But don’t we have them already? Aren’t property taxes already wealth taxes? My income is quite low as an artist, but I own two rural buildings whose value has dramatically increased and I pay far more in property taxes than I pay in income taxes. I was looking into moving into Italy, and it seems I get a deduction for my property taxes against their wealth taxes. Because they understand it’s the same thing. Of course you could add a wealth tax to financial investments, yes.
Wealth taxes make sense when the wealth is used to generate income, they aren’t always productive when the “wealth” is used for necessities like personal shelter and their valuation is dependent on demand and a competitive market you have no control over. Stupid for taxes to go up on your place you live in because blackstone bought a bunch of appartments nearby.
I think a hidden part of this discussion lies in how the process of accumulating and storing wealth fundamentally changes how your brain functions. Greed, or another mental health description one could better devise, should be an official mental illness and documented/treated as such. I've come from privilege and have had a front row seat for most of my life to what happens when people accumulate or are born with massive resources. Very few are immune to these effects. I've chosen many paths towards rejecting this wealth, for better and for worse.
Until we address (or force) this fundamental human nature problem, I believe we'll continue to see forces oppose disbanding and re-distributing all the invisible wealth of the world towards building real prosperity for all.
In a lot of ways, greed is the invisible mental illness that is shrouding the invisible economy in America. Everyone can easily acknowledge that hoarding common things is rooted in mental illness, we even have TV shows about it. Yet when you hoard wealth and money you are somehow intelligent, lucky, strategic, and worth praise. It is the same mental illness on different levels of privilege and access.
Thanks for sharing this Max. Very insightful. I think this is super important to consider when evaluating the behavior of the massively wealthy who control our politics and major companies. Even worse, I fear we're now poising people's minds with crypto 24/7 investing and just creating hordes of young gamblers who have no other hope to make a living.
I am 74 and came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. And, I'm a refugee from the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union in late 1956. We settled in Florida in 1957. Although the America of today is a far wealthier, far more diverse, and far larger nation than it was in 1957, what seems to be missing is an optimistic faith in the future. Kennedy's call to public service ("Ask not what your country can do for you...etc..."); the race to the moon landing; the wonderful world of the future in the Jetsons cartoon, and so on. Even though today's world is very challenging, it seems that what's missing in our leadership class is a sense of national mission and the ability to articulate it clearly to ALL Americans - not just to our "tribe" or political party. I meet so many smart young people who seem depressed, defeated, and dispirited. I direct them to smart people such as yourself and I thank you for your wonderful work.
Thank you! Yes my grandparents came over around the same time and had the same optimism - life was hard, but things could get done. I see some of that these days and am hopeful that more and more people who can express the need for a collective run for office. But I agree, some of it is bleak.
My suspicion is that young, talented people are being held back by expectations from society and our existing system that are actually insufficiently challenging. A system not geared to solving big problems. A recent poll asked kids what they wanted to be when they grow up. A shocking percentage said, "influencer." Huh?!? What about tackling climate change? Ridding the world of plastic? Ending world poverty? Proving cheap, clean energy to everyone? I realize that the answer is likely that our economic system's incentives are not geared to achieve these goals. Can these incentives be changed? If so, how?
If wealth is earned, not redistributed, how much wealth do you think young people should have? Wouldn't that be a function of merit, effort, experience, knowledge and skills?
Wealth is useful resources, nothing more. "Should" does not depend on any of those things you listed necessarily. It is one function of a healthy population for the older generation to bequeath and pass on resources onto the younger generation.
"Make the world a better place for your children"...in other words. That is not something the 40s-60s generation has done or seems to want to do.
"Earning" wealth is a function of the value system of the person asking the question. It is the wrong question.
You may as well ask the questions of older Americans and the US in general, which has burned through natural resources at more than their "fair share" relative to the global majority as well as present and future generations.
The US is like an exhausted coal mine, an aquifier drained to the extent of causing land sublimation, degraded soil being used artificially fertilized to produce poor quality food..
Simply imagine if the current generation had the resources and largesse of the previous generations.
And to answer your question specifically, if wealth is earned, the US would be at an enormous deficit to other countries, past generations and future generations. In terms of "earned" wealth, the US has enormously negative wealth.
If we are to consider the US without those debts to other peoples and countries, then wealth would be "earned" based on productivity.
