In today’s episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins host me to explore this internal division within liberalism and look for ways to bridge it. Our starting point is on opposite sides of the divide — my book The Permanent Problem offers an unsparing diagnosis of deep problems within contemporary liberal societies, while Jonathan has written repeatedly on the dangers of excessive liberal self-criticism — but throughout the conversation we probe for common ground while clarifying where we disagree.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript. But first, a few links relevant to our chat:

Jonathan’s essay on why you should feel good about liberalism

Jonathan’s review of The Permanent Problem

My response to Jonathan’s review

Jonathan’s review of Adrian Wooldridge’s The Revolutionary Center and Alex Zakaras’s Freedom for All

Jonathan’s review of Ryan Avent’s In Good Faith

Alana Newhouse’s essay “Everything Is Broken”

Aaron Renn’s essay on Old Orderists vs. New Orderists

Marlene Laruelle’s essay on liberal reconstruction vs. liberal restoration

My essay on the advance of the capitalist monoculture

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Jonathan Rauch, who’s back for his second time on the show. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a writer at The Atlantic, and the author of a number of fine books going all the way back to Kindly Inquisitors, and then most recently, Cross Purposes. Jonathan, great to have you on the show.

Jonathan Rauch: Nice to be with you, Brink.

Lindsey: So Jonathan and I agree about a lot of things, but on today’s show, we’re going to talk about things that we apparently disagree about. We’re both liberals, small-l liberals in the classic sense of that term. We believe in the moral equality of all individuals, popular self-government under the rule of law, the market economy, what Jonathan calls liberal science. We also both believe that liberalism is on its heels in the 21st century, facing aggressive and self-assured challenges from both the extreme left and extreme right. Where we seem to disagree is on how liberals ought to be reacting to this contemporary challenge.

There’s a whole shelf of books now that have been written in recent years on what’s ailing the House of Liberalism in the 21st century. I wrote one of them, and you’ve reviewed several of them, including mine, and you’ve developed a consistent critique throughout those reviews. Here’s how I put it, and then I’ll let you clean it up. In general, liberalism’s capacity for self-correction is one of its greatest strengths. So of course, self-criticism is an essential part of healthy liberalism. But in the current political crisis, you argue that some liberals have been going too far, going past responsible liberal self-criticism to wallow in over the top liberal self-flagellation. You’ve called this a failure of nerve, making unnecessary concessions to our enemies that only serve to add further momentum to their attacks. So we’ll dive very deeply into all of this, but does that sound about right? How would you put it?

Rauch: Well, it’s in the ballpark. The quotations at the end I don’t recognize as words that I wrote, but the general ballpark is correct.

Lindsey: Failure of nerve was a quote.

Rauch: Oh, I’m sorry?

Lindsey: Failure of nerve was a quote.

Rauch: Yeah. Well, that sounds right. If I said enemies, I’m disappointed in myself. I may have, but I try not to use that kind of intense…

Lindsey: Let’s say opponents. That’s better.

Rauch: But yeah, that’s the ballpark. And that’s not to negate the importance of criticism and the importance of recognizing failure. And there have certainly been plenty of those. And I bear my share of responsibility for missing any number of turning points. So I don’t think we’re fundamentally disagreeing that there are some important flaws that it’s just very important to fix, and that if we don’t, we’re in trouble. I think I’m not even sure the extent to which we actually disagree on these things as opposed to weighting them differently. But one thing I think that’s going on is almost an eagerness on the part of many liberals to support and sometimes exaggerate criticisms that are not all that well-founded. Another tendency I see is a tendency to underrate the strengths of liberalism and to fail to go out and tell people about those strengths. If we don’t tell our story, no one else will. And then a third thing that I’ve emphasized increasingly recently is my concern that we’re naive, that we’re playing a different game from our political opponents. They are using methods of psychological warfare in what they see as a relentless contest of wills. They’re using powerful propaganda techniques. Those includes lies, distortions, half-truths, exaggerations, and they’re quite ruthless about it. And I think we tend to be naive about what we’re up against, internalize the criticisms as if they were well-intentioned without understanding the nature of the conflict that we face. So those, I don’t know if we disagree on those things in particular, simply weight them differently. I don’t know. What do you think?

Lindsey: It could be. So here, I’ll put forward my opposing position that the political crisis that’s gripping the United States is not just gripping the United States, it’s gripping basically all liberal democracies, or many liberal democracies around the world and some less advanced countries as well. So I see this as something that’s not America-specific. There’s something deep and global going on. I see the political problem as both a product of and a misguided reaction to some real and serious failings in contemporary liberal society, not deep-seated problems with the principles of liberalism, but failures in how liberalism is being applied in contemporary liberal society.

I would say that you could call our political situation a legitimacy crisis for governing elites and established institutions, that a critical mass of the public has simply lost faith in those elites and those institutions and thus is vulnerable to or interested in what you might bloodlessly call anti-system politicians and more colorfully call demagogues. So in this situation of a legitimacy crisis, I think the first step is to recognize publicly that it exists, to declare that you understand that there has been a loss of trust and that trust needs to be rebuilt. From my perspective, scolding liberals for being too willing to interrogate and face up to their problems is really just to perpetuate the complacency that has allowed issues to fester until this backlash exploded in our faces. So put our positions in the starkest terms. I’m giving aid and comfort to the bad guys from your perspective. And from my perspective, you’re stuck in Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” complacency, which is what got us to this pass in the first place.

Let me say that our positions are not idiosyncratic. That is, I think that we personify two sides of a split within Team Liberal these days. There have been a number of people who’ve written about this. Back a few years ago, Alana Newhouse wrote a piece in Tablet called “Everything Is Broken,” talking about the people who see institutions as fundamentally broken versus fundamentally good and sound. Aaron Renn wrote a piece about Old Orderists versus New Orderists, people who basically are conservative, small-c conservative, who want to preserve existing institutions, versus others who think that there’s some real ground-up institutional rebuilding that needs to be done. They would be the new orderists. Most recently, Marlene Laruelle, if I’m pronouncing her name correctly, did something on the distinction between liberal reconstruction and liberal restoration. Reconstruction is rebuilding to make us ready for the 21st century versus restoration, getting back what’s rightly ours after the usurpation of the past decade. And so do any of those dichotomies resonate with you at all or not really?

Rauch: The dichotomies don’t because they’re dichotomous and it’s just not the way I think. I’m very much a, what is it? Fox, not hedgehog. Is that the distinction?

