. So many of them fail, even with proven formulas.

We should just get over looking for Mega Blockbuster movies that ALSO push art forward.

justicezyx2• 5 years ago

This article does not mention education as the cause, which I personally has to be the most important cause of declining creativity across the American society. My older daughter is in 2nd grade. I think from my eyes that the STEM education is about fun, not the hard-and-cold reasoning. For example, algebra is taught with tricks, not simply what they are, and the ugly rules that underpins those human invention (math is a human invention of describing the physical world).

And as Ray Dalio mentioned, education is not a federal responsibility, nor is the federal government allowed to exercise influence. Then we are left with declining education across the board.

It's just not possible to revert the trend, if the root of everything was allowed to be ignored. One cannot fix a sinking building by fixing anything other than the foundation!

insta_anon• 5 years ago

Immigration is an interesting topic.

I’d love to move from Europe to the US to work on new ideas and companies, however while countries like Australia try to attract people like me (https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/working-in-australia/v...), there is not even an entrepreneur visa in the US.

The best thing I can hope for is to win the Greencard lottery, which is crazy if you consider that highly qualified immigrants are such a big contributor to economic growth (https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/I...).

mcguire• 5 years ago

"The best objection to everything that I’ve written so far is that there exists a world where young people tend to be in control, where regulatory burdens aren’t blocking megaprojects, and where new ideas are generally cherished and even, perhaps, fetishized. It’s the internet—or, more specific, the software industry. If you are working on AI, or crypto, or virtual reality, you probably aren’t starved for new ideas. You very well may be drowning in them."

I'm glad our industry's PR is working.

AlexTWithBeard• 5 years ago

My traditional question is: did the author short USD against any other currency of his choice? Or he's just shaking the air without willing to put the money where his mouth is?

asimpletune2• 5 years ago

I think we often value, without realizing it, reliable , linear returns, more than we value unpredictable, non-linear returns that fundamental change the paradigm altogether.

It’s a matter of bosses and incentives maybe?

asimpletune2• 5 years ago

Maybe we should change it the USA? That’s what the article is about.

I don’t care about making this big point about it. I’m from the USA, it’s just that no one else in the world thinks that USA = America.

We should just have a word in our language for someone from from the USA

worik4• 5 years ago

As far as movies are concerned the innovation, and quality writers, moved to T.V. in the nineteen nineties.

In the last 25 years the innovation has been in information technology. The changes in that are as breathtaking as the changes in transport a century ago.

More generally in industry the innovators are more likely to be found in Asia now. Being an innovator and navigating a police state is an interesting challenge!

worik4• 5 years ago

And another thing: What about social innovation?

jeffreyrogers3• 5 years ago

Maybe we just took all the low hanging fruit?

- Manufacturing can't get that much more efficient without a lot of automation, which is a very hard problem that requires expertise in computer vision, robotics, mechanical engineering, and domain knowledge. That's expensive and hard to organize.

- Per capita energy consumption in the developed world is already high and will be hard to increase while also decreasing CO2 emissions. Especially given entrenched interests and the inability of most governments to complete large projects on schedule.

- There's only so many ways to move and rearrange matter in ways that are fundamentally revolutionary. We found a lot of them in the 1800s and 1900s. Jet engines, motors of various types, lot of chemistry, power generation stuff. There are still interesting developments going on (especially in biology), but mostly they are incremental advances, not something that unlocks entirely new capabilities.

DoingIsLearning• 5 years ago

Per capita energy consumption in the developed world is already high and will be hard to increase while also decreasing CO2 emissions.

Emissions per capita are almost binomial.[0]

A handful of nations are blatantly wasteful in their emissions. Whereas many developed countries have proven that we could all be polluting under 5 tonnes per capita.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

CottonMcKnight• 5 years ago

To stretch the metaphor, I'd say we've been low on gas for a long time. I first noticed the low fuel indicator light on when Congress cancelled the Supercolliding Super Conductor in 1993.

fatbird• 5 years ago

Algorithmic domination: the constant application of optimization clumps us at the mean. We're addicted to the broadest tastes. Rather than surfacing the interesting parts of the long tail, we're herded in ever larger numbers to simpler, more palatable offerings that are safer to offer.

crnkofe• 5 years ago

I can feel the sentiment. Movies have gotten repetitive. Storylines are recycled over and over. Characters likewise. Tech stacks copy the legacy which we've gotten bored with, change a few pieces and make a nice updated page, sell it as the amazing fancy new thing and of course hide the messed up parts. The silver bullet still hasn't been found.

It feels like everyone is trying to optimize for something. NBA teams optimize for points based on data which clearly affects where and how often they attempt to score. Companies optimize for profit as they always did. Academia optimizes for citations. Hackers optimize for productivity. Optimization has a clear path and there's no room there for innovation. Getting incrementally better is a priority.

