Speculations on an arc of history

Wikimedia Commons.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve written over three dozen essays that all focus on a single, fundamental question: if we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy? It is a profound and complicated question, and my attempt at an answer has many different strands. Here I’m going to try to weave them all together into a single, coherent narrative — the tl;dr version of “The Permanent Problem.”

Anatomically modern humans have now roamed the earth for something like 200,000 years, and for all but the past couple of centuries — if the history of our species were reduced to 24 hours, we’re talking about the final 90 seconds — the overwhelming majority of us have had our hands full simply trying to secure the basics of physical survival. For most of this time, prior to the advent of agriculture ten millennia ago, we lived as small bands of hunter-gatherers with no capacity to accumulate any kind of surplus: just finding food and shelter was a daily struggle that absorbed all our productive energies. Since the agricultural revolution, the resulting small food surplus made possible all the developments of human capacities that we call civilization — but that was a privilege reserved for a tiny elite, as 95 percent of us toiled in subsistence food production, just a stretch of bad weather away from physical privation.

The agricultural revolution represented the first great phase change of humanity, one that dramatically expanded the development and exercise of new human capabilities at the collective level. At the individual level, though, there was little improvement in the conditions of life for most people; indeed, in certain respects — notably access to adequate nutrition — wellbeing likely declined. Using terminology I introduced earlier, the agrarian age produced a huge spike in “peak” human flourishing, as well as a steady rise in total flourishing as the human population rose from around 5 million to 1 billion. Average flourishing, however, barely budged.

We are now a couple of centuries into humanity’s second great phase change: the Industrial Revolution, or as the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North put it, “the wedding of science and technology” that made systematic, sustained progress possible. Some futurists in our century anticipate a technological “singularity” with the coming of artificial general intelligence — by which they mean a transformation in conditions so radical that life on the other side of it is simply unimaginable, just as what goes on in the singularity of a black hole is completely inaccessible to us. Maybe they’re right, maybe another singularity is coming, but what’s clear enough — take a look at the chart below — is that we’re already on the other side of one. There was nothing in the prior 200,000 years of human existence that gave us any inkling that industrialization was possible or that it could sweep the entire planet, and nothing to prepare us for the wild, harrowing, and exhilarating ride we’ve been on.

Source: Our World in Data.

As the chart illustrates, this second great phase change launched a spectacular, ongoing rise in the social surplus. While the agrarian surplus sufficed to lift only a tiny elite out of exposure to grinding material deprivation, our productive powers have now advanced to the point that, in the most advanced countries, serious material deprivation afflicts only an unfortunate few. Just over the past generation, we have witnessed precipitous drops in poverty around the world, to the point that it is now eminently reasonable to expect that the specter of physical privation — previously humanity’s constant grim companion — will someday soon be all but banished from the world.

This general uplift in mankind’s material circumstances has created the circumstances in which mass flourishing becomes possible — in which the vast run of ordinary people, not just a pampered and exploitative elite, have the resources and leisure to develop and exercise their own capabilities and reap the psychic rewards that flow from the actualization of human potential.

Being able to afford mass flourishing and actually achieving it are two different things, however, and the United States and other advanced democracies are presently caught in the gap between the two. Ironically, the social arrangements that enabled the accumulation of our vast social surplus, together with the cultural responses to that accumulation, have vastly complicated the task of making the possible real. Indeed, even as our material circumstances continue to improve, across much of society the state of spiritual wellbeing has actually been deteriorating. Getting richer as a society is no longer making us happier overall; indeed, the effect is rather the opposite. This is the nasty riddle that the permanent problem now poses for us.