Lindsey: Yep.

Rauch: I’m trained as a journalist. I came up through National Journal, a policy magazine. I work at a place called Brookings, which is a policy institution. And the way I think about the world is a big bundle of problems and challenges and no two are quite alike and they all require responses and some of them are very urgent right now. But I don’t really know how to generalize it to these grand narratives about the world. That just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The interesting thing about your summary of your worldview is until you got to the very end, the summary, which as you said, was intended to heighten the differences, I agreed with every word of it. I literally could have written every word of that myself. There is a legitimacy crisis. It is global. Voters are unhappy everywhere. We may differ in that I place the source, the venue of those dissatisfactions primarily in the political realm. I think that’s where most of it is coming from, but there’s simply no doubt that we face that kind of problem. And in fact, just yesterday, I was planning out with a friend what I hope will become a podcast series looking at the global sources of this dyspepsia and unhappiness because it’s rocking every country in the world. Britain just went, what? Seven prime ministers in 10 years?

Lindsey: Yes. Yeah.

Rauch: France Macron is a perfectly competent president of France. His approvals are in the teens. We’re seeing the authoritarian populist trend everywhere. Pretty much weirdly, only Italy in Europe seems stable.

Lindsey: Well, they elected a populist, but then she moderated in power.

Rauch: Yeah, and she’s popular and Japan seems to be doing okay for the moment. They went through a period of instability. Anyway, you probably don’t want to get into all the global stuff, but the point is that there is a crisis and it is global, and denying it would be unrealistic and silly. So at that level, it’s a little unclear to me what we’re arguing about, except that I do think a lot of people go first to, well, let’s call it blame liberalism first. Say it’s got to be all our fault. I think they’re ignoring the malevolence of authoritarian populists and others who are using very powerful methods of propaganda, political organizing, deliberate nihilism, the way they use media and social media. That’s not something we’re doing. And I worry that if all we focus on are yes, the real problems that we have to solve first, if we globalize those not in the sense of worldwide, but in the sense of it’s one big story. And two, if that big story is all our fault, then I think we will fail to address what we’re really up against.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I certainly don’t think our problems are all our fault, but they don’t have to be our fault to be our problem. So there are two separate questions and I hope we’ll have time to get to both time horizons. But first, and the one that’s more acute and gets temperatures more elevated is how should liberals react to this current political crisis, the backlash from left and right extremes? There’s a second question, which really my book was more aimed at, which is how is liberal society doing more broadly and where does liberal society go from here? What is the path of liberal progress and growth?

Issue one is about how to beat the bad guys and keep liberalism going. The second time horizon, the broader, the longer view is about the direction liberal society ought to be going in. What I call the permanent problem is going to stay here even if we solve the current political distempers, what I call the crises of inclusion and dynamism will still be with us. The challenge of translating mass prosperity into mass flourishing will still be with us. So I see in that second bigger view, I see the crisis of politics that we’re through now is just one element that is embellishing and making more difficult, deeper underlying issues.

And you said you’re a fox and you’re a journalist by training and you see details. And so I don’t know what I am by training, but what I’ve wound up figuring out is that I specialize in generalizing. So all my books are big picture narratives where I try to see some pattern in events that isn’t what everybody else is saying and try to help us understand the details through presenting them in a new frame. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more convinced that our ideological knee jerks have a lot to do with our personality. What we think is very carefully thought intellection, a lot of it is just who we are being expressed on political questions. And so it could be that some of our differences here are just personality differences, that my sweeping, broad statements rub you the wrong way as under-sourced. And perhaps I am frustrated at your lack of being able to see the same big picture I see. So it could be that rather than substantive disagreements about specifics X, Y, and Z, we just have different ways of looking at things that have different strengths and have their different weaknesses.

Rauch: I think there’s certainly something to that. I guess I’d use the phrase intellectual style.

Lindsey: Yes sir.

Rauch: Ours do rub up against each other. That said, over the years, I think we’ve known each other 20 plus years. And I’ve learned a lot from your style without being able to take it on board as my own. And let me try something that might be helpful, which is to try to explain what I think I’m learning from the work that you and others are doing as it gradually evolves. I, like a lot of us, am very much on a journey in what I think are uncharted waters. And my starting point for that journey was, past tense, also still is to some extent. But my starting point was the voters in America and the world don’t know how good they’ve got it. They enjoy a level of peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge, which is unparalleled in human affairs. And that’s especially true of the United States of America, which has never been more prosperous, more secure. Life spans have never been longer, two-year dip recently. And you know you can recite all those things as well as I can. And so aren’t they being more than a bit spoiled to think that now is one of the worst times in American history? Isn’t there just at some level a fundamental failure of perception here and maybe also a failure on the part of liberals to tell our story in the way that Ronald Reagan so effectively did tell stories about peace and freedom and the shining city on the hill? And so that’s where my priors were, a sense that there’s almost a kind of immorality in people’s not understanding and appreciating how fortunate they are to be Americans and how fortunate they are to be alive right now.

Okay, that’s the starting point. The second thing that happens is what you said so well earlier that I might’ve written it and wish I had, which is it’s clear people are angry and dissatisfied with the system, especially but not only the political system, and it’s worldwide. So are they unhappy about nothing? Are they simply deluded? So my first step in my journey is there must be something there that I’m not seeing. What is it? So then comes a series of things that I think are happening. They include a global migration crisis, which is very unsettling, the rise of social media, algorithms that are antisocial, all of that stuff. Bifurcation — this is something you’ve written about eloquently. The very different economic and social pathways that people with college educations and people living in urban environments are taking from people without those things. If you look under the gross numbers, you see this strong divergence and more. I could go on, and those things are real.

And then the next thing that happens is a series of books, of which yours is one of the first and one of the most ambitious, but all of them grappling with aspects of these problems and telling bigger stories than I’m used to hearing. And collectively, I think they begin to gravitate toward a story about meaning and fulfillment, that they’re fundamental human needs, which can’t be measured in terms of the things I’m used to measuring, which need to be filled, which are not getting filled, and which is one of the factors, not the only one, but one of the factors that’s driving this deep dissatisfaction. And you and Adrian Wooldridge and Alex Zakaras and James Davison Hunter and others are circling around this and beginning to define it. And I’m struggling with it trying to understand it, but I am coming to see that what you call mass flourishing and what others might call the pursuit of happiness, that that seems to be where a core locus of problems lies. And that’s a place that I need to get more centered on. Does any of that make sense?

