Book Club: The Code Economy, Chapter 11: Education and Death

Welcome back to EvX’s book club. Today we’re reading Chapter 11 of The Code Economy, Education.

…since the 1970s, the economically fortunate among us have been those who made the “go to college” choice. This group has seen its income row rapidly and its share of the aggregate wealth increase sharply. Those without a college education have watched their income stagnate and their share of the aggregate wealth decline. …

Middle-age white men without a college degree have been beset by sharply rising death rates–a phenomenon that contrasts starkly with middle-age Latino and African American men, and with trends in nearly every other country in the world.

It turns out that I have a lot of graphs on this subject. There’s a strong correlation between “white death” and “Trump support.”

White vs. non-white Americans

American whites vs. other first world nations

source

But “white men” doesn’t tell the complete story, as death rates for women have been increasing at about the same rate. The Great White Death seems to be as much a female phenomenon as a male one–men just started out with higher death rates in the first place.

Many of these are deaths of despair–suicide, directly or through simply giving up on living. Many involve drugs or alcohol. And many are due to diseases, like cancer and diabetes, that used to hit later in life.

We might at first think the change is just an artifact of more people going to college–perhaps there was always a sub-set of people who died young, but in the days before most people went to college, nothing distinguished them particularly from their peers. Today, with more people going to college, perhaps the destined-to-die are disproportionately concentrated among folks who didn’t make it to college. However, if this were true, we’d expect death rates to hold steady for whites overall–and they have not.

Whatever is affecting lower-class whites, it’s real.

Auerswald then discusses the “Permanent income hypothesis”, developed by Milton Friedman: Children and young adults devote their time to education, (even going into debt,) which allows us to get a better job in mid-life. When we get a job, we stop going to school and start saving for retirement. Then we retire.

The permanent income hypothesis is built into the very structure of our society, from Public Schools that serve students between the ages of 5 and 18, to Pell Grants for college students, to Social Security benefits that kick in at 65. The assumption, more or less, is that a one-time investment in education early in life will pay off for the rest of one’s life–a payout of such returns to scale that it is even sensible for students and parents to take out tremendous debt to pay for that education.

But this is dependent on that education actually paying off–and that is dependent on the skills people learn during their educations being in demand and sufficient for their jobs for the next 40 years.

The system falls apart if technology advances and thus job requirements change faster than once every 40 years. We are now looking at a world where people’s investments in education can be obsolete by the time they graduate, much less by the time they retire.

Right now, people are trying to make up for the decreasing returns to education (a highschool degree does not get you the same job today as it did in 1950) by investing more money and time into the single-use system–encouraging toddlers to go to school on the one end and poor students to take out more debt for college on the other.

This is probably a mistake, given the time-dependent nature of the problem.

The obvious solution is to change how we think of education and work. Instead of a single, one-time investment, education will have to continue after people begin working, probably in bursts. Companies will continually need to re-train workers in new technology and innovations. Education cannot be just a single investment, but a life-long process.

But that is hard to do if people are already in debt from all of the college they just paid for.

Auerswald then discusses some fascinating work by Bessen on how the industrial revolution affected incomes and production among textile workers:

… while a handloom weaver in 1800 required nearly forty minutes to weave a yard of coarse cloth using a single loom, a weaver in 1902 could do the same work operating eighteen Nothrop looms in less than a minute, on average. This striking point relates to the relative importance of the accumulation of capital to the advance of code: “Of the roughly thirty-nine-minute reduction in labor time per yard, capital accumulation due to the changing cost of capital relative to wages accounted for just 2 percent of the reduction; invention accounted for 73 percent of the reduction; and 25 percent of the time saving came from greater skill and effort of the weavers.” … “the role of capital accumulation was minimal, counter to the conventional wisdom.”

Then Auerswald proclaims:

What was the role of formal education in this process? Essentially nonexistent.

Boom.

New technologies are simply too new for anyone to learn about them in school. Flexible thinkers who learn fast (generalists) thus benefit from new technologies and are crucial for their early development. Once a technology matures, however, it becomes codified into platforms and standards that can be taught, at which point demand for generalists declines and demand for workers with educational training in the specific field rises.

For Bessen, formal education and basic research are not the keys to the development of economies that they are often represented a being. What drives the development of economies is learning by doing and the advance of code–processes that are driven at least as much by non-expert tinkering as by formal research and instruction.