You could say that we’ve fallen into a “middle flourishing trap” — akin to what economists call the “middle-income trap.” The latter refers to the frustratingly common phenomenon in which a poor country finally achieves economic takeoff and begins to experience high growth — only for growth to tail off sharply and stall once continued development requires something more than cheap labor and access to export markets. A country’s institutions may be sufficient to permit an escape from poverty — they provide social peace and decent export-supporting infrastructure —and the success that those institutions bring helps to lock them in and entrench them and the powers that profit from them. When the requirements for continued development become more complex — reductions in corruption, strengthened capacity to raise revenues, improvements in education and social welfare policy, build-out of high-quality domestic infrastructure, support for robust domestic credit and equity markets — the political challenge of adapting institutions to those new requirements proves too much to handle, and the country gets stuck between poverty and wealth, the latter in view but tantalizingly out of reach. Outside of Europe and the countries of English-language settlement, the only economies to make it out of the middle-income trap and achieve advanced status are Japan and the “four tigers”: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

In the present case, we are blessed with institutions that have carried us all the way to mass affluence and still continue to lift material living standards upward. But for the next great push of social progress — the move from widespread material plenty to widespread flourishing — our institutions have failed to deliver. To their credit, they have expanded opportunities for challenging, fulfilling lives more broadly than ever before: for most of those within the well-educated professional and managerial elite, and for a lucky few outside it. But something like three-quarters of the population have been left on the outside looking in, lacking meaningful and rewarding work to do and subject now to an ongoing disintegration of the vital social bonds on which wellbeing depends.

The dynamics here are analogous to those of struggling middle-income countries. Once mass affluence is attained, the connection between more and better stuff and more rewarding, fulfilling lives weakens considerably; furthermore, the cultural responses to mass affluence within the context of the institutions that created it tend over time to degrade the operation of the overall system and make further social progress even more difficult. Meanwhile, because our legacy institutions are so obviously superior to anything that came before in their support of overall wellbeing, we have thus far lacked the imagination to even conceive and articulate alternative arrangements, much less amass the social resources to build them and make them work.

What institutions am I talking about? The key features of our capitalist system that I believe are responsible for our present predicament are twofold: first, the superhuman scale at which it operates; and second, its orientation toward commercial profit. Without these features, humanity would have remained mired in poverty. But the extent of their persistence, and their tendency over time to crowd out alternatives, have left us caught in a no-man’s-land between material and spiritual plenty.

The productive powers of humanity prior to industrialization were constrained by natural limits: the favorability of soil and climate; the power of human and animal muscle, water, and wind; the speed of human and animal movement; the trust sustainable by blood ties and personal relationships. The path to prosperity was opened by breaking through these limits with mechanization (made possible by new energy sources) and organization. Machines vastly amplified muscle power, slashed travel times, and achieved the “high-volume throughput” (in Alfred Chandler’s phrase) that makes mass production possible; the evolution of commercial law and the development of the modern corporation produced impersonal institutional structures that could coordinate cooperation between large numbers of complete strangers.

The great transformation wrought by industrialization was thus to recreate social existence on a superhuman scale. People left subsistence agriculture for the money economy, thereby integrating themselves into enormous impersonal networks of cooperation and competition. They congregated in cities soon larger than any that had previously existed, living in conditions that permitted (or imposed, depending on one’s perspective) unprecedented levels of anonymity. More and more of them worked for large organizations that used bureaucratic protocols to direct divisions of labor far too extensive and complex for a single boss to supervise personally. The factories that some of those organizations ran pumped out products at superhuman speeds, which then were then distributed at superhuman speeds to far-flung customers nationwide and even globally.

This transformation was guided only loosely from above: from that bird’s-eye view, the wealth explosion of industrialization was spontaneous and unplanned, constantly surprising and confusing central authorities who struggled to react and keep up. But at ground level, at the level of individual enterprises, industrialization was a massive exercise in planning, organization, and calculation with an intensity and rigor never before seen. And what oriented and guided all these countless individual endeavors and coordinated them into a coherent whole was the massively parallel information processing system of the marketplace, in which individual price signals aggregated up into the bottom lines of profit or loss. The prospect of profits incentivized the discovery process of innovation and commercialization for individual enterprises, and then the actual results of profit or loss acted to guide the rest of the industry to imitate or avoid what competitors were doing.