Lindsey: Absolutely. So let me start at your initial reaction because I share it at least partially, which is that of course, the United States and other advanced democracies are quite simply the richest, healthiest, the best educated, most humanely governed societies in human history. Just without question. The amount of physical suffering that was par for the course a generation or two ago, it’s just utterly unbearable to contemporary psychologies to think that people would have to endure that kind of loss on the regular.

So this is a story of liberalism not doing anything wrong, but nonetheless producing circumstances that then are unfavorable to its sustainability. This is an old cyclical history story. Liberalism makes people rich. Being rich makes you spoiled and taking things for granted and don’t know how good you have it and you’re willing to blow it all up on the chance that something could be better on the other side of the explosion and then you end up in ruin. So that is a story in which there’s no failure of liberal principle. It’s simply history as irony in motion. I don’t know who said that, I have to look it up, but it’s a wonderful saying. But again and again, terrible things produce in the end beneficent consequences and wonderful historical breakthroughs end up having a terrible dark side. That’s just the way history works. So we have conquered poverty in the advanced economies, which is something that absolutely was beyond human imagination that we were actually capable of doing this. And yet we have made poverty a marginal tragedy, not the normal lot of human life. And yet, so by solving that enormous problem, we’ve created a host of new problems and we’re floundering in dealing with those.

So I agree with you. I do think that there is an element of degraded civic virtue. All of our Founding Fathers believed that free government, republican government, government without hereditary rulers, relied on a considerable amount of self-control, a self-mastery within the populace. So if you’re not going to rule yourself, you’re going to be ruled by your betters. The theory of republican government is that people can rule themselves. So that imposes high moral expectations. They all thought that a virtuous people was a precondition for a successful republic, and they looked to organize religion to supply that virtue, even those who weren’t particularly orthodox Christian. So the threat of declining civic virtue for the future of liberalism is an old worry, and it seems to me relevant to our current situation.

I would say that my potted history of the political crisis, more narrowly, is about two things. First, this deepening class divide along educational lines, where the non-college educated jobs are higher paying and much cleaner and safer than the jobs of the past and yet the status of ordinary workers today, the importance of what ordinary workers can contribute to the commonweal is simply less than it was when we were poor. During industrialization, progress, economic progress, industrial might all depended upon mass inputs of brute physical labor and mindless clerical labor. And that dependence that created the class conflict that defined industrial capitalism. And that was a big deal. That was a huge source of instability. It gave rise to the socialist movement, which gave rise to totalitarian communism, which gave rise to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear Holocaust. You don’t get more unstable than that. So our old style industrial class conflict was a big deal and it all hinged on dependence of progress on dirty, dangerous work.

Our current class divide, I think is the mirror image of that. It’s based on the increasing independence of progress from the contributions of ordinary people. That more and more, technological progress is something that is a game for highly trained specialists. And everything else we’ve either automated or outsourced to poor countries for the time being as a way station to automation. But the actual pushing the whole system forward, which ordinary workers, factory workers used to do, they used to be deployed on the technological frontier along with their managers and bosses in the auto and steel industry. They were clearly integral to the building of American riches in a way that… Service labor is nice to have, it gives you luxuries, it gives you fripperies and things that are nice, but it just isn’t as existentially as important as it was back in the day. Back in the day when you had organized labor and they could go on strike and the steel industry went on strike, it was a national security crisis. It was a global security crisis because if the American economy is in a jam, then world freedom is in peril. So there was enormous importance in what ordinary workers did and it was widely recognized. The socialist movement saw the ordinary worker, the proletarian, as the protagonist of world history. And liberal countries were sufficiently freaked out by the socialist challenge that they had to do a good game of saying similar things. So we got all that lovely Art Deco artwork glorifying factory workers.

There’s no analog glorifying Walmart greeters or call center workers. So there has been, I think, beyond what we call bloodlessly skill-biased technological change, where over time, highly skilled workers have been pulling away in income terms from less skilled workers. So in addition to getting farther and farther relatively behind in income and living standards over time, you’ve had this status diminution where the work you do just isn’t as important as it was in the past and everybody knows it. The standards for avoiding being a loser are much higher than they used to be. Used to be back in antebellum America, you come off the boat as a poor immigrant, you’ve got nothing except a strong back and a willingness to work hard. There’s free land, free if you can steal it from Indians, and there’s no qualifications you need to go as high as anybody can go in American society. Whereas now, if you don’t graduate high school, then you’re a stone-cold loser. And really, if you don’t get a four-year degree, you’re pretty much excluded from a good shot at a job in the meritocracy and therefore you will consider yourself outside the elite, out on the outside looking in.

So I think there’s been a whole lot of marginalization of the status of ordinary workers. On top of that, then you’ve had the political marginalization of ordinary people as participants in politics. Once upon a time you had all these mass organizations, you had unions and you had other big mass organizations, The Grange for farmers, things like that, where you had local units and they had local leaders and you build up to national leadership and those big mass organizations would train leaders from the ranks. Over the course of the 1970s, all those mass organizations got outcompeted by special interest, single-issue professional nonprofits where the only membership is writing a check. They’re all staffed by highly educated, college educated professionals. So the capacity of ordinary people to participate directly in political life and have people from their ranks in Congress or in the administration and people from their ranks being paid attention to is just much, much, much less than it was back in the day.

I would say all of that, that economic and social and political marginalization has produced great gobs of angst and resentment amongst the people who are on the outside looking in. And it has manifested in the populist right and they are looking for candidates who inspire the fear and contempt of those elites and who threaten to burn it all down. So I think that’s step one or part one of my potted history of this political crisis is the changing structure of the American economy produced this class cleavage. That class cleavage, the way it’s played out over time has produced a real sense of us against them by ordinary folks, the majority versus the professional and managerial elite.

Then I would say all of this is occurring against a worsening information environment. I have grown persuaded by the kind of media analysis of people like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman that the medium of communication has a great effect beyond what’s the actual content of any medium. The actual medium itself has a big effect on how we think and how we interact. And I’ve grown convinced that our conversion from a political print culture to a political video culture is a dumbing down. The level of political debate is lower than it was. Print culture is logical and rigorous and analytical and deliberative. Video culture is emotional and spontaneous and reactive and simplistic. And I think you see all of that. You see those cognitive traits of a simpler way of apprehending the world in populist politics. So here again, this is a byproduct of affluence, our current media technologies and the media culture in which we live. The richer we get, the more important entertainment becomes as far as how we spend our days. And we’ve decided to fuse politics and entertainment in a really corrupt amalgam with now a reality TV star as president who’s basically running the White House as a TV show. So those are my two elements. Class conflict against the backdrop of a media information environment that’s making liberal democracy harder.