Without first having that information in hand, it's not very productive or meaningful to hypothesize about what's fair. And I assume your old enough to know life isn't fair: climate and geography are unevenly distributed, along with eye-hand coordination, muscle mass, intelligence, creativity, energy, drive, culture, etc.
Based on energy consumption and per capita GDP, the U.S. is among the most productive nations on earth. If that bothers you, it's called capitalism, which has done more to lift the greatest number out of poverty than any alternative method for organizing an economy or any system of government in history.
Past generations owe nothing to future generations. We all come into the world crying, with a blank slate, and with equal opportunity (in America). We stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us, with the ability to build on their knowledge, skills and experiences.
Judging by the anti-capitalist mood in this comment thread, I note the mal-education imposed by our government education programs continues apace. Our giants appear to be shrinking.
The poor in America live better than the kings of only a couple hundred years ago. Longer life spans, greater literacy, less disease and famine, modern conveniences that would dazzle people from the 1700s. Rather than whine because someone tells us to be envious of others who are more successful, we should adjust our expectations or try harder.
We are alive at the best of all possible times, unless one liked heating with wood they had to chop, worrying if they had enough food that they had to grow or kill to last through winter and spring, and having to look out for predators (other than fellow human).
We have access to the knowledge of all mankind in the palm of our hand. We should make productive use of it, not waste our limited life energy envious of relative differences in wealth or income. There have always been rich and poor and there always will be. However, the successful don't get that way by stealing from others (Bernie Madoff wasn't successful in the end). We should all focus on being successful. No one is stopping us but ourselves.
New technology can be scary. AI is our generation's horseless carriage. We'll figure out how to put it to best use, or something like Terminator 3 and Sky Net will come to pass, at which point nothing really matters.
Have you considered the possibility the moon landing was faked, JFK was assassinated, and furthermore..the wealth that Kyla is speaking of is nominal. It is also, in many ways, fake. When you dismiss young people for being depressed, defeated, and dispirited...have you done the work of trying to understand them first?
Gerstle wrote the "rise and fall of the neoliberal order, what like 5 years ago already? I think this is an extended age of neoliberal decay, where renewal has been thwarted by the reactionary political moment and our broken political system.
There's a quote that sticks in my mind, I have no idea where I heard it "the nails are still growing on the cadaver". Neoliberalism is still zombie-around, nails still growing, rolling up wealth through extraction, financialization, and speculation (as you've written so well about) while it still can. The sad part is that Trump's white nationalism subsumed what should be a large chunk of a broad-based economic populist coalition.
Ooof what a quote! I do worry that so much of the economy is tilting towards taking rather than creating… I am hopeful we will see energy innovation with AI but am worried about that that energy will create. And the Trump point is interesting - people can be mobilized, but how can you mobilize them for something that won’t end up hurting them?
I read the paper you linked regarding our enshittified labor market (aptly described) and how a federal jobs guarantee could provide a floor for wages and labor standards. In the context of this substack, it’s positioned as a potential stabilizer in the wake of AI accelerated job loss. I found the paper overall pretty disappointing on the merits.
I’m genuinely concerned about the lack of serious proposals for how society can deal with the impact that AI is going to have on jobs. The current impacts you describe here are only the beginning. To me, this seems like one of the most urgent economic issues of our time. But I’m disappointed in the lack of new scholarship or serious policy proposals for we might address it.
What do you think? Am I too pessimistic on the jobs guarantee ? Are you aware of any new scholarship for how we might address the unique challenges to the labor market caused by AI? I really do think we will need new ideas here, we can’t use 20th century labor policies to solve 21st century problems.
I’ve interviewed several people on this for some events and many say reskilling/jobs aren’t enough because the problem is purpose. I am pessimistic too. But that paper was one of the only ones Ive found that talks about the underlying problem, which is why I included it.
I’ll let you know. Your article was perfect my module on the Faltering American Dream, which I created because many of my students 20-30 were expressing fear and anxiety about entering the job market.
Brilliant, Kyla! Such great thinking and observation. There’s no easy road to the other side of this. So glad you’re here with a lantern in the darkness.
1. You are establishing yourself as the economic voice of this generation. As an "old guy" rolling up on 60, I hear many of my cohort say "well, they [young folk] should just... [get a better job, not take out student loans, find low cost housing, etc]" and I tell them "go read Kyla Scanlon... I'll wait."