The thing is there is a certain point where incremental steps no longer yield that much benefit. This is most obvious in the differences between athletes in some top sports where timings that used to be measured in seconds are now measured in milliseconds. Once you're perfectly optimized there's no more room for growth or progress. I feel like this is where everyone is congregating today. At the max peak of the growth function.

pillefitz• 5 years ago

Are you implying there's growth and evolution towards a better state if we stopped optimizing? Or is it the objective function being wrong?

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Reddit is also full of roughly the same 10 jokes recycled endlessly generally with some highly upvoted pun thread hanging off of every single article on top of the entirely expected "r/UnexpectedOffice" mention and the usual "69420/Nice" thread. And that's the content from the actual human beings in between all the trolling and "push polling" by bots in the creative writing exercises on ChoosingBeggars.

I think I need to re-read Amusing Ourselves to Death and see if it still basically holds up in the social media age.

necovek• 5 years ago

It's an elaborate piece, but largely an unsubstantiated opinion piece.

Sure, some things are obvious: largest amount of cash goes on trivial, incremental improvements. Sure, popular movies are largely lacking substance.

But none of that makes the larger premise true: we don't need to be investing the most money in risky, experimental research and development. Throughout the history, that's also been the case (eg investment in military has always been huge, and only a fraction was for RnD).

It can similarly be used as a counter argument: we are getting more deeply invested during our daily work, and we need more frivolous entertainment to relax us. I don't think this is true either, but noted circumstances are not in a contradiction with this either.

RandyRanderson• 5 years ago

The linked hbr article would be a great study on how statistics can be used to reach incorrect conclusions/imply results that are not true. Off the top of of my head:

* immigrants that start more businesses (the implication is that this is a good thing, maybe it's not). What if they did that b/c they couldn't find a job b/c they had less contacts?

* study looked at 1300 odd people and then followed up with 360 found on linkedin later. Maybe the ones on linkedin are on there to promote their business? The ones that got jobs don't have need for li?

I stopped reading there.

Also note that if 1000 ppl start businesses, 1 bill gates in the 1000 will completely skew the results.

mensetmanusman7• 5 years ago

Written in 1891: (Sound familiar?)

“ That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising.

The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses;

the increased self reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it - actually there is no question which has taken deeper hold on the public mind.”

-Rerum Novarum

Isamu• 5 years ago

The idea that today’s innovations are incremental and the innovations of the past were leaps is not quite right.

History of technology is a hobby of mine and I have been struck by how incremental all the big innovations of the past really were, once you take the trouble to look into what was going on at the time.

Also, it takes decades to assess how important an innovation. And in the early stages all new things are much less impressive than the things they mature into.

So recent history seems always less impressive, and also more incremental because we have all the context of how new things arose.

bobthechef• 5 years ago

Miscellaneous commentary.

1. It seems like a rather bad sign to rely too heavily on immigration. Immigrants like that come to the US because of better opportunities, so they may be selection bias here, but why aren't those opportunities being pursued by Americans? One cause is the poor quality of education.

2. Unless the incentives so crushing that it is impossible to do any research that isn't a crowd pleaser, I don't like the idea of laying too much blame at their feet. People in the sciences have agency and they can choose to sacrifice popularity to pursue something they believe is worth exploring. I think most of them, like most people, are motivated by other often petty careerist desires (an exception would be that you've sort of painted yourself into a corner and need to support a family and the incentives are so brutal that you wouldn't be able to do so otherwise). So work on virtue and a lot of the good stuff will follow. We have a dearth of virtue.

3. I would not emphasize "new ideas" primarily. It's not about new ideas per se. It's about deepening your own understanding of something and to share that understanding with others (though much of science is actually less about understanding and more about technology production and therefore industrial application). The language of "new ideas" makes it sound like what's "new" and "ideas" are inherently valuable things just because they're new and they're ideas. It's incredibly pointless to pursue these for that reason and I believe this unhealthy compulsion is what stands behind the fetish for novelty and the intellectual superficiality it can produce. Novelty qua novelty is not a worthy pursuit!

4. Many of the inventions listed are low hanging fruit. Coca cola? Come on, man. And this right before he accuses the smartphone of banality. Besides, the measure of a civilization is not ultimately to be found in its technical savvy, but it's spiritual health. That health, of course, bears good fruit.

5. The so-called Dark Ages are accused of being a period of stagnation. But what was happening was the synthesis of a new civilization that drew into itself the good within the ashes of the old. We could witness something similar, not in any big P "Progressive" sense, but as a repudiation of the rot of modernity and a return to tradition. Mind you, I speak in decades, and probably centuries.