Rauch: Well, this goes to the very first thing you said, which so I think adroitly framed the conversation, a difference in intellectual style. Those are important things about I would say that there are far too few of them, that there’s a lot more happening than those things, but those are important things. I’ll enter as a footnote, because I’m pretty sure you don’t disagree with it, that when we talk about the declining status of the working man, we’re talking about white, less than high school educated working men, blue collar.

Lindsey: Less than college, not less than high school?

Rauch: Well, for a long time it was less than high school. More recent now, less than college, not now. Correct. Less than college. Less than four year degree is what we’re really talking about now. But then in most of this period, you wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman, African American, and so forth. And so what we seem to be talking about there is a status decline of not everybody, but of a particular group for whom a narrative of cultural dominance was important. My colleague at Brookings, Carol Graham, studies optimism and hope. And she finds that one group in America has consistently less of it than others, and that’s white working class men. Even though objectively they’re doing better than black working class men. And she thinks the evidence doesn’t pop out of the numbers, but she thinks that’s because the life story of black working class men in living memory is one of improvement in status, and that’s not true of white working class men.

This all begs a question, which we don’t need to get into, of how sympathetic should we be to people whose narrative is that they think that they should be the social template that dominates the country and they no longer have that privilege. Those of us who are members of marginalized communities would say it serves some right. But as a factual matter, the story that you tell is true and the media story is also true. The way I hear these things or maybe contextualize them is different though, or maybe different, which is that those are among the things in a big bundle of vectors in a complicated society, which is pointing in a negative direction. And that our job is to figure out what the vectors are that can be changed and try to turn them around. I tend to point to other vectors ahead of those.

I think status is important and social media important, absolutely. But I look at broken political systems, for example. I look at in the United States, the primary system in France, Britain, they made similar mistakes, they over-democratized. And I see stuff that can and should be repaired, for example. I see bad choices that were made along the way that were not necessarily the inevitable effects of technology. We didn’t have to do the McCain-Feingold law. People at the time predicted what would happen and it did. We didn’t have to fail to do the adjustment part of trade adjustment. That was a bad choice that was made in the ‘90s on and on. So the way I tend to look at all this is not some historical discontinuity in which the whole system reaches a breaking point that requires some kind of radical or revolutionary reboot. I look at it as a rolling series of problems of types that we’re not unfamiliar with. Let’s not forget the status decline of farmers who dominated the economy, how long ago would that be? I guess 200 years ago, and virtually disappeared. So I guess my analysis is more like let’s figure out the things that can be improved in this big bundle of rolling stuff and work on them.

And then I’d add one more thing, which is I’m going to advertise my most recent book. It’s called Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. I think in the conversation that you and I and Adrian and James and Bill Galston and others are having, and at the liberal LibCon 2026 conference, the thing that Shikha Dalmia just did. In all of this conversation, there’s circling through it a question of who’s responsible.

So the question you ask in your book, it’s about flourishing. Let’s substitute happiness and let’s say pursuit of happiness. Let’s say that people in America are very fortunate in many ways, but they’re not very happy. So whose responsibility is it to make people happy? I define liberalism in a particular way. I define it as the concept that all humans are born free and equal. Not everyone believes that. As instantiated through three core institutions, science, liberal democracy, and market economies. And those three things, they rest on values, they transmit values, but they’re not complete and they never have been. And we know that because ever since John Locke, liberals have been telling us, you need to go outside the system to get the values that you will need to participate and thrive within it. All the founders said that, and you know this story and you’ve told this story. In fact, I think you told it half an hour ago. So then there’s a kind of implicit question of responsibility. Whose job is it to help people, not make people, help people feel fulfilled in life? I don’t think that’s the job of the scientific establishment. I don’t think it’s the job of the corporations and securities markets that structure our economy. And God help me, I certainly don’t think it’s the function of Republican and Democratic elected politicians. God, help us if it is.

Lindsey: Yeah. I agree.

Rauch: I think it’s the responsibility of social institutions, which are in some sense pre-political, maybe pre- liberal. And that the most important of those are religious institutions and that the most important of those in America and the Western world, but let’s focus on the US for the time being, is Christianity. And I argue in the book that Christianity has made some tragic mistakes over the past 50 years. First, the mainline churches and then the evangelical churches. We don’t need to get into the details, but that those were actual bad choices that have had bad consequences and that we…

Lindsey: So those include mistakes by religious liberals, right? Religious liberalism screwed up.

Rauch: First by religious liberals, then by religious conservatives. The first well-intentioned, the second maybe not so well-intentioned. We can get into what that means, but the point isn’t here to point fingers. The point is to say we can’t fix that. I’m an atheist homosexual Jew. But what I can do is go to my friends in the religious world and say, “Guys, we need your help. We cannot straighten this out within those core liberal institutions. Can we help you guys straighten yourselves out so that you can help us?” I look with hope to figures like the Pope, who I think has provided a clear moral voice. I am very enthusiastic about the initiatives that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are taking. I’ve been talking to Episcopalians. They are looking for their voice, and to some extent they found it in Minneapolis in January. So there is a growing awakening in the religious world that they need to step up, but the point I’m making is you and I can’t fix that. That’s not a crisis of liberalism per se. That’s a crisis in the surrounding context.

Lindsey: Well, you and I can’t fix anything, Jonathan. If we thought all our problems could be solved by pure policy wonkery, still you and I couldn’t fix them. All we can do is talk about them. All we can do is talk about what’s wrong and how things might get better.

Rauch: Well, but there’s a lot you can do in Congress, right? There’s a lot you can do if you’re just in the party structures, you don’t need a lot of change the way parties choose their nominees. But at the level of policy, the world you and I live, there’s not much you and I can do about the politicization of Sunday morning services.

