This is an excellent book, and I cannot wait to read the end of it. I too, believe that we need to change the trajectory our civilization is taking. For some ideas of how to do so, I would definitely recommend you read this: https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/digital-involution. Do you plan to address the retreat from the real world into the digital?
I see. Very well then. It's a great set of ideas and great writing. I felt charged to go after the world and what I want. Charged to do so more so. Thank you. I hope I can help with this along my journey as well.
You claim that we need a corrective to anti-humanism. To reassert our dignity, glory and value as humans.
You then proceed to write such a corrective, describing our profound nature, and arguing for human population growth.
So my question is, is that it? Is this the antidote you speak of? Is realizing our greatness via substack a potion we can drink to correct our anti humanist ways?
I’m being a bit facetious but also serious at the same time. What is the path to correcting this?
I question the idea that more people means more progress. Consider that Britain, a small island country came to rule over a quarter of humanity. The huge numbers India or China had counted little.
The British people were able to prevail because of the combined "force multipliers" of capitalism and science. Rising progress can continue even with falling population as the share of the population with these and other force multipliers rise.
For example, in his intro to this series Crawford notes that productivity is slowing.
This isn't for a lack of people, our population has continued to rise. It's because American political leaders have chosen to implement a less effective, but easy to manage, form of capitalism (neoliberalism) over its more effective (but harder to manage) form. In my most recent post I provide reasons why we should try to replace neoliberalism.
Certainly true that progress is not strictly proportional to population. Institutions matter a lot, as you say it is a force multiplier. But holding other factors constant, more people will make more progress.
Regarding the current productivity slowdown, it's true that population continues to rise, but population growth rate has slowed, and there is reason to believe that as the frontiers of progress are pushed ever further out, we need ever more people to keep pushing them. So a growing but decelerating population might naturally see a slowdown in progress.
The example of Britain shows than the right institution can outweigh vast numbers of people. The is also the story told by the development of the various force multipliers:
5000 BP the State
2600 BP Axial Religion and Superstates
1100 BP WEIRD psychological and Western Civ
400 BP Capitalism
250 BP Science and the Industrial Rev
150 BP Communication Revolution
70 BP IT Revolution
30 BP Internet
Today AI
Each of these speeds up the process on a per capita basis and they have been coming at decreasing intervals.
In the intermediate future population will keep growing. Today most of the world’s population does not take part in progress. For the next century progress will likely come from two sources.
[1] Those (shrinking) population already involved in progress using the newest force multipliers (likely AI) to continue on.
[2] Those not in the progressive population today moving into it, as China has done over the last 40 years and India is doing, and as the US could do if we followed my advice and dumped neoliberalism.
I agree with the point that there are a lot of humans now who are not adding anything to progress and are just leeching resources... There a lot of lazy uninspired individuals in this modern age and they are the only reason I support a lower population worldwide, those guys are not adding to the value of humanity and just piggybacking off the sweat of the few who are actually adding value to the World 🌍
I wouldn't put it that way. I am tjhinking more along the lines of for tens of millennia, humans were at least as intelligent and so living today, and maybe more so, lived amidst great natural wealth and yet lived very simple lives, showing very little of what this blog characterizes as progress.
Here and there were see evidence of more complex societies and even the emergence of early cultivation (Ohallo II) 10000 years before the Agricultural Revolution marked the beginning of continuous cultivation. Humans need a more stable climate and the evolution of a number of social scaleup techs listed in my previous post. These did not happen everywhere at once. The same statis that had been the cause for all of humanity for a 200 millennia before 10K BCE, continued on after that time in many places. Even today there exist pockets of humanity that have not yet acquired Axial Religious, and more that haven't acquired capitalism or the Enlightenment. The per capita world economy would roughly quadruple in size, with no change in technology were the scaleup techs already in place in the development societies spread to the whole world (this is roughly equivalent to a century world of growth at advanced economy rates.
It isn't free-riding any more than it was free-riding for the vast majority of mankind who failed to advance before 10K BCE despite periodic advances like Ohallo II.
My own grieviance is with the people in so called developed societies who are not pulling their weight in furthering our collective growth and mostly act as leeches to our resources.. those are the people I take offense with
Others who are not yet touched with capitalism and it's effect and living how their Ancestors live can continue that way no problem IMO, but if you're living in more advanced societies then you have an obligation to pull your weight and a sizable number of people aren't doing that there for various reasons (bad governments are one of the causes) but they should do more to help themselves and the collective
I think you should also consider intelligence as a factor. Giving everyone a pill that would increase IQ by 10% would certainly yield progress without needing a population rise. Also doubling the number of our idiots would probably not help much.