Make sure to read the endnotes to this chapter; several of them are very interesting. For example, #3 begins:

“Typically, new technologies demand that a large number of variables be properly controlled. Henry Bessemer’s simple principle of refining molten iron with a blast of oxygen work properly only at the right temperatures, in the right size vessel, with the right sort of vessel refractory lining, the right volume and temperature of air, and the right ores…” Furthermore, the products of these factories were really one that, in the United States, previously had been created at home, not by craftsmen…

#8 states:

“Early-stage technologies–those with relatively little standardized knowledge–tend to be used at a smaller scale; activity is localized; personal training and direct knowledge sharing are important, and labor markets do not compensate workers for their new skills. Mature technologies–with greater standardized knowledge–operate at large scale and globally, market permitting; formalized training and knowledge are more common; and robust labor markets encourage workers to develop their own skills.” … The intensity of of interactions that occur in cities is also important in this phase: “During the early stages, when formalized instruction is limited, person-to-person exchange is especially important for spreading knowledge.”

This reminds me of a post on Bruce Charlton’s blog about “Head Girl Syndrome“:

The ideal Head Girl is an all-rounder: performs extremely well in all school subjects and has a very high Grade Point Average. She is excellent at sports, Captaining all the major teams. She is also pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved.

The Head Girl will probably be a big success in life…

But the Head Girl is not, cannot be, a creative genius.

*

Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes, hence there is no place for the creative genius.

Modern Colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military…

And in doing so, they filter-out and exclude creative genius.

Creative geniuses invent new technologies; head girls oversee the implementation and running of code. Systems that run on code can run very smoothly and do many things well, but they are bad at handling creative geniuses, as many a genius will inform you of their public school experience.

How different stages in the adoption of new technology and its codification into platforms translates into wages over time is a subject I’d like to see more of.

Auerswald then turns to the perennial problem of what happens when not only do the jobs change, they entirely disappear due to increasing robotification:

Indeed, many of the frontier business models shaping the economy today are based on enabling a sharp reduction in the number of people required to perform existing tasks.

One possibility Auerswald envisions is a kind of return to the personalized markets of yesteryear, when before massive industrial giants like Walmart sprang up. Via internet-based platforms like Uber or AirBNB, individuals can connect directly with people who’d like to buy their goods or services.

Since services make up more than 84% of the US economy and an increasingly comparable percentage in coutnries elsewhere, this is a big deal.

It’s easy to imagine this future in which we are all like some sort of digital Amish, continually networked via our phones to engage in small transactions like sewing a pair of trousers for a neighbor, mowing a lawn, selling a few dozen tacos, or driving people to the airport during a few spare hours on a Friday afternoon. It’s also easy to imagine how Walmart might still have massive economies of scale over individuals and the whole system might fail miserably.

However, if we take the entrepreneurial perspective, such enterprises are intriguing. Uber and Airbnb work by essentially “unlocking” latent assets–time when people’s cars or homes were sitting around unused. Anyone who can find other, similar latent assets and figure out how to unlock them could become similarly successful.

I’ve got an underutilized asset: rural poor. People in cities are easy to hire and easy to direct toward educational opportunities. Kids growing up in rural areas are often out of the communications loop (the internet doesn’t work terribly well in many rural areas) and have to drive a long way to job interviews.

In general, it’s tough to network large rural areas in the same ways that cities get networked.

On the matter of why peer-to-peer networks have emerged in certain industries, Auerswald makes a claim that I feel compelled to contradict:

The peer-to-peer business models in local transportation, hospitality, food service, and the rental of consumer goods were the first to emerge, not because they are the most important for the economy but because these are industries with relatively low regulatory complexity.

No no no!

Food trucks emerged because heavy regulations on restaurants (eg, fire code, disability access, landscaping,) have cut significantly into profits for restaurants housed in actual buildings.

Uber emerged because the cost of a cab medallion–that is, a license to drive a cab–hit 1.3 MILLION DOLLARS in NYC. It’s a lucrative industry that people were being kept out of.

In contrast, there has been little peer-to-peer business innovation in healthcare, energy, and education–three industries that comprise more than a quarter of the US GDP–where regulatory complexity is relatively high.

Again, no.