Lindsey: Right. So if we shift to this window of liberalism over the longer term, what’s the next stage of liberal progress? I think the challenges are overwhelmingly cultural. So what I call that, we’re stuck in this no man’s land between mass prosperity and mass flourishing. We’ve raised our sights. We’re no longer simply satisfied with full stomachs. We want meaning, we want fulfillment, we want purpose and belonging, but at least many of us are living under conditions that don’t seem very favorable to giving us those things. So I have a couple of thoughts. First, on the structural side, the people who are flourishing today are the college educated by and large. They have interesting, challenging work, which gives their whole life an arc through a career path. They have a lot of autonomy in their job so that they can feel creative and like their own boss. And so there’s a lot of scope in work life for college educated professionals to develop and realize capacities and derive enjoyment therefrom, which is basically what happiness or flourishing is in the eudaimonistic conception.

But working people don’t have that. They get the external reward of the paycheck. They get some rewards from hanging out with people they like and enjoying some interactions with customers, but by and large, it’s a slog. It’s a lot of tedium. It’s a lot of precarity. Sometimes it’s a lot of abuse you have to put up with. Over the longer term, I don’t see the prospect as very realistic that someday everybody’s going to have a really cool, interesting, fulfilling job.

So the way I have come down is looking at the longer term, what we ought to aim for is, at least for most people who don’t have the opportunity for intrinsically fulfilling work, we ought to try to move to a world where we’re rich enough that participation in work for pay becomes much more discretionary than it is today. That it becomes a phase you go through in life on the way to early retirement, kind of like schooling is for college educated professionals. It’s a phase, but it’s not your whole life. So I see moving beyond mass employment to a world where people are well enough off to live off their savings as the goal towards which economic progress should aim. But then what do you do with that extra free time? Basically, if you average out over 365 days a year, people who don’t work have five extra hours every day. How do you spend them? These days, the chronically jobless tend to spend them sleeping and watching television. So that’s not very good. And that’s why the prospect of AI, a productivity revolution that gets rid of all our jobs makes people horrified because they have no idea what to do.

We need to answer that question. What are humans for when they don’t have to be doing something? I think the most obvious thing humans for is making and taking care of and hanging out with other humans in community. And that a major part of our sadness today is the breakdown and disintegration of our face-to-face relationships, which are the foundation for happiness for most of us. And the reason that has happened is that back when we were poor, face-to-face relationships fulfilled vital practical functions. So you had to have them. Your kids, first, they were an act of God that just showed up. Second, they helped out on the farm. They took care of you when you were older. Your spouse was your partner in economic production. Your neighbors were an insurance policy against bad times. And also the only alternative to listening to the crickets for evening entertainment was hanging out with them. So your face-to-face relationships had obvious urgent practical functions.

Most of those practical functions over time we have outsourced either to the marketplace or to the welfare state so that now our face-to-face relationships have basically become consumption options, things we do because they’re fun. But consumption options amidst a sea of expertly marketed commercial consumption alternatives. And I think the marketing is winning out at the margins all too often. So I hope to see a cultural turn recognizing what’s really important in life, which at basis is other people. Recognizing that more cohesive, more intensive, more demanding community life is the recipe for happiness for most of us and encouraging patterns of institutional development that push in that direction.

More broadly, becoming rich has vastly increased our ceiling for what we are capable of. It has made possible development of capacities and exercise of capacities that were unthinkable for people when they were locked in poverty as subsistence farmers. So our ceiling, our capacity to flourish has never been greater. But I think our floor has gotten lower than ever before because we have all this insurance of wealth, so that we can be incredibly dysfunctional and self-destructive and get away with it to a degree that people couldn’t in the past. How do we manage that freedom? How do we figure out how to rule ourselves, exert real autonomy to aim for those higher things and indulge in the lower guilty pleasures, but not be overwhelmed by them? We need cultural supports that help us identify and choose higher order goods over lower and possibly addictive pleasures. And the most obvious one of those cultural supports is organized religion. So even though I’m not a believer, it’s hard for me to see a real cultural turnaround without it having a religious component.

Rauch: So question for you. A lot there. And I don’t think we’re as far apart as we sometimes seem to think we are. When you think about the category of everything you just said, and admittedly there’s a lot in it, it doesn’t fit in any one box. Do you see the failing that you’re talking about there? The failing to meet needs beyond material needs? I guess they’ve been called post-materialist.

Lindsey: Yes.

Rauch: Who’s that guy? Anyway, do you locate that failing conceptually as a failing of liberal institutions? Or do you locate that as a problem in the environment in which those institutions are struggling to function? Is that a meaningful question even?

Lindsey: The effect of the operation of liberal institutions over time has been to ramp up the importance of markets and bureaucracy in our life and over time reduce the functions of and therefore the place in our lives of intermediate institutions. And those intermediate institutions give us a lot of social stability and also give us a lot of that meaning-making function. So when you’re left with nothing but managerialism and consumerism, that’s pretty thin gruel for a culture of human flourishing to be made out of. You need other components. As you said, liberalism never promised to provide those. Those existed already. Those meaning-making intermediate institutions existed already when liberalism arose. But over time, the operation of liberal institutions has served to erode those. So I don’t think anybody did anything wrong. And I don’t think any of that erosion was necessarily a mistake, but this is the position we have found ourselves in.

I wrote an essay about the advance of the capitalist monoculture. And I talked about how when I was a kid, consumerism and the expressive individualism of consumerism and the kind of narcissism of consumerism — those are things we see in the culture more broadly, but they were balanced by a lot of other forces in the culture. Many of them hidebound and backwards and we’re glad they’re gone, but still. So we had the sexual division of labor. We had the whole woman’s world, which wasn’t the reign of commerce, wasn’t the reign of economic rationality. It was the reign of sentiment and love and care. We had the learned professions, law and medicine, which set themselves in opposition to commerce. They were supposed to represent the interests of their clients and guard against conflicts of interest. Over time, law and medicine had been completely commercialized. The university set apart the life of the mind as something different from getting and spending. Universities became a mass institution and then became a certifying institution for entrance to the meritocracy, and they have become commercialized, The university has basically become, instead of something totally separate and apart from the world of getting and spending, it is a training school for maximizing your ability to get and spend. The church obviously stands as an alternative viewpoint from Mammon, but it has declined dramatically in our lifetime.

