I agree strongly that innate human worth depends no more on intelligence than on property owned, beauty, or any other marker, and that we all have a baseline dignity that must be respected. However - it is not likely that we can transform human nature into perfectly loving our enemies and caring for the disgusting, the abusive and the disagreeable as we care for ourselves. (Christianity has tried for 2k years, and that problem is not solved.) Given this, the remedies that FDB promotes ask too much. Instead of assuring everyone of opportunity to flourish, it is likely better to simply start with assuring everyone of the chance to flourish - a commitment to not get in their way. This commitment to individual liberty would, I think, serve most people far better than attempts to redistribute wealth in a way that is intrinsically intrusive and historically subject to abuse and corruption.
Isn't our *current* economic system already a massive platform for unequal wealth distribution through abuse and corruption, though? You don't have to be a Marxist to see how our tax system, labor laws, property rights, globalized work force, etc. decide who gets lots of money and who pisses in bottles at Amazon fulfillment centers for starvation wages. There are gobs of analysts, accountants, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and so on working very hard every day to redistribute wealth in ways that look abusive and corrupt to the vast majority of humanity.
But it's not obvious that that's a feature specific to 'capitalism' as it seems evident in basically every socio-economic system throughout all of human history (and likely pre-history).
And it's not like libertarians aren't also constantly decrying the same 'corruption' too!
Alas, there are no shortcuts to building – and then _maintaining_, indefinitely – a better society.
What is obvious is that the complex of adaptive behaviors and traits that were selected for in cultural evolution as modernism (and capitalism) emerged in NW Europe over the last 1,000 years are no longer sustainable or adequately anti-fragile-to-disruption under postmodern social conditions.
A new adaptive challenge is present that will require various changes to something like a construct-aware meta rationalist paradigm.
I'm a fan of 'meta-rationality' but I don't think it's obvious that 'capitalism' is inadequate.
My favorite 'meta-rationalist' is David Chapman. [His main meta-rationality website: https://meaningness.com/.] In his view, meta-rationality doesn't _replace_ rationality, and any 'meta-rational paradigm' similarly wouldn't replace our current 'rational paradigm(s)' but instead provide means of 'navigating' between or among different rational paradigms.
I _do_ think there's a deep connection between 'post-modernism' and nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing 'really' has any meaning.
I don't know what you mean by "a construct-aware meta rationalist paradigm", particularly "construct-aware". What are the 'constructs' of which this supposed paradigm must be 'aware'? People? Post-modern people?
Yes, meta-rationality is a "transcend and include" thing, each stage of cultural evolution transcends but includes the previous stage.
The Burning Bush in the Old Testament is a metaphor of how "magic" or shamanistic/tantric spirituality is transcended by contemplative temple religion-spirituality (prophets/saints).
Chapman's web site is excellent, probably the best place to start on the topic (his article on "Boomeritis" has a good list). Or Ronfeld's TIMN* stuff.
Constructs would be Jean Gebser's structures of consciousness, or similarly Ken Wilber's "vMemes" (stolen from Spiral Dynamics) or Robert Kegan's stages of psychological development, etc.
According to those models, post-capitalist economics will emerge from post-modern social conditions (which create a "crisis of meaning"), network effects, technological disruption and the crumbling of the "Blue church" institutional paradigm. John Vervaeke's discussions about the "Religion of No Religion" covers a lot of this ground.
One version of post-capitalism roughly corresponds to what Michel Bauwens is doing with the P2P Foundation.
I think of capitalism as one part of a complex of evolutionary adaptations in the NW European gene pool. That complex is referred to as WEIRD** culture by Henrich for example: high-social-trust, Constitutional order, high literacy, wealthy, liberal personality (Enlightenment rationalism, "openness to new experience"), industrial economy, scientific and technological advances, etc.
What economic globalism and neoliberalism has done, as driven by tech disruption, is to expose the fragile features of WEIRD and Blue church institutions, values and ideas.
