Envisioning the Next Level

An Exercise in Definite Optimism (Part 1)

Image by DALL-E 2.

Whatever you think about Peter Thiel with regard to other matters, his views on definite versus indefinite visions of the future offer real insight. This passage from Zero to One provides a good introduction:

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat is as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today…. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready — for nothing in particular.

In Thiel’s view, an ethos of definite optimism prevailed in the United States for most of its history, most recently in the 1950s and 60s, and helps to explain the country’s unprecedented dynamism. People had a clear, concrete vision of how the future would be different from the past and were committed to realizing that vision in practice. This ethos has been lost, according to Thiel, since the 1970s. One clear indication is the overwhelmingly dystopian cast of recent science fiction: “We have one sort of catastrophic, anti-technological scenario after another, and the future is some combination of The Terminator, Avatar, Elysium, and The Matrix.” A more tangible indicator has been the shift in business focus from engineering to finance. “In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money,” Thiel once remarked. “In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money and money simply becomes an end in itself, which seems always a little bit perverse. You just accumulate money and you have no idea what to do with it.”

Just to make clear that this analysis has no particular ideological slant, it tracks closely with that provided by Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen in their 2016 book Concrete Economics. They argue that America’s rise to world economic leadership was driven, not by “the unguided results of mindless evolution,” but by “intelligent designs.” “Repeatedly, government in the United States opened up a new economic space,” they write, “doing what was needed to enable and encourage entrepreneurs to rush into that space, innovate, expand it, and, over time, reshape the economy.” “The new direction has always been selected pragmatically, not ideologically, and presented concretely,” they elaborate. “You could see it in advance — as in, ‘This is the kind of thing we are going to get.’”

Since the 1970s, DeLong and Cohen argue, the United States has fallen away from pursuing concrete visions of the next step in economic development, preferring instead to go wherever the market — and the effects of other governments’ policies — happened to lead. And so we ended up with the “hypertrophy of finance” (a chapter title in their book), along with deindustrialization and the steady erosion of those “engineering communities of technological practice” that had built the American colossus.

The economic analyst Dan Wang, who introduced me to the concept in a pair of excellent essays, sees definite optimism as a form of human capital:

I wonder if economists overrate the easier-to-observe policy factors and under-theorize the idea that positive visions of the future drive long-term growth. To put it in a different way, I wish that they would consider definite optimism as human capital. In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future.

When I say “positive” vision, I don’t mean that people must see the future as a cheerful one. Instead, I’m saying that people ought to have a vision at all: A clear sense of how the technological future will be different from today. To have a positive vision, people must first expand their imaginations. And I submit that an interest in science fiction, the material world, and proximity to industry all help to refine that optimism. I mean to promote imagination by direct injection.

As I now turn the attention of this blog away from surveying the daunting challenges that face us and toward examining possibilities for renewal and revitalization, it seems to me that the best way to kick things off is with some definite optimism of my own. I have no interest in trying to describe any kind of utopia, as the whole idea of fully realized, unchanging perfection is totally antithetical to my conception of human flourishing. But I will take a stab at sketching a “eutopia” (a good place, not the good place) or a “protopia” (Kevin Kelly’s neologism, referring to an imperfect society that is steadily improving) — a vision of a society that has successfully passed through the transitional malaise in which we are now mired and come out the other side at a higher level of social development.

Let me start first, with a nod to Peter Thiel and Dan Wang, by discussing the technological advances needed to take us to the next level. As I have stated more than once in these essays, our current technological dispensation is neither ecologically nor sociologically sustainable. Our dependence on fossil fuels is altering the climate and poisoning us with air pollution; our reliance on factory farming is putting relentless pressure on wild species, inflicting diabolical suffering on domestic ones, and exposing ours to zoonotic transmission of pathogens. In addition to the harmful environmental externalities produced by our current level of technology, there is also a harmful cultural externality: the anti-Promethean backlash against technological progress triggered by its historically adversarial relationship with the natural world. As long as our most advanced technology continues to pose real threats to our health and the rest of the biosphere, there will be a strong constituency against advancing further.

We can break out of this trap, and the escape routes are currently being mapped. Learning curve effects have driven dramatic cost decreases for wind and solar over the past decade. Exciting developments are underway in the field of enhanced geothermal energy, with new drilling techniques allowing us to tap massive power reserves from subsurface heat: accessing just 2 percent of the thermal energy present between two and six miles below the surface of the United States would deliver over 2,000 times the country’s current annual energy consumption. The first design for a small modular nuclear reactor, which offers the possibility of much lower costs through scale economies in production, received regulatory approval earlier this year. And fusion power, perhaps the ultimate clean energy source, finally passed the key threshold of more energy out than in during a test last year.

The successful transition to clean energy sources will allow us to meet what is currently our most urgent large-scale environmental challenge — arresting, and probably to some degree reversing, anthropogenic climate change. The successful achievement of clean energy superabundance, meanwhile, will enable us to address a host of other pressing environmental problems — in particular, those created by our industrialized systems of food supply.

