Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens argues that it is perhaps more accurate not think of humanity domesticating grain but grain domesticating humanity! Human life was radically altered for the benefit of the grain reproductive cycle.
My 9 year old daughter read Unstoppable Us and is currently reading Unstoppable Us 2, which is basically a children's version of Sapiens. The second book is mostly about the agricultural revolution (it's positives and negatives) and is pretty good. I recommend it for any parent who think their kids get too much of the "everything is horrible and getting worse" narrative that seems so pervasive today.
Every time we solve a problem, we transform it into a new, more nuanced, more complex, more challenging problem. And I think this is an *optimistic* view of the world, no joke. This is in large part because we do in fact keep knocking them down. A human without a problem to solve is just a really expensive monkey.
It is not in vogue to think in these terms, but in fact, the adoption of the internal combustion engine was a monumental environmental *achievement* in the early 20th century. It meant that city streets were no longer ankle-deep in horse shit, which posed obvious, severe, immediate environmental consequences.
In doing so, of course we began to release gigatons of long-buried fossil carbon, and I do not downplay the importance of mitigating the effects of that, and moving away from releasing even more. But fellow 80s kids, remember the spooky specter of acid rain? Or the ozone hole? Both remembered mostly in the past tense?
We encounter problems and solve them in novel ways, not through thousands or millions of years of evolutionary fumbling and tinkering, but consciously and with intentionality. To me, it is the defining characteristic of the human condition.
“ But fellow 80s kids, remember the spooky specter of acid rain? Or the ozone hole? Both remembered mostly in the past tense?”
I agree with this, so long as you are citing them in order to show what we can accomplish through concerted international effort. Sometimes people cite them as though they were false alarms or prove that global warming is exaggerated. Which is a gross misunderstanding.
The ozone hole and acid rain were solved technically, by finding new refrigerants and reducing NOx emissions, and through legislation and treaties that enforced the introduction of the new technologies. We had to work hard to solve them, and we had to overcome resistance from naysayers.
So, it’s important to learn the right lesson from those episodes: action is needed on both the scientific side and the governmental side.
Thanks! I like your techno-optimist approach. But it’s hard to engineer all the problems away when one party is committed to saying there is no problem and it’s a hoax. That’s not an engineering problem, and it’s a hard one.
My more pessimistic view is that all our problem solving leads to more and more complexity that's out of our control. Systems incrementally grow and interconnect with other systems until their complexity is beyond any human intellectual capacity or resources to comprehend them. AI might possibly help us out with this, but that cure may be worse than the disease—since black-box AI approaches for managing complex systems would achieve an even greater level of incomprehensibility.
As an every-day example, I see this in user interfaces and operating systems: most of the operating systems we deal with daily have layers and layers of complexity that, at any rate, are not documented, at least for us users. If we need to solve a software problem, we're forced to go to "user communities" who have more experience with "what worked to make the problem go away" but are otherwise pretty much clueless. It's easier for Microsoft and Apple to let non-security, non-showstopper glitches live forever.
But the complexity of software is not just an artifact of software; it's an artifact of the Apple and Microsoft corporate systems, which are in turn controlled by the world's financial and economic systems. Attractive ("cool") if un-needed new features (corporate growth=survival) and cybersecurity have priority over any possible bottom-up rebuilding, code cleanup, and fixing bugs at their source rather than slapping together some workaround.
Could be. In a similar vein, as I said elsewhere today, maybe we'll someday get to the point where it takes somebody's whole career just to learn what's already been done.
But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct.
"But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct."
That feels a little too tidy. Perhaps *you* won't solve it, but somebody who listens to the critique might. Not that I recommend it as a life approach, but I'm leery of completely dismissing radical pessimism.
"But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct." - A pithy and valid statement, but I'm more wary of engaging in mental self-censorship.
Here's an Asimov short story, The Feeling of Power, about where increasing reliance on technology could lead (I think it's a little silly but probably has a kernel of truth): https://urbigenous.net/library/power.html
Thousands of food influencers claim to dispense original dietary advice about processed foods and seed oils. But Michael pollen had that dialed in years before without any of the weirder conspiracies. The man is a true legend.
I feel like the best food advice is actually strikingly banal and no one would make any money selling it.
I lost a lot of weight sort of inspired by pollan with a diet of cook for myself and eat your vegetables and work out six days a week and literally no one wants to hear it.
Like the number of times I’d have a conversation where they’re like how’d you lose all that weight and I said I ate a lot of vegetables and ran 20 miles a week and lifted 2x and they changed the subject was in the dozens.
Undoubtedly they were hoping for more of a magic bullet than "I eat less of the types of things I used to like to consume, and dedicate several hours each week to fitness". Hell, I want that magic solution too.
It may be redundant with what you're reading, but here's a relevant substack on language from an occasional SB poster that I quite enjoy: https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/
If you want something more in depth if slightly dated, I highly recommend Ben Fortson's "Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction". Detailed and comprehensive but still very accessible even to laymen.
Those charts are all misleading because the period of exponential growth ended ~50 years ago. We harnessed sui generis technological improvements (particularly reliable production and combustion of fossil fuels, electrification, and germ theory) to have a sudden immense leap forward. But technological development has slowed tremendously in the past half-century; we picked all the low-hanging fruit. Sustained development in information technology (ie computers) has helped to shield people from that reality, but the impact of computing and the internet is vastly less consequential, in real world terms, than plumbing or food refrigeration or antibiotics. Paul Krugman's prediction about the internet actually turned out to be entirely true, in economic terms. And J. Robert Gordon put together a massive amount of evidence to demonstrate all of this in Rise & Fall of American Growth. Certainly the slowdown in growth rate and productivity improvements can't be argued with.
Subjectively, if you took someone from 1900 and teleported them to 1960, they'd find the world utterly transformed. If you took them from 1960 to 2020 they'd find a lot of refinement and a few real innovations but ultimately it would all be comprehensible to them. It's like when people put the iPhone at the top of most consequential inventions in history, which is a joke - try going one week without indoor plumbing and one week without your smartphone and see which is easier.
This is a very comfortable time to be alive, but it's not an era of great technological progress, and on that level we're likely to live in a period of profound mundanity for a long time.
I find it strange that you completely discount the impact of the internet when you would not have a job without it. I wouldn’t either! Might not show up in the productivity statistics but has clearly transformed the world and I don’t get the argument that it has not. Happy 4th!
I'm the happiest guy I know. I just know that pretending that YouTube is as consequential as vaccines or the hydrogen bomb or modern fertilizers just isn't a helpful way to think. Sure, the internet changes people's lives. But the whole point of this essay is to pull way, way back, and from the standpoint of history what's happened since 1970ish just can't hold a candle to what happen from 1910ish to 1960ish. I don't know why that would be an inflammatory observation, Sharty.
I think it’s absolutely true that 1910-1950 featured far more change than the longer period of 1950-2010. But I think it’s also quite plausible that some time in the past fifteen years or so we entered a new period that could be as transformative as that earlier period. Smartphones really have transformed a lot of basic human activities, from how we travel to how we find people to have sex with to how we fit our political views into the world.
I was watching some tv shows from the 60s and 70s and I think if you brought someone from there to now they would be as shocked as someone from 1900 brought to then. We don't think about the impact because its so gradual but the world now is nothing like it was in 2000.
I'm not sure that individual human lives are ultimately that different. Human nature is still the same as it has always been. The arc of a human life can certainly be different in terms of its content and opportunities, but our threescore and ten years here are still essentially the same: settling in or traveling, finding connection and community, living in society under some form of government.
For example, does my easier travel in more countries and regions provide me with more insights than traveling provided Darwin or Benjamin Franklin?
"I'm the happiest guy I know" could be a comment on who you hang out with more than your joy.
The impact of contemporary technologies may be hard to measure in the present. They're changing things in a very different way than prior ones, especially in terms of social change. Those changes could have profound impacts we don't suspect yet. We also don't know what AI and clean energy technologies will do.
Look the fact that you got that piece delivered to your laptop or phone wirelessly and instantaneously is no small thing and it's exactly the kind of good thing that a period of refinement delivers. And if you've got Hepatitis C or cystic fibrosis, the refinements of this period are very consequential indeed. The point is only that, when we do this explicit exercise - looking at humanity from the standpoint of 10,000 feet and considering the sweep of history in the grandest terms - it's hard not to conclude that an era of massive leaps forward in all manner of fields began in the early 1800sish and ended sometime in the second half of the 20th century. Statistical economic slowdown is a crude guide to that, but it is useful and reflects underlying trends. I'm very happy to live now because things are still getting better. But because of that low-hanging fruit I mentioned, people who lived in this 150ish-year period lived to see the world in a way that was just awe-inspiringly transformative, whereas in many core ways an American who reaches adulthood in 2020 will be living more or less the same material existence as one who reached adulthood in 1980. That's all!
Arguably the benefits of the digital revolution have been more profoundly felt in the developing world. The “era of massive leaps forward” in poverty reduction is still very much under way and the increased efficiencies in business processes are enabling that, either directly through better technology or indirectly, through wealth growth. I work with a software team across the Pacific Ocean, in Vietnam, which wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. And I suspect the material existence of their parents in 1982 was different from theirs today. But, yeah, no flying cars for us yet. 😁
In terms of human happiness I honestly think the internet has been a net negative. Yes, it has made our lives "easier" in a lot of ways but I think the negative impact on society has outweighed the positives.
There may be an analogy to agriculture there, many things are easier, but over all people’s lives are worse, and there is an extractive elite raking in unheard of wealth.
No Alexander, no Caesar, no Henry VIII, could even dream of compelling the extraction of wealth from the masses that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al have managed to do.
How many divisions does Zuckerberg have? How many cities has Bezos razed? How many nations does Musk rule? How many peasants have been massacred and enslaved?