There is a ton of competition in healthcare; just look up naturopaths and chiropractors. Sure, most of them are quacks, but they’re definitely out there, competing with regular doctors for patients. (Midwives appear to be actually pretty effective at what they do and significantly cheaper than standard ob-gyns.)

The difficulty with peer-to-peer healthcare isn’t regulation but knowledge and equipment. Most Americans own a car and know how to drive, and therefore can join Uber. Most Americans do not know how to do heart surgery and do not have the proper equipment to do it with. With training I might be able to set a bone, but I don’t own an x-ray machine. And you definitely don’t want me manufacturing my own medications. I’m not even good at making soup.

Education has tons of peer-to-peer innovation. I homeschool my children. Sometimes grandma and grandpa teach the children. Many homeschoolers join consortia that offer group classes, often taught by a knowledgeable parent or hired tutor. Even people who aren’t homeschooling their kids often hire tutors, through organizations like Wyzant or afterschool test-prep centers like Kumon. One of my acquaintances makes her living primarily by skype-tutoring Koreans in English.

And that’s not even counting private schools.

Yes, if you want to set up a formal “school,” you will encounter a lot of regulation. But if you just want to teach stuff, there’s nothing stopping you except your ability to find students who’ll pay you to learn it.

Now, energy is interesting. Here Auerswsald might be correct. I have trouble imagining people setting up their own hydroelectric dams without getting into trouble with the EPA (not to mention everyone downstream.)

But what if I set up my own windmill in my backyard? Can I connect it to the electric grid and sell energy to my neighbors on a windy day? A quick search brings up WindExchange, which says, very directly:

Owners of wind turbines interconnected directly to the transmission or distribution grid, or that produce more power than the host consumes, can sell wind power as well as other generation attributes.

So, maybe you can’t set up your own nuclear reactor, and maybe the EPA has a thing about not disturbing fish, but it looks like you can sell wind and solar energy back to the grid.

I find this a rather exciting thought.

Ultimately, while Auerswald does return to and address the need to radically change how we think about education and the education-job-retirement lifepath, he doesn’t return to the increasing white death rate. Why are white death rates increasing faster than other death rates, and will transition to the “gig economy” further accelerate this trend? Or was the past simply anomalous for having low white death rates, or could these death rates be driven by something independent of the economy itself?

Now, it’s getting late, so that’s enough for tonight, but what are your thoughts? How do you think this new economy–and educational landscape–will play out?

Cathedral Round-Up: Give Zuck a Chance?

Yale’s commencement speech was delivered this year by Epstein, a major-league baseball guy with a story about teamwork and winning the World Series.

MIT’s commencement speech was delivered by Matt Damon, no wait that was last year, this year they’re going to have Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

Wellesley, of course, had Hillary Clinton. (Warning: link goes to Cosmopolitan.)

And Harvard’s commencement speech was delivered by Mark Zuckerberg, who discussed his presidential bid:

You’re graduating at a time when this is especially important. When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community. But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed, and are trying to fill a void.

As I’ve traveled around, I’ve sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go.

Just a second. Do you know what I did after school to keep myself busy and out of juvie?

Homework.

Today I want to talk about three ways to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world.

First, let’s take on big meaningful projects.

Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.

Every generation has its defining works. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon – including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of more people built the Hoover dam and other great projects.

These projects didn’t just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things. …

So what are we waiting for? It’s time for our generation-defining public works. How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? How about curing all diseases and asking volunteers to track their health data and share their genomes? Today we spend 50x more treating people who are sick than we spend finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place. That makes no sense. We can fix this. How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online, and personalizing education so everyone can learn?

Oh, Zuck. You poor, naive man.

I’m not going to run through the pros and cons of solar panels because I don’t know the subject well enough. Maybe that’s a good idea.

I’d love to cure all diseases. Sure, nature would invent new ones, but it’d still be great. But what’s actually driving medical costs? Diseases we have no cures for, like ALS, Alzheimer’s, or the common cold? Or preventable things like overeating=>obesity=>heart disease? Or is it just a nasty mishmash of regulation, insurance, and greedy pharmaceutical companies?

According to What is Driving US Healthcare Costs:

Half of all adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease, such as heart disease, cancer, and [type 2] diabetes. Twenty-five percent of adults in the U.S. have two or more chronic diseases. An aging population, lifestyle choices (like exercise and nutrition), and genetics contribute to the growing prevalence of chronic illnesses.

