Society seems split into two camps on the matter of intelligence. Side A believes that everyone is secretly smart, but for a variety of reasons (bad teachers, TV, racism, sexism, etc) their true intelligence isn’t showing. Side B believes that some people really are stupid, because they are bad people, and they therefore deserve to suffer.
Out in reality, however, there are plenty of good, decent people who, through no fault of their own, are not smart.
I’m not making my usual jest wherein I claim that about 75% people are morons. I am speaking of the bottom 40% or so of people who have no particular talents or aptitudes of use in the modern economy. For any job that isn’t pure manual labor, they will almost always be competing with candidates who are smarter, quicker, or better credentialed than they are. Life itself will constantly present them with confusing or impenetrable choices–and it will only get worse as they age.
The agricultural economy–which we lived in until 7 decades ago, more or less–could accommodate plenty of people of modest intellects so long as they were hard-working and honest. A family with a dull son or daughter could, if everyone liked each other, still find a way for them to contribute, and would help keep them warm and comfortable in turn.
When you own your own business, be it a farm or otherwise, you can employ a relative or two. When you are employed by someone else, you don’t have that option. Back in the early 1800s, about 80% of people were essentially self-employed or worked on family farms. Today, about 80% of people are employees, working for someone else.
Agriculture is now largely mechanized, and most of the other low-IQ jobs, whether in stores or factories, are headed the same direction. Self-driving cars may soon replace most of the demand for cabbies and truckers, while check-out kiosks automate retail sales. I wouldn’t be surprised to see whole restaurants that are essentially giant vending machines with tables, soon.
The hopeful version of this story says that for every job automated, a new one is created. The invention of the tractor and combine didn’t put people out of work; the freed-up agricultural workers moved to the city and started doing manufacturing jobs. Without automation in the countryside we couldn’t have had so many factories because there would have been no one to work them. Modern automation therefore won’t put people out of jobs, long-term, so much as enable them to work new jobs.
The less hopeful point of view says that we are quickly automating all of the jobs that dumb people can do, and that the new economy requires significantly more intelligence than the old. So, yes, there are new jobs–but dumb people can’t do them.
If the pessimistic view is correct, what options do we have? People are uncomfortable with just letting folks starve to death. We already have Welfare. This seems suboptimal, and people worry that many of those who receive it aren’t virtuously dumb, but crafty and lazy. Makework jobs are another option. If not awful, they can let people feel productive and like they’ve earned their income, but of course they can be awful, and someone else has to make sure the fake job doesn’t result in any real damage. (If they could work unsupervised, they wouldn’t need fake jobs.) Our economy already has a lot of fake jobs, created to make it look like we’re all busy adults doing important things and prevent the poor from burning down civilization.
People have been floating UBI (universal basic income) as another solution. Basically, all of the benefits of welfare without all of the complicated paperwork or the nagging feeling that some lazy bum is getting a better deal than you because everyone gets the exact same deal.
UBI would ideally be offset via an increase in sales taxes (since the money is initially likely to go directly to consumption) to avoid hyperinflation. This is where we get into “modern monetary theory,” which basically says (I think) that it doesn’t really matter whether the gov’t taxes and then spends or spendsand thentaxes so long as the numbers balance in the end. Of course, this is Yang’s big presidential idea. I think it’s a fascinating idea (I’ve been tossing it around but haven’t had a whole lot to say about it for about fifteen years) and would love to see the independent nation of California or Boston try it out first.
UBI doesn’t exactly solve the problem of the dumb–who still need help from other people to not get scammed by Nigerian princes–but it could simplify and thus streamline our current system, which is really quite unwieldy.
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed… every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. … The vast majority of people on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, people on disability don’t show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs — who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that — is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It’s the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.
A friend of mine was homeless for a couple of decades. During that time he was put on disability. To this day, he doesn’t know why. He kept trying to fight it. It offended his sensibilities that some bureaucrat thought he was “disabled.” He wanted to prove to them that he was able, that he could still work and do valuable things.
He eventually ended up with full-blown schizophrenia, so the government official was probably correct in the first place–people who are homeless for multiple years tend to have something wrong with them, even if they themselves don’t recognize it. But he didn’t have schizophrenia then. Then he was just poor, and “disability” is backup welfare for the poor.
If that doesn’t seem obvious, ask yourself what disability means. For the government, disability isn’t a matter of how much pain you’re in or how many limbs you have; it’s a matter of whether you’re too impaired to work.