2. I've been a software developer since the late 1980's. Written thousands of lines of code. My job changed irrevocably a year ago. I have hardly written a line of code since. Problems that would've taken me a month before now get solved, by the AI, in an hour. This is incredibly liberating for me, but I don't see how the junior folks avoid getting wiped out. Over the past year, I've tried to help several young people just out of university get jobs and it's just impossible for them. 4 years ago, their parents told them "get a job writing code - it's the future." That future is looking pretty bleak now.
3. You are focused on the thing that matters more than anything else when it comes to jobs: a sense of purpose. As Voltaire said: "Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need." Of those, "need" is actually the easiest to solve. Instead of panicking about having fewer workers to pay into programs like Social Security, we can, as Bill Gates said a number of years back, "tax the robots." "Vice" can be handled legally (or not handled at all, depending on culture - yes, Dutch people, I'm looking at you ;-)). But it is "boredom" (or "purpose") that is the "almost impossible" one to solve without having a meaningful occupation. And this brings up a wider societal point that is beyond the scope of this discussion: maybe we simply have far, far, far too many human beings on this planet, in general, for there to be enough "meaningful work", assuming that the AI and attendant accelerating developments in robotics continue apace. But, then again, this could be my 'anti-natalist' bias showing ;-).
In any case, continue your great work - you always raise issues that I'm thinking about and talking with friends about days and weeks later.
Meaning and purpose are often rooted in belief in something greater than self.
Certain cults have endeavored to replace such beliefs with fealty to the cult, whether the cult of state power or of man made God in the form of an omniscient AI.
And here we are, thrashing about to find meaning in something greater than ourselves in ourselves.
I think part of the problem in dealing with these problems is that we aren't looking at the actual problems, only their manifestations, not their sources, like only being able to perceive a tesseract by its shadow. Here's what I'd look at too:
1. The problem with white men is that for 400 years they've been trained from birth to be narcissists even as every thumb has been put on the scale for them to reinforce their supposed supremacy. Now that the thumbs have been pulled off a bit, a significant percentage, perhaps 30%, not only can't compete, but doesn't think they should have to.
2. Since Reagan, the American ethos has been "everyone for themselves." Capitalism is no longer anti-socialism, it's anti-social.
3. Per your previous post, the ladders that enabled success have been kicked away, pulled up or had their lower rings removed in the name of efficiency and savings. Now we're in Horatio Alger's world of needing a patron to lift you up.
4. We're still a slave nation culturally, institutionally, socially, morally and in terms of infrastructure. We just don't have slaves formally. We do have prisoners, though, who, like the enslaved, are monetized and securitized. And most people are treated the same way. (I still can't get over the fact that the basic office cube is the size of a prison cell. Or vice versa.)
5. With all our national resources claimed and extracted, the American people are the new mines to be exploited. Used to be during the '80s, if you weren't stealing you were leaving money on the table. Now it's, if you're not gouging.
6. America is old. It can sprawl, but it can't reinvent or rebuild (except, as always, to displace poor people, for rich white people). I say this as some who was at a Paris sidewalk cafe recently and realized such a charming place could never work in New York for a dozen reasons.
Basically, if America is an idea, it's become a really crummy one that serves only today's equivalent of Virginia plantation owners. How can we change this?
Hearing you simply alone crying in an ancient stone tower feels right to me. I’m an old fart, my ancestors emigrated from County Cavan and elsewhere in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries settling in Annapolis and Tennessee. My career was making and fixing buildings. I’m as worried about opportunity for prosperity for youth and really everyone. My daughter Jean struggled with the questions you raise and despite her enthusiasm, capability and deep friendships ultimately despaired ending her life last 4th of July. I want to help others, always have I guess. What is to be done?
I do not know, but reading your work gives me hope that together we will find the answers.
With all the focus to AI, I miss the fact that many layoffs just make room to hire cheaper foreign workers chained by a work visa. Sometimes AI is just sugar coating greed.
But that's a side story. The main story is cultural failure. Younger countries have just not yet gotten to that point. Perhaps they learn in time, perhaps they don't. The population shrinks, resources are limited, yet growth is the universal answer. Debt grows in the belief that the economy will catch up in growth. That there will be a new giant resource after oil to power everything: AI. That is will be fine, like in the end it always was.
Except it wasn't. How many cultures and nations, how many currencies, are only remembered by history? Facing that, people still think their nation, their currency is the best of all and will last forever. The patterns of beginning, growth, peak and failure do not repeat, but they rhyme. Aristotle describes democracy turning to oligarchy and then to revolution and breakdown. If that sound familiar, then you agree nothing has changed since. The conclusion is inevitable.