Chronic diseases contribute to rising healthcare costs because they are expensive to treat. Eighty-six percent of all healthcare spending is for patients with a chronic disease. Patients with three or more chronic diseases are likely to fall into the most expensive one percent of patients, accounting for 20 percent of healthcare expenditures. Many of these patients require high spending in every cost category – physician visits, hospital stays, prescription drugs, medical equipment use, and health insurance.

These are the diseases of Western Civilization, and they’re caused by sitting on your butt eating blog posts and eating Doritos all day instead of chasing down your dinner and killing it with your bare hands like a mighty caveman. Rar.

Luckily for us, unlike ALS, we know what causes them and how to prevent them. Unluckily for us, Doritos are really tasty.

But this also means that until we find some way to outlaw Doritos (or society collapses,) we’re going to keep spending more money treating Type-2 Diabetes and heart disease than on “curing” them.

I don’t see how “modernizing democracy” is going to put millions of people whose jobs have been automated back to work, though it might employ a few people to make websites.

As for education, you’d think Zuckerberg would have learned after throwing 100 MILLION DOLLARS at the Newark public schools and getting ZILCH–ZERO–NADA student improvement in return, but I guess not.

There’s this myth that students have “individual learning styles” and that if you could just figure out each student’s own special style and tailor the curriculum directly to them, they’d suddenly start learning.

In reality, this notion is idiotic. Learning is fundamental to our species; our brains do it automatically, all the time. Imagine a caveman who could only learn the location of a dangerous lion via pictograms sketched by other cavemen, rather than from someone shouting “Lion! Run!” Our brains are flexible and in the vast majority of cases will take in new information by whatever means they can.

But getting back to Zuck:

These achievements are within our reach. Let’s do them all in a way that gives everyone in our society a role. Let’s do big things, not only to create progress, but to create purpose.

So taking on big meaningful projects is the first thing we can do to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

Overall, I think Zuckerberg has identified an important problem: the robot economy is replacing human workers, leaving people without a sense of purpose in their lives (or jobs.) Some of his proposed solutions, like “employ people in solar panel industry,” might work, but others, like “vote online,” miss the mark completely.

Unfortunately, this is a really hard problem to solve. (Potential solutions: Universal Basic Income so we don’t all starve to death when the robots automate everything, or just let 90% of the population starve to death because they’ve become economically irrelevant. Chose your future wisely.)

Back to Zuck:

The second is redefining equality to give everyone the freedom they need to pursue purpose.

Many of our parents had stable jobs throughout their careers. Now we’re all entrepreneurial, whether we’re starting projects or finding or role. And that’s great. Our culture of entrepreneurship is how we create so much progress.

Now, an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. Facebook wasn’t the first thing I built. I also built games, chat systems, study tools and music players. I’m not alone. JK Rowling got rejected 12 times before publishing Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo. The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.

12? Is that it? I’ve got about a hundred rejections.

Actually, those 12 were from publishers after J.K. Rowling landed an agent, so that doesn’t tell you the full number of rejections she received trying to get that agent. 12 rejections from publishers sounds pretty par for the course–if not better than average. Publishing is an incredibly difficult world for new authors to break into.

But today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose. Right now our society is way over-indexed on rewarding success and we don’t do nearly enough to make it easy for everyone to take lots of shots.

Let’s face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Look, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I don’t know a single person who gave up on starting a business because they might not make enough money. But I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed.

We all know we don’t succeed just by having a good idea or working hard. We succeed by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today. If we’re honest, we all know how much luck we’ve had.

Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.

We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.

Called it. Is Zuck going to run on the full communism ticket?

We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable childcare to get to work and healthcare that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.

Or… maybe we could work on making employment more stable and using UBI to let parents take care of their own children instead of treating them like consumer goods to be produced by the cheapest possible workers?

I’m kind of biased here because I went to daycare as a kid and hated it.

He’s correct on healthcare, though. It definitely shouldn’t be tied to employers.

Now, while I do think that we should actually take a good, hard look at our criminal justice system to make sure we aren’t locking up innocent people or giving completely unjust sentences, society doesn’t normally lock people up for “mistakes.” It locks them up for things like murder. Like the Newark schools, I fear this is an area where Zuckerberg really doesn’t understand what the actual problem is.

And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.