According to the models, post-capitalism emerge with anti-fragile, holistic, integral culture (Kegan stage 5).
re: the cultural-evolutionary bridge to Kegan stage 5 , post-capitalist civilization
Chapman's summary of the problem with being stuck between fragile modern rationalism (stage 4), postmodernism (4.5) and construct-aware, holistic, meta rationality (stage 5):
"Instead of assuring everyone of opportunity to flourish, it is likely better to simply start with assuring everyone of the chance to flourish - a commitment to not get in their way. "
This is equally as utopian as your caricature of Freddie's ideas (transform human nature into perfectly loving our enemies and caring for the disgusting, the abusive and the disagreeable as we care for ourselves). There is no such thing as equality of opportunity, which is the phrase that your "commitment to not get in their way" is euphemistically intended to avoid, even theoretically. All there is is the choice of what qualities you are willing to tolerate being the mechanism as to who gets a good life and who doesn't, and somewhat mysteriously those qualities tend to somehow be the ones the speaker generally possesses.
As with much of your writing, I absolutely love this. I'm a teacher and know all too well the grind of state testing and how negatively it affects so many of my students. Your first post convinced me to subscribe, this one has convinced me to pick up the book.
I loved your book, which I had pre-ordered and read immediately when it arrived. You are advocating for an educational system that is similar to what exists throughout Europe (where I live): students are tracked according to academic ability, based on testing that is done usually around fifth grade. Only about 10–20 percent of students go on to university; the rest do apprenticeships and job training. And at the end of these trainings is a well-paying job and a social safety net.
So many Americans I talk with are horrified by this system, but really, is our way more humane? For every academically talented kid in Europe who tests poorly and has to go to an apprenticeship rather than university, there are likely a hundred students in the US who we push into college even though they’re not able to do the work, and who wind up dropping out deep in debt with no prospects for getting a job at a wage sufficient to pay back that debt (because credential inflation means lots of jobs now require a BA when a generation ago a high school diploma was needed).
We readily acknowledge the different levels of ability in sports, music, acting, art, and other fields. Why should academics, uniquely, be the only area where everyone is exactly equal?
Anyway, thank you for writing your book, which reframes the education discussion in an important way.
Perhaps the American system is not more humane, but the German way is not very good either. German friends of mine complained that 5th grade is much too early to filter children, because they don't really know what they want to do with their lives and because lots of people are late bloomers that only figure things out at the end of high-school.
The system we have in Italy where some high-schools are vocational and some prepare for university (classico / scientifico / tecnico industriale), and at the end of 8th grade parents and children decide the track, seems much better. Universities have open enrollment, so the system doesn't preclude students that finished a classico (studying Latin, Greek, literature and modern languages) from enrolling to engineering, it's just ecceedingly rare.
Of course, this is Italy and the country's motto is "flexibility über alles" :D.
I talk to my wife (a teacher) about this a lot. Her education degree made her a fervent believer that everything was due to environmental factors, and that there was no limit to what a quality teacher could do. A few years teaching Kindergarten flipped her perspective. She now believes she has a pretty good idea which of these 5-year-olds will be successful in life and which won't.
I made the mistake of reading Cult of Smart last year as a teacher about to enter grad school for an education degree. After a year of expensive and highly-rated education about education, I can say with confidence that just about nobody in the education policy complex and its university offshoots is talking as honestly about intelligence distribution or relative vs. absolute value as Freddie in his book. I didn't read anything in my grad coursework that explained educational outcome disparities as parsimoniously and clearly as Cult of Smart.
Freddie, I'm a relatively new reader of yours and, having read your (excellent) book and columns on the inevitability of ability-based hierarchies of educational and other achievement, I'm left with one lingering question. While I accept (and even admire) your honest Marxist support for a more redistributive economic system to ameliorate the impact of these hierarchies on the of quality of life of those on the lower rungs of these partially-inherited hierarchies, how do you propose to continue to create the wealth necessary to fund such a system if you significantly reduce the incentives (prosperity for one's own family, desire for social status, greed, or just "winning the race") that drive the relatively more gifted to seek places on the higher rungs through constructive achievement? I concede that we might live in a better world if these aspects of human nature weren't so central to the efficient creation of the goods and services needed to raise an entire society's standard of living, but I haven't seen much historical evidence that such a system is actually possible over the long term. (Some might argue that Scandinavia offers hopeful examples in this regard, but I question whether their social welfare systems could be supported over the long term if those countries were required to bear the true economic costs of their own national security, currently subsidized by the United States--because, I hasten to add, it's in our interests to do so.). I'm sincerely curious!