My family descends from McMillans in Scotland and my wife is a descendant of McCarthy's in Ireland. We have also visited Kilkenny castle and it is indeed beautiful, as is the town itself.
It strikes me that we are experiencing a modern-day version of the Gilded Age of the 1870's, in which wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs who seem oblivious to the fact that the fate of their success is directly tied to the welfare of the people from whom their wealth is derived. The Gilded Age eventually ended by a painful recession, but also as a result of social outrage, political reform and the rise of labor unions. I wonder if you see similarities in current times to the Gilded Age and what you might foresee will end this modern day gilded age.
PS/Your writing is some of the most insightful available today.
Re extraction vs building: there’s a good anecdote (I think in Gibbon) that in the 300s the Romans had to recycle a few old victory arches to make one for Constantine. They claimed this was to associate his reign with history, but lowkey they could not find the craftsmen to build one from scratch.
This touches on our tendency to lean on history when we stop building new things. Also touches on the only viable path wealth building being one of reshuffling old goods.
Wow! What a journey. Thanks for taking us along.
Of course, we need to address inequality by moving the invisible wealth into our local systems.
Maybe we can re-frame "wealth taxes" into "system builders" and "make the wealthy feel good again."
The words we use to talk about policy certainly make a difference
But don’t we have them already? Aren’t property taxes already wealth taxes? My income is quite low as an artist, but I own two rural buildings whose value has dramatically increased and I pay far more in property taxes than I pay in income taxes. I was looking into moving into Italy, and it seems I get a deduction for my property taxes against their wealth taxes. Because they understand it’s the same thing. Of course you could add a wealth tax to financial investments, yes.
Wealth taxes make sense when the wealth is used to generate income, they aren’t always productive when the “wealth” is used for necessities like personal shelter and their valuation is dependent on demand and a competitive market you have no control over. Stupid for taxes to go up on your place you live in because blackstone bought a bunch of appartments nearby.
I think a hidden part of this discussion lies in how the process of accumulating and storing wealth fundamentally changes how your brain functions. Greed, or another mental health description one could better devise, should be an official mental illness and documented/treated as such. I've come from privilege and have had a front row seat for most of my life to what happens when people accumulate or are born with massive resources. Very few are immune to these effects. I've chosen many paths towards rejecting this wealth, for better and for worse.
Until we address (or force) this fundamental human nature problem, I believe we'll continue to see forces oppose disbanding and re-distributing all the invisible wealth of the world towards building real prosperity for all.
In a lot of ways, greed is the invisible mental illness that is shrouding the invisible economy in America. Everyone can easily acknowledge that hoarding common things is rooted in mental illness, we even have TV shows about it. Yet when you hoard wealth and money you are somehow intelligent, lucky, strategic, and worth praise. It is the same mental illness on different levels of privilege and access.
Greed is motivational and incentivizing.
You seem to be conflating it with envy, which is selfish and covetous.
Thanks for sharing this Max. Very insightful. I think this is super important to consider when evaluating the behavior of the massively wealthy who control our politics and major companies. Even worse, I fear we're now poising people's minds with crypto 24/7 investing and just creating hordes of young gamblers who have no other hope to make a living.
Agreed. (Pun intended) the article didn't mention it, but that was the word I was looking for.
I am 74 and came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. And, I'm a refugee from the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union in late 1956. We settled in Florida in 1957. Although the America of today is a far wealthier, far more diverse, and far larger nation than it was in 1957, what seems to be missing is an optimistic faith in the future. Kennedy's call to public service ("Ask not what your country can do for you...etc..."); the race to the moon landing; the wonderful world of the future in the Jetsons cartoon, and so on. Even though today's world is very challenging, it seems that what's missing in our leadership class is a sense of national mission and the ability to articulate it clearly to ALL Americans - not just to our "tribe" or political party. I meet so many smart young people who seem depressed, defeated, and dispirited. I direct them to smart people such as yourself and I thank you for your wonderful work.
Thank you! Yes my grandparents came over around the same time and had the same optimism - life was hard, but things could get done. I see some of that these days and am hopeful that more and more people who can express the need for a collective run for office. But I agree, some of it is bleak.