I think there is a fairly good case for low populations now under average utilitarianism.
Lets say the future is going to contain a huge number of people having extremely good lives. Then the average utility is nearly what those utopia residents recieve, dragged down slightly by modern humanities relatively worse lives (and dragged down by the past, but lets assume time travel isn't an option). So the average utilitarian thing to do is to reach utopia while subjecting as few people as possible to the relatively substandard 21 century living conditions. (Relative to the utopia)
How is your mind working? The number of ideas and facts. The number of citations and quotes. They fit and integrate well together. Each lends to the overall theme. How much was read? My guess is that not all these things were read for this article, but I might be wrong. My guess is that you've read them before and when you began to write this your mind just jumps to those previous readings. A sudden calling up from the subconscious. "Ah that, it will fit here." You might not call up the exact words and you might have to go find them, but it's that calling up. It's what motivated my question of how is your mind working.
Well, I've been reading and thinking about this as an active topic for seven years (and it was a topic of interest even longer than that). So I've built up a lot of ideas and mental structures in my head about it.
As for the citations, yes, many of them are things I've read over the years. Some come from fact-checking (Jenni Morales is my very helpful research assistant who finds many of them and helps prepare the footnotes and the bibliography).
I'm doing almost no new research to write these essays—I don't have time, given my target publication schedule!
The word "man" referring to humankind appears in this article only when Crawford (who himself uses "human") quotes other writers who are using it that way, which was acceptable and normal at the time they were writing. I hope you are able to abstract away from their particular usage of the word and appreciate the ideas and sentiments behind it.
Crawford usually when I read substack articles I want to get to the end,you are a rare one I want the end to be as far down as possible
Thank you!
I agree. I wanted to keep reading and reading.
Not sure how this got in my email box, but I really enjoyed it. Great article
Another great chapter!
This was truly inspirational
“: we pursue knowledge for the sake of curiosity, art and music for the sake of beauty, game and sport for the sake of competition.”
This is an excellent book, and I cannot wait to read the end of it. I too, believe that we need to change the trajectory our civilization is taking. For some ideas of how to do so, I would definitely recommend you read this: https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/digital-involution. Do you plan to address the retreat from the real world into the digital?
I see. Very well then. It's a great set of ideas and great writing. I felt charged to go after the world and what I want. Charged to do so more so. Thank you. I hope I can help with this along my journey as well.
That's great to hear, thanks!
This is a good read, thank you.
You claim that we need a corrective to anti-humanism. To reassert our dignity, glory and value as humans.
You then proceed to write such a corrective, describing our profound nature, and arguing for human population growth.
So my question is, is that it? Is this the antidote you speak of? Is realizing our greatness via substack a potion we can drink to correct our anti humanist ways?
I’m being a bit facetious but also serious at the same time. What is the path to correcting this?
It's a start! More broadly we need a new culture of progress, as I described in the intro (https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/thm-introduction-the-present-crisis) and will elaborate on in Part 3. The message needs to be reinforced and amplified again and again.
I question the idea that more people means more progress. Consider that Britain, a small island country came to rule over a quarter of humanity. The huge numbers India or China had counted little.
The British people were able to prevail because of the combined "force multipliers" of capitalism and science. Rising progress can continue even with falling population as the share of the population with these and other force multipliers rise.
For example, in his intro to this series Crawford notes that productivity is slowing.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18299a0d-8f64-4cd6-9ceb-19c01f2d4a36_1200x1400.png
This isn't for a lack of people, our population has continued to rise. It's because American political leaders have chosen to implement a less effective, but easy to manage, form of capitalism (neoliberalism) over its more effective (but harder to manage) form. In my most recent post I provide reasons why we should try to replace neoliberalism.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/why-neoliberalism-should-be-replaced/comments
Certainly true that progress is not strictly proportional to population. Institutions matter a lot, as you say it is a force multiplier. But holding other factors constant, more people will make more progress.
Regarding the current productivity slowdown, it's true that population continues to rise, but population growth rate has slowed, and there is reason to believe that as the frontiers of progress are pushed ever further out, we need ever more people to keep pushing them. So a growing but decelerating population might naturally see a slowdown in progress.
