I linked
recently a post in Marginal Revolution showing how to keep some well-known
measures of technological progress in different fields evolving at roughly the
same pace as in past decades (or decreasing slowly, instead of catastrophically
collapsing and bringing civilization as we know it to a technical standstill)
it seemed like it was necessary to double the amount of people working in R+D in
those fields. The very same MR pointed a couple days ago to another study, by
the redoubtable Dietrich Vollrath Diminishing returns in idea generation, but not to worry! that came to the soothing conclusion that we
shouldn’t (literally) panic yet, even if indeed the meta-productivity of ideas
(i.e. the productivity of those authoring the bits of information that, when
applied to manufacturing and distribution processes in turn increase the
productivity of every other sector of the economy) is undeniably diminishing
and at historically low levels(but hey, remember Brynjolfsson and Friedman and
Bill Gates! These are times of unparalleled creativity! Of
never-before-witnessed ingenuity and invention! My question for all the techno-optimists
still stands, if the ever accelerating technology is ushering an age of
exponential improvements in everybody’s lives, how come more and more people
are realizing they live today, and will most likely live ‘til their last days,
worse than their parents? Latest evidence this article from the normally upbeat
Spanish newspaper “el pais”: Young 'uns living worse than their parents at their age of various youngsters reflecting on
reaching the age of their parents when they were born, and realizing they have
much, much less wealth, security, and hope than they had…)
However, when
you look into Vollrath’s argument, I don’t find that many actual reasons to
bridle my later instincts towards despondency and despair. Yup, even if it
takes more and more people to come up with productivity-enhancing ideas, thanks
to demographic grow and increased economic throughput that in turn allow
populous societies (China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh) to send a higher
percentage of their youngsters to university-level education, those more and
more people are indeed forthcoming. Or are they? Not so much in the case of
China, if we are to believe this paper from Wu and Zheng for the China Policy
Institute: China higher education expansion challenges.
Not surprisingly, enrollment in China’s universities is decelerating:
Why, when the
country is crowing richer and its culture has always valued education as a
means of social advancement? Well, basically there are less and less kids to
draw from:
So even if a
higher percentage of them could still make it to college (and, according to Wu
and Zheng that means shouldering a higher percentage of the education’s cost,
as the state can not afford to foot the entirety of the bill, even when the
youth still enrolling in the increasing number of universities comes from the much poorer rural
interior, and the institutions they join offer on average a lower quality
education), that may not be enough to maintain (let alone increase) the total
graduation rate, as the pool from which that percentage draws is consistently
diminishing.
I couldn’t find similar figures for India, but I would be surprised if it presented a significantly different picture. Yep, India’s population growth is not yet as low as China’s (thanks to almost three decades of single child policy), but it is also clearly trending downwards, and already very close to diving below replacement level. Also, they start from a baseline position where educational attainment is massively less valued for a significant majority of the population, so they may never catch up to Chinese levels. Bottom line: do not count on millions upon millions of educated Chinese and Indian whiz kids replenishing the dwindling number of Western engineers and researchers and thus keeping our innovation engines firing on all cylinders. In a couple generations the total number of professionals able to keep pushing the discovery of new drugs, the squeezing of more transistors in the same number of square millimeters, or the further increase of yields in our food crops will not just stop growing, but may actually start decreasing.
And then I
guess that, according to Vollrath, will be the time to actually start panicking…
But I was not
originally concerned by that particular kind of ideas when I started writing my
post. How many transistors you can pack in a printed circuit, or how many
molecules you can change in a chemical compound so it has exactly the same
effect in the human organism but allows its marketer to extend the patent and
keep on profiting handsomely from it won’t really make any noticeable difference
in how people work and live. They are so inconsequential as to barely need to
concern us here. I’m thinking in bigger game, the great ideas that configure
how people think in their day to day lives. What they dream of. What they
legitimately expect and hope for. Do you want an example of BIG idea that can
have momentous consequences, dwarfing those of keeping Moore’s law apparently
going on for six additional months? Take a look at this recent article by Evan
Osnos in the “New Yorker”: Doomsday prep for the super rich.
Not that I’m surprised, in this same blog I’ve stated that total civilizational
collapse is a scenario with non-negligible probabilities, and I’ve recommended my
readers to prepare for it (learn martial arts and how to shoot, keep a working
gun and enough ammo close by, It didn’t occur to me that a bike would come in
handy to escape through clogged roads, but I happen to own three, so I have
that well covered).
What caught
my eye was the figure Osnos quotes about how many of the richest between the
rich (the hedge fund managers, “Silicon Valley billionaires”, pop stars…) have
already invested heavily in a safe
getaway and emergency means of scape (not just a private plane and a runway,
but space also for the pilot’s family): more than 50%!!!! And those are the
super-rational, super-intelligent guys (well, may be with the exception of the
pop stars) that command the heights of our society and that our dominant mode
of reasoning tell us we should respect and yield to. What, in Toynbeean terms
would be the ruling (dominating) elite of our crumbling system. That seem to
lean mostly towards the opinion that things
are likely enough to go South without much warning as to spend a non-negligible
amount of their fortunes in repurposed cold-war missile silos refurbished for
the occasion or vast properties in New Zealand.