My suspicion is that young, talented people are being held back by expectations from society and our existing system that are actually insufficiently challenging. A system not geared to solving big problems. A recent poll asked kids what they wanted to be when they grow up. A shocking percentage said, "influencer." Huh?!? What about tackling climate change? Ridding the world of plastic? Ending world poverty? Proving cheap, clean energy to everyone? I realize that the answer is likely that our economic system's incentives are not geared to achieve these goals. Can these incentives be changed? If so, how?
Your suspicion is incorrect. Young people are held back by lack of real wealth, nto some nebulous lack of challenge.
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/are-you-an-american
If wealth is earned, not redistributed, how much wealth do you think young people should have? Wouldn't that be a function of merit, effort, experience, knowledge and skills?
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/are-you-an-american
Wealth is useful resources, nothing more. "Should" does not depend on any of those things you listed necessarily. It is one function of a healthy population for the older generation to bequeath and pass on resources onto the younger generation.
"Make the world a better place for your children"...in other words. That is not something the 40s-60s generation has done or seems to want to do.
"Earning" wealth is a function of the value system of the person asking the question. It is the wrong question.
You may as well ask the questions of older Americans and the US in general, which has burned through natural resources at more than their "fair share" relative to the global majority as well as present and future generations.
The US is like an exhausted coal mine, an aquifier drained to the extent of causing land sublimation, degraded soil being used artificially fertilized to produce poor quality food..
Simply imagine if the current generation had the resources and largesse of the previous generations.
And to answer your question specifically, if wealth is earned, the US would be at an enormous deficit to other countries, past generations and future generations. In terms of "earned" wealth, the US has enormously negative wealth.
If we are to consider the US without those debts to other peoples and countries, then wealth would be "earned" based on productivity.
Michael,
Define fair share.
Who decides?
Without first having that information in hand, it's not very productive or meaningful to hypothesize about what's fair. And I assume your old enough to know life isn't fair: climate and geography are unevenly distributed, along with eye-hand coordination, muscle mass, intelligence, creativity, energy, drive, culture, etc.
Based on energy consumption and per capita GDP, the U.S. is among the most productive nations on earth. If that bothers you, it's called capitalism, which has done more to lift the greatest number out of poverty than any alternative method for organizing an economy or any system of government in history.
Past generations owe nothing to future generations. We all come into the world crying, with a blank slate, and with equal opportunity (in America). We stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us, with the ability to build on their knowledge, skills and experiences.
Judging by the anti-capitalist mood in this comment thread, I note the mal-education imposed by our government education programs continues apace. Our giants appear to be shrinking.
The poor in America live better than the kings of only a couple hundred years ago. Longer life spans, greater literacy, less disease and famine, modern conveniences that would dazzle people from the 1700s. Rather than whine because someone tells us to be envious of others who are more successful, we should adjust our expectations or try harder.
We are alive at the best of all possible times, unless one liked heating with wood they had to chop, worrying if they had enough food that they had to grow or kill to last through winter and spring, and having to look out for predators (other than fellow human).
We have access to the knowledge of all mankind in the palm of our hand. We should make productive use of it, not waste our limited life energy envious of relative differences in wealth or income. There have always been rich and poor and there always will be. However, the successful don't get that way by stealing from others (Bernie Madoff wasn't successful in the end). We should all focus on being successful. No one is stopping us but ourselves.
New technology can be scary. AI is our generation's horseless carriage. We'll figure out how to put it to best use, or something like Terminator 3 and Sky Net will come to pass, at which point nothing really matters.
Have you considered the possibility the moon landing was faked, JFK was assassinated, and furthermore..the wealth that Kyla is speaking of is nominal. It is also, in many ways, fake. When you dismiss young people for being depressed, defeated, and dispirited...have you done the work of trying to understand them first?
https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/was-whitey-on-the-moon
Shoot me now…
Gerstle wrote the "rise and fall of the neoliberal order, what like 5 years ago already? I think this is an extended age of neoliberal decay, where renewal has been thwarted by the reactionary political moment and our broken political system.
There's a quote that sticks in my mind, I have no idea where I heard it "the nails are still growing on the cadaver". Neoliberalism is still zombie-around, nails still growing, rolling up wealth through extraction, financialization, and speculation (as you've written so well about) while it still can. The sad part is that Trump's white nationalism subsumed what should be a large chunk of a broad-based economic populist coalition.