As my Niskanen colleague Matt Yglesias put in in a “Slow Boring” post, “It turns out that while ‘grow the plants outside’ is a very efficient energy strategy compared to vertical farming, it’s incredibly profligate in terms of basically everything else.” Agriculture currently uses half of the world’s habitable land, and three-quarters of that is devoted to raising livestock. And it accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater usage worldwide. The harms inflicted on the biosphere by industrialized agriculture are tremendous. Of 28,000 different species currently threatened with extinction, agriculture is implicated as a cause for 24,000 of them. And every year, we slaughter some 70 billion farm animals and trillions of aquatic animals, but only after subjecting them to often stomach-turning conditions and nightmarish suffering. Meanwhile, the way we feed ourselves is threatening humanity’s long-term health: factory farming greatly increases our exposure to more pandemics, and pumping our livestock full of antibiotics is exacerbating the serious and growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.

This Gordian knot of problems can be cut with one simple but radical step: move food production indoors. Vertical farming reduces the acreage needed for raising crops by up to 95 percent, emits 70 percent less carbon into the atmosphere, generally needs little or no pesticides and other farming chemicals, and uses only 10-20 percent as much water as outdoor agriculture. Artificial meat, either plant-based or cultivated from animal cells, can free up enormous amounts of land, slash greenhouse gas emissions, and end untold suffering. There’s only one way to unlock these enormous, transformational benefits: lots and lots of cheap clean energy. Both vertical farming and cultivated meat are highly energy-intensive, so to make it possible for these new technologies to displace factory farming at scale will require continued breakthroughs in making clean energy more affordable.

Imagine, though, that we succeed. We have managed to stabilize the climate. We have learned how to feed ourselves without disrupting the rest of life on this planet. As humanity’s agricultural footprint steadily shrinks, we can witness and celebrate as nature bounces back, endangered species flourish again, and old crop and pasture lands revert to wilderness. While we’re being ambitious, let’s imagine that continued progress in reducing launch costs allows us to make asteroid mining practicable, with mind-bogglingly vast mineral reserves now available to us without the environmental harms caused by earthbound extractive industries, and without the injustices and suffering caused by extractive regimes propped up by wealth under the ground.

Raising our society up to this new level of technology — a stretch goal to be sure, but a realizable one — would amount to nothing less than a redefinition of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere out of which it emerged and in which it stands as the apex species. That relationship, adversarial since early humans first started hunting megafauna to extinction, will be transformed to custodial: humanity will have marshalled its powers, not to threaten the rest of life on this planet, but to protect it and facilitate its flourishing. We can even make up for past sins by resurrecting lost species. We can make the earth one vast, beautiful garden.

And it will be clear that this beautiful garden of a world is a distinctly human achievement — and specifically a technological achievement. Calling this age the Anthropocene Era can become a statement of pride, not a rebuke. I have no doubt that there will still be people who remain hostile to technological progress; there will be a dark side to progress, as there always is, and these people will focus on that to the exclusion of all else. But their numbers and influence will surely wane in a world where technology’s creative and restorative powers are so clearly in evidence.

Just as a technological leap is required to bring us into a new and sustainable relationship with the natural world, one is also needed to provide the basis for new institutional and organizational settings that encourage and facilitate human flourishing. To “live wisely and agreeably and well,” we need not only to reconcile our technological dynamism with our rootedness in the natural world; we also need to reconcile the liberating individualism of modernity with our hard-wired needs as social animals.

As I discussed in my last essay, our current social order shows unmistakable signs of overextension. It is being pushed to serve functions for which it is ill-suited, and its overall top-heaviness is undermining its ability to serve those core functions at which it excels. The key development that led to this overstretch was the achievement of mass affluence and the shift to a postindustrial economy. The industrial transition from agrarian poverty to material plenty required the mass mobilization of the population into the paid workforce, but in the postindustrial era the technological progress that drives overall systemic development is no longer a mass mobilization enterprise. And yet the mass mobilization has continued, and even intensified as women have streamed into all quarters of the paid workforce over recent decades.

If a hefty majority of adults are working within the system as employees, but the system really needs only a fraction of them to enable its advance, it is hardly surprising that such a system is incapable of providing fulfilling and rewarding work for all participants. Postindustrial, information-age capitalism does provide challenging and interesting work, access to an unprecedentedly lavish standard of living, and high social status to a mass elite of managers, professionals, and entrepreneurs — roughly a quarter of the work force. With only limited exceptions, though, everyone else is consigned to work that is some combination of unenjoyable, precarious, and low-paying — and relegated to the low social status that attaches to the superfluous.

Mobilization into paid employment has always involved harsh tradeoffs. Capitalism has long been in the business of fraying social connections: as Marx observed some 175 years ago, “all that is solid melts into air” in the “bourgeois epoch.” The move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft — and, in particular (the word “bourgeois” gives it away) the mass migration from the countryside to the cities — has transformed how and with whom personal relationships are maintained. There have been great gains for physical welfare and personal freedom, and great losses for certain kinds of deep human connection.