This is unhinged. These men own several big houses each, they certainly have tremendous material wealth. But it was gained largely through trade and production of goods that people wanted. What has been compelled? And that wealth is a fraction of the wealth that has been created by them in the lives of other people.
Too many ding dongs act like commerce is zero sum and act like it’s identical to plundering conquerors.
Also Freddie has no idea about innovations in agricultural production that are driving improvements in yields year over year. Lots of those trends started mid century. Also the human genome project was huge for healthcare.
The key event was the first oil shock in 1973. Since then a tremendous effort has gone into making things more efficient. We’re not going to see radical change until we dramatically increase the amount of energy use per capita. If we get that figured out, and we will, we’ll be off to the races.
Right. The big leap was an exponential increase in our ability to harness and channel energy. Technologies to make use of coal, petroleum, natural gas, hydro, the strong force—along with widespread electrification—have been utterly transformative (so goes the theory) like nothing we've quite seen since. But most of the heavy lifting on these improvement had been achieved by 1950 or so. So progress, while seemingly dazzling since then because of how it has accumulated, has nonetheless been decidedly more incremental.
The next lurch forward perhaps awaits fusion. Or maybe solar/wind/batteries will get there first. But the point is, energy abundance was transformative for the better part of two centuries. The quicker we get re-acquire it the better.
I think fusion has the potential to be much more efficient than solar in terms of space used. This is important not just because even at 20% efficiency, solar panels would need 10k square miles to power the current US demand, but to really get a tech jump, you want to dramatically increase energy abundance. Imagine a world in which US power usage increases 10x, we don't want to have to use an area the size of Michigan to fulfill that.
Even if that were correct and I'm unconvinced, there would still be massive gains available just in making sure, to take one of your examples, everyone who wanted it actually had indoor plumbing, or clean water.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say “the period of exponential growth ended”? As Matt noted the period of “stagflation” still had more per capita growth than any other period in human history. If year-on-year growth is positive even by a small percent that is still exponential growth, and that seems to be the case with world-wide per capita growth. Are you just using “exponential” as an imprecise term for “big”? Or is there some evidence that there has been a change to linear (or some other function) growth?
It seems like you're discounting "having a repository of almost all of human knowledge at our fingertips" pretty heavily. Although to be fair, most people don't access or use that knowledge in a functional way.
I think it's the opposite of Death By 1000 Cuts: our lives are improved in millions of miniscule ways. I can build or fix or grow many many things that my ancestor in 1950 couldn't because I can easily access the knowledge of people who came before, or people who have specialized. I don't need to spend a hundred hours failing before I have a Eureka. I simply stand on the shoulders of the guy who knows how to build the thing already, and I can find that guy in seconds.
"Subjectively, if you took someone from 1900 and teleported them to 1960, they'd find the world utterly transformed. If you took them from 1960 to 2020 they'd find a lot of refinement and a few real innovations but ultimately it would all be comprehensible to them."
This observation seems much more related to order and tempo of development in the west than to other areas of the world. I think a person in China in the grip of the great famine in 1960 would find that more than "refinements" and a few innovations separated that time from China in 2020. I would also say that the leap from 1900 to 1960 in the west had as much to do with expanding the availability of core inventions as anything else. The electric motor and the electrical distribution system, indoor plumbing attached to sewage disposal, the internal combustion vehicle, subways, steel-framed skyscrapers, mechanical farming equipment, radio, asphalt-paved roads, the extraction and refinement of petroleum and dozens of other technologies we use every day existed in 1900, they just were not widely distributed (rigid-body aviation just missed the cut). Wider distribution and dispersion of these inventions (along with staggering improvements and refinements of them) was made possible by improved industrial productive capacity, which increased dramatically between 1900 and 1960, but not as dramatically as it increased between 1960 and 2020. Despite this, the latter period is characterized by the continued production and distribution of the technologies and capabilities already known to humanity by 1900, as well as the new technologies invented between 1900 and 1960 (jet engine, nuclear weapons and power, etc.), as well as new technologies invented between 1960 and 2020, which includes all of electronics, digital communication, space-based activity, and virtually all of what we would consider modern medicine, genetics and pharmacology. As a greater share of human productive capacity is devoted to making and distributing these pre-existing and "good enough" products and technologies to a rapidly expanding global population, a lesser share is devoted to "breakthrough" technologies to replace the good enough ones. So there is a path dependency at work in these comparisons -- as more good enough technologies from prior periods are carried forward into subsequent eras, the latter will inevitably tend to look more like the former. Sometimes this has tragic results, as with the continued reticence to displace fossil fuel techs, but it almost always has more to do with the economics of production and distribution than it has to do with the pace or volume of invention per se.
Yglesias talks about this: “It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?”
The curve of standard of living and tech rise may have flattened compared to 1870-1970 but is still a very steep curve compared to the past.
This seems to get it wrong. Although the internet has not lead to faster growth, there was growth which has been caused in part by the internet. The exponential growth has not stopped, we just don’t have super exponential growth anymore.
Yes, from 1919 to 1941 there was a period of technological growth likely to never be repeated barring a recursively improving AI, that doesn’t mean our current growth doesn’t exist. There’s no other period of time in the US or UK where you would see such transformation. The people of 1840 could understand 1900 and the people of 1780 could understand 1840 along with all the interpolations.
We pine for an anomaly within an anomaly despite almost no one alive experiencing it. I’d love 2-3% total factor productivity growth at the technological frontier but you’re going to be disappointed if that is your standard.
I agree that we've definitely been in a slow down period over the last couple of decades. However, it also seems like we're getting closer to the next series of break throughs - chiefly if we ever figure out fusion, AI, and DNA manipulation. Maybe we'll be at the cusp of those for the next hundred years, but it seems like we're getting closer to them.
*with the caveat that all three could destroy the modern world.
Making bacon wrapped hot dogs today, don’t listen to the haters who say not to use thick cut bacon, use a thicker hot dog, thick bacon and use toothpicks to ensure maximum dog adherence until it gets crispy enough to stay on the hotdog sans tooth pick.
I love history and found this to be a very interesting column, but as Paul Krugman often quotes, “ in the long run we are all dead.” And that’s the ultimate rub. The darkness of human history is the overhanging reality of our mortality. It drives some people to seek to extend lives, improve the fortunes of future generations but it also drives many people to seek pleasure and self gratification at the expense of others while they can. Look I get the thesis here, and most of what’s rolled up in your data is centuries of people just trying to survive, but the “exploiter class” (great term) has special powers, special visibility, and now, more than ever perhaps, outsized thundering voices. Russian oligarchs, American billionaires, Chinese party officials, they twizzle and turn the levers that move the curves you are displaying, at least in this time. And there is an urgency to force better choices, because in the long run ALL of us are dead.
My most woo woo take/belief is that we are all part of a collective consciousness and that we are more like clouds than anything else (we exist in a certain state for a certain amount of time, disperse and then regather.
It’s the closest I get to theology these days. I’m somewhere between Ram Dass, Duncan Trussell and Thich Nhat Hanh.
Bottom line: there has never been a better time to be alive for more humans everywhere in the world than right now. The future is obviously unknown but humans have (or have developed) the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, often after a bit of difficulty and a crisis or two. The concern I have is whether the pace of change is now or will soon out-run our collective ability to adapt (relatively peacefully) so that we can recover from th inevitable crises. Stay tuned, keep calm and carry on.
Honestly, it’s annoying AF that most of the really momentous political events in election years seem to happen right before our favorite pundits go on their big long happy summer vacations.
We need your hot takes and tweets, guys! Rest is for the non-pundit class!!
This article published right before I felt confident enough to start commenting, and I won't add a whole lot while I'm out of town for the holiday. I've always held decent but not absolute skepticism of the Diamond argument, and I think there were some good comments under the original article as a counterpoint. But if we do stipulate that Diamond's argument should be deemed correct, then that would mean that the European conquest of the Americas and other overwhelming hunter gatherer lands not only caused a lot of death and destruction, but it did so in the name of spreading a lower quality of life. That's not an argument I hear much about when critiquing what happened to those Indigenous societies.
I don't think one could call the Aztec and Incan empires hunter-gatherer societies. Maybe to some of the tribes in Northern America, but far from all of them (e.g., the Cahokian empire).
Agriculture, which is what lead or leads to the demise of hunter-gathering was invented and well established in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans showed up.
Tangential to your point, I was recalling all the stories from around Ben Franklin’s time of white people who’d been kidnapped by and then rescued from tribes ultimately running away to join the tribe again. (To say nothing of natives fleeing back to their tribes any chance they got.)
Looking at Matt’s graph, I wonder how much of that is because the average quality of life for the Europeans in America had yet to take off, and so the nomadic life of tribes was legit just better.
This brings to mind the discourse we've heard in recent years* about secular stagnation, and the slowdown of technological progress, and all the rest. I've often wondered whether there is some profound, very deep attribute of the physical universe (entropy?) that means technological progress is bound to slow down. Because to me it seems that way.
Mind you, it's easy to miss this, because technological improvements are cumulative. But in the broad scheme of things, humanity's new technologies and discoveries seems to be progressively *less* groundbreaking with the passage of time. Occasional breakthroughs will transpire that might accelerate progress, sure. But they're the exceptions to the trend. Consider: (1) stone tools (2) fire (3) boats (4) domestication of animals (5) the sail (6) agriculture (7) the wheel (8) metallurgy (9) writing (10) mathematics (11) crossbow (12) paper (13) movable type (14) compass (15) guns (16) sextant (17) steam engine/boats/railways (18) electrification (19) internal combustion engine (20) airplane (21) refrigeration (22) radio (23) motion pictures (24) TV (25) jet engine (26) antibiotics (27) nuclear technology (28) computers (29) chemotherapy (30) mobile telephony (31) internet (32) MRNA vaccines (33) LLMs.
When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?
There are exceptions, sure, and some of these are necessarily judgment calls, or are hard to measure. But the trend seems clear: although occasional, dramatic breakthroughs happen, the big new technologies tend to be less groundbreaking than those in our past.