Ooof what a quote! I do worry that so much of the economy is tilting towards taking rather than creating… I am hopeful we will see energy innovation with AI but am worried about that that energy will create. And the Trump point is interesting - people can be mobilized, but how can you mobilize them for something that won’t end up hurting them?
Yes - instead of focusing on problems like affordable housing, etc., we’re mesmerized by the Epstein files and other sideshows of social decay.
Another beautiful essay Kyla. What an amazing talent and thoughtful mind! Thanks so much for the inspiration!
Thank you! And thanks for the support!
I read the paper you linked regarding our enshittified labor market (aptly described) and how a federal jobs guarantee could provide a floor for wages and labor standards. In the context of this substack, it’s positioned as a potential stabilizer in the wake of AI accelerated job loss. I found the paper overall pretty disappointing on the merits.
I’m genuinely concerned about the lack of serious proposals for how society can deal with the impact that AI is going to have on jobs. The current impacts you describe here are only the beginning. To me, this seems like one of the most urgent economic issues of our time. But I’m disappointed in the lack of new scholarship or serious policy proposals for we might address it.
What do you think? Am I too pessimistic on the jobs guarantee ? Are you aware of any new scholarship for how we might address the unique challenges to the labor market caused by AI? I really do think we will need new ideas here, we can’t use 20th century labor policies to solve 21st century problems.
I’ve interviewed several people on this for some events and many say reskilling/jobs aren’t enough because the problem is purpose. I am pessimistic too. But that paper was one of the only ones Ive found that talks about the underlying problem, which is why I included it.
What a remarkable post! Thank you! I will assign it to my students.
Thanks! I'll be curious what they think.
I’ll let you know. Your article was perfect my module on the Faltering American Dream, which I created because many of my students 20-30 were expressing fear and anxiety about entering the job market.
Brilliant, Kyla! Such great thinking and observation. There’s no easy road to the other side of this. So glad you’re here with a lantern in the darkness.
Thank you!
Kyla this is so wonderfully written - keep it up.
I'm a recent subscriber. Three points:
1. You are establishing yourself as the economic voice of this generation. As an "old guy" rolling up on 60, I hear many of my cohort say "well, they [young folk] should just... [get a better job, not take out student loans, find low cost housing, etc]" and I tell them "go read Kyla Scanlon... I'll wait."
2. I've been a software developer since the late 1980's. Written thousands of lines of code. My job changed irrevocably a year ago. I have hardly written a line of code since. Problems that would've taken me a month before now get solved, by the AI, in an hour. This is incredibly liberating for me, but I don't see how the junior folks avoid getting wiped out. Over the past year, I've tried to help several young people just out of university get jobs and it's just impossible for them. 4 years ago, their parents told them "get a job writing code - it's the future." That future is looking pretty bleak now.
3. You are focused on the thing that matters more than anything else when it comes to jobs: a sense of purpose. As Voltaire said: "Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need." Of those, "need" is actually the easiest to solve. Instead of panicking about having fewer workers to pay into programs like Social Security, we can, as Bill Gates said a number of years back, "tax the robots." "Vice" can be handled legally (or not handled at all, depending on culture - yes, Dutch people, I'm looking at you ;-)). But it is "boredom" (or "purpose") that is the "almost impossible" one to solve without having a meaningful occupation. And this brings up a wider societal point that is beyond the scope of this discussion: maybe we simply have far, far, far too many human beings on this planet, in general, for there to be enough "meaningful work", assuming that the AI and attendant accelerating developments in robotics continue apace. But, then again, this could be my 'anti-natalist' bias showing ;-).
In any case, continue your great work - you always raise issues that I'm thinking about and talking with friends about days and weeks later.
Meaning and purpose are often rooted in belief in something greater than self.
Certain cults have endeavored to replace such beliefs with fealty to the cult, whether the cult of state power or of man made God in the form of an omniscient AI.
And here we are, thrashing about to find meaning in something greater than ourselves in ourselves.
This is all great, especially the book rec.
I think part of the problem in dealing with these problems is that we aren't looking at the actual problems, only their manifestations, not their sources, like only being able to perceive a tesseract by its shadow. Here's what I'd look at too:
1. The problem with white men is that for 400 years they've been trained from birth to be narcissists even as every thumb has been put on the scale for them to reinforce their supposed supremacy. Now that the thumbs have been pulled off a bit, a significant percentage, perhaps 30%, not only can't compete, but doesn't think they should have to.