So in one of these areas after another that had other values being injected into the culture besides bureaucratic control and moneymaking, a lot of them had problems and we don’t mourn their passing, but they’ve left a hole in the culture that we have not figured out how to rebuild. And so I think that is the great challenge of rich societies is to figure out how to build those intermediate institutions that help people control themselves and be responsible for their own lives and live their own lives well. So we have in our class, the highly educated, we have the brass ring of the great job in the meritocracy, or getting into the good school and then getting the good job. All of that is an incentive structure which gives good, solid, careerist, external reward motives for a culture of self-denial and long-term planning and real autonomy. People outside of that world aren’t developing those traits. And so in our current sort of cultural free-for-all, they’re getting lost. This crisis of disconnection, this crisis of meaning, it’s much worse on the other side of the class divide than it is on our side. And I think it’s there especially that I find it very difficult to figure out how culturally ordinary people are going to find their way back to lives of self-mastery without religion. It’s hard for me to see it happening purely secularly.

Rauch: So I’m going to try to summarize what I think I just heard to see if I understand, and then maybe make a few comments. And there’s so much there, I’ll only be able to respond to parts. I think the story I just heard is that liberalism by itself was not the cause of the excesses of commercialization, consumerism, and individualism that we’ve seen over the past several decades, but it either accelerated those things or at a bare minimum did nothing to slow them down.

Lindsey: Yeah. Just to interrupt briefly, my bad guy is mass affluence. We have problems of mass affluence. Mass affluence isn’t actually a bad guy. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened, but it has brought problems in its train.

Rauch: And maybe liberalism?

Lindsey: Liberalism gave us mass affluence, right? Sorry.

Rauch: ... that there were aspects of liberalism that are pretty fundamental to liberalism, not just incidental, which accelerated some of those bad things. And you and Adrian talked about that on a previous episode, for example. So if that’s what I just heard, there’s a lot to it. There are some things, although I certainly disagree with post-liberals about their prescription, they’ve identified some true things. Now, I don’t give them a lot of credit for that because the reason we know that liberalism is not all that good at supplying meaning in life is because we’ve been saying so. We told them that, and we’ve been telling them that for 250 years. So they did not discover this.

Lindsey: Adrian Wooldridge said it very nicely that everything good and insightful and incisive you read in a post-liberal has been said better 50, 100, 200 years ago by a liberal.

Rauch: And they all rehash Nietzsche. That said, what they’re saying is not wrong.

Lindsey: I agree. They have identified symptoms that are real.

Rauch: Well, yeah, they’ve co-opted things that we identified that were…

Lindsey: Okay, that’s right.

Rauch: ... I love to quote Hillary Clinton’s 1993 speech on the politics of meaning in which she says all the things we’re saying, and she was mocked for it. But she was not wrong to say people feel an absence of meaning in their lives. So that’s true and it’s a problem. We may differ in that I hear, again, I may be mischaracterizing or misunderstanding, but I hear more economism in your diagnosis than I feel is right. I’m not sure this has all that much to do with the nature of jobs and occupations and the sense of status that went with factory work. I think it’s easy to forget that most of those jobs were always miserable. People hated them. We all remember what happened to labor relations. We all remember the very low status of the working man. So that may be a factor. I would put much less emphasis on the economy. I would put more emphasis on politics. I would put even more emphasis on our cultural institutions, which as I said, are pre-liberal, their failure to step up, their consumerization. So Christianity is a countercultural faith and it does best when it stands not in opposition to, but in contrast to the culture of individualism and consumerism. Well, if you’re in an environment where people are shopping for churches and bouncing from one to the next and churches are competing to see which can offer the lowest barriers to entry so you don’t have to do anything… In fact, one retired Presbyterian minister said it got to the point where there were whole church meetings in which the word God was never used. That’s a choice, right? That’s not something that was imposed by McDonald’s franchises.

Lindsey: Right.

Rauch: And so I tend to look at these things outside of the domain of the structures of our economic system. I look more to the political system where we have some very serious problems, but in principle, problems that can be addressed. But maybe the main difference in all of that is the one I mentioned earlier. It’s a problem, but I don’t think we can solve it by blaming primarily ourselves. I think liberals need to, of course, we need to diagnose, we need to understand the problems in the system, we need to fix them. But at the same time, it is as important or even more important for us to address the other institutions that are not doing their job, some of which have, I put the post-liberals in this camp, some of which have done a brilliant job of blaming us for their failures. I tell my Christian friends, if you want to know why the percentage of Americans affiliated with the church was 70 percent right through polling in the 20th century and is now below half, maybe you should look in the mirror. Maybe that’s not my fault.

So I realize it’s not constructive to point fingers and call people out. That’s not what I’m suggesting, but I am suggesting it’s important for people like you and me as we self-criticize to hold others to account as well and to remind the American public and maybe the world public that we cannot simply, we liberals, liberalism, we cannot simply gift them a system that meets all their needs, that there are other responsibilities held by other institutions and by individuals. I don’t think you disagree with any of that in principle. I think maybe we’re talking about emphasis.

Lindsey: Yeah. So going back to the economics, I would say I do think the class divide is really important to understanding the political crisis and the larger social malaise. First, there’s just a genuine divergence in chances for a happy life based on educational qualifications now. The odds of getting married, the odds of growing up in a two-parent family, the odds of owning a home, life expectancy, all of these are diverging now. So during the industrial era when jobs were much worse and people were much poor, ordinary working stiffs, their physical lives were much worse, but I feel their spiritual lives were richer in many ways. First, they had this experience of just almost like time-lapse photography of seeing their living standards rise. They were on this one-time journey from poverty to affluence and they rode it and it was exhilarating. And it took a lot of the sting out of the terrible work they had to do from 9 to 5.

Plus they were enmeshed in deep, cohesive communities, which were sometime oppressive and awful, but also gave roots and gave a sense of meaning and belonging. And so now you have people whose jobs are not as physically demanding or difficult and that pay better, but the experience of climbing through the ranks and gaining on the rich, that’s gone. You’re falling behind more and more. And in all these different dimensions, outside of dollars, of your chances for having a good life, we’re seeing the prospects for flourishing diverging between the people at the top and everybody else. And that’s something different from the first three quarters of the 20th century and it’s bad. So I do think figuring out how to employ people and figuring out how people will spend their time if they’re not employed, those are big challenges over the next 50 to 100 years. They don’t necessarily play directly into the current crisis of liberal democracy, but that wasn’t the main thing I was thinking about when I was writing my book.