(The largest countervailing force to the above reduction in the disruptiveness of innovation is the increasing *frequency* of the arrival of new innovations, even if they're often more incremental in nature. We've replaced radicality with regularity.)
*There was a lot of chatter about this phenomenon about the time the series Mad Men debuted—2007 IIRC. People were arguing whether the living standards of the US in 1960 had improved more in the preceding 47 years than had been the case in the 47 years before 2007. I'd say "yes!"
> When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?
Computers are probably up there with the technologies you mentioned. And the Industrial Revolution was bigger than the written word, and probably comparable to fire or agriculture.
Industrial Revolution vs. written word -- hmmm....maybe distinct axes of progress?
The written word made a bigger difference to the advancement of elite culture, but it was compatible with subsistence living for the 99%.
The IndRev made a greater difference to a greater number of people because it was essentially a phenomenon of *mass* production, of more and more units sold to more and more people.
Can we keep those distinct, i.e. the progress of the most fortunate vs. the progress of the majority?
(This raises a separate question, whether we could imagine an alternative history in which the IndRev had not been a mass phenomenon -- more and more technological advances, without ever making multiple copies.)
I think the latter question you pose is hard to answer in the affirmative. It conferred such monumental advantages in the real world that whoever accidentally stumbled upon the idea of making lots of X would radically outcompete anyone who didn't join them. Whether that would take a decade or a century, I don't know, but it seems close to inevitable.
That seems right in any world much like ours. To imagine the alternative, i.e. an IndRev without mass production, you have to go full sci-fi and imagine, I don't know, a priesthood of engineers who devote themselves to innovation without dissemination. Even then, it's hard to see how the details work -- how do you get the raw materials without large-scale mining, how do you do that without train-cars, and so on. "Close to inevitable" seems a fair assessment.
Yeah, jumping off from that prompt, somebody's still going to back-ass their way into spreading the technology, if only by accident or carelessness. Maybe not even the first time it's invented, but the second or third. It seems like trying to keep an invasive species out of an inviting virgin environment with ample resources and no predators. It's a question of when, not if.
>And the Industrial Revolution was bigger than the written word,
I don't think so. Rome and Han China operated highly sophisticated, advanced societies. They wouldn't exist without writing systems—without the ability to reliably and accurately record, accumulate, and pass on detailed information. But they could—and did—exist without modern industrial technology.
The industrial revolution has been an utterly dramatic transformation that has made humans a lot richer. But it hasn't been as integral to the existence of civilization itself as written language.
“…. civilization isn’t as important to the quality and character of human life as broadly shared wealth and prosperity.“
Yeah, that’s what was trying to get at by suggesting that there are distinct axes of progress, or at least distinct measures for the elite and the masses.
But does your formulation risk begging the question? “Broadly shared wealth and prosperity” are certainly vital to the quality and character of broadly shared lives, I.e. the median, mean, and modal human lives. But the quality and character of humanity, what it means to be human and what the species has accomplished, were affected by Michelangelo’s carving of the David, by Eudoxus’ general theory of proportions, by Cantor’s diagonalization argument, long before there were images of the David on the screens of our digital computers. What is “human life”? Perhaps something different from the average. Rephrasing Neil Armstrong, we can distinguish a small step for one guy from a giant leap for humanity.
When inventions are newly appeared it's impossible to gauge their (especially long-term) importance. The printing press was obviously super important, but its main function in its first many years was to mass print indulgences so the Church could maximize its revenues.
"When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?"
The really rapid pace of change occurred when we moved from hydrogen and helium to filling in the rest of the periodic table. Lithium -- bam! That made a big splash. Then it seemed like a speed-run through the rest of the metals. We were so excited over Boron, I don't think anyone really understood the implications of Carbon.
And looking back, in the very long run, I just don't think we've done anything as significant since then. When is the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as iron?
Does anyone (except maybe Silicon Valley techbros) really dispute the basic premise? If we have seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants, it doesn't seem implausible that there will come a time that it takes a smart person their entire career merely to fully comprehend the developments that have already taken place in their field.
No, think of being a doctor. If you look at an official medical license it says Physician and Surgeon. Because was back when the system was set up the scope of what medicine could do was so limited that one person could do it all. Now you have surgeons who only do certain types of surgery and only on, for example, right hands. And of course you have endocrinologist and cardiologists and neurologists and neurosurgeons and on and on.
Or think of the Wright brothers - they built the whole plane including the engines. Now an engineer might specialize is engine fuel to oil heat exchangers.
I like to think of knowledge as a sphere. As the boundary of knowledge gets pushed out further, people work in narrower and narrower cones to compensate, so you can still make it to the frontier of human knowledge by age 25, just in your own little slice. On the other hand something like calculus or evolution is impressive because underlies such a broad swathe of human knowledge, but is not actually that difficult to discover.
What I see as the problem is that coordinating between all these people working in their different silos is a social/communication problem, which we aren't actually all that good at. In the 1800s everyone was just friends with each other and wrote letters and it kinda worked out, but that's not scalable. Today we have things like Arxiv and Google Scholar, but I don't know what comes next to improve communication and coordination between researchers.
Cosigned bigly. Obviously there will never be another Euler; focus-narrowing has been happening for the entire age of science. It seems conceivable that we might eventually hit a limit because those cones just get too slim and sequestered. I don't think that'll happen in my lifetime, but in five hundred years, who's to say?
Perhaps. But it's at least as likely that within 500 years understanding of subjects ranging from quantum mechanics to black holes will have advanced to a point where discoveries are being made that we can't imagine now. Didn't the head of the US Patent Office once suggest in the late 19th Century that his agency be closed because everything useful had already been invented?
Well, just to focus on the Mad Men phenomenon for a bit: there was quite a bit of back and forth about this question when the series appeared. To me it seemed obvious at the time (2007) that less progress in raising material standards of living (in rich countries) had been accomplished since 1960 than in the 47 years prior (1913). Don Draper's 1960 life was remarkably, recognizably more similar to that of a UMC American in 2007 (no, not identical, but really quite similar) than would be the case if we compared his life to someone in 1913. But it was a surprisingly controversial take.
Anyway, that got me thinking: maybe if there is a slowdown in innovation, it's just a fundamental aspect of nature that is the rule more often than not. In other words, OF COURSE* productivity is slowing down: what we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries was a rare speed up, and now things are settling back into their more usual pattern.
*To be clear, I'm just presenting this line of reasoning; I'm not claiming I either accept or reject it. If I had to guess, I reckon secular stagnation (or at least slowdown) may well be valid. But I'm officially agnostic on the question.
“ Don Draper's 1960 life was remarkably, recognizably more similar to that of a UMC American in 2007 (no, not identical, but really quite similar) than would be the case if we compared his life to someone in 1913.”
An upper middle class/upper class guy like Don in 1913 would have had electricity, a car and a phone. AT&T went public as parent of the Bell Telephone System in 1899. The Ford Motor Company had been in business for a decade by 1913 and cars as a technology has been around for over a quarter century by then.
His wife would be fetching water from the well, heating it on a wood burning stove so they could cook or take baths, and spending most hours of most days cleaning clothes in it.
"His wife would be fetching water from the well...."
His wife or their servants. We forget how pervasive it was for wealthy people to have multiple servants. Agatha Christie, born in the UK middle class in 1890, wrote in the 1950s that she had never thought she would be so wealthy as to be able to afford a car, or so poor as not to be able to afford servants.
Just to give you some baseline for technology in 1913 - the first hotel in the US with indoor plumbing was the Tremont Hotel in Boston in 1829. Indoor plumbing was installed in the White House in 1833.
By 1853 they had had and cold running water in the family quarters.
Not for an UMC/rich guy in 1913 suburban NYC. They would have had electricity, a car, running water, a water heater, central heat, a phone. Electric washing machines had been on the market for a few years by then.
A year later the first home in America got air conditioning. The first modern AC system in a commercial building was installed in 1902.
I wasn't there at the time, but I suspect you're downplaying the utter reliability with which we treat these sorts of technologies in the modern era.
Kids these days don't remember driving down any random interstate and just seeing cars broken down *all over the place*. Every couple miles, like clockwork. Spraying your carb down and getting dirty and mad to eventually get the thing to fire up twenty minutes later. Now, off my lawn.
It’s still true that a majority of people in the United States didn’t have any of these things, and the upper middle class streetcar suburbanites who had them in 1913 would have had most of them for only a few years.
1913's Draper would have possessed *some* of the comfort's of 1960's Drapers. No argument. But nonetheless his life would not look nearly as similar to the latter's as the latter's would to 2007's.
In 1960 Don's daily life went something like this: Awoke in his four bedroom colonial in a suburban subdivision to an electric alarm device; took a shower using hot water likely heated by a system very similar to one in use in 2007; got dressed in a suit of clothes that would hardly look out of place a half century later; ate a breakfast prepared in a kitchen with highly similar electric appliances to those of 2007 including an electric stove, toaster and refrigerator; kissed his wife and kids goodbye (the latter of whom would soon board a yellow school bus, just as they would in 2007); drove a powerful ICE car with radial tires, power steering, power breaks, radio, etc; travelled 25 miles into the center of Manhattan; rode an elevator to an office suite in a 60 story skyscraper; talked to people all over the country as a regular matter of course and twice to a client in Europe; went back home; had a pizza delivered to his house; ate dinner; administered an antibiotic prescription to his son who was suffering a chest infection; watched a talking movie on a CRT, and then got a live late news report that featured a phoned in account from a journalist in London; had sex with his wife, who was taking a medication designed to prevent pregnancy; and then set his alarm for a bit earlier than usual because in the morning he had to catch a jet to Chicago.
This to me sounds vastly more like 2007 (or indeed 2024) than 1913. YMMV!