Quite simply, there is no set of alternative social arrangements that even remotely rivals the market order’s crowdsourcing approach for generating innovation and mass prosperity. Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars, and thus commercial behavior can end up paying excessive attention to the whims of the rich and undercounting what matters for everybody else; second, because of the existence of external costs and benefits, private profit-and-loss calculations can deviate sharply from assessments of overall social welfare, guiding market actors to underproduce goods with large external benefits (e.g., scientific research) and overproduce goods with large external costs (e.g., pollution). These defects are real and important, but governments have been able to compensate for them at least partially through redistribution and regulation. With the growth of the welfare and regulatory state as a complement to the private market order, the larger capitalist system emerged that would carry whole societies to mass affluence.

Without these social transformations effected by capitalism — the reconstitution of social existence at superhuman scale, and the commercialization of social existence guided by the pursuit of private gain — the achievement of mass material prosperity would have been impossible. But precisely because of these transformations, the capitalist system has struggled in the face of the next great challenge of social development: the translation of material prosperity into mass flourishing.

The effective functioning of the industrial, superhuman social order imposed heavy costs on people as they adapted to the new scale and tempo of life. Life in the Machine Age required people to go to considerable lengths to make their own lives more machine-like or at least machine-compatible. Living by the clock, domination by bosses, the inhuman rigor of factory work and the mind-numbing tedium of clerical labor, urbanization and the frictions of crowded living among strangers, traffic and the hassle of commuting, vulnerability to macroeconomic fluctuations that could quickly turn millions out of work for long stretches, separation from family and friends as people chase economic opportunities in different directions — these are genuine hardships and stresses.

During the transition to mass affluence, these costs were more than offset by rapid strides in life expectancy, health, education, and material living standards. But once the threshold of decent material comfort and security was crossed, the costs of modern living remained high while the benefits grew distinctly more modest for most people. As the relative demand for brawn and rote clerical work declined, the relative importance of the economic contributions of ordinary workers — and their bargaining power in the marketplace — lessened accordingly. Material living standards continued to improve, but with nothing like the impact of the move from urban tenements to two-car garage suburbia. And the spiritual rewards of work — in particular, the sense that what you’re doing is important and widely valued — surely fell for most.

The superhuman scale of industrial life entailed superhuman complexity, and the need to handle that complexity summoned into existence a whole new class of knowledge workers: managers who staffed the corporate chains of command, professionals whose expertise in law, accounting, and finance gave them vital coordinating roles, administrators who directed the growing bureaucracies of government, educators to train the next generation from pre-K to grad school, and members of the “helping professions” to provide a growing array of social services. With the arrival of mass affluence, this professional-managerial class grew larger than ever and began claiming both a disproportionately larger share of the economic pie and an ever-expanding remit to assert managerial control. Eclipsing the old business-owning bourgeoisie, the PMC rose to the leading and dominant position in society. And armed with the hammer of special knowledge that entitled them to tell other people what to do, they showed a pronounced tendency to see all the world as nails.

Meanwhile, the commercialization of life continued apace, as the pursuit of economic competitiveness and gain steadily displaced other motivations. Just as resources, status, initiative, and agency were draining out of the general population and concentrating in the PMC, the triumph of consumerism was encouraging us to see the pursuit of happiness as one extended shopping trip. The combined effect of these developments was to send a clear, insistent cultural message: leave everything to the system, whether in the form of the market or the state, and we’ll take care of you. After decades of being on the receiving end of that message, we are left with a society in which dependency and learned helplessness are depressingly widespread. As Tanner Greer puts it, “In the 21st century the main question in American social life is not ‘how do we make this happen?’ but ‘how do we get management to take our side?’”