That’s why Priscilla and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation. It was never a question of if we were going to do this. The only question was when.

According to Wikipedia:

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a limited liability company founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan with an investment of “up to $1 billion in [Facebook] shares in each of the next three years”.^[2][3][4] Its creation was announced on December 1, 2015, for the birth of their daughter, Maxima Chan Zuckerberg.^[2]

The aim of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to “advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy”.^[2]

Priscilla Chan’s Wikipedia page states, “On December 1, 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg posted an open Facebook letter to their newborn daughter. They pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares, then valued at $45 billion, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is their new charitable foundation that focuses on health and education.^[3][12]”

If I were there kid, I might be kind of pissed about my parents celebrating my birthday by giving away my inheritance.

Note, however, that:

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit,^[15][16] spend money on lobbying,^[15][17] make political donations,^[15][17][18] will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives^[17] and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust.^{[15][16][17][18]} Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, “Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”.^[17][18]

So maybe this whole “charity” thing is just window-dressing. BTW, one of CZI’s projects is Andela:

Andela is a global engineering organization that extends engineering teams with world-class software developers. The company recruits the most talented developers on the African continent, shapes them into technical leaders, and places them as full-time distributed team members with companies that range from Microsoft and IBM to dozens of high-growth startups. Backed by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital, Andela is building the next generation of global technology leaders. Andela has offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala and New York.

So Zuck’s going to solve the problem of people dying of hopelessness after losing their jobs to automation by training and importing third worlders to replace more jobs. (Meanwhile, they’re skimming the most talented people out of the third world, leaving countries there with even less human capital.)

But back to the speech:

Millennials are already one of the most charitable generations in history. In one year, three of four US millennials made a donation and seven out of ten raised money for charity.

I’m going to call bullshit on this, mostly because charitable giving correlates with age, not moving around too much, and most importantly, religiosity. The nation’s most charitable state is Utah, followed closely by the Southern states. The least charitable states are in New England, which is highly atheist, and whose lower classes are notably clannish:

“It Was Like a War Zone”: Busing in Boston:

Southie was ground zero for anti-busing rage. Hundreds of white demonstrators — children and their parents — pelted a caravan of 20 school buses carrying students from nearly all-black Roxbury to all-white South Boston. The police wore riot gear.

“I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School,” Jean McGuire, who was a bus safety monitor, recalled recently. “And the bricks through the window. …

From the start of busing, police at South Boston High outnumbered students. Yet the violence continued. Then-Mayor Kevin White, making a rare TV appeal, declared a curfew and banned crowds near the school, but said there was only so much he could do to protect students and enforce the federal mandate. …

Law enforcement tactics toughened, and what had started out as an anti-busing problem soon included anti-police sentiment. Many of the police officers were Irish from Southie.

“I had never seen that kind of anger in my life. It was so ugly,” said patrolman Francis Mickey Roache (South Boston High Class of 1954), who was on duty at the school that first day of desegregation, when protesters turned on him.

“These are women, and people who were probably my mother’s age, and they were just screaming, ‘Mickey, you gotta quit, you gotta quit!’ They picked me out because they knew me. I was a South Boston boy, I grew up in Southie,” he remembered. …

A group of whites in South Boston brutally beat a Haitian resident of Roxbury who had driven into their neighborhood. A month later some black students stabbed a white student at South Boston High. The school was shut down for a month.

Then-Gov. Francis Sargent put the National Guard on alert. State police were called in and would remain on duty on the streets of South Boston for the next three years.

Maybe they should have sent the black kids to Zuckerberg’s school instead of the Irish schools.

Millenials do give to charity on the internet, however, as entrepreneur.com notes:

Millennials frequently get berated for supposedly being selfish and not generous. Despite being the largest U.S. demographic by age, the generation of 18-to-34 year-olds donates less and volunteers less for charitable causes than any other age group.

But maybe it depends where you’re looking.

Millennials are the driving force behind a movement that is rapidly disrupting the $241 billion market in the U.S. alone for charitable giving. Crowdfunding is no longer just for indie film projects and iPhone accessories. The segment for personal appeals such as medical expenses, memorials, adoptions and disaster relief is soaring–an estimated $3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Massolution.

Just for the record, I detest the term “Millenials.” But let’s get back to Zuck:

Purpose doesn’t only come from work. The third way we can create a sense of purpose for everyone is by building community. And when our generation says “everyone”, we mean everyone in the world.