Other than the jet and the television all that happened in 1913. Executives in 1913 Long Island or NJ or CT drove to the train station and commuted into Manhattan and took elevators to their offices just like they did in 1960 and today. Electric fridges, toasters and ranges were available in 1913. Keep in mind JP Morgan’s townhouse was the first home in American to get electricity and that was in 1881.
I think you might be right, but it's a tricky thing to quantify. Like you list "agriculture" as one invention rather than many, even though modern farming would be almost unrecognizable to the people of 5,000 years ago. We also should consider the impact on an individual vs. society. Realizing one could take manure and spread it on crops might have improved the yield for a single farmer, but it took the Haber–Bosch process to scale up to feed billions.
I think that the perception of a slowdown of technological progress is an artifact of exactly the short-term perspective that Matt discusses here, and the sociological equivalent of becoming "velocitized", the danger that your Driver Ed teacher warned you about (mine certainly did) of losing the sense of going fast when you've been moving at high speed for a while.
The bulk of our technological progress has taken place over the last three hundred years -- and that's being pretty generous to the 18th Century. Four of the five innovations that provide the bones and sinews of modern societies -- Telegraphy, the Bessemer Process for producing steel, the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminum, and Telephony -- all date from the 19th Century, only Telegraphy from prior to 1850; the fifth, fully synthetic Plastics, is from the early 20th. All barely yesterday in the history of the species.
Instant communication by wire has been superseded by wireless, the Bessemer Process has been replaced by more precise and less polluting processes, and we are less dependent on the Hall-Héroult process because of strides in recycling secondary aluminum. From one point of view these changes can be perceived as incremental rather than disruptive in a technological sense, but their economic impacts, and so their impacts on people's lives, have often been much more profound and transformative. And here I'm mostly talking about our physical artifacts, without even bringing the ongoing digital revolution into it.
I live in Brazil. When I lived here the first time in the early 1970s, there was one international airport serving the fifth largest country on Earth. Landline telephone accounts were such valuable assets that people left them to their children in their wills. Letters on Air Mail paper to my family in the United States took two weeks in each direction. When I needed to talk to them telephone, I would send them a telegram with the date and time, go to the satellite telephone office at that time, and pay a deposit. The operator would send me to a cubicle with a table, a chair, and a phone, and connect the call. When we finished, I would get my deposit back because it was a collect call and leave.
I moved back in 2017. I've lost count of how many airports now provide international service.
Most people, even the poorest, have instant communication with the world through their cellphones. Most people, including me, do most of their banking through their phones; Brazilians under 40 have never seen a checkbook, and wouldn't recognize one. Our home internet is comparable to anywhere in North America or Europe. Today we made a video call from my computer to my brother for his birthday, instantly and without a second thought.
Humans are messy, and progress has stops and starts; we can't even all agree on what "progress" means. But I have a hard time seeing a case for technological stagnation.
I don't think that even the most blinkered antiquary would join in your contention that the bulk of our technological progress had been achieved by midway through the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 14-37), but that is precisely what your statement above says on its face.
Logically yes, it has to at some point simply from a laws of physics standpoint. E.g., once you invent controlled anti-matter reactions, it is no longer possible to make energy production any more efficient unless you discover entirely new physical laws.
In any given technological field, yes. But nothing precludes new fields from developing, or mature ones from being supplanted. It happens all the time.
I think your comment illustrates the general failure to understand the scale of human history Matt describes. You should fully expect many, many generations to come and go between inventions as large as fire or agriculture.
This sentence: “The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think.” reminded me of this blog post from historian and novelist Ada Palmer: https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/, particularly “In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress.” (I also highly recommend her novels.)
James Burke in the 1985 TV series "The Day the Universe Changed" made a similar point about how we (the audience today) just assume that people will keep discovering new things and developing more efficient technologies, but that was very much not the case for most of human history. (Sadly can't find a clip on YouTube with the exact quote.)
It's so good, but I recommend going back through the first few because my god the world and story are so baroque that it's very easy to forget who is who and what happened.
A book that totally changed my way of looking at things was ‘The Dawn of Everything’. It takes awhile setting up framing but once it gets into the history - the gift of it is that - based on the latest archeological findings - human society has been structured in vastly different ways. This is very different than our common understand of human history which really just posits a few (or even just a binary) choice(s). It made me realize how vast the possibilities for human civilization were and how much we lose by accepting only our current choices.
That book seems to have the same features of many of Graeber’s other books - he is great at critiquing standard stories, and finding interesting alternatives, but is then way too insistent that his alternative is absolutely certain. This review by Anthony Appiah seemed to me to do a good job of identifying aspects of all of that:
I would recommend reading "After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC" by Steven Mithen as a counterpoint to "The Dawn of Everything," which heavily cherrypicks examples to support the authors' political thesis.
When you start talking about history on such long time scales, it becomes necessary to think about the very difficult question of what humanity's purpose is or should be. In discussing the standard of living all the way back to before homo sapiens, Matt tacitly assumes that the degree of individual well-being is at least a decent proxy for whatever humanity's purpose is. This is probably pretty resonant with current liberal thought, although one does need to think about the role that population statistics play. Is it the well-being of the most well-off human that counts? The least well-off? The average? The median? The sum? Nevertheless, under many possible choices of statistic, humanity will be seen to have gone backward for a long time after the invention of agriculture.
I call myself a Conservative Democrat these days (owing to the death of the true Republican Party), and I do not subscribe to the thought that individual well-being is the ultimate human good. I think our goal is a collective one, to grow and spread as far and wide as we can. In mathematical terms, life is a local reduction of entropy, taking in energy and producing pattern. In the aftermath of the agricultural revolution, living standards declined, but the surge in population and cultural complexity counts as progress in my view. I'm not against individual well-being, but I view it as a means, not an end. A single dictator on top of a pile of serfs is not a very complex, dynamic, growth-oriented structure for society, and the recent rise in well-being has furthered our ability to pursue my version of humanity's purpose. But I am more likely than Matt to see an ebb and flow of living standards as compatible with steady collective progress.
It’s perfectly defensible to disavow any universal human purpose ordained by God or science or natural law, if such is your belief. But even absent that, there is still our own chosen purpose, whether it be unanimously agreed or not. If you don’t have even a personal opinion of what our purpose ought to be, you have nowhere to anchor any opinions you might have about what other people ought to do.
Correct; I absolutely consider humans and bacteria to be pursuing the same purpose, though humans are far ahead in the game. Or perhaps it is appropriate to include bacteria in our score, since we can’t really survive without them. Perhaps all of Earth’s biosphere, or at least a substantial subset of it, is properly part of our team, as the most efficient way for us to spread beyond our planet is to take much of it with us.
Really liked this when I first saw it and still do. I greatly admire dr Diamond but was always a little skeptical about the immiseration of the populace via agriculture, especially grain. Part of the problem is how crappy the evidence is, not too surprising considering the difficulty of the question. Turns out that in the past few years a guy has developed fancy new methods to analyze diet and reaches conclusions contrary to conventional wisdom. The methods are compelling. Don’t remember his name but if readers are interested I could figure it out.
Thanks again, Ms Yglesias, for entertaining me and also expanding my horizons. I believe I subscribed to this Substack on more or less day one. Best money I’ve spent. Happy fourth everyone!
I think it's a mistake to say "nothing much happened" during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans existed before the dawn of agriculture; rather, the things that happened during that period are largely unknown to us, because no archaeological evidence is left for them. We can know what kind of stone tools people were using 100,000 years ago, because stone tools are durable enough to survive and be observable to us now; we don't know what stories they told, what they believed, what their social norms looked like. All those things might have changed many times over, with many of those changes feeling incredibly momentous at the time, only to be forgotten after decades or centuries or millennia, leaving them utterly unknown to us now!
Also, the clothing and wood tools that people used might well have changed a lot more than we know, given that these things are perishable and rarely appear in the archaeological record.
Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens argues that it is perhaps more accurate not think of humanity domesticating grain but grain domesticating humanity! Human life was radically altered for the benefit of the grain reproductive cycle.
My 9 year old daughter read Unstoppable Us and is currently reading Unstoppable Us 2, which is basically a children's version of Sapiens. The second book is mostly about the agricultural revolution (it's positives and negatives) and is pretty good. I recommend it for any parent who think their kids get too much of the "everything is horrible and getting worse" narrative that seems so pervasive today.
Every time we solve a problem, we transform it into a new, more nuanced, more complex, more challenging problem. And I think this is an *optimistic* view of the world, no joke. This is in large part because we do in fact keep knocking them down. A human without a problem to solve is just a really expensive monkey.
It is not in vogue to think in these terms, but in fact, the adoption of the internal combustion engine was a monumental environmental *achievement* in the early 20th century. It meant that city streets were no longer ankle-deep in horse shit, which posed obvious, severe, immediate environmental consequences.
In doing so, of course we began to release gigatons of long-buried fossil carbon, and I do not downplay the importance of mitigating the effects of that, and moving away from releasing even more. But fellow 80s kids, remember the spooky specter of acid rain? Or the ozone hole? Both remembered mostly in the past tense?
We encounter problems and solve them in novel ways, not through thousands or millions of years of evolutionary fumbling and tinkering, but consciously and with intentionality. To me, it is the defining characteristic of the human condition.
“ But fellow 80s kids, remember the spooky specter of acid rain? Or the ozone hole? Both remembered mostly in the past tense?”
I agree with this, so long as you are citing them in order to show what we can accomplish through concerted international effort. Sometimes people cite them as though they were false alarms or prove that global warming is exaggerated. Which is a gross misunderstanding.
The ozone hole and acid rain were solved technically, by finding new refrigerants and reducing NOx emissions, and through legislation and treaties that enforced the introduction of the new technologies. We had to work hard to solve them, and we had to overcome resistance from naysayers.
So, it’s important to learn the right lesson from those episodes: action is needed on both the scientific side and the governmental side.
