I couldn't help, but smile at your childhood letter to NASA. My grandmother worked as a nurse for NASA through all the iconic Apollo missions. In the 90s, as a kid, I would run my hands over the commemorative model spacecrafts in their Arlington, VA home, imagining what it must have felt like to be a part of that story.
While I'm too young to have firsthand knowledge of the 70s, it's a decade that we seem to be reexamining now, and for good reason. I recently came across a line that the late art critic, Robert Hughes wrote in the early eighties, and I can't get it out of my head... that "by 1975, all of the isms felt like wasms", and it feels as relevant as ever.
Perhaps similar to you, I have a way of looking back on certain events in the context of my own timeline. The Berlin wall came down a couple of weeks before my first birthday, and in so many ways, the nineties were my sixties. In the 90s, particularly the back half of the decade, there seemed to be a prevailing narrative, or illusion, that we would forever be on the up and up, socially and economically... as though the only problems left to solve were of the global humanitarian variety.
If the aughts were my seventies, I've also never forgotten Thomas Friedman's, Thank You For Being Late, where he opens the book by asking "What the hell happened in 2007?" - coincidentally the year I graduated from high school.
This long winded, somewhat personal, comment is all to say, I sometimes worry about my own generation and those that follow. To only know the nineties and beyond for a lot of Americans, is to expect a level of material comfort and American power that breeds complacency, even among capable, intelligent people. It's especially problematic in a society that seemingly no longer has much of an attention span for history.
I appreciate all your comments, and I'm glad you liked the letter -- I'm very proud of 9 year-old me for having to gumption to write irate letters to important people and get a response! Yes, the analogy of the 90s to the 60s works for me -- full of optimism and hope for the future, and without the earlier decade's tumultuous conflicts. At the time I laughed during The Matrix when they said they set the matrix in the late 90s because that was the peak of human civilization. Looking back, they had a point!
Two thoughts. I can't help but think that one of the biggest issues today is our lack of ability to do real risk/reward calculations. By that I mean how the risk reward actually applies to the individual. We are constantly being bombarded by statistics, something has increased by 80% or decreased by 13% without reference to the actual numbers, depending on what the goal of the statistic is. By that I mean if it is designed to encourage or scare us. The 80% increase could be 13 individuals, or the 13% decrease could be thousands or 10's of thousands or vise-a-versa.
Our lack of security and the all or nothing attitude of most people toward success is very scary. The lack of ability to restart if anything goes wrong, even the lack of ability to declare bankruptcy or find social support has decreased the adventurism of many people.
If you look at the 1970s, it was an era of great opportunity. We had amazing advances in materials science, biochemistry and a host of other fields. We had a challenge in the form of an energy crisis, but, instead of rising to meet the crisis, we folded. Did we rethink our suburban restructuring? No. Did we push for alternate power sources? No. Did we continue to apply the strategies of the previous decades? No.
You may be right about risk aversion. There was no way rising energy prices weren't going to lead to inflation, and inflation hurts the wealthy more than the worker. The wealthy had a lot to lose, and it was their risk aversion that weakened our society. They demanded austerity. They demanded recession. They demanded that others get lower wages. They demanded reaction. By the 1980s, they had what they wanted.
The energy companies of the day, developers, manufacturers, they all were risk averse. Rather than face the challenge, they wanted to pretend that they could just keep doing what they were doing and, as long as they came out on top, it didn't matter how low everything fell. I remember the 1970s all too well, and it was a scary time. Those who had were not willing to take chances, and we all paid for it.
Maybe you covered it in your other pieces, but the early 1970's is when one of the biggest developments in the history of technological unemployment caused my new labor saving devices really started to kick in. I mean the revolution in home appliances that, because being a homemaker was no longer a full-time job, allowed tens of millions of married women to enter the workforce. At first this was a positive advantage to the families involved, especially when it came to being able to afford a nice house in a safe neighborhood with good public schools. But then, once most married women were in the workforce, what was at first a positive benefit became.a necessity as only two-earner households could compete for that good. The analogy which Lester Thorough at MIT used to use applies here: in a theatre it sometimes helps to stand up in order to get a better view, but only until everyone stands up, at which point you can see no better than you could when sitting down before. Except now you have to stand up to enjoy what before you could enjoy sitting down. And of course the influx of so many millions of women into the workforce depressed the wages of those who were already there, namely, men.
The ambivalence of the rise of the two-earner household--on the one hand, expanded opportunities for women to participate in society; on the other, pressure to keep up with the Joneses as the consumption affordable by dual earners becomes the norm--is an important point.