The crumbling of the "Blue church" (see Jordan Hall) ensures that capitalism-as-we-know-it is unsustainable.
We already see scholars like Joel Kotkin predicting that the failure of corporate-crony capitalism is currently creating Neo-Feudalism (illiberalism).
-----
Long:
I'm personally not a socialist, but I can see how libertarian-voluntary socialism might work for some people in some places.
Capitalism as we know it, neoliberalism and so forth, is a moral failure. All human societies evolved methods of regulating morals to survive. A moral failure, a crisis of meaning, is a real danger to human survival (existence as we know it).
A "crisis of meaning exists" (ses John Vervaeke) now because of tech disruption, globalism, neoliberalism and network effects (see Jordan Hall on the collapse of the "Blue church").
Also see Habermas' theory of communicative action, the "colonization of lifeworld by systems" and Howard Rheingold on Disinformocracy.
The P2P Foundation has a catalog of something like 20,000 "post-capitalist" projects of various kinds.
Your book is great. That said, this is the correct answer to the problem, you have to seriously consider letting go of certain instincts you have to help others. The market knows better than you do who is good at what....
So no JG, no UBI, instead, we do Weekly Wage Subsidies:
1. Everyone who wants welfare or UI is in the database at LABOR.GOV
2. Only SMBs and families can hire the cheap labor.
3. Employer in for $100/wk + Govt in for $200/wk.
4. Every $20/more employers offer, Govt in for $10 less (toping out at $480/wk with govt in for $10)
At the $100/wk, THIRTY MILLION people not working now will be offered 100's of jobs each immediately. $5200/yr is massively non-marginal. This ends labor slack FOREVER. It wins full conservative support bc no more welfare queens (your opinion here doesn't matter, it wins cons support). AND it wins ALL the upper-class liberals bc they get the cheap labor.
It doesn't win union support BUT it wins the blue-collar employees of the Fortune 1000, bc the only way Walmart and Amazon etc can get employees to stay with them long term is to pay above the $490/wk.
This gives you full employment forever. Anyone who wants "welfare or UI" from the govt, has to work on the 100s of jobs offered to them, to get the govt money.
As the economy improves, SMB and families have to keep offering more, which reduces the Govt spend. And note: when we have a shock, like COVID, the machine INSTANTLY redeploys the cheap labor. It's really very simple, once you price welfare labor AFTER welfare, you can run a giant kiddie pool of capitalism that competes vibrantly vs the Fortune 1000.
One example, using Amazon. Bezos has 300K SMBs he loves to tout who sell stuff on his site. With this plan in place, those 300L+K can not afford their own pick, pack, ships staff, so they they can store inventory themselves and sell across Ebay, Walmart.com, etc. They do not have to lock up their inventory at Amazon. Mom and pop everything will finally have a leg up, and it's one they DESERVE because they pay for the welfare AND there is a terrible natural trend of BIG BIZ = BIG GOVT. This recasts welfare as a LABOR RESOURCE that we give SMB and families to fight back vs Big Biz.
I have long been an uninformed believer in the transformative power of education. But everything in this succinct sum-up I agree with. I'm afraid I must buy the book.
And pass it on to everyone who thinks critically and thoughtfully about what the country can do better. Thank you , FDB.
Did you ever respond to Nathan Robinson's review? (If I recall correctly, it deployed a logical fallacy, equivocation, to argue that the book's central thesis is based on a logical fallacy.)
I think he's edited it since but the original version was, I think, 21,000 words. Seriously. The book is only 55,000.