Yes, they go in the "problems mostly solved because we saw they were problems and then we mostly solved them" ledger.
Thanks! I like your techno-optimist approach. But it’s hard to engineer all the problems away when one party is committed to saying there is no problem and it’s a hoax. That’s not an engineering problem, and it’s a hard one.
My more pessimistic view is that all our problem solving leads to more and more complexity that's out of our control. Systems incrementally grow and interconnect with other systems until their complexity is beyond any human intellectual capacity or resources to comprehend them. AI might possibly help us out with this, but that cure may be worse than the disease—since black-box AI approaches for managing complex systems would achieve an even greater level of incomprehensibility.
As an every-day example, I see this in user interfaces and operating systems: most of the operating systems we deal with daily have layers and layers of complexity that, at any rate, are not documented, at least for us users. If we need to solve a software problem, we're forced to go to "user communities" who have more experience with "what worked to make the problem go away" but are otherwise pretty much clueless. It's easier for Microsoft and Apple to let non-security, non-showstopper glitches live forever.
But the complexity of software is not just an artifact of software; it's an artifact of the Apple and Microsoft corporate systems, which are in turn controlled by the world's financial and economic systems. Attractive ("cool") if un-needed new features (corporate growth=survival) and cybersecurity have priority over any possible bottom-up rebuilding, code cleanup, and fixing bugs at their source rather than slapping together some workaround.
One phrase that captures the idea is "More is Different." This is a simpler way of saying "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Someone here probably put me on to this series of posts, which provides some useful vocabulary and concepts for exploring the topic of complexity: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iwCRYnGYMvxgzrCMf/complex-systems-are-hard-to-control#control-difficulties-in-complex-systems
Could be. In a similar vein, as I said elsewhere today, maybe we'll someday get to the point where it takes somebody's whole career just to learn what's already been done.
But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct.
"But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct."
That feels a little too tidy. Perhaps *you* won't solve it, but somebody who listens to the critique might. Not that I recommend it as a life approach, but I'm leery of completely dismissing radical pessimism.
"But if you take the pessimistic worldview of "we can't solve this", you will *definitely* prove yourself correct." - A pithy and valid statement, but I'm more wary of engaging in mental self-censorship.
Here's an Asimov short story, The Feeling of Power, about where increasing reliance on technology could lead (I think it's a little silly but probably has a kernel of truth): https://urbigenous.net/library/power.html
Grain was just Felis Lybica's catspaw in the long game to dominate humanity!
Michael Pollan makes similar points about corn in the omnivores dilemma.
Thousands of food influencers claim to dispense original dietary advice about processed foods and seed oils. But Michael pollen had that dialed in years before without any of the weirder conspiracies. The man is a true legend.
I feel like the best food advice is actually strikingly banal and no one would make any money selling it.
I lost a lot of weight sort of inspired by pollan with a diet of cook for myself and eat your vegetables and work out six days a week and literally no one wants to hear it.
Like the number of times I’d have a conversation where they’re like how’d you lose all that weight and I said I ate a lot of vegetables and ran 20 miles a week and lifted 2x and they changed the subject was in the dozens.
Undoubtedly they were hoping for more of a magic bullet than "I eat less of the types of things I used to like to consume, and dedicate several hours each week to fitness". Hell, I want that magic solution too.
Banger book
Pollan also makes that point about all agriculture in The Botany of Desire (with chapters specifically about tulips, apples, cannabis, and potatoes).
Funny, he posited something similar about psilocybin mushrooms in How To Change Your Mind.
I'm also currently reading the book about the origins of Indo-European languages. My fellow nerd, I salute you.
I can only consume HWL in itty bitty bitty chunks. It is just way over my head.
Awesome book, but it makes my thinkmeat all goopy.
HWL?
https://www.amazon.com/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/0691058873
Thank you!
Thanks for beating to me to my own shorthand!
It may be redundant with what you're reading, but here's a relevant substack on language from an occasional SB poster that I quite enjoy: https://klaussimplifies.substack.com/
If you want something more in depth if slightly dated, I highly recommend Ben Fortson's "Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction". Detailed and comprehensive but still very accessible even to laymen.
Those charts are all misleading because the period of exponential growth ended ~50 years ago. We harnessed sui generis technological improvements (particularly reliable production and combustion of fossil fuels, electrification, and germ theory) to have a sudden immense leap forward. But technological development has slowed tremendously in the past half-century; we picked all the low-hanging fruit. Sustained development in information technology (ie computers) has helped to shield people from that reality, but the impact of computing and the internet is vastly less consequential, in real world terms, than plumbing or food refrigeration or antibiotics. Paul Krugman's prediction about the internet actually turned out to be entirely true, in economic terms. And J. Robert Gordon put together a massive amount of evidence to demonstrate all of this in Rise & Fall of American Growth. Certainly the slowdown in growth rate and productivity improvements can't be argued with.
Subjectively, if you took someone from 1900 and teleported them to 1960, they'd find the world utterly transformed. If you took them from 1960 to 2020 they'd find a lot of refinement and a few real innovations but ultimately it would all be comprehensible to them. It's like when people put the iPhone at the top of most consequential inventions in history, which is a joke - try going one week without indoor plumbing and one week without your smartphone and see which is easier.
This is a very comfortable time to be alive, but it's not an era of great technological progress, and on that level we're likely to live in a period of profound mundanity for a long time.
I find it strange that you completely discount the impact of the internet when you would not have a job without it. I wouldn’t either! Might not show up in the productivity statistics but has clearly transformed the world and I don’t get the argument that it has not. Happy 4th!
It's true - there were no writers before the internet.
Your mendacity and bitterness is eclipsed only by your bad faith.
I'm the happiest guy I know. I just know that pretending that YouTube is as consequential as vaccines or the hydrogen bomb or modern fertilizers just isn't a helpful way to think. Sure, the internet changes people's lives. But the whole point of this essay is to pull way, way back, and from the standpoint of history what's happened since 1970ish just can't hold a candle to what happen from 1910ish to 1960ish. I don't know why that would be an inflammatory observation, Sharty.
I think it’s absolutely true that 1910-1950 featured far more change than the longer period of 1950-2010. But I think it’s also quite plausible that some time in the past fifteen years or so we entered a new period that could be as transformative as that earlier period. Smartphones really have transformed a lot of basic human activities, from how we travel to how we find people to have sex with to how we fit our political views into the world.
I was watching some tv shows from the 60s and 70s and I think if you brought someone from there to now they would be as shocked as someone from 1900 brought to then. We don't think about the impact because its so gradual but the world now is nothing like it was in 2000.
I'm not sure that individual human lives are ultimately that different. Human nature is still the same as it has always been. The arc of a human life can certainly be different in terms of its content and opportunities, but our threescore and ten years here are still essentially the same: settling in or traveling, finding connection and community, living in society under some form of government.
For example, does my easier travel in more countries and regions provide me with more insights than traveling provided Darwin or Benjamin Franklin?
"I'm the happiest guy I know" could be a comment on who you hang out with more than your joy.
The impact of contemporary technologies may be hard to measure in the present. They're changing things in a very different way than prior ones, especially in terms of social change. Those changes could have profound impacts we don't suspect yet. We also don't know what AI and clean energy technologies will do.
Certainly there were no Substack writers! I liked your recent NYMag piece mental illness and involuntary commitment by the way.
Look the fact that you got that piece delivered to your laptop or phone wirelessly and instantaneously is no small thing and it's exactly the kind of good thing that a period of refinement delivers. And if you've got Hepatitis C or cystic fibrosis, the refinements of this period are very consequential indeed. The point is only that, when we do this explicit exercise - looking at humanity from the standpoint of 10,000 feet and considering the sweep of history in the grandest terms - it's hard not to conclude that an era of massive leaps forward in all manner of fields began in the early 1800sish and ended sometime in the second half of the 20th century. Statistical economic slowdown is a crude guide to that, but it is useful and reflects underlying trends. I'm very happy to live now because things are still getting better. But because of that low-hanging fruit I mentioned, people who lived in this 150ish-year period lived to see the world in a way that was just awe-inspiringly transformative, whereas in many core ways an American who reaches adulthood in 2020 will be living more or less the same material existence as one who reached adulthood in 1980. That's all!
Arguably the benefits of the digital revolution have been more profoundly felt in the developing world. The “era of massive leaps forward” in poverty reduction is still very much under way and the increased efficiencies in business processes are enabling that, either directly through better technology or indirectly, through wealth growth. I work with a software team across the Pacific Ocean, in Vietnam, which wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. And I suspect the material existence of their parents in 1982 was different from theirs today. But, yeah, no flying cars for us yet. 😁
In that case I will co-sign your claim
In terms of human happiness I honestly think the internet has been a net negative. Yes, it has made our lives "easier" in a lot of ways but I think the negative impact on society has outweighed the positives.
There may be an analogy to agriculture there, many things are easier, but over all people’s lives are worse, and there is an extractive elite raking in unheard of wealth.
No Alexander, no Caesar, no Henry VIII, could even dream of compelling the extraction of wealth from the masses that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al have managed to do.
How many divisions does Zuckerberg have? How many cities has Bezos razed? How many nations does Musk rule? How many peasants have been massacred and enslaved?
This is unhinged. These men own several big houses each, they certainly have tremendous material wealth. But it was gained largely through trade and production of goods that people wanted. What has been compelled? And that wealth is a fraction of the wealth that has been created by them in the lives of other people.
Too many ding dongs act like commerce is zero sum and act like it’s identical to plundering conquerors.
Also Freddie has no idea about innovations in agricultural production that are driving improvements in yields year over year. Lots of those trends started mid century. Also the human genome project was huge for healthcare.
These people are silly.
Attention consumed.
The key event was the first oil shock in 1973. Since then a tremendous effort has gone into making things more efficient. We’re not going to see radical change until we dramatically increase the amount of energy use per capita. If we get that figured out, and we will, we’ll be off to the races.