The article points out that “unemployment” numbers are kept artificially low by not counting the disabled among the unemployed, even though many of the “disabled” are really “people who can’t get job”:
There’s a story we hear all the time these days that doesn’t, on its face, seem to have anything to do with disability: Local Mill Shuts Down. Or, maybe: Factory To Close. …
But after I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed. One of them, Scott Birdsall, went to lots of meetings where he learned about retraining programs and educational opportunities. At one meeting, he says, a staff member pulled him aside.
“Scotty, I’m gonna be honest with you,” the guy told him. “There’s nobody gonna hire you … We’re just hiding you guys.” The staff member’s advice to Scott was blunt: “Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you’re on your own.”
Scott, who was 56 years old at the time, says it was the most real thing anyone had said to him in a while.
There used to be a lot of jobs that you could do with just a high school degree, and that paid enough to be considered middle class. I knew, of course, that those have been disappearing for decades. What surprised me was what has been happening to many of the people who lost those jobs: They’ve been going on disability.
Note: the text string “imm” does not appear anywhere in the article.
In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability.
Source: NPR Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo
As the article discusses, since the definition of “disabled” depends on your ability to get (or not) jobs, it depends, in turn, on the kinds of jobs a person is qualified to work. A programmer who has lost both legs in an accident can, with a few accommodations, still program perfectly well, whereas a farmer who needs to be able to do manual labor all day cannot. It’s easier to work despite a back problem if you have a college degree and can qualify for a white-collar job where you can sit down for most of the day. It’s harder if you have to carry heavy objects.
If you have a back problem and the only work you can get involves standing and carrying heavy things, well, that’s going to hurt.
Humans are fine at standing. Being on your feet a lot isn’t abstractly a problem. The Amish do tons of manual labor and they’re fine. But the Amish get to take bathroom breaks whenever they want. They can stretch or sit down if they need to. They get to dictate their own movements.
If you’re working at McDonald’s, your movements are dictated by the needs of the kitchen and the pace of the customers.
And that’s assuming you can get a job:
[Scott] took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, “Since I’ve had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won’t have worry to about this stuff anymore.” It worked; Scott is now on disability.
Scott’s dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there’d been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he’d have done that too. But there wasn’t a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn’t just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path — one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.
Source: NPR Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo
The human body isn’t designed to stand in one place all day. We’re designed to move. A strong or desperate person can do it,but the vast majority find it unpleasant or painful. Do it for years, combine it with another condition, close the factory… and you’ll find a lot of people willing to take that disability check over moving to a new city to try their luck at the next factory, again and again and again as each factory shuts down, moves, or fires everyone and replaces them with immigrants willing to work for wages that make disability sound attractive:
But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. … Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me.
People who leave the workforce and go on disability qualify for Medicare… They also get disability payments from the government of about $13,000 a year. This isn’t great. But if your alternative is a minimum wage job that will pay you at most $15,000 a year, and probably does not include health insurance, disability may be a better option.
But, in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work. Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life. That’s the deal. And it’s a deal 14 million Americans have signed up for.
I know people who’ve taken this deal. The really sad part is the despair. When people are filing for disability, it means they’ve given up. It’s like we decided to have Universal Basic Income, only we structured it the wort way possible to make recipients miserable.
I mean, this is AMERICA. Our ancestors were PIONEERS. They BUILT this place from the ground up.
My grandmother still lives in the house my grandfather built. Nearby, you can still visit the house my great-grandfather built. Those houses have all sorts of oddities because they were built by hand with whatever was available.
And say what you will, much of America is still beautiful. Forests mountains lakes rivers grasslands deserts. Beautiful.
An elderly woman I know lives in an an area with stunning natural beauty. “I hate it here,” she complains. Why? Is she blind? People stay inside and watch TV and grow lonelier.
I saw this “wine glass” at the store last night.
It was advertised as “for mom!” because what every kid wants is a drunk, alcoholic caregiver.
The marketing of chic-tee-hee isn’t it cute that we’re alcoholics? alcoholism to women is disgusting. It’s a sign of how far we’ve sunk that people see this as funny instead of a desperate cry for help.
And I don’t think I need to delve into the statistics on the opiate crisis and rising death rates among younger white women. All of the people who’ve lost their lives to drug addictions.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
evolutionistx 