Besides that
collective vote for disengagement from what, resorting again to Toynbee’s
terminology, can only be called the proletariat (those to be left behind
killing each other for the final scraps of the collapsed system) it seems very
futile and very inconsequential, indeed, to worry about the latest features of
the iPhone 7, or the fact that Uber is allowed to operate in Paris. The
achievements of scientists and engineers, of physicians and physicists are
spare change compared with the kind of seismic changes in the direction of
society that can be enacted by someone like Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. And I
will argue that for a Napoleon, a Hitler or a Stalin to be able to grasp the collective
imagination and craft a discourse that resonates with the masses and energizes
them and moves them into action (frenzied as it may seem at times, such
actions, judged irrational from the vantage point of our current rationality,
were the pinnacle of reasonableness from the perspective of theirs) there needs
to be an intellectual first that creates the intellectual groundwork for the
messianic (sometimes demonic) figure to work upon. Before Napoleon, Hitler or
Stalin (or FDR or Mao or Pol Pot or Adenauer or Churchill or Saddam) there was
a Hume, a Smith, a Freud, a Marx, a Hassan al-Banna that both captured and
shaped the “spirit of the times”, that read something in the collective mood
that his contemporaries didn’t perceive and gave it a recognizable shape,
altering forever what their fellow men deemed not just possible, but desirable
and rational to do.
When I was
defending my dissertation, weaved precisely around the way in which the
dominant reason prevalent in the West explained how a bunch of somewhat
dysfunctional social groups that in the XVIII century seemed to be only good at
massacring themselves ended up dominating the world, and imposing their belief
system on the whole face of the planet (the very same dominant reason that evolved
and refined itself for maximum productivity of material goods, thus ability to
field large and technologically superior armies, the happiness of their
citizens be damned), one of the most poignant questions afterwards came from
the most distinguished philosopher of the tribunal: Miguel García Baró).
He protested the way I was laying the blame for most of society’s ills (the
deadening materialism, the imposed competitiveness that forces us to see other
people as means, and never as needs in themselves, the rampant egoism and
selfishness we seem to instill in every new generation, even the environmental
degradation, a product of our instrumental approach to nature) on thinkers and
philosophers, while according to him most of those figures had opposed such
transformations, and tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent them, warning their
countrymen of the dire consequences if they didn’t oppose what they perceived
as the wrong turn History (with capital H) had taken or may take (and did
indeed take, but not, according to MGB, because people heeded the sages’
advice, but because they foolishly ignored it).
I humbly
confess I’m not sure I mustered all the necessary rhetorical devices to answer
the wise professor, so his very valid protestation went mostly unanswered. But
to atone for such weakness in my defense I’ve been thinking intensely about the
relative role of the intellectuals (and not in the abstract, but each and any
of the main figures of the European and the Anglo-Saxon tradition, between 1650
to our days) in the shaping and amelioration (or, rather, as we will see, the
worsening) of their societies, and I have to report back that I ended very much
reaffirmed in my initial argument: they are the main culprits, and the most
marked contributors to why things are nowadays as they are. I already had
distinguished two kinds of thinkers: the “justificators” (Newton, Leibniz, Hobbes,
Descartes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Hegel, Weber, Comte, Heidegger, Wittgenstein)
and the “Critics” (Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx). Both are equally
responsible of the current state, more than the scientists (and we have had, in
the natural sciences, peerless thinkers that have revolutionized our
understanding of the world almost as much as Newton… almost) like Clerk
Maxwell, Bohr, Schrödinger and Einstein. More than the artists that have shaken
to the core our understanding of what means to be human, and the potential
limits of the human experience (which, again, have taken millennia of artistic expression
and put ‘em on their feet, opening landscapes of possibility in the realm of emotion,
sensation and feeling that were entirely unknown for our forebears). And, of
course, more than the politicians that have started wars and revolutions only
when the peoples under their sway had already been primed to follow their lead
by a widely shared conception of how a human life was supposed to be lived.
So I think we
can agree ideas have consequences, and there are some big ideas that can have
vast, telluric, stratospheric, tsunami-like consequences. The question, then,
for every enterprising, able-bodied (or rather, able-minded) adult is how to
contribute positively to the formation of the “right” ideas, those that may
enable and facilitate our exhausted civilization to evolve in the direction of
better opportunities for everybody, better chances for human flourishing for
the majority of human beings, and not only for the tiny minority holed up in a
missile silo watching a dystopian apocalypse unfold.
But of
course, and I’m sure you already saw this one coming, that would be the subject
for another post!
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