Posts Tagged ‘flourishing’
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…
Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…
In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.
We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.
This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…
[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}
… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.
He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.
This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.
They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.
That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.
This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.
That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.
Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.
* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
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As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.
Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).
“We are saved by making the future present to ourselves”*…
Recently, Steven Johnson (and here) received the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center. Presented by his friend and mentor Marty Seligman, it honored Johnson’s “work over the years advancing the cause of human flourishing.”
From his acceptance speech…
… I’ve always been drawn to… long-term perspectives, where you position yourself… in the larger context of hundreds or thousands of years of human suffering and progress. Some of my California friends even built an entire organization to celebrate that long-term view: the Long Now Foundation, which is dedicated to thinking on the scale of centuries or millennia, encouraging us to get out of the 24-hour news cycle that dominates so much of our lives today. A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.
And here I want to bring us back to another idea that Marty Seligman has been an advocate for. Almost ten years ago, he edited a collection of essays called Homo Prospectus which had a huge influence on my thinking about the world. The core idea behind that book was that a defining superpower of human beings is our ability to mentally time-travel to possible future states, and think about how we might organize our activities to arrive at those imagined future outcomes.
“What best distinguishes our species,” he wrote in the introduction to that book, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain.”
It is unclear whether nonhuman animals have any real concept of the future at all. Some organisms display behavior that has long-term consequences, like a squirrel’s burying a nut for winter, but those behaviors are all instinctive. The latest studies of animal cognition suggest that some primates and birds may carry out deliberate preparations for events that will occur in the near future. But making decisions based on future prospects on the scale of months or years — even something as simple as planning a gathering of the tribe a week from now — would be unimaginable even to our closest primate relatives. If the Homo prospectus theory is correct, those limited time-traveling skills explain an important piece of the technological gap that separates humans from all other species on the planet. It’s a lot easier to invent a new tool if you can imagine a future where that tool might be useful. What gave flight to the human mind and all its inventiveness may not have been the usual culprits of our opposable thumbs or our gift for language. It may, instead, have been freeing our minds from the tyranny of the present.
The problem now is that the future is getting increasingly hard to predict, in large part because of what has started to happen with artificial intelligence over the past few years. I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at transformative changes in technology, and I’ve come to believe that what we’re experiencing right now is going to be the most seismic, the most far-reaching transformation of my lifetime, bigger than the personal computer, bigger than the Internet and the Web. And while there is much to debate about what the impact of this revolution is going to be for the job market, for politics, and just about any other field, there is growing consensus that it is going to provide an enormous lift to medicine and human health. The Nobel Prize for chemistry going to the AlphaFold team last week was arguably the most dramatic illustration of the promise here. Earliest this month, Dario Amodei—the founder of the AI lab Anthropic, makers of Claude–published a 13,000 word piece on where he thought we were headed with what he calls “powerful AI” in the next decade or two. The line that really struck me in the piece was this:
My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years… a compressed 21st century.
Whether or not something that dramatic does come to pass—and I think we have to take the possibility of it seriously—it seems clear that given the kind of biological and medical advances that AI will likely unlock, there is significant headroom left in the story of extended human lifespan, perhaps even a sea change in how we age. That is, on one level, incredibly hopeful news. But it is also the kind of change that will inevitably have enormous secondary effects. To understand just how momentous those changes could be, take a look at this chart:
That’s the 6,000 year history of human population growth. You might notice, if you really squint your eyes, that something interesting appears to happen about 150 years ago. After millennia of slow and steady growth, human population growth went exponential. And that’s not the result of people having more babies—the human birth rate was declining rapidly during much of that period. That’s the impact of people not dying. And while that is on one level incredibly good news, it is also in a very real sense one of the two most important drivers of climate change. If we had transferred to a fossil-fuel-based economy but kept our population at 1850 levels, we would have no climate change issues whatsoever—there simply wouldn’t be enough carbon-emitting lifestyles to make a measurable difference in the atmosphere.
The key idea here is that no change this momentous is entirely positive in its downstream effects. Trying to anticipate those effects, and mitigate the negative ones, is going to take all of our powers of prospection.
When I was putting together my thoughts for this talk, my mind went back to the one time I spoke with Marty, about five years ago, when I was writing about cognitive time travel for the Times Magazine. As usual, I was incredibly behind in actually doing the reporting for the piece, and I’d called Marty desperate for a few quotes on a tight deadline. He very generously found time for me, but he had to do the call from an animal hospital, because as it happens he and his family were in the middle of putting their dog down. So our very first moments in conversation with each other plunged right into the depths of loss and grieving and the strange bonds that form between animals and humans. There was no small talk.
As I said earlier, death is, in the most basic sense, the termination point of human flourishing. But it’s also the shadow that hovers over us while we are still alive. We have done so much to minimize that shadow over the past century or two, going from a world where it was the norm for a third of your children to die before adulthood to a world where less than one percent do. But what does it mean for human flourishing if that runaway life expectancy curve that we’ve been riding for the past century keeps ascending? What does it mean if AI starts out-performing us at complex cognitive tasks? How do we flourish in that brave new world? Do we take on a new responsibility—not just ensuring the path of human flourishing, but also the flourishing of our AI companions? These are all difficult questions precisely because of time. The rate of change is so extreme right now we don’t have as much time to learn, and adapt. The doubling of human life expectancy was a process that really unfolded over two hundred years, and we’re still dealing with its unintended consequences. What happens if that magnitude of change gets compressed down to a decade?
I don’t know the answers to those questions yet, I’m sorry to report. But maybe spelling them out together helps explain something about what I’ve tried to do with my career, which I think from afar can sometimes seem a bit random, bouncing back and forth between writing about long-term decision making or exploring the history of human life expectancy and building software with language models. This award is called the Pioneer Award, and while I’m deeply honored to receive it, I don’t think of myself so much as a pioneer in any of these fields, but rather as someone who has consistently tried to find a place to work that was adjacent to the most important trends in human flourishing, so that I could help shine light on them, explain them to a wider audience, and in the case of my work with AI, nudge them in a positive direction to the best of my ability. That you all have recognized me for this work—pioneer or not—means an enormous amount to me. You can be sure I will do my best to savor it…
On progress, the “compressed 21st century,” and the importance of foresight: “Ways of Flourishing,” from @stevenbjohnson in his newsletter Adjacent Possible. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* George Eliot
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1873 that Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. It became the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
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