Right. The big leap was an exponential increase in our ability to harness and channel energy. Technologies to make use of coal, petroleum, natural gas, hydro, the strong force—along with widespread electrification—have been utterly transformative (so goes the theory) like nothing we've quite seen since. But most of the heavy lifting on these improvement had been achieved by 1950 or so. So progress, while seemingly dazzling since then because of how it has accumulated, has nonetheless been decidedly more incremental.
The next lurch forward perhaps awaits fusion. Or maybe solar/wind/batteries will get there first. But the point is, energy abundance was transformative for the better part of two centuries. The quicker we get re-acquire it the better.
(AI, of course, is a major elephant in the room.)
I think an under-explored potential future is "solar and storage get *so* cheap that manmade fusion is an economic dead-end, forever".
(this is distinct from it being my *prediction* per se)
Dyson Swarm FTW!
I think fusion has the potential to be much more efficient than solar in terms of space used. This is important not just because even at 20% efficiency, solar panels would need 10k square miles to power the current US demand, but to really get a tech jump, you want to dramatically increase energy abundance. Imagine a world in which US power usage increases 10x, we don't want to have to use an area the size of Michigan to fulfill that.
Has anybody ever found a better use for Michigan?
I have bad news for you. Earth's pretty much it.
Even if that were correct and I'm unconvinced, there would still be massive gains available just in making sure, to take one of your examples, everyone who wanted it actually had indoor plumbing, or clean water.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say “the period of exponential growth ended”? As Matt noted the period of “stagflation” still had more per capita growth than any other period in human history. If year-on-year growth is positive even by a small percent that is still exponential growth, and that seems to be the case with world-wide per capita growth. Are you just using “exponential” as an imprecise term for “big”? Or is there some evidence that there has been a change to linear (or some other function) growth?
I think Freddie makes claims about things he doesn’t even attempt to know.
It seems like you're discounting "having a repository of almost all of human knowledge at our fingertips" pretty heavily. Although to be fair, most people don't access or use that knowledge in a functional way.
I think it's the opposite of Death By 1000 Cuts: our lives are improved in millions of miniscule ways. I can build or fix or grow many many things that my ancestor in 1950 couldn't because I can easily access the knowledge of people who came before, or people who have specialized. I don't need to spend a hundred hours failing before I have a Eureka. I simply stand on the shoulders of the guy who knows how to build the thing already, and I can find that guy in seconds.
My parents are going to feel super old when I tell them I read "my ancestor in 1950" today.
"Subjectively, if you took someone from 1900 and teleported them to 1960, they'd find the world utterly transformed. If you took them from 1960 to 2020 they'd find a lot of refinement and a few real innovations but ultimately it would all be comprehensible to them."
This observation seems much more related to order and tempo of development in the west than to other areas of the world. I think a person in China in the grip of the great famine in 1960 would find that more than "refinements" and a few innovations separated that time from China in 2020. I would also say that the leap from 1900 to 1960 in the west had as much to do with expanding the availability of core inventions as anything else. The electric motor and the electrical distribution system, indoor plumbing attached to sewage disposal, the internal combustion vehicle, subways, steel-framed skyscrapers, mechanical farming equipment, radio, asphalt-paved roads, the extraction and refinement of petroleum and dozens of other technologies we use every day existed in 1900, they just were not widely distributed (rigid-body aviation just missed the cut). Wider distribution and dispersion of these inventions (along with staggering improvements and refinements of them) was made possible by improved industrial productive capacity, which increased dramatically between 1900 and 1960, but not as dramatically as it increased between 1960 and 2020. Despite this, the latter period is characterized by the continued production and distribution of the technologies and capabilities already known to humanity by 1900, as well as the new technologies invented between 1900 and 1960 (jet engine, nuclear weapons and power, etc.), as well as new technologies invented between 1960 and 2020, which includes all of electronics, digital communication, space-based activity, and virtually all of what we would consider modern medicine, genetics and pharmacology. As a greater share of human productive capacity is devoted to making and distributing these pre-existing and "good enough" products and technologies to a rapidly expanding global population, a lesser share is devoted to "breakthrough" technologies to replace the good enough ones. So there is a path dependency at work in these comparisons -- as more good enough technologies from prior periods are carried forward into subsequent eras, the latter will inevitably tend to look more like the former. Sometimes this has tragic results, as with the continued reticence to displace fossil fuel techs, but it almost always has more to do with the economics of production and distribution than it has to do with the pace or volume of invention per se.
This is sort of what Brad DeLong says, isn't it? The long 20th century ended in 2010 for him, though.
It’s hard to judge the effects of things while they happen. 2010 could have just been a false summit.
Yglesias talks about this: “It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?”
The curve of standard of living and tech rise may have flattened compared to 1870-1970 but is still a very steep curve compared to the past.
This seems to get it wrong. Although the internet has not lead to faster growth, there was growth which has been caused in part by the internet. The exponential growth has not stopped, we just don’t have super exponential growth anymore.
Yes, from 1919 to 1941 there was a period of technological growth likely to never be repeated barring a recursively improving AI, that doesn’t mean our current growth doesn’t exist. There’s no other period of time in the US or UK where you would see such transformation. The people of 1840 could understand 1900 and the people of 1780 could understand 1840 along with all the interpolations.
We pine for an anomaly within an anomaly despite almost no one alive experiencing it. I’d love 2-3% total factor productivity growth at the technological frontier but you’re going to be disappointed if that is your standard.
I agree that we've definitely been in a slow down period over the last couple of decades. However, it also seems like we're getting closer to the next series of break throughs - chiefly if we ever figure out fusion, AI, and DNA manipulation. Maybe we'll be at the cusp of those for the next hundred years, but it seems like we're getting closer to them.
*with the caveat that all three could destroy the modern world.
America. 🇺🇸💥
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
Making bacon wrapped hot dogs today, don’t listen to the haters who say not to use thick cut bacon, use a thicker hot dog, thick bacon and use toothpicks to ensure maximum dog adherence until it gets crispy enough to stay on the hotdog sans tooth pick.
💯 and it’s not like you’re gonna overcook the hot dog—just cook it til the bacon is done!
I love history and found this to be a very interesting column, but as Paul Krugman often quotes, “ in the long run we are all dead.” And that’s the ultimate rub. The darkness of human history is the overhanging reality of our mortality. It drives some people to seek to extend lives, improve the fortunes of future generations but it also drives many people to seek pleasure and self gratification at the expense of others while they can. Look I get the thesis here, and most of what’s rolled up in your data is centuries of people just trying to survive, but the “exploiter class” (great term) has special powers, special visibility, and now, more than ever perhaps, outsized thundering voices. Russian oligarchs, American billionaires, Chinese party officials, they twizzle and turn the levers that move the curves you are displaying, at least in this time. And there is an urgency to force better choices, because in the long run ALL of us are dead.
My most woo woo take/belief is that we are all part of a collective consciousness and that we are more like clouds than anything else (we exist in a certain state for a certain amount of time, disperse and then regather.
It’s the closest I get to theology these days. I’m somewhere between Ram Dass, Duncan Trussell and Thich Nhat Hanh.
Bottom line: there has never been a better time to be alive for more humans everywhere in the world than right now. The future is obviously unknown but humans have (or have developed) the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, often after a bit of difficulty and a crisis or two. The concern I have is whether the pace of change is now or will soon out-run our collective ability to adapt (relatively peacefully) so that we can recover from th inevitable crises. Stay tuned, keep calm and carry on.
I'm amused by Matt's failure to stick to his pledge to stop tweeting while on vacation https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1808924260338925792?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
And thank God for it!
Honestly, it’s annoying AF that most of the really momentous political events in election years seem to happen right before our favorite pundits go on their big long happy summer vacations.
We need your hot takes and tweets, guys! Rest is for the non-pundit class!!
This article published right before I felt confident enough to start commenting, and I won't add a whole lot while I'm out of town for the holiday. I've always held decent but not absolute skepticism of the Diamond argument, and I think there were some good comments under the original article as a counterpoint. But if we do stipulate that Diamond's argument should be deemed correct, then that would mean that the European conquest of the Americas and other overwhelming hunter gatherer lands not only caused a lot of death and destruction, but it did so in the name of spreading a lower quality of life. That's not an argument I hear much about when critiquing what happened to those Indigenous societies.
I don't think one could call the Aztec and Incan empires hunter-gatherer societies. Maybe to some of the tribes in Northern America, but far from all of them (e.g., the Cahokian empire).
Agriculture, which is what lead or leads to the demise of hunter-gathering was invented and well established in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans showed up.
Three Sisters auto-like
Hence why I said overwhelming and not entirely.
Tangential to your point, I was recalling all the stories from around Ben Franklin’s time of white people who’d been kidnapped by and then rescued from tribes ultimately running away to join the tribe again. (To say nothing of natives fleeing back to their tribes any chance they got.)
Looking at Matt’s graph, I wonder how much of that is because the average quality of life for the Europeans in America had yet to take off, and so the nomadic life of tribes was legit just better.
This brings to mind the discourse we've heard in recent years* about secular stagnation, and the slowdown of technological progress, and all the rest. I've often wondered whether there is some profound, very deep attribute of the physical universe (entropy?) that means technological progress is bound to slow down. Because to me it seems that way.
Mind you, it's easy to miss this, because technological improvements are cumulative. But in the broad scheme of things, humanity's new technologies and discoveries seems to be progressively *less* groundbreaking with the passage of time. Occasional breakthroughs will transpire that might accelerate progress, sure. But they're the exceptions to the trend. Consider: (1) stone tools (2) fire (3) boats (4) domestication of animals (5) the sail (6) agriculture (7) the wheel (8) metallurgy (9) writing (10) mathematics (11) crossbow (12) paper (13) movable type (14) compass (15) guns (16) sextant (17) steam engine/boats/railways (18) electrification (19) internal combustion engine (20) airplane (21) refrigeration (22) radio (23) motion pictures (24) TV (25) jet engine (26) antibiotics (27) nuclear technology (28) computers (29) chemotherapy (30) mobile telephony (31) internet (32) MRNA vaccines (33) LLMs.
