Interesting Links for 20-11-2016
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On Rural America: Understanding Isn’t The Problem
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Looking for atheism in the ancient world
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How to make a nice cup of tea
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How you get from
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The Forsetti piece was very thought provoking.
I find myself in two minds.
On the one hand, I think large numbers of people have found the early 21st century an economically worrying place to live. They (or people they know and love) have not done well out of globalisation or automation (or as well as they expected to). A more connected and socially liberal world has made things different from how they expected them to be. No one has really asked them if they are okay with the future and, if they're not okay, what could be done to get them to okay with it. I have sympathy for that. I like the fact that globalisation and technology is making me prosperous and the city I live bloom. I can see that if you're on the other side of that coin it would be less than awesome.
Now many people also seem to want things that I think are actively bad. They want a socially conservative country where people know their place and there are restrictions on the freedom of non-white, non-male, non-straight individuals and communities. I don't support that. However, it doesn't go away just because I want it to and I certainly can't ban being uncomfortable with a more socially liberal country.
And many people also seem to be making unwise electoral choices about how to fix the problems in their life and taking on trust short-term, easy, "common sense" solutions which I think won't work and trusting people I think are badly equiped to run things to solve complex long-term problems.
And from an electoral point of view, clearly the coalition of people who are concerned about the economics of the 21st century, not keen on a socially liberal country and happy to go for simple solutions to complex problems might not be a majority in the West but they are a large and well motivated minority and can probably gain a plurality in important elections over the next ten years given luck and a following wind.
So, on the one hand there is a lot to recomend a rich, high quality dialogue. What would make globalisation and automation good for them? What would compensate them for their losses? What important parts of their community are being damaged and how and what can be done to shore them up?
How can we encourage people who are a little bit racist or sexist or homophobic or generaly -ist to be more accepting of other people and treat them as if they were fully human?
How do we have a high quality deliberation about what the complex solutions to complex problems are and what are the problems we can't or won't solve and who has to live with those consequuences?
On the other hand, as the Forsetti article suggests - perhaps some of these people are deliberate and unrepenting barbarians who don't understand the 21st century, who can't understand it because their frame of reference doesn't have space for the type of problems the 21st century poses and want to destroy it - which is a shame because one of the things they don't understand is that there is no going back. You might not want to have stuff made by robots but someone else does and will and they will always be able to make stuff better, faster and cheaper than you can by hand. You might not want to have stuff made in foreign countries but you can't stop foreigners making things, you can't stop them being better, faster and cheaper at making things than you and you can't stop two groups of foreigners buying and selling things they make instead of buying them from you. And you can't stop the people who are doing well out of the 21st being utterly unsympathetic to your attempts to ruin it for the rest of us.
At the moment I think a big, slow existential fight is brewing rather than a big, slow existential dialogue. I'd rather have the dialogue but I fear the fight might be inevitable.
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But I think that the liberal side of things should have started that dialogue a long time ago, and spent more time on how we were going to deal with inequality and changing circumstances, and made sure that what we were doing was better for everyone.
But we've had too many politicians who either didn't have the vision or the will to try and sell that vision.
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I'm a bit of a fan of Joseph Schumpeter and the idea of creative destruction - specifically in this regard the idea that when there is a recession the financial and economic stress of that kills of organisations and business models that are no longer successful and allows new organisations or business models to replace them. That the process of innovation is often a process of bad times killing off moribond organisations and those being replaced with innovative ways of doing things. However, organisations also includes communities especially where those communities are organised around particular economic ventures or models.
I think, therefore, that many businessess and the communities in which they are embedded which were not working well will have been pushed out of business by the crash and will take their communities down with them and part of what we're seeing is a response to that process - with people who are struggling to shift to working in new organisations.
And we should have had a conversation with them before hand which basically said, everything you do is out of date and the next time there is a recession it will be wiped out - how can we help you prepare for that? But we didn't, and now it might well be too late to prepare those parts of the economy for a soft landing.
Equally, they ought to have seen it coming themselves.
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