Capitalist mass employment and urbanization transformed the family from a locus of production to one of consumption; marriage changed from an economic partnership to an emotional refuge, and children went from productive assets to increasingly costly splurges. Rural communities where everybody knew everybody gave way to the anonymous city, whose urban villages of ethnic enclaves preserved community intimacy for a while, and to a suburbia that started out gregarious but didn’t stay that way. Where once communal intimacy was the natural default, now it took time and conscious effort to maintain close relationships outside the home. The scope of strong personal connections shrank to the confines of the nuclear family and a smattering of relatives and friends.

These dynamics were all already in place at the dawn of mass affluence, but they continued to intensify over time. Back in 1950, nearly 50 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas or small towns with populations under 10,000 — today it’s down to 25 percent, and almost all of these small communities are in dismal decline. Urban areas sprawled relentlessly and traffic worsened, increasing the effective distance between people. Meanwhile, competition for free time escalated rapidly, thanks in particular to the addictive nature of TV and later the internet; the long-term rewards of investing in relationships lost out all too often to the short-term stimuli of mass media. And while in its early days social media held out the promise of reconnecting us to each other, over time it has proved much better at provoking social anxiety and mutual hostility.

Along with the heavy costs imposed by its atomizing tendencies, industrial capitalism brought enormous benefits. Being mobilized into the system promised escape, and liberation: escape from grinding poverty and the high risk of premature death; escape from the narrow confines of illiteracy into the larger and richer mental world made possible by the written word; escape from smothering oppression in isolated villages into the glittering possibilities of the larger world and the exhilarating freedom of urban anonymity. And crucially, these benefits were available at all levels of social life, from the lowest laborers to captains of industry. During industrialization, people in all elements of society had cause to see themselves as net winners — incredibly fortunate jackpot winners — from their participation in the great social enterprise.

But things are different now. Yes, we’re all much richer, safer, more comfortable, better fed, and more consumingly entertained than we were during industrial times. But that extra increment of material bounty does not make up for the fact that advanced capitalism today is a game in which some three-quarters of the players are destined to feel like losers. Meanwhile, the burdens of social disintegration borne by those outside the elite have ratcheted up dramatically in recent decades: ties to family, work, and community have loosened and unraveled, and the resulting loneliness and despair can be seen in the mounting death toll from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

I don’t see any way to avoid the bottom-line conclusion: life within the confines of capitalist mass employment has become a bad bargain for most of its participants. Accordingly, if we are envisioning the next level of social development, a higher level that has moved from mere material plenty to true mass flourishing, we need to imagine how technological and organizational innovation might offer a new form of liberation: escape from having to play a game you’re almost sure to lose. What is needed are new technologies and new social arrangements that promote and facilitate economic independence — by which I mean a general reduction in the pressures to elevate economic considerations over vital relationships and personal wellbeing, and more particularly an expanded domestic sector of households, neighborhoods, and communities that takes back some of the responsibilities previously delegated to the market and the state.

The progressive economics writer Mike Konczal wrote a book a couple of years ago titled Freedom from the Market, arguing how regulation, redistribution, and public provision can increase human freedom by rendering wellbeing less dependent on market outcomes. What I have in mind is something more radical: freedom from the system — that is, freedom from the state as well as the market. Konczal’s vision of increased freedom from the market entails greater dependence on the state, and along some important margins I believe that can be a good trade. But in my view, the most promising path to mass flourishing leads away from the gigantism of both global markets and national politics and bureaucracy and towards reorganizing important parts of life on a face-to-face basis.

The concept of work-life balance is a familiar one, even if achieving it too often proves elusive. We understand that economic motives and what’s good for us as people often pull in opposite directions, and we recognize that prioritizing the personal over the financial is often a wise choice. But the contemporary conception of work-life balance is distinctly individualistic: it assumes the balancing act is something to be managed by each of us personally. The truth, however, is that our collective way of life is itself badly out of balance, creating immense pressure to ignore deep-seated psychic needs for connection and belonging in pursuit of material comfort and economic gain. We therefore need technological and organizational innovations that effect a rebalancing of work and life at the macro scale.

What kind of innovations am I talking about? I have in mind two broad categories. First, we need innovations that dramatically reduce the cost of living and thus make participation in the labor market a much more discretionary choice than it is at present. Second, we need a new goal for technological and organizational progress: abundance at human scale. In other words, we need new technologies and social arrangements that allow households, neighborhoods, and communities to provide for more of their own material needs without recourse to the impersonal mechanisms of market or state.

I’ll have much more to say about all this in the next essay. For now, let me close with an important clarification. This is not a vision of a post-capitalist future: the system of market-mediated specialization and exchange remains the greatest social technology ever devised, and I cannot conceive of a good future in which it no longer plays a vitally important role. Rather, this is a vision for supplementing and balancing capitalism by assuming for ourselves some of the responsibilities it currently shoulders. What we need now is not an overthrow of the system, but an adjustment of its scope.