As far as I can tell, he advances the naïve environmentalist argument with an insistence that there are undiscovered environmental that, for some reason, we haven't thought to measure in 150 years of education research. He also argues, more or less, that the social consequences would be bad if what I was saying were true, and also that it would hurt people's feelings if it were true.
That does not strike me as particularly crying out for a long rebuttal.
Yes, I was one of those kids who went to college not because I really wanted to, but because every adult in my life told me that I "have" to go to college, that I had no future without that degree. So I went and got a worthless BA degree. I learned nothing in college except how to bubble C on those stupid scantron tests. What a waste of 4 years of my life and thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile I have several friends who have trouble finding jobs in their chosen industries like sales, marketing, software development, etc. even though they have years of experience in those fields, which they attribute to not having that stupid bachelor's degree. So many employers just use it as an easy sorting mechanism - throw every resume without a degree in the trash, no matter how little a degree would have actually prepared the person for doing the job.
You make some good objections to our education-based meritocracy, but I don't think your critique goes deep enough. (This isn't necessarily a problem. No one can cover everything in a single book.)
Even if everyone had equal intellectual potential and one's success depended solely on one's effort, meritocracy would still be unjust. Why? Because (to quote an often mocked but rarely addressed teenage talking point) I didn't choose to be born. None of us did. None of us chose to come into existence as vulnerable creatures with a multitude of needs that can be satisfied only through effort. None of us signed up to have our quality of life determined by our "work ethic."
Of course, no one, aside from your parents, is individually responsible for setting you up with a good life. And if this were a hunter-gatherer society, in which everyone lived at a subsistence level, then I could understand the argument that each person bears complete responsibility for their own flourishing. (Ironically enough, though, it's hunter-gatherer societies that are the most tight-knit and mutually supportive.)
But we don't live in a hunter-gatherer society. We live in a post-industrial society that already produces enough food to feed everyone and is in the process of automating many of the processes that produce things that people need. Yes, society must incentivize work to some extent. But there's a difference between incentivizing work and saying that you don't deserve to escape misery unless you're putting in the effort to escape it. I'll leave the policy details to others, but let me say this: at this point in humanity's technological and economic development, it is morally obscene to make a decent life dependent on "hard work."
Hunter-gatherer societies had intense social bonding and altruistic social cooperation because those were evolutionary adaptations that improved group survival.*
Evolutionary theorists point out that (based on current evidence) all tribal hunting-gathering societies had to, and did, punish non-cooperators, again, as a matter of survival.
So, merit is wired into human culture by evolution. To socially cooperate was to have moral merit. To be uncooperative lacked moral merit.
Modern culture evolved the ability to extend social trust beyond clans and kinship groups, to the nation state. High-social-trust, modern nation state societies arguably have higher levels of social cooperation, but it is diffused via institutional structures such as Constitutional law into abstractions, and not limited to the kind of biological feedback loops that reinforce tribal trust and cooperation in smaller populations.
What is actually "morally obscene" from a biological viewpoint is to think that humans can be decent (altruistic) without a reward/punishment system.
Utopia is a biological and moral obscenity, and delusional.
> Eventually I traced it all to a single anonymous account with a Michael Cera picture for an avatar and less than a thousand followers, who was confidently reporting specific details about a book that, again, only existed in my head, and even there was just a vague and loose idea.
That's so awesome. maybe it was a Fight Club situation and you were actually tweeting from an alt account in the dead of night.
Freddie is going to come around to my plan rethinking JG/UBI into something that lets SMBs and families kick-ass vs Fortune 1000
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/by-request-the-cult-of-smart/comments#comment-1993918
"Scott Alexander did in his review of the book" links to https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/publish/post/33567726 which is inaccessible.
Fixed, thank you.
There is no falsehood in America more resilient than one which benefits influential core constituencies of the Democrats and Republicans.
This book is great and you should buy it. Share it with people that work in education.