There's an interaction here between social pressure and regulation, too. Often, part of the reason you can't afford a house in a good school district on one income anymore is that the type of dwelling you *could* still afford in that district on one income, if anyone built them anymore, is now illegal to build because the district was downzoned in the 70s. More generally, we have both intensified competition for intrinsically positional goods and artificially made more types of goods more positional.
Here is another way of framing it: the feeling of secure abundance can reduce risk aversion, but the feeling of *insecure* abundance strongly tends to increase it. The most fearful people and institutions are those that have a lot to lose and know it.
I saw this in the private sector when I worked on Google search features. It was an amazingly smart and resourceful team of people who sincerely wanted to take more risks-- but had built up, for individually unimpeachable reasons, a huge thicket of obstacles to launching risky new features. Before you could make even a small incremental change, you had to get approvals from security, privacy, product strategy, legal, accessibility, site reliability, and on and on and on. And gathering all the evidence that you'd checked all the boxes to get all those permits was a huge part of the cost of feature development, much as permitting has become such a big part of construction costs today.
This was all because Google search was extremely lucrative and there were many ways to screw it up-- and we could see screwups readily in the metrics-- so we knew we had a lot to lose. I used to administer one of those permitting processes: I was the gatekeeper who verified that new features would not increase latency, the time from when you hit return on your query to when you got results on your computer screen. I tried to make compliance easier as best I could, giving developers tools to quickly evaluate their latency impact and decision trees they could use to classify truly low-risk features as exempt from latency review. And yet it was still a significant burden and we still felt it was worth it, felt we really had to keep that compliance check, because even a small latency increase, on the order of tens of milliseconds, would lead directly to a comparatively huge loss of usage and thus of ad revenue. Multiply that by ten other compliance teams, and you had a ready source of constant internal complaints about how Google had gotten too big and bureaucratic and sclerotic and it was too hard to do anything new and nimble startups were going to eat our lunch.
Arnold Kling often talks about making systems easy to fix instead of hard to break. It may be that that kind of approach-- building a feeling of security in our abundance by demonstrating that mistakes aren't that bad and can easily be mitigated-- is a promising path to removing the fear that leads to sclerosis. But we've clearly got to address it somehow, because even the most productive and innovative people with the most intellectual comprehension of the cost of sclerosis can fall prey.
1. I am missing: 1970 - War in Vietnam, 2004 - Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. An enormous squandering of resources, money not used productively in the US. Soldiers coming home in coffins or damaged for life mental/physically. The weakness of the US way of thinking and doing exposed.
2. All complaining about declining population growth and shortages in the work-force is hilarious in a country that squanders skills and education of about 75-100,000 women every year. (Yes, H-4's.)
3. People not willing to move for a job: make all costs tax deductible. Do not tax temporary housing paid for by an employer. When my husband to a job in another city a few years ago the whole process cost us around $ 50,000. None of it tax deductible (anymore). Thankfully our house was not "under water" - something that soon will start to happen again having a negative effect on work-related mobility.
4. Some cities are expensive and only people with high incomes can afford to go there. And nowadays a couple will also look at what a move would mean for the other spouse (usually the wife) in options to work and to earn. Those ramification were not that important around 1970. Another reason people are less job-mobile is that people get older, making many (usually the wife) perform caring duties several hours or days a week.
5. The US people saw well-paying manufacturing jobs disappear while the demographics in the US started to change considerably. Legislation in the 90ies made that even more men of color were incarcerated, making a normal life for them impossible afterwards. Ordinary people feel squeezed by taxes especially property taxes - that stay the same no matter how much you earn or not earn in c are of job-loss. Medical expenses have gone up in every regard. Every bigger city now has people squatting in tents under overpasses. Many people are bogged down by student debts, that for some do not go away no matter how much to pay back. How do you expect people to "dream big" under the current conditions ?
The experts who get Ph.D.'s etc. on theses like you mention, should stip theorizing and start to look out of their windows . I lived in several different places in the US, and found that most people are just hanging in there. They have little to no prospect that things will get significantly better for them. But they read about Zuckerberg's island, Elon's sink, Bezos' boat.
5. There are complaints about how/what children learn in school. GO METRIC ! It is a beautiful, logical system. Yesterday in a store someone told me that a pint is 16 ounces - not realizing apparently that a pint is volume and ounces is weight. So yes it can be but it does not need to be. It should be forbidden to label some products in pints when smaller in size and the larger sized in pounds/ounces, making it impossible to compare prices quickly. (The pint of blueberries in question was 12 ounces.)