But beyond that, the failures of broader institutions, I agree. Again, I’ve never said that… I never wrote a word say of criticism of the principles of liberalism. Liberalism certainly has characteristic vices. It has a kind of universalism that can be preachy and it’s got a thinness that can miss the woolly, undefinable, unquantifiable things that actually matter to people. So it does have some of those weaknesses.

But the real problems that I think are threatening liberal democracy, and the real problems that are making liberal society feel stuck and not really progressing, those are simply the as yet unsolved problems created by prior successes. We are in the wake of the greatest success in human history, which is the marginalization of poverty. We have overthrown mass poverty, we have overthrown mass ignorance, and therefore we have given people the chance to have fully developed lives in a way that was utterly unthinkable before. Now we’ve got to figure out how to create institutions that realize that potential more effectively than we’re doing now. And I think we built institutions to get rich and that happened. And in the process, that changed our culture in a lot of ways that degraded a lot of these intermediate institutions. So now for the next phase of progress towards real mass flourishing, we need cultural reconstruction and institutional reconstruction to build a life proper for mass affluence, proper for being able now to concentrate on the really important things.

Rauch: Well, that sounds right to me. So the part that sounds especially right maybe, or maybe I’m phrasing this or seeing this a slightly different way, you tell me. There is nothing new about disruptive economic change. We may be about to see the biggest yet. I don’t know.

Lindsey: Right. Somehow we’ve gotten through this whole hour plus without talking about AI, but that’s another can of worms.

Rauch: Yeah. Well, you mentioned it and you were right to do so because some people say that there’ve been disruptions, but never this big and this fast. So we’ll see. And all those people who we thought were at the top of the status hierarchy may be looking for work in three years. I’m already hearing reports of consultancies. A friend of mine is a consultant. He fired all but one of his junior analysts because the machine could do it better. And I said, “Well, what about the guy who supervises the junior analysts? How are you going to train him?” And he said, “Well, I worry about that, but that’s a problem I can’t afford to deal with right now.”

So these disruptions are not new in nature. Each one is different. And I think what I heard you saying, or maybe I’m reading this in, but I think a lot of what’s happening here is that we’ve always relied on institutions of civil society to help buffer those shocks. And that those buffers, those outside institutions, that’s your friends, your family, your community, your church, it’s the local Elks Club, it’s the Boy Scouts, it’s the fact that you’re volunteering at the soup kitchen or you’re teaching Sunday school. Those other sources of meanings which help stabilize people and communities when they’re going through times of intense change, which face it, is always more or less, that those have thinned out. And if that’s the case, and if that’s where we, social critics collectively need to focus primarily, then we’re outside the classic domain of federal programs and market structures and scientific inquiry. We’re in the domain of a lot of people, individually and collectively, figuring out ways to rebuild their communities and sense of communities. And I don’t think that of its nature can be a top-down prescriptive exercise.

Lindsey: I agree.

Rauch: One of the things that…

Lindsey: My last podcast guest was a guy, Phil Levin, whose business is helping people buy or build homes together with family and friends. So creating compounds with common living facilities, and aiming towards having cohesive face-to-face communities with people you know. So those kinds of things, people discovering... We’re seeing a lot of this kind of backlash against excessive life online and this sense that we need to touch grass. Board games and vinyl records are becoming popular again. There’s a general dawning cultural sense that we need to reconnect with the real and the physical, and I think also with the social. And so that’s a lot of what I’m hoping to do over the coming years is look for those green shoots of people who are engaged in these acts of nascent social reconstruction and highlight them.

Rauch: So I think that’s right though. I would put even more emphasis on collective activities by institutions like churches, which are still at the top of my list. But yeah, I am like you, I’m seeing a renaissance of interest in rebuilding civil society. I’m part of that. I’m helping a guy named David Blankenhorn found a new nonprofit, it’s called Civic Life, and we’re going to try to bring conversations about core American ideas and songs, documents to living rooms and Starbucks and church basements and local civic groups, libraries, we hope maybe women’s prisons. We are not going to do this. We’re going to try to create means to catalyze it because I feel like… So there are two big crises that worry me most. I’m going to really try not to drone on, but this might interest you. Should I do this? It’s going to take a minute and a half.

Lindsey: Okay.

Rauch: Both of them transcend Donald Trump. Both of them are probably global, but I’ll focus on America. The first is the disconnection of people, especially younger people from our civic traditions. A sense of nihilism and cynicism about the possibilities for ordinary people to contribute in meaningful ways to institutions of democracy. And a sense among many of burn, baby, burn, it’s not working, burn it all down. I meet young people all the time. I talk to them about this. They can’t typically name even one institution other than their family that they believe in. They’re still idealistic, but they don’t see how to invest that. And I tell them, “Look, the challenge for your generation, I’m checking out. I’m a Baby Boomer. We caused this mess. Sorry. You guys have to figure out how to rebuild institutions that you can have some confidence in. I can’t do that. And politics can’t do that.” I don’t know if they can, and that worries me.

So those two things worry me. Those are two things. One is disconnection from our civic heritage, our traditions, the American story, and the other is disconnection from institutional life. Both of those things, to the extent that they’re real, I keep coming back to this, but I think to address them, we need to refocus more attention away from the real and alleged failings of our market economy and consumerism and all that. And we need to push that attention outward and ask people, what are you doing in your community that you think could actually help? Let’s sit down and try to figure out what can we do as Americans to try to improve the situation wherever we have leverage.

Lindsey: So it’s disconcerting for a couple of DC policy walks to not have a policy to-do list to solve our problems. But I am convinced with you that this is ultimately a cultural problem. And cultural problems are the biggest collective action problems. They ultimately are, what do we all think and believe and how do we act on the basis of those beliefs? And so that’s the ultimate bottom-up enterprise. And we can do our part in our area to improve our locality. And with our voices that reach other people, we can point people in the right direction or highlight people who are doing good things. But this is humanity’s story. They’re the actors and also the writers and directors. And so I am hopeful, I have reasons for hope that we can rise to the challenges.

Rauch: Well, I realize you’re closing out the show, but I just want to take a stab at something on the way out the door, hopefully in a way that wraps up rather than provokes.

Lindsey: Okay.