When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?
There are exceptions, sure, and some of these are necessarily judgment calls, or are hard to measure. But the trend seems clear: although occasional, dramatic breakthroughs happen, the big new technologies tend to be less groundbreaking than those in our past.
(The largest countervailing force to the above reduction in the disruptiveness of innovation is the increasing *frequency* of the arrival of new innovations, even if they're often more incremental in nature. We've replaced radicality with regularity.)
*There was a lot of chatter about this phenomenon about the time the series Mad Men debuted—2007 IIRC. People were arguing whether the living standards of the US in 1960 had improved more in the preceding 47 years than had been the case in the 47 years before 2007. I'd say "yes!"
> When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?
Computers are probably up there with the technologies you mentioned. And the Industrial Revolution was bigger than the written word, and probably comparable to fire or agriculture.
Industrial Revolution vs. written word -- hmmm....maybe distinct axes of progress?
The written word made a bigger difference to the advancement of elite culture, but it was compatible with subsistence living for the 99%.
The IndRev made a greater difference to a greater number of people because it was essentially a phenomenon of *mass* production, of more and more units sold to more and more people.
Can we keep those distinct, i.e. the progress of the most fortunate vs. the progress of the majority?
(This raises a separate question, whether we could imagine an alternative history in which the IndRev had not been a mass phenomenon -- more and more technological advances, without ever making multiple copies.)
I think the latter question you pose is hard to answer in the affirmative. It conferred such monumental advantages in the real world that whoever accidentally stumbled upon the idea of making lots of X would radically outcompete anyone who didn't join them. Whether that would take a decade or a century, I don't know, but it seems close to inevitable.
"...it seems close to inevitable."
That seems right in any world much like ours. To imagine the alternative, i.e. an IndRev without mass production, you have to go full sci-fi and imagine, I don't know, a priesthood of engineers who devote themselves to innovation without dissemination. Even then, it's hard to see how the details work -- how do you get the raw materials without large-scale mining, how do you do that without train-cars, and so on. "Close to inevitable" seems a fair assessment.
Yeah, jumping off from that prompt, somebody's still going to back-ass their way into spreading the technology, if only by accident or carelessness. Maybe not even the first time it's invented, but the second or third. It seems like trying to keep an invasive species out of an inviting virgin environment with ample resources and no predators. It's a question of when, not if.
>And the Industrial Revolution was bigger than the written word,
I don't think so. Rome and Han China operated highly sophisticated, advanced societies. They wouldn't exist without writing systems—without the ability to reliably and accurately record, accumulate, and pass on detailed information. But they could—and did—exist without modern industrial technology.
The industrial revolution has been an utterly dramatic transformation that has made humans a lot richer. But it hasn't been as integral to the existence of civilization itself as written language.
Sure as hell modern industrial technology completely depends on the written word.
But civilization isn’t as important to the quality and character of human life as broadly shared wealth and prosperity.
“…. civilization isn’t as important to the quality and character of human life as broadly shared wealth and prosperity.“
Yeah, that’s what was trying to get at by suggesting that there are distinct axes of progress, or at least distinct measures for the elite and the masses.
But does your formulation risk begging the question? “Broadly shared wealth and prosperity” are certainly vital to the quality and character of broadly shared lives, I.e. the median, mean, and modal human lives. But the quality and character of humanity, what it means to be human and what the species has accomplished, were affected by Michelangelo’s carving of the David, by Eudoxus’ general theory of proportions, by Cantor’s diagonalization argument, long before there were images of the David on the screens of our digital computers. What is “human life”? Perhaps something different from the average. Rephrasing Neil Armstrong, we can distinguish a small step for one guy from a giant leap for humanity.
And was fire an "invention" or a "discovery", and perhaps even an accidental one? That's "technology" very broadly defined indeed!
The phrase "control of fire" makes a better case for it being a technology.
Chat GPT? Maybe more powerful than the original internet when it is all said and done.
When inventions are newly appeared it's impossible to gauge their (especially long-term) importance. The printing press was obviously super important, but its main function in its first many years was to mass print indulgences so the Church could maximize its revenues.
Ah, so *that's* why it is called "mass" production!
Sigh . . .
"Sigh...."
With all this progress going on, someone has to keep us anchored in the stupid.
"When's the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as fire-making technology? Or farming? Or the written word?"
The really rapid pace of change occurred when we moved from hydrogen and helium to filling in the rest of the periodic table. Lithium -- bam! That made a big splash. Then it seemed like a speed-run through the rest of the metals. We were so excited over Boron, I don't think anyone really understood the implications of Carbon.
And looking back, in the very long run, I just don't think we've done anything as significant since then. When is the last time we invented something as awesomely transformative as iron?
Does anyone (except maybe Silicon Valley techbros) really dispute the basic premise? If we have seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants, it doesn't seem implausible that there will come a time that it takes a smart person their entire career merely to fully comprehend the developments that have already taken place in their field.
No, think of being a doctor. If you look at an official medical license it says Physician and Surgeon. Because was back when the system was set up the scope of what medicine could do was so limited that one person could do it all. Now you have surgeons who only do certain types of surgery and only on, for example, right hands. And of course you have endocrinologist and cardiologists and neurologists and neurosurgeons and on and on.
Or think of the Wright brothers - they built the whole plane including the engines. Now an engineer might specialize is engine fuel to oil heat exchangers.
I like to think of knowledge as a sphere. As the boundary of knowledge gets pushed out further, people work in narrower and narrower cones to compensate, so you can still make it to the frontier of human knowledge by age 25, just in your own little slice. On the other hand something like calculus or evolution is impressive because underlies such a broad swathe of human knowledge, but is not actually that difficult to discover.
What I see as the problem is that coordinating between all these people working in their different silos is a social/communication problem, which we aren't actually all that good at. In the 1800s everyone was just friends with each other and wrote letters and it kinda worked out, but that's not scalable. Today we have things like Arxiv and Google Scholar, but I don't know what comes next to improve communication and coordination between researchers.
Cosigned bigly. Obviously there will never be another Euler; focus-narrowing has been happening for the entire age of science. It seems conceivable that we might eventually hit a limit because those cones just get too slim and sequestered. I don't think that'll happen in my lifetime, but in five hundred years, who's to say?
Perhaps. But it's at least as likely that within 500 years understanding of subjects ranging from quantum mechanics to black holes will have advanced to a point where discoveries are being made that we can't imagine now. Didn't the head of the US Patent Office once suggest in the late 19th Century that his agency be closed because everything useful had already been invented?
Well, just to focus on the Mad Men phenomenon for a bit: there was quite a bit of back and forth about this question when the series appeared. To me it seemed obvious at the time (2007) that less progress in raising material standards of living (in rich countries) had been accomplished since 1960 than in the 47 years prior (1913). Don Draper's 1960 life was remarkably, recognizably more similar to that of a UMC American in 2007 (no, not identical, but really quite similar) than would be the case if we compared his life to someone in 1913. But it was a surprisingly controversial take.
Anyway, that got me thinking: maybe if there is a slowdown in innovation, it's just a fundamental aspect of nature that is the rule more often than not. In other words, OF COURSE* productivity is slowing down: what we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries was a rare speed up, and now things are settling back into their more usual pattern.
*To be clear, I'm just presenting this line of reasoning; I'm not claiming I either accept or reject it. If I had to guess, I reckon secular stagnation (or at least slowdown) may well be valid. But I'm officially agnostic on the question.
“ Don Draper's 1960 life was remarkably, recognizably more similar to that of a UMC American in 2007 (no, not identical, but really quite similar) than would be the case if we compared his life to someone in 1913.”
An upper middle class/upper class guy like Don in 1913 would have had electricity, a car and a phone. AT&T went public as parent of the Bell Telephone System in 1899. The Ford Motor Company had been in business for a decade by 1913 and cars as a technology has been around for over a quarter century by then.
His wife would be fetching water from the well, heating it on a wood burning stove so they could cook or take baths, and spending most hours of most days cleaning clothes in it.
"His wife would be fetching water from the well...."
His wife or their servants. We forget how pervasive it was for wealthy people to have multiple servants. Agatha Christie, born in the UK middle class in 1890, wrote in the 1950s that she had never thought she would be so wealthy as to be able to afford a car, or so poor as not to be able to afford servants.
You think UMC class suburban New Yorkers were hauling water in 1913?
Here is the bathroom from a middle class home in 1913:
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/44/72/bb/4472bb6582d9068d43289d2874d4a3f1.jpg
Here is a bathroom from the Victorian era say 1890?
https://www.brownstoner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/victorian-bathrooms-nooney-clinton-hill.jpg
Just to give you some baseline for technology in 1913 - the first hotel in the US with indoor plumbing was the Tremont Hotel in Boston in 1829. Indoor plumbing was installed in the White House in 1833.
By 1853 they had had and cold running water in the family quarters.
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/questions/when-did-the-white-house-first-get-plumbing
Not for an UMC/rich guy in 1913 suburban NYC. They would have had electricity, a car, running water, a water heater, central heat, a phone. Electric washing machines had been on the market for a few years by then.
A year later the first home in America got air conditioning. The first modern AC system in a commercial building was installed in 1902.
I wasn't there at the time, but I suspect you're downplaying the utter reliability with which we treat these sorts of technologies in the modern era.
Kids these days don't remember driving down any random interstate and just seeing cars broken down *all over the place*. Every couple miles, like clockwork. Spraying your carb down and getting dirty and mad to eventually get the thing to fire up twenty minutes later. Now, off my lawn.
It’s still true that a majority of people in the United States didn’t have any of these things, and the upper middle class streetcar suburbanites who had them in 1913 would have had most of them for only a few years.