I couldn't help, but smile at your childhood letter to NASA. My grandmother worked as a nurse for NASA through all the iconic Apollo missions. In the 90s, as a kid, I would run my hands over the commemorative model spacecrafts in their Arlington, VA home, imagining what it must have felt like to be a part of that story.
While I'm too young to have firsthand knowledge of the 70s, it's a decade that we seem to be reexamining now, and for good reason. I recently came across a line that the late art critic, Robert Hughes wrote in the early eighties, and I can't get it out of my head... that "by 1975, all of the isms felt like wasms", and it feels as relevant as ever.
Perhaps similar to you, I have a way of looking back on certain events in the context of my own timeline. The Berlin wall came down a couple of weeks before my first birthday, and in so many ways, the nineties were my sixties. In the 90s, particularly the back half of the decade, there seemed to be a prevailing narrative, or illusion, that we would forever be on the up and up, socially and economically... as though the only problems left to solve were of the global humanitarian variety.
If the aughts were my seventies, I've also never forgotten Thomas Friedman's, Thank You For Being Late, where he opens the book by asking "What the hell happened in 2007?" - coincidentally the year I graduated from high school.
This long winded, somewhat personal, comment is all to say, I sometimes worry about my own generation and those that follow. To only know the nineties and beyond for a lot of Americans, is to expect a level of material comfort and American power that breeds complacency, even among capable, intelligent people. It's especially problematic in a society that seemingly no longer has much of an attention span for history.
Very much enjoy your blog,
Amanda
I appreciate all your comments, and I'm glad you liked the letter -- I'm very proud of 9 year-old me for having to gumption to write irate letters to important people and get a response! Yes, the analogy of the 90s to the 60s works for me -- full of optimism and hope for the future, and without the earlier decade's tumultuous conflicts. At the time I laughed during The Matrix when they said they set the matrix in the late 90s because that was the peak of human civilization. Looking back, they had a point!
Two thoughts. I can't help but think that one of the biggest issues today is our lack of ability to do real risk/reward calculations. By that I mean how the risk reward actually applies to the individual. We are constantly being bombarded by statistics, something has increased by 80% or decreased by 13% without reference to the actual numbers, depending on what the goal of the statistic is. By that I mean if it is designed to encourage or scare us. The 80% increase could be 13 individuals, or the 13% decrease could be thousands or 10's of thousands or vise-a-versa.
Our lack of security and the all or nothing attitude of most people toward success is very scary. The lack of ability to restart if anything goes wrong, even the lack of ability to declare bankruptcy or find social support has decreased the adventurism of many people.
If you look at the 1970s, it was an era of great opportunity. We had amazing advances in materials science, biochemistry and a host of other fields. We had a challenge in the form of an energy crisis, but, instead of rising to meet the crisis, we folded. Did we rethink our suburban restructuring? No. Did we push for alternate power sources? No. Did we continue to apply the strategies of the previous decades? No.
You may be right about risk aversion. There was no way rising energy prices weren't going to lead to inflation, and inflation hurts the wealthy more than the worker. The wealthy had a lot to lose, and it was their risk aversion that weakened our society. They demanded austerity. They demanded recession. They demanded that others get lower wages. They demanded reaction. By the 1980s, they had what they wanted.
The energy companies of the day, developers, manufacturers, they all were risk averse. Rather than face the challenge, they wanted to pretend that they could just keep doing what they were doing and, as long as they came out on top, it didn't matter how low everything fell. I remember the 1970s all too well, and it was a scary time. Those who had were not willing to take chances, and we all paid for it.
Maybe you covered it in your other pieces, but the early 1970's is when one of the biggest developments in the history of technological unemployment caused my new labor saving devices really started to kick in. I mean the revolution in home appliances that, because being a homemaker was no longer a full-time job, allowed tens of millions of married women to enter the workforce. At first this was a positive advantage to the families involved, especially when it came to being able to afford a nice house in a safe neighborhood with good public schools. But then, once most married women were in the workforce, what was at first a positive benefit became.a necessity as only two-earner households could compete for that good. The analogy which Lester Thorough at MIT used to use applies here: in a theatre it sometimes helps to stand up in order to get a better view, but only until everyone stands up, at which point you can see no better than you could when sitting down before. Except now you have to stand up to enjoy what before you could enjoy sitting down. And of course the influx of so many millions of women into the workforce depressed the wages of those who were already there, namely, men.
The ambivalence of the rise of the two-earner household--on the one hand, expanded opportunities for women to participate in society; on the other, pressure to keep up with the Joneses as the consumption affordable by dual earners becomes the norm--is an important point.