Outsourcing to the system led to a general atrophying of bottom-up initiative and agency. At the same time, cultural responses to mass affluence served to undermine the dynamism of the capitalist system itself — that is, its ability to deliver ongoing scientific and technological progress. The more stuff people have, the more they focus on hanging on to what they’ve got even if it means passing up on additional gains. We see the sclerosis produced by this kind of loss aversion in the rise of the hydra-headed “vetocracy” and the growing obstacles to disturbing the status quo of the built environment; we see it in the fall-off in geographic mobility, in the rise of “safetyism,” and in the steady build-up of change-blocking lobbying coalitions. An especially virulent form of this hidebound conservatism came to dominate the modern environmental movement: what I’ve called the “anti-Promethean backlash” emerged as a powerful cultural obstacle to the continued pursuit of technological mastery over nature.

Cultural forces unleashed by mass affluence also worked comprehensively to weaken attachments to all institutions within the system and ultimately to the system itself. With the existential security created by mass affluence and the shifting focus of economic life from solving problems in the physical world (agriculture, manufacturing, mining) to solving problems involving other people (the service sector and government), the culture’s basic orientation changed: from outward toward the external world, with the aim of improving the world for human purposes, to inward into the psyche, with the aim of managing feelings and experiences. What followed was the cultural shift from (in Ronald Inglehart’s words) “survival” to “self-expression” values, with a bedrock commitment to personal choice (not really autonomy, which implies self-control) and a corresponding suspicion of any institution or source of authority that imposes limits on one’s choice.

While this shift made possible considerable social progress, it also produced toxic excesses — namely, the breakout of antinomian romanticism from its birthplace in bohemian subcultures to achieve mass cultural dominance. The “adversary culture” that emerged associated progressive enlightenment with resistance to all forms of institutional oppression and an oppositional stance toward history and all our received institutions. And although those associated with that adversary culture tended to find commercial society vulgar and distasteful and fundamentally unjust, it is nonetheless striking how much the messages emanating out of highbrow and “serious” pop culture harmonized with those of commercial advertising pitches. Consumerism thrived in a world that valorized personal choice overall; without missing a beat, those selling us stuff were all too happy to encourage customers to “have it your way.”

This acid bath for institutional authority has worked gradually to weaken and dissolve all the bonds that hold society and lives together. Connections to work, family, church, and community are all unraveling for those outside the well-educated elite. And the overall fertility rate, here and now in most of the world, has sunk far below the level needed to sustain population: unless that trend can be reversed, whole societies will soon start to melt away. As with our personal ties to each other, our ties to the social order are weakening as well: trust in virtually all social institutions is in relentless decline. Progressives are alienated from their society’s past and the past’s lingering presence; conservatives are alienated by present-day progressive cultural and economic hegemony.

The ongoing disintegration of society has now reached crisis proportions in our politics, as the basic values, norms, and institutions of liberal democracy have come under severe stress here and around the world. The roots of our political woes, as with so much else, can be traced back to the advent of mass affluence. In the go-go, prosperous 60s, the declining salience of class conflict and the rising salience of personal identity and self-expression led to a reorientation of progressive egalitarianism: from solidarity with have-nots (a group that was rapidly shrinking) to solicitude for a growing group of “belong-nots,” groups outside the socioeconomic and cultural mainstream (blacks, women, gays, immigrants, criminal suspects, etc.). Over time this shift has resulted in a redrawing of the main lines of political conflict from economic to cultural disputes. The latter, alas, are much more intractable and combustible: one can always split the difference over dollars and cents, but how do you compromise when the grievance is that you belong to the wrong demographic group? This is the logic behind the upward spiral of “negative partisanship” – when you support one party, not out of any deep attachment to its agenda or confidence in its leaders, but rather out of the conviction that the other party despises you and wants to destroy your way of life. Since democracy ultimately rests on the willingness to take turns ruling and being ruled, it’s obvious enough how culture-war politics undermines that willingness and thus attacks democracy at its very foundations.