1913's Draper would have possessed *some* of the comfort's of 1960's Drapers. No argument. But nonetheless his life would not look nearly as similar to the latter's as the latter's would to 2007's.
In 1960 Don's daily life went something like this: Awoke in his four bedroom colonial in a suburban subdivision to an electric alarm device; took a shower using hot water likely heated by a system very similar to one in use in 2007; got dressed in a suit of clothes that would hardly look out of place a half century later; ate a breakfast prepared in a kitchen with highly similar electric appliances to those of 2007 including an electric stove, toaster and refrigerator; kissed his wife and kids goodbye (the latter of whom would soon board a yellow school bus, just as they would in 2007); drove a powerful ICE car with radial tires, power steering, power breaks, radio, etc; travelled 25 miles into the center of Manhattan; rode an elevator to an office suite in a 60 story skyscraper; talked to people all over the country as a regular matter of course and twice to a client in Europe; went back home; had a pizza delivered to his house; ate dinner; administered an antibiotic prescription to his son who was suffering a chest infection; watched a talking movie on a CRT, and then got a live late news report that featured a phoned in account from a journalist in London; had sex with his wife, who was taking a medication designed to prevent pregnancy; and then set his alarm for a bit earlier than usual because in the morning he had to catch a jet to Chicago.
This to me sounds vastly more like 2007 (or indeed 2024) than 1913. YMMV!
I think this is bias-ply erasure, but the judges will allow it in service of building out a long and excellent comment.
Other than the jet and the television all that happened in 1913. Executives in 1913 Long Island or NJ or CT drove to the train station and commuted into Manhattan and took elevators to their offices just like they did in 1960 and today. Electric fridges, toasters and ranges were available in 1913. Keep in mind JP Morgan’s townhouse was the first home in American to get electricity and that was in 1881.
I think you might be right, but it's a tricky thing to quantify. Like you list "agriculture" as one invention rather than many, even though modern farming would be almost unrecognizable to the people of 5,000 years ago. We also should consider the impact on an individual vs. society. Realizing one could take manure and spread it on crops might have improved the yield for a single farmer, but it took the Haber–Bosch process to scale up to feed billions.
I think that the perception of a slowdown of technological progress is an artifact of exactly the short-term perspective that Matt discusses here, and the sociological equivalent of becoming "velocitized", the danger that your Driver Ed teacher warned you about (mine certainly did) of losing the sense of going fast when you've been moving at high speed for a while.
The bulk of our technological progress has taken place over the last three hundred years -- and that's being pretty generous to the 18th Century. Four of the five innovations that provide the bones and sinews of modern societies -- Telegraphy, the Bessemer Process for producing steel, the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminum, and Telephony -- all date from the 19th Century, only Telegraphy from prior to 1850; the fifth, fully synthetic Plastics, is from the early 20th. All barely yesterday in the history of the species.
Instant communication by wire has been superseded by wireless, the Bessemer Process has been replaced by more precise and less polluting processes, and we are less dependent on the Hall-Héroult process because of strides in recycling secondary aluminum. From one point of view these changes can be perceived as incremental rather than disruptive in a technological sense, but their economic impacts, and so their impacts on people's lives, have often been much more profound and transformative. And here I'm mostly talking about our physical artifacts, without even bringing the ongoing digital revolution into it.
I live in Brazil. When I lived here the first time in the early 1970s, there was one international airport serving the fifth largest country on Earth. Landline telephone accounts were such valuable assets that people left them to their children in their wills. Letters on Air Mail paper to my family in the United States took two weeks in each direction. When I needed to talk to them telephone, I would send them a telegram with the date and time, go to the satellite telephone office at that time, and pay a deposit. The operator would send me to a cubicle with a table, a chair, and a phone, and connect the call. When we finished, I would get my deposit back because it was a collect call and leave.
I moved back in 2017. I've lost count of how many airports now provide international service.
Most people, even the poorest, have instant communication with the world through their cellphones. Most people, including me, do most of their banking through their phones; Brazilians under 40 have never seen a checkbook, and wouldn't recognize one. Our home internet is comparable to anywhere in North America or Europe. Today we made a video call from my computer to my brother for his birthday, instantly and without a second thought.
Humans are messy, and progress has stops and starts; we can't even all agree on what "progress" means. But I have a hard time seeing a case for technological stagnation.
Excellent comment.
>The bulk of our technological progress has taken place over the last three hundred years<
Not remotely true. The bulk of our technological progress took place between 300,000 years ago and about 2,000 years ago.
I don't think that even the most blinkered antiquary would join in your contention that the bulk of our technological progress had been achieved by midway through the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 14-37), but that is precisely what your statement above says on its face.
"technological progress is bound to slow down"
Logically yes, it has to at some point simply from a laws of physics standpoint. E.g., once you invent controlled anti-matter reactions, it is no longer possible to make energy production any more efficient unless you discover entirely new physical laws.
In any given technological field, yes. But nothing precludes new fields from developing, or mature ones from being supplanted. It happens all the time.
True!
I think your comment illustrates the general failure to understand the scale of human history Matt describes. You should fully expect many, many generations to come and go between inventions as large as fire or agriculture.
https://cfs.energy/
Fusion will be a biggie when get there.
This sentence: “The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think.” reminded me of this blog post from historian and novelist Ada Palmer: https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/, particularly “In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress.” (I also highly recommend her novels.)
James Burke in the 1985 TV series "The Day the Universe Changed" made a similar point about how we (the audience today) just assume that people will keep discovering new things and developing more efficient technologies, but that was very much not the case for most of human history. (Sadly can't find a clip on YouTube with the exact quote.)
I really need to read book four of the Terra Ignota series! I read all three existing ones quickly but didn’t get the fourth one when it came out.
It's so good, but I recommend going back through the first few because my god the world and story are so baroque that it's very easy to forget who is who and what happened.
A book that totally changed my way of looking at things was ‘The Dawn of Everything’. It takes awhile setting up framing but once it gets into the history - the gift of it is that - based on the latest archeological findings - human society has been structured in vastly different ways. This is very different than our common understand of human history which really just posits a few (or even just a binary) choice(s). It made me realize how vast the possibilities for human civilization were and how much we lose by accepting only our current choices.
That book seems to have the same features of many of Graeber’s other books - he is great at critiquing standard stories, and finding interesting alternatives, but is then way too insistent that his alternative is absolutely certain. This review by Anthony Appiah seemed to me to do a good job of identifying aspects of all of that:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
I would recommend reading "After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC" by Steven Mithen as a counterpoint to "The Dawn of Everything," which heavily cherrypicks examples to support the authors' political thesis.
When you start talking about history on such long time scales, it becomes necessary to think about the very difficult question of what humanity's purpose is or should be. In discussing the standard of living all the way back to before homo sapiens, Matt tacitly assumes that the degree of individual well-being is at least a decent proxy for whatever humanity's purpose is. This is probably pretty resonant with current liberal thought, although one does need to think about the role that population statistics play. Is it the well-being of the most well-off human that counts? The least well-off? The average? The median? The sum? Nevertheless, under many possible choices of statistic, humanity will be seen to have gone backward for a long time after the invention of agriculture.
I call myself a Conservative Democrat these days (owing to the death of the true Republican Party), and I do not subscribe to the thought that individual well-being is the ultimate human good. I think our goal is a collective one, to grow and spread as far and wide as we can. In mathematical terms, life is a local reduction of entropy, taking in energy and producing pattern. In the aftermath of the agricultural revolution, living standards declined, but the surge in population and cultural complexity counts as progress in my view. I'm not against individual well-being, but I view it as a means, not an end. A single dictator on top of a pile of serfs is not a very complex, dynamic, growth-oriented structure for society, and the recent rise in well-being has furthered our ability to pursue my version of humanity's purpose. But I am more likely than Matt to see an ebb and flow of living standards as compatible with steady collective progress.
Humanity has no purpose. Why would it? As humans we feel compelled to find meaning in our lives, but that's just a quirk of our psychology.
It’s perfectly defensible to disavow any universal human purpose ordained by God or science or natural law, if such is your belief. But even absent that, there is still our own chosen purpose, whether it be unanimously agreed or not. If you don’t have even a personal opinion of what our purpose ought to be, you have nowhere to anchor any opinions you might have about what other people ought to do.
Correct; I absolutely consider humans and bacteria to be pursuing the same purpose, though humans are far ahead in the game. Or perhaps it is appropriate to include bacteria in our score, since we can’t really survive without them. Perhaps all of Earth’s biosphere, or at least a substantial subset of it, is properly part of our team, as the most efficient way for us to spread beyond our planet is to take much of it with us.
Really liked this when I first saw it and still do. I greatly admire dr Diamond but was always a little skeptical about the immiseration of the populace via agriculture, especially grain. Part of the problem is how crappy the evidence is, not too surprising considering the difficulty of the question. Turns out that in the past few years a guy has developed fancy new methods to analyze diet and reaches conclusions contrary to conventional wisdom. The methods are compelling. Don’t remember his name but if readers are interested I could figure it out.
Thanks again, Ms Yglesias, for entertaining me and also expanding my horizons. I believe I subscribed to this Substack on more or less day one. Best money I’ve spent. Happy fourth everyone!
I think it's a mistake to say "nothing much happened" during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans existed before the dawn of agriculture; rather, the things that happened during that period are largely unknown to us, because no archaeological evidence is left for them. We can know what kind of stone tools people were using 100,000 years ago, because stone tools are durable enough to survive and be observable to us now; we don't know what stories they told, what they believed, what their social norms looked like. All those things might have changed many times over, with many of those changes feeling incredibly momentous at the time, only to be forgotten after decades or centuries or millennia, leaving them utterly unknown to us now!
Also, the clothing and wood tools that people used might well have changed a lot more than we know, given that these things are perishable and rarely appear in the archaeological record.