I agree strongly that innate human worth depends no more on intelligence than on property owned, beauty, or any other marker, and that we all have a baseline dignity that must be respected. However - it is not likely that we can transform human nature into perfectly loving our enemies and caring for the disgusting, the abusive and the disagreeable as we care for ourselves. (Christianity has tried for 2k years, and that problem is not solved.) Given this, the remedies that FDB promotes ask too much. Instead of assuring everyone of opportunity to flourish, it is likely better to simply start with assuring everyone of the chance to flourish - a commitment to not get in their way. This commitment to individual liberty would, I think, serve most people far better than attempts to redistribute wealth in a way that is intrinsically intrusive and historically subject to abuse and corruption.
Isn't our *current* economic system already a massive platform for unequal wealth distribution through abuse and corruption, though? You don't have to be a Marxist to see how our tax system, labor laws, property rights, globalized work force, etc. decide who gets lots of money and who pisses in bottles at Amazon fulfillment centers for starvation wages. There are gobs of analysts, accountants, journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and so on working very hard every day to redistribute wealth in ways that look abusive and corrupt to the vast majority of humanity.
Sure!
But it's not obvious that that's a feature specific to 'capitalism' as it seems evident in basically every socio-economic system throughout all of human history (and likely pre-history).
And it's not like libertarians aren't also constantly decrying the same 'corruption' too!
Alas, there are no shortcuts to building – and then _maintaining_, indefinitely – a better society.
What is obvious is that the complex of adaptive behaviors and traits that were selected for in cultural evolution as modernism (and capitalism) emerged in NW Europe over the last 1,000 years are no longer sustainable or adequately anti-fragile-to-disruption under postmodern social conditions.
A new adaptive challenge is present that will require various changes to something like a construct-aware meta rationalist paradigm.
I'm a fan of 'meta-rationality' but I don't think it's obvious that 'capitalism' is inadequate.
My favorite 'meta-rationalist' is David Chapman. [His main meta-rationality website: https://meaningness.com/.] In his view, meta-rationality doesn't _replace_ rationality, and any 'meta-rational paradigm' similarly wouldn't replace our current 'rational paradigm(s)' but instead provide means of 'navigating' between or among different rational paradigms.
I _do_ think there's a deep connection between 'post-modernism' and nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing 'really' has any meaning.
I don't know what you mean by "a construct-aware meta rationalist paradigm", particularly "construct-aware". What are the 'constructs' of which this supposed paradigm must be 'aware'? People? Post-modern people?
Yes, meta-rationality is a "transcend and include" thing, each stage of cultural evolution transcends but includes the previous stage.
The Burning Bush in the Old Testament is a metaphor of how "magic" or shamanistic/tantric spirituality is transcended by contemplative temple religion-spirituality (prophets/saints).
Chapman's web site is excellent, probably the best place to start on the topic (his article on "Boomeritis" has a good list). Or Ronfeld's TIMN* stuff.
Constructs would be Jean Gebser's structures of consciousness, or similarly Ken Wilber's "vMemes" (stolen from Spiral Dynamics) or Robert Kegan's stages of psychological development, etc.
According to those models, post-capitalist economics will emerge from post-modern social conditions (which create a "crisis of meaning"), network effects, technological disruption and the crumbling of the "Blue church" institutional paradigm. John Vervaeke's discussions about the "Religion of No Religion" covers a lot of this ground.
One version of post-capitalism roughly corresponds to what Michel Bauwens is doing with the P2P Foundation.
I think of capitalism as one part of a complex of evolutionary adaptations in the NW European gene pool. That complex is referred to as WEIRD** culture by Henrich for example: high-social-trust, Constitutional order, high literacy, wealthy, liberal personality (Enlightenment rationalism, "openness to new experience"), industrial economy, scientific and technological advances, etc.
What economic globalism and neoliberalism has done, as driven by tech disruption, is to expose the fragile features of WEIRD and Blue church institutions, values and ideas.
According to the models, post-capitalism emerge with anti-fragile, holistic, integral culture (Kegan stage 5).