The example of Britain shows than the right institution can outweigh vast numbers of people. The is also the story told by the development of the various force multipliers:
5000 BP the State
2600 BP Axial Religion and Superstates
1100 BP WEIRD psychological and Western Civ
400 BP Capitalism
250 BP Science and the Industrial Rev
150 BP Communication Revolution
70 BP IT Revolution
30 BP Internet
Today AI
Each of these speeds up the process on a per capita basis and they have been coming at decreasing intervals.
In the intermediate future population will keep growing. Today most of the world’s population does not take part in progress. For the next century progress will likely come from two sources.
[1] Those (shrinking) population already involved in progress using the newest force multipliers (likely AI) to continue on.
[2] Those not in the progressive population today moving into it, as China has done over the last 40 years and India is doing, and as the US could do if we followed my advice and dumped neoliberalism.
I agree with the point that there are a lot of humans now who are not adding anything to progress and are just leeching resources... There a lot of lazy uninspired individuals in this modern age and they are the only reason I support a lower population worldwide, those guys are not adding to the value of humanity and just piggybacking off the sweat of the few who are actually adding value to the World 🌍
I wouldn't put it that way. I am tjhinking more along the lines of for tens of millennia, humans were at least as intelligent and so living today, and maybe more so, lived amidst great natural wealth and yet lived very simple lives, showing very little of what this blog characterizes as progress.
Here and there were see evidence of more complex societies and even the emergence of early cultivation (Ohallo II) 10000 years before the Agricultural Revolution marked the beginning of continuous cultivation. Humans need a more stable climate and the evolution of a number of social scaleup techs listed in my previous post. These did not happen everywhere at once. The same statis that had been the cause for all of humanity for a 200 millennia before 10K BCE, continued on after that time in many places. Even today there exist pockets of humanity that have not yet acquired Axial Religious, and more that haven't acquired capitalism or the Enlightenment. The per capita world economy would roughly quadruple in size, with no change in technology were the scaleup techs already in place in the development societies spread to the whole world (this is roughly equivalent to a century world of growth at advanced economy rates.
It isn't free-riding any more than it was free-riding for the vast majority of mankind who failed to advance before 10K BCE despite periodic advances like Ohallo II.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/rise-of-civilization-part-i
Oh, I see your point and agree in general
My own grieviance is with the people in so called developed societies who are not pulling their weight in furthering our collective growth and mostly act as leeches to our resources.. those are the people I take offense with
Others who are not yet touched with capitalism and it's effect and living how their Ancestors live can continue that way no problem IMO, but if you're living in more advanced societies then you have an obligation to pull your weight and a sizable number of people aren't doing that there for various reasons (bad governments are one of the causes) but they should do more to help themselves and the collective
I think you should also consider intelligence as a factor. Giving everyone a pill that would increase IQ by 10% would certainly yield progress without needing a population rise. Also doubling the number of our idiots would probably not help much.
I think there is a fairly good case for low populations now under average utilitarianism.
Lets say the future is going to contain a huge number of people having extremely good lives. Then the average utility is nearly what those utopia residents recieve, dragged down slightly by modern humanities relatively worse lives (and dragged down by the past, but lets assume time travel isn't an option). So the average utilitarian thing to do is to reach utopia while subjecting as few people as possible to the relatively substandard 21 century living conditions. (Relative to the utopia)
Not sure how this got in my email box, but I really enjoyed it. Great article
An extended discussion of what you mean by “success” and “happiness” would be useful to include
Wait for the next essay!
How is your mind working? The number of ideas and facts. The number of citations and quotes. They fit and integrate well together. Each lends to the overall theme. How much was read? My guess is that not all these things were read for this article, but I might be wrong. My guess is that you've read them before and when you began to write this your mind just jumps to those previous readings. A sudden calling up from the subconscious. "Ah that, it will fit here." You might not call up the exact words and you might have to go find them, but it's that calling up. It's what motivated my question of how is your mind working.
Well, I've been reading and thinking about this as an active topic for seven years (and it was a topic of interest even longer than that). So I've built up a lot of ideas and mental structures in my head about it.
As for the citations, yes, many of them are things I've read over the years. Some come from fact-checking (Jenni Morales is my very helpful research assistant who finds many of them and helps prepare the footnotes and the bibliography).
I'm doing almost no new research to write these essays—I don't have time, given my target publication schedule!
The word "man" referring to humankind appears in this article only when Crawford (who himself uses "human") quotes other writers who are using it that way, which was acceptable and normal at the time they were writing. I hope you are able to abstract away from their particular usage of the word and appreciate the ideas and sentiments behind it.