2. Since Reagan, the American ethos has been "everyone for themselves." Capitalism is no longer anti-socialism, it's anti-social.
3. Per your previous post, the ladders that enabled success have been kicked away, pulled up or had their lower rings removed in the name of efficiency and savings. Now we're in Horatio Alger's world of needing a patron to lift you up.
4. We're still a slave nation culturally, institutionally, socially, morally and in terms of infrastructure. We just don't have slaves formally. We do have prisoners, though, who, like the enslaved, are monetized and securitized. And most people are treated the same way. (I still can't get over the fact that the basic office cube is the size of a prison cell. Or vice versa.)
5. With all our national resources claimed and extracted, the American people are the new mines to be exploited. Used to be during the '80s, if you weren't stealing you were leaving money on the table. Now it's, if you're not gouging.
6. America is old. It can sprawl, but it can't reinvent or rebuild (except, as always, to displace poor people, for rich white people). I say this as some who was at a Paris sidewalk cafe recently and realized such a charming place could never work in New York for a dozen reasons.
Basically, if America is an idea, it's become a really crummy one that serves only today's equivalent of Virginia plantation owners. How can we change this?
Sorry for the long post.
Is this the fruit of mal-education, blaming the patriarchy because succeeding on merit isn't your thing?
Maybe adjust your expectations to match your talent, or work to improve your talents. Resist the temptation to spit in the face of meritocracy.
America did not invent slavery, but it was the first nation to abolish it. It is still practiced in many countries in Africa.
And if you think America is racist, you've obviously never been to China or Japan.
The concept of racism is also a head scratcher, given that among homo sapiens, there is only one race: human.
Culture, not (socially constructed) race.
"Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal."
~ Thomas Sowell
Dear Kyla,
Hearing you simply alone crying in an ancient stone tower feels right to me. I’m an old fart, my ancestors emigrated from County Cavan and elsewhere in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries settling in Annapolis and Tennessee. My career was making and fixing buildings. I’m as worried about opportunity for prosperity for youth and really everyone. My daughter Jean struggled with the questions you raise and despite her enthusiasm, capability and deep friendships ultimately despaired ending her life last 4th of July. I want to help others, always have I guess. What is to be done?
I do not know, but reading your work gives me hope that together we will find the answers.
Dean, I am so sorry for your loss, and really a loss for all of us.
“If he’s admitting something is failing, you know, something to watch.”
This isn’t a grammatically correct sentence. 🤷♂️ FYI.
Thanks for catching that! Have fixed it.
With all the focus to AI, I miss the fact that many layoffs just make room to hire cheaper foreign workers chained by a work visa. Sometimes AI is just sugar coating greed.
But that's a side story. The main story is cultural failure. Younger countries have just not yet gotten to that point. Perhaps they learn in time, perhaps they don't. The population shrinks, resources are limited, yet growth is the universal answer. Debt grows in the belief that the economy will catch up in growth. That there will be a new giant resource after oil to power everything: AI. That is will be fine, like in the end it always was.
Except it wasn't. How many cultures and nations, how many currencies, are only remembered by history? Facing that, people still think their nation, their currency is the best of all and will last forever. The patterns of beginning, growth, peak and failure do not repeat, but they rhyme. Aristotle describes democracy turning to oligarchy and then to revolution and breakdown. If that sound familiar, then you agree nothing has changed since. The conclusion is inevitable.
My family descends from McMillans in Scotland and my wife is a descendant of McCarthy's in Ireland. We have also visited Kilkenny castle and it is indeed beautiful, as is the town itself.
It strikes me that we are experiencing a modern-day version of the Gilded Age of the 1870's, in which wealth is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs who seem oblivious to the fact that the fate of their success is directly tied to the welfare of the people from whom their wealth is derived. The Gilded Age eventually ended by a painful recession, but also as a result of social outrage, political reform and the rise of labor unions. I wonder if you see similarities in current times to the Gilded Age and what you might foresee will end this modern day gilded age.
PS/Your writing is some of the most insightful available today.
Re extraction vs building: there’s a good anecdote (I think in Gibbon) that in the 300s the Romans had to recycle a few old victory arches to make one for Constantine. They claimed this was to associate his reign with history, but lowkey they could not find the craftsmen to build one from scratch.
This touches on our tendency to lean on history when we stop building new things. Also touches on the only viable path wealth building being one of reshuffling old goods.