* https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/david-ronfeldts-timn-and-the-four-forms-of-governance/2009/05/20
** Joseph Henrich (Harvard) on WEIRD modern-rationalist culture:
https://areomagazine.com/2021/01/04/joseph-henrichs-the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-how-the-west-became-psychologically-peculiar-and-particularly-prosperous/
Blue church fragility to disruption, explained:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202005/the-hammer-the-dance-and-the-red-religion
re: the cultural-evolutionary bridge to Kegan stage 5 , post-capitalist civilization
Chapman's summary of the problem with being stuck between fragile modern rationalism (stage 4), postmodernism (4.5) and construct-aware, holistic, meta rationality (stage 5):
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
"Instead of assuring everyone of opportunity to flourish, it is likely better to simply start with assuring everyone of the chance to flourish - a commitment to not get in their way. "
This is equally as utopian as your caricature of Freddie's ideas (transform human nature into perfectly loving our enemies and caring for the disgusting, the abusive and the disagreeable as we care for ourselves). There is no such thing as equality of opportunity, which is the phrase that your "commitment to not get in their way" is euphemistically intended to avoid, even theoretically. All there is is the choice of what qualities you are willing to tolerate being the mechanism as to who gets a good life and who doesn't, and somewhat mysteriously those qualities tend to somehow be the ones the speaker generally possesses.
As with much of your writing, I absolutely love this. I'm a teacher and know all too well the grind of state testing and how negatively it affects so many of my students. Your first post convinced me to subscribe, this one has convinced me to pick up the book.
I loved your book, which I had pre-ordered and read immediately when it arrived. You are advocating for an educational system that is similar to what exists throughout Europe (where I live): students are tracked according to academic ability, based on testing that is done usually around fifth grade. Only about 10–20 percent of students go on to university; the rest do apprenticeships and job training. And at the end of these trainings is a well-paying job and a social safety net.
So many Americans I talk with are horrified by this system, but really, is our way more humane? For every academically talented kid in Europe who tests poorly and has to go to an apprenticeship rather than university, there are likely a hundred students in the US who we push into college even though they’re not able to do the work, and who wind up dropping out deep in debt with no prospects for getting a job at a wage sufficient to pay back that debt (because credential inflation means lots of jobs now require a BA when a generation ago a high school diploma was needed).
We readily acknowledge the different levels of ability in sports, music, acting, art, and other fields. Why should academics, uniquely, be the only area where everyone is exactly equal?
Anyway, thank you for writing your book, which reframes the education discussion in an important way.
Perhaps the American system is not more humane, but the German way is not very good either. German friends of mine complained that 5th grade is much too early to filter children, because they don't really know what they want to do with their lives and because lots of people are late bloomers that only figure things out at the end of high-school.
The system we have in Italy where some high-schools are vocational and some prepare for university (classico / scientifico / tecnico industriale), and at the end of 8th grade parents and children decide the track, seems much better. Universities have open enrollment, so the system doesn't preclude students that finished a classico (studying Latin, Greek, literature and modern languages) from enrolling to engineering, it's just ecceedingly rare.
Of course, this is Italy and the country's motto is "flexibility über alles" :D.
I talk to my wife (a teacher) about this a lot. Her education degree made her a fervent believer that everything was due to environmental factors, and that there was no limit to what a quality teacher could do. A few years teaching Kindergarten flipped her perspective. She now believes she has a pretty good idea which of these 5-year-olds will be successful in life and which won't.
I made the mistake of reading Cult of Smart last year as a teacher about to enter grad school for an education degree. After a year of expensive and highly-rated education about education, I can say with confidence that just about nobody in the education policy complex and its university offshoots is talking as honestly about intelligence distribution or relative vs. absolute value as Freddie in his book. I didn't read anything in my grad coursework that explained educational outcome disparities as parsimoniously and clearly as Cult of Smart.
Actual science threatens their 100+ year old ideological premises (Hegelian idealism), no?