To this picture of developments in the capitalist system since the arrival of mass affluence, let me add one additional element: the internet revolution and our growing devotion to online “virtual” experience in preference to the real thing. Our growing fondness for plugging into the “experience machine” has further fortified the “flourishing trap” by offering us effortless, addictive escapism in lieu of the arduous process of actual escape. If we are to find our way back onto the road of social progress, surely the accumulation of discontents with life off the road will be an important reason why. But if virtual experience provides a sufficiently powerful opiate for those discontents, we may never rouse ourselves in search of something better.

The narrative I’ve offered to this point has been a grim one, but I am hopeful that the story doesn’t end there. Even though the capitalist system has developed in ways that leaves us well short of mass flourishing, we can identify other developments that — if properly encouraged — could create an escape route out of the flourishing trap.

I see two promising possibilities. First, ever since industrialization started pushing living standards upward, that rise took two forms: greater money income with which to buy more goods and services, and greater leisure as a result of reduced work effort. Initially, reduced work effort took the form of shorter working weeks; more recently, it has taken the form of reduced lifetime working hours due to a combination of delayed entry into the workforce and extended retirement. Accordingly, a movement toward greater economic independence is really nothing new: ever since industrialization kicked off, we have been slowly but surely reducing our dependence on paid work effort to support ourselves.

We might have purchased considerably more leisure with our riches up to now if we weren’t simultaneously making it much more expensive to be a functional member of society. The housing sector in particular has been a disaster for affordability, somehow suffering from negative productivity growth for decades on end. With a focused effort to drive down important elements of the cost of living — not through stripping away amenities, but by developing new materials and production methods — we could make a high material standard of living with considerably reduced work effort a reality.

The other way to reduce dependence on the larger system is to make more goods and services for ourselves. Moving to decentralize some forms of production down to the household and local level lies at the heart of my vision for an economic independence movement, and here again I believe that there are favorable economic trends that can be exploited. Capitalism regularly generates enormous private enterprises in relatively concentrated industries to exploit economies of scale and scope, but those economies aren’t immutable over time. In industry after industry, we have seen the scale of profitable production runs fall over time, enabling mass customization instead of Henry Ford’s “the customer can have any color of Model T he wants so long as it’s black.” With a determined effort to push technological progress in the right direction, there is considerable potential for developing production technologies and techniques that allow households and localities to produce high-quality basic goods — food, shelter, and energy — for themselves at reasonable cost. We are already seeing a boom in distributed energy resources — i.e., rooftop solar — and it is possible to imagine a much broader trend along similar lines. Indoor farming and cultivated meat could someday be produced at the local level, along with new kinds of housing structures that people could build and remodel and renovate themselves.

Ramping up small-scale local production would constitute not so much a retreat from the global capitalist division of labor as a rearrangement of its priorities. The idea is to exploit large-scale specialization and exchange to develop technologies and production techniques that allow household and localities to enjoy a higher quality of life — achieved through the creation of vital face-to-face communities joined together by shared practical responsibilities. To extend this idea more broadly, especially promising are advances in “additive manufacturing,” or 3D printing, which allow local, small-scale efficient production of goods from globally produced open-source designs and specs. Solarpunk and other “small is beautiful” proponents have given the name of “cosmolocalism” to this rearrangement of the division of labor: with global designs developed for local production facilities, large-scale capitalism can give us the tools to enjoy a much better life than what our current complete dependence on the market and the state is able to offer.

These possibilities for reviving social progress offer genuine hope, but I doubt that they will be activated in the normal course of events. Seizing these opportunities will require a concerted cultural turn:  the emergence of a broad-based DIY/hacker “counterculture” that celebrates the virtues of productive self-sufficiency and problem-solving in the physical world.

There is a better world to be had: we can rise to the challenge of the permanent problem and redirect the arc of history toward mass flourishing. But that future won’t make itself. It will happen only if enough of us want it and work for it.