6. Any age that is as obsessed with orgasms as ours (and "paradoxically" as impotent and sterile) will not be mentally fit enough to pursue anything that requires deep, sustained intellectual engagement and commitment. Any culture that makes "following your passions (appetites)", the effeminate pursuit of pleasure, and the delicate avoidance of discomfort (and the envy of those who reject this ethos) its founding doctrines is doomed to wallow in mediocrity ans spiritual slavery. Incidentally, this impotence and sterility, the result of a hedonistic view of sex, relationships, and life in general, is responsible for the demographic crisis. Raising children is work and can be exhausting and unpleasant and will certainly detract from a life of pleasure. And when you're as demoralized as people are today, why suffer all that? Toward what end? If anything, we are simply living out the nihilism that has been with us for some time. Nietzsche wrote of it (though his "remedy" was of course preposterously and syphilitically insane). We are riding out the fumes of a civilization that struck a blow a long time ago. The bad motivations, the idols (to borrow Nietzsche), false gods that they are, have progressively withered as they have shown to be incapable of functioning as such. The very notion of truth itself is suspect. We now worship our appetites. We are now "liberated" from the truth. Of course, anyone "liberated" from the truth is now disconnected from reality and how can you expect anything fruitful from someone as spiritually dead as someone who has cocooned himself away from the truth?

7. Globalism is a force for homogenization of culture, especially pop culture. There's no cultural exchange as a result.

8. The "easy answers" mentality atrophies depth and sustained and measured intellectual activity.

9. The idea that originality is stifled by knowledge is pretty stupid. Those who don't learn tend to repeat the mistakes of those before them, and those before them, and... In philosophy, we see this all the time (modernism has echoes in presocratic ancient Greece). Every meet a freshman philosophy major? Meet one and you've met them all. However, having learned and absorbed all that knowledge is not itself good enough to lead to originality. Humility is key. Humility is a predisposition and habit to acknowledge things as they are without denial or mental jiggery-pokery. So when you don't know something, and you haven't any pride, you'll naturally ask the question because you want to know the answer. That's your originality! Want to know whence the stagnation? A populace that has no humility and one with too much pride to be honest about what they know and don't know. I you can't admit that the emperor is naked, how can you even think to ask "why"?

disambiguation• 5 years ago

I think we're simply an empire in decline. We stopped investing in ourselves a long time ago.

Economists say real growth and innovation stopped around 1971. Meanwhile the past 2 decades are defined by 9/11, the war on terror, the 2008 crash, the 2016 election, and most recently covid.

None of which we've fully recovered from.

All along this downward trend we've been searching for ways to rebound, but our options present new dilemmas. While our discoveries have enabled us to reap incredible rewards, we now also have many different ways to self extinguish.

Assuming we can avoid extinction, our options are fairly dystopic.

We could use the internet to better organize ourselves like China. But this comes at the cost of privacy, free speech, and many individual liberties.

We could use CRISPR and RNA breakthroughs to create a health revolution. But this is a slippery slope to eugenics.

Maybe general AI can be our savior? But self anointed prophets like Elon musk think otherwise.

We're at a crossroads where we can't decide on the path forward nor can we go back to the old ways. Society has implicitly decided that religion and capitalism have failed us, and are therefore not viable options.

Boomers continue to cannibalize new generations to enrich themselves. They have completely boxed out Gen X, not to mention millenials and Gen Z.

Meanwhile these are all just the societal issues. We still have to plan for the energy cliff and climate change.

In order to forecast our own decline, we can look to the UK which is still going through its "declining empire" phase. Overall they made out pretty well, things aren't perfect and they don't have the same influence as in their glory days, but they still enjoy plenty of 1st world benefits.

But one key difference that concerns me compared to the US is that the UK has a stronger sense of national identity.

The USA national identity has always been fragile, and I fear there's a good chance we tear ourselves apart on the way down.

History tells us these cycles are inevitable, but collapse isn't all the way to zero. We'll find a way as others have before us. It's simply our turn to learn to live with it.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

So basically the "social networking" of the world is causing everyone to value superficiality and conformity?

Plus internationalization/internetification of the world is spreading megacorps everywhere, and English, which to a certain degree is homogonizing culture?

And a lot of good ideas are in isolation, science, art, technology. It is a problem that everything gets exposed too early to opinion and gets chopped down before it can germinate into something interesting and offbeat.

Also, crap is there a lot of entertainment available simply for the cost of an internet connection.

But I'm hoping COVID will result in a wealth of new ideas, since there was a fair amount of isolation.

mitchbob• 5 years ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/c943x

lenkite• 5 years ago

I wish someone would figure out dark matter and dark energy. Some-one who figures out Grand Unified Theories. Old but gold problems.

Are there new fundamental forces that are un-discovered ?

We need some crazy, maverick intellectuals and teams to push the frontier of fundamental science forward. Tech will naturally follow.

America is running on fumes

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