OKAY FULL COMMUNISM.

Quick show of hands: how many of you are from another country? Now, how many of you are friends with one of these folks? Now we’re talking. We have grown up connected.

In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn’t nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was “citizen of the world”. That’s a big deal.

Here’s a little challenge. Why don’t you go live in China, and when they ask to see your passport, just loudly proclaim that you’re a “citizen of the world” and therefore don’t need a visa to be there? (No, not as Zuckerberg, the man with 63 billion dollars, but as a just a common millenial.)

Then move to Afghanistan and let the local warlords know that you’re a “citizen of the world” and going to live in their village, now, and would they please respect your religious and gender identities?

Try moving to Japan, North Korea, Bhutan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mexico, or any other nation, buying land, voting in local elections (if they have them,) and hanging out with your new neighbors.

Let me know how that works out.

Every generation expands the circle of people we consider “one of us”. For us, it now encompasses the entire world.

Zuck, have you even asked the people of Nigeria if they consider you “one of them”? You don’t speak their language. You don’t share their values (otherwise you’d have a lot more children.) You probably haven’t even spent a day of your life hanging out with your Nigerian friend in a poor neighborhood in Lagos.

I understand the naivety of a well-meaning young person who just wants to be friends with everyone, but adults understand that not everyone wants to be friends with them. Just because you like the pleasant idea of having a few friends from other countries does not mean that you are actually part of those cultures, nor that the people from those places actually want to you there.

We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations — to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

How did that work out when the German city states united into one country?

We get that our greatest opportunities are now global — we can be the generation that ends poverty, that ends disease. We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics. Progress now requires coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

But we live in an unstable time. There are people left behind by globalization across the world. It’s hard to care about people in other places if we don’t feel good about our lives here at home. There’s pressure to turn inwards.

Related:

This is the struggle of our time. The forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowledge, trade and immigration against those who would slow them down.

Because we all know that Japan, one of the few nations that is actually dealing reasonably well with robotification by not adding more laborers to a shrinking market, is horribly un-free.

Trump supporter beaten bloody by “ideas”

This is not a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. There are people in every country for global connection and good people against it.

This isn’t going to be decided at the UN either. It’s going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now.

We all get meaning from our communities. Whether our communities are houses or sports teams, churches or music groups, they give us that sense we are part of something bigger, that we are not alone; they give us the strength to expand our horizons.

That’s why it’s so striking that for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find purpose somewhere else.

But I know we can rebuild our communities and start new ones because many of you already are.

Interestingly, Zuckerberg is citing data from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. From the Amazon blurb:

Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.

Bowling Alone attributes these changes to a variety of causes, including TV and declining religiosity, but Putnam’s Wikipedia page notes:

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as “hunkering down,” avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.

Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:

• Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
• Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
• Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
• Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
• Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
• Less likelihood of working on a community project.
• Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
• Fewer close friends and confidants.
• Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
• More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment”.

Alexander Wienberger, Holodomor

Perhaps it is a sign of how far our communities have degenerated that today’s young adults imagine themselves to be as connected to people in China and Nigeria as with their own neighbors.

Zuckerberg’s not dumb, but I suspect he has spent his entire life ensconced in a very expensive cocoon filled with people who are basically like him, from his highschool, Phillips Exeter, to Harvard and Silicon Valley. Strip him of his 63 billion dollars and send him to a normal school, and Zuck’s just another unattractive dweeb whom women wouldn’t date and jocks would shove into lockers.

Communism starts with well-meaning idiots who want to help everyone and ends with gulags and mass graves.

 

That said, I think it’d be interesting to give Zuckerberg a chance to put his ideas into practice. Why not take his 63 billion and buy his own island, sign a semi-autonomy deal with whatever country’s jurisdiction it’s under, (probably in exchange for taxes,) and set up Zucktopia? He can let in whomever he wants–Africa’s top coders, Syrian refugees, Chinese gameshow hosts–start his own scientific and medical research institutions, and try to build a functional society from the ground up. If any of his ideas are terrible, he’ll probably figure that out quite quickly. If they’re good, he can turn his island into a purpose-driven economic powerhouse.

I don’t think Zuck has a good shot at the presidency just because he’s dorky and Americans hate dorks, but I didn’t predict Trump’s victory, either.