Freddie, I'm a relatively new reader of yours and, having read your (excellent) book and columns on the inevitability of ability-based hierarchies of educational and other achievement, I'm left with one lingering question. While I accept (and even admire) your honest Marxist support for a more redistributive economic system to ameliorate the impact of these hierarchies on the of quality of life of those on the lower rungs of these partially-inherited hierarchies, how do you propose to continue to create the wealth necessary to fund such a system if you significantly reduce the incentives (prosperity for one's own family, desire for social status, greed, or just "winning the race") that drive the relatively more gifted to seek places on the higher rungs through constructive achievement? I concede that we might live in a better world if these aspects of human nature weren't so central to the efficient creation of the goods and services needed to raise an entire society's standard of living, but I haven't seen much historical evidence that such a system is actually possible over the long term. (Some might argue that Scandinavia offers hopeful examples in this regard, but I question whether their social welfare systems could be supported over the long term if those countries were required to bear the true economic costs of their own national security, currently subsidized by the United States--because, I hasten to add, it's in our interests to do so.). I'm sincerely curious!
That's an excellent question.
Short version:
The crumbling of the "Blue church" (see Jordan Hall) ensures that capitalism-as-we-know-it is unsustainable.
We already see scholars like Joel Kotkin predicting that the failure of corporate-crony capitalism is currently creating Neo-Feudalism (illiberalism).
-----
Long:
I'm personally not a socialist, but I can see how libertarian-voluntary socialism might work for some people in some places.
Capitalism as we know it, neoliberalism and so forth, is a moral failure. All human societies evolved methods of regulating morals to survive. A moral failure, a crisis of meaning, is a real danger to human survival (existence as we know it).
A "crisis of meaning exists" (ses John Vervaeke) now because of tech disruption, globalism, neoliberalism and network effects (see Jordan Hall on the collapse of the "Blue church").
Also see Habermas' theory of communicative action, the "colonization of lifeworld by systems" and Howard Rheingold on Disinformocracy.
The P2P Foundation has a catalog of something like 20,000 "post-capitalist" projects of various kinds.
Your book is great. That said, this is the correct answer to the problem, you have to seriously consider letting go of certain instincts you have to help others. The market knows better than you do who is good at what....
So no JG, no UBI, instead, we do Weekly Wage Subsidies:
1. Everyone who wants welfare or UI is in the database at LABOR.GOV
2. Only SMBs and families can hire the cheap labor.
3. Employer in for $100/wk + Govt in for $200/wk.
4. Every $20/more employers offer, Govt in for $10 less (toping out at $480/wk with govt in for $10)
At the $100/wk, THIRTY MILLION people not working now will be offered 100's of jobs each immediately. $5200/yr is massively non-marginal. This ends labor slack FOREVER. It wins full conservative support bc no more welfare queens (your opinion here doesn't matter, it wins cons support). AND it wins ALL the upper-class liberals bc they get the cheap labor.
It doesn't win union support BUT it wins the blue-collar employees of the Fortune 1000, bc the only way Walmart and Amazon etc can get employees to stay with them long term is to pay above the $490/wk.
This gives you full employment forever. Anyone who wants "welfare or UI" from the govt, has to work on the 100s of jobs offered to them, to get the govt money.
As the economy improves, SMB and families have to keep offering more, which reduces the Govt spend. And note: when we have a shock, like COVID, the machine INSTANTLY redeploys the cheap labor. It's really very simple, once you price welfare labor AFTER welfare, you can run a giant kiddie pool of capitalism that competes vibrantly vs the Fortune 1000.
One example, using Amazon. Bezos has 300K SMBs he loves to tout who sell stuff on his site. With this plan in place, those 300L+K can not afford their own pick, pack, ships staff, so they they can store inventory themselves and sell across Ebay, Walmart.com, etc. They do not have to lock up their inventory at Amazon. Mom and pop everything will finally have a leg up, and it's one they DESERVE because they pay for the welfare AND there is a terrible natural trend of BIG BIZ = BIG GOVT. This recasts welfare as a LABOR RESOURCE that we give SMB and families to fight back vs Big Biz.
C'mon Freddie, you can get here
https://medium.com/@morganwarstler/guaranteed-income-choose-your-boss-1d068ac5a205
I have long been an uninformed believer in the transformative power of education. But everything in this succinct sum-up I agree with. I'm afraid I must buy the book.
And pass it on to everyone who thinks critically and thoughtfully about what the country can do better. Thank you , FDB.