There's an interaction here between social pressure and regulation, too. Often, part of the reason you can't afford a house in a good school district on one income anymore is that the type of dwelling you *could* still afford in that district on one income, if anyone built them anymore, is now illegal to build because the district was downzoned in the 70s. More generally, we have both intensified competition for intrinsically positional goods and artificially made more types of goods more positional.
Here is another way of framing it: the feeling of secure abundance can reduce risk aversion, but the feeling of *insecure* abundance strongly tends to increase it. The most fearful people and institutions are those that have a lot to lose and know it.
I saw this in the private sector when I worked on Google search features. It was an amazingly smart and resourceful team of people who sincerely wanted to take more risks-- but had built up, for individually unimpeachable reasons, a huge thicket of obstacles to launching risky new features. Before you could make even a small incremental change, you had to get approvals from security, privacy, product strategy, legal, accessibility, site reliability, and on and on and on. And gathering all the evidence that you'd checked all the boxes to get all those permits was a huge part of the cost of feature development, much as permitting has become such a big part of construction costs today.
This was all because Google search was extremely lucrative and there were many ways to screw it up-- and we could see screwups readily in the metrics-- so we knew we had a lot to lose. I used to administer one of those permitting processes: I was the gatekeeper who verified that new features would not increase latency, the time from when you hit return on your query to when you got results on your computer screen. I tried to make compliance easier as best I could, giving developers tools to quickly evaluate their latency impact and decision trees they could use to classify truly low-risk features as exempt from latency review. And yet it was still a significant burden and we still felt it was worth it, felt we really had to keep that compliance check, because even a small latency increase, on the order of tens of milliseconds, would lead directly to a comparatively huge loss of usage and thus of ad revenue. Multiply that by ten other compliance teams, and you had a ready source of constant internal complaints about how Google had gotten too big and bureaucratic and sclerotic and it was too hard to do anything new and nimble startups were going to eat our lunch.
Arnold Kling often talks about making systems easy to fix instead of hard to break. It may be that that kind of approach-- building a feeling of security in our abundance by demonstrating that mistakes aren't that bad and can easily be mitigated-- is a promising path to removing the fear that leads to sclerosis. But we've clearly got to address it somehow, because even the most productive and innovative people with the most intellectual comprehension of the cost of sclerosis can fall prey.
Very interesting, thanks!
Depressing, but difficult to argue with your analysis
1. I am missing: 1970 - War in Vietnam, 2004 - Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. An enormous squandering of resources, money not used productively in the US. Soldiers coming home in coffins or damaged for life mental/physically. The weakness of the US way of thinking and doing exposed.
2. All complaining about declining population growth and shortages in the work-force is hilarious in a country that squanders skills and education of about 75-100,000 women every year. (Yes, H-4's.)
3. People not willing to move for a job: make all costs tax deductible. Do not tax temporary housing paid for by an employer. When my husband to a job in another city a few years ago the whole process cost us around $ 50,000. None of it tax deductible (anymore). Thankfully our house was not "under water" - something that soon will start to happen again having a negative effect on work-related mobility.
4. Some cities are expensive and only people with high incomes can afford to go there. And nowadays a couple will also look at what a move would mean for the other spouse (usually the wife) in options to work and to earn. Those ramification were not that important around 1970. Another reason people are less job-mobile is that people get older, making many (usually the wife) perform caring duties several hours or days a week.
5. The US people saw well-paying manufacturing jobs disappear while the demographics in the US started to change considerably. Legislation in the 90ies made that even more men of color were incarcerated, making a normal life for them impossible afterwards. Ordinary people feel squeezed by taxes especially property taxes - that stay the same no matter how much you earn or not earn in c are of job-loss. Medical expenses have gone up in every regard. Every bigger city now has people squatting in tents under overpasses. Many people are bogged down by student debts, that for some do not go away no matter how much to pay back. How do you expect people to "dream big" under the current conditions ?
The experts who get Ph.D.'s etc. on theses like you mention, should stip theorizing and start to look out of their windows . I lived in several different places in the US, and found that most people are just hanging in there. They have little to no prospect that things will get significantly better for them. But they read about Zuckerberg's island, Elon's sink, Bezos' boat.
5. There are complaints about how/what children learn in school. GO METRIC ! It is a beautiful, logical system. Yesterday in a store someone told me that a pint is 16 ounces - not realizing apparently that a pint is volume and ounces is weight. So yes it can be but it does not need to be. It should be forbidden to label some products in pints when smaller in size and the larger sized in pounds/ounces, making it impossible to compare prices quickly. (The pint of blueberries in question was 12 ounces.)