Did you ever respond to Nathan Robinson's review? (If I recall correctly, it deployed a logical fallacy, equivocation, to argue that the book's central thesis is based on a logical fallacy.)
I think he's edited it since but the original version was, I think, 21,000 words. Seriously. The book is only 55,000.
As far as I can tell, he advances the naïve environmentalist argument with an insistence that there are undiscovered environmental that, for some reason, we haven't thought to measure in 150 years of education research. He also argues, more or less, that the social consequences would be bad if what I was saying were true, and also that it would hurt people's feelings if it were true.
That does not strike me as particularly crying out for a long rebuttal.
Sounds like the standard "blank slate" education establishment delusions.
Yes, I was one of those kids who went to college not because I really wanted to, but because every adult in my life told me that I "have" to go to college, that I had no future without that degree. So I went and got a worthless BA degree. I learned nothing in college except how to bubble C on those stupid scantron tests. What a waste of 4 years of my life and thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile I have several friends who have trouble finding jobs in their chosen industries like sales, marketing, software development, etc. even though they have years of experience in those fields, which they attribute to not having that stupid bachelor's degree. So many employers just use it as an easy sorting mechanism - throw every resume without a degree in the trash, no matter how little a degree would have actually prepared the person for doing the job.
You make some good objections to our education-based meritocracy, but I don't think your critique goes deep enough. (This isn't necessarily a problem. No one can cover everything in a single book.)
Even if everyone had equal intellectual potential and one's success depended solely on one's effort, meritocracy would still be unjust. Why? Because (to quote an often mocked but rarely addressed teenage talking point) I didn't choose to be born. None of us did. None of us chose to come into existence as vulnerable creatures with a multitude of needs that can be satisfied only through effort. None of us signed up to have our quality of life determined by our "work ethic."
Of course, no one, aside from your parents, is individually responsible for setting you up with a good life. And if this were a hunter-gatherer society, in which everyone lived at a subsistence level, then I could understand the argument that each person bears complete responsibility for their own flourishing. (Ironically enough, though, it's hunter-gatherer societies that are the most tight-knit and mutually supportive.)
But we don't live in a hunter-gatherer society. We live in a post-industrial society that already produces enough food to feed everyone and is in the process of automating many of the processes that produce things that people need. Yes, society must incentivize work to some extent. But there's a difference between incentivizing work and saying that you don't deserve to escape misery unless you're putting in the effort to escape it. I'll leave the policy details to others, but let me say this: at this point in humanity's technological and economic development, it is morally obscene to make a decent life dependent on "hard work."
This can be addressed by allowing children to sue their parents for having given birth to them.
Hunter-gatherer societies had intense social bonding and altruistic social cooperation because those were evolutionary adaptations that improved group survival.*
Evolutionary theorists point out that (based on current evidence) all tribal hunting-gathering societies had to, and did, punish non-cooperators, again, as a matter of survival.
So, merit is wired into human culture by evolution. To socially cooperate was to have moral merit. To be uncooperative lacked moral merit.
Modern culture evolved the ability to extend social trust beyond clans and kinship groups, to the nation state. High-social-trust, modern nation state societies arguably have higher levels of social cooperation, but it is diffused via institutional structures such as Constitutional law into abstractions, and not limited to the kind of biological feedback loops that reinforce tribal trust and cooperation in smaller populations.
What is actually "morally obscene" from a biological viewpoint is to think that humans can be decent (altruistic) without a reward/punishment system.
Utopia is a biological and moral obscenity, and delusional.
* Peter Richerson, biologist, quotes Darwin on the topic:
(as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of sympathy in "primeval times")
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a
slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of
the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an
advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense
advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from
possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage,
and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves
for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would
be natural selection (178-179)."
> Eventually I traced it all to a single anonymous account with a Michael Cera picture for an avatar and less than a thousand followers, who was confidently reporting specific details about a book that, again, only existed in my head, and even there was just a vague and loose idea.
That's so awesome. maybe it was a Fight Club situation and you were actually tweeting from an alt account in the dead of night.