Rauch: So in organizing this conversation, you asked the question something like, I’ll paraphrase, how much criticism by liberalism of liberalism, of these institutions, is justified, and how much is too much? May not be exactly what you said, but where do we draw that line? And I think my answer to that is the right amount is the amount that calls attention to things that we should and can fix within markets, democracies and science, liberal democracy and science, but the too much is when we redirect attention that belongs elsewhere to ourselves. And that’s why I feel the criticism has gotten out of hand or was getting out of hand. I think one advantage of the work that you and Adrian and Ryan Avent and all the others that we’ve mentioned and others that I don’t know about and others to come is I think this work is adding up to a collective body, which is advancing the conversation substantively as people listen to these critiques, as they refine them, as they increasingly see where these problems are located. And that to me is also a source of encouragement because that’s what liberal intellectuals should be doing, right? It’s what I’m trying to do. I’m still groping as you can tell, but I think we’re getting somewhere.

Lindsey: Yeah, that’s the thing about modernity. We’re always in completely unexplored territory. We’re always at the frontier and nobody’s ever done this before. So we’re all blind men trying to feel the elephant. And if you feel that ... So as far as the scope of critique, since I think the biggest problems facing liberalism these days are cultural and culture involves everybody, it’s hard for me to figure out how to ... Well, culture is everybody’s responsibility. It’s the responsibility of writers and thinkers to talk about it and raise the issues. It’s the responsibility of everybody to live up to the best within themselves. So I’m not sure that I buy into the idea that there’s some stuff that liberals ought not to talk about because that’s somebody else’s problem. But I certainly agree that we’re all in an enterprise of trying to figure things out and we’re in the dark, we’re in the gloom, we’re doing the best we can. I know to have gotten to this point, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my analysis of public affairs over the years, and so I’m sure I’m making some now. But in the great spirit of liberal self-correction, we keep talking and we keep trying and therein lies progress.

Rauch: Amen.

Lindsey: So thank you, Jonathan, for helping me to feel the elephant here and try to make sense of what’s going on in this vexatious political moment. Great having you on the show.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript. But first, a few links relevant to our chat:

Virginia’s new podcast with Charles Mann, “Everyday Abundance”

Charles Mann’s essay series on “How the System Works”

Virginia’s essay on America’s democratization of ambition

My first-ever big-think essay, written for Virginia’s Reason magazine back in 1992, with a similar take on democratized ambition

My Substack essay updating those 1992 thoughts

Virginia’s essay on Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mattering Instinct

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem podcast. I’m very happy to have as my guest today my first return engagement on the show, my longtime friend, Virginia Postrel. Virginia, welcome to The Permanent Problem.

Virginia Postrel: It’s always great to talk to you, Brink.

Lindsey: Let me give you a proper introduction. Virginia Postrel is an author and an essayist. She’s the author of several excellent books starting off with The Future and Its Enemies. Most recently, The Fabric of Civilization. She’s an editor at the superb newish publication, Works in Progress. And she’s got a new podcast out with Charles Mann, who’s probably best known for his book 1491, but the podcast is called Everyday Abundance. So, tell us a little bit about it and the thinking that went behind it.

Postrel: Yeah. So, Charles and I had occasion to do a panel, or rather he was supposed to give a talk and then he said, “I want to interview you.” And I said, “No, they got you to give a talk. I’ll interview you.” This was at the Roots of Progress conference. And so, he had recently written a series of articles for The New Atlantis called “How the System Works” and had become very aware of people…

Lindsey: And those were just great, by the way. I feel like those should be part of the K-12 curriculum.

Postrel: Well, actually, so does he. And that’s what he wrote. So, let’s see if I can remember. There’s one about the system that brings us electricity, one about water, one about public health, and one about food. So, they’re all about these big complicated systems, where they came from, how they work, because he had realized that especially younger people have no clue, and people in general as well. So, that was what we were discussing, how to do this Q&A at this conference. But this led to a general discussion about how people don’t know where anything came from. When we talk about technology, we talk about things like AI and everything to do with computers as if that’s the only technology in the world. And in fact, we’re surrounded by all kinds of technologies. And of course I wrote The Fabric of Civilization, which is about textiles, which are one of the oldest technologies. And the root of the word technology comes from the word for weave. But anyway, one thing led to another and we came up with this idea of doing a series of podcast episodes where we explored the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies you didn’t even know were technologies.

Lindsey: So, what are some of your recent episodes?

Postrel: The most recent one is on doing laundry. Greatest invention ever, the washing machine, the electric washing machine. They don’t have to be electric now. They could be gas.

I keep thinking of the ones that are coming out. We have one coming out on blowing your nose, on driving the car, which is about not the invention of the car, but what had to be done in order to have driving as a regular thing. We did one on working out, about everyday exercise. The first one we did was on brushing your teeth. So, you get the kind of idea. There are all these everyday activities. One that we have coming out is shopping for groceries. And that actually has four different inventions in it, which are not the only ones that are needed, but we go from packaged goods to self-service grocery stores all the way up to scanners and barcodes. So, it’s all these things that people take for granted. Shopping cart, that’s the one I forgot. It’s just actually an invention.

Lindsey: In a previous life, I was a lawyer and one of the joys of my job… I was an anti-dumping lawyer. So, we represented clients that were exporting to the United States and accused of selling at an unfairly low price. To defend those cases, you had to know a lot about the production process as well as about the sales process and all their accounting details and so forth. And we always had to do factory tours and know something about how the production process worked. So, I got to do tours of everything from the lowest tech, just injection plastic molding cigarette lighter factories to high-tech, making the flat panel displays for laptops, all up and down the scale of complexity. And it’s always so much more phenomenally complicated than you can imagine.

Postrel: So much more phenomenally complicated. And one of my recent Works in Progress columns is about disposable diapers. And there I really, really wanted a factory tour, but they’re incredibly secretive and I couldn’t get one.

Lindsey: So, now that I’m on this current jag with The Permanent Problem, I find myself in this very peculiar and lonely position of simultaneously thinking that we really ought to be much, much more conscious of the incredible bounty that consumerism has given us and to understand the cleverness and ingenuity that had to compound over time to give us all these things. So, we should be simultaneously much more conscious and appreciative of that — and, simultaneously, much more conscious of the limits of what consumerism can do for our lives. The most important things in life are not the things you can buy at the store. And those are, for a lot of people, getting crowded out these days. And so, I find myself flopping back and forth between those two positions and angering everybody in the process.

Postrel: I was thinking about your perspective in the context of the Everyday Abundance podcast. And I was thinking that our stories are for the most part about unheralded people who created important things. And I think people who are really into their work tend to overemphasize the importance of work as a source of meaning in life, but it is an important source of meaning in life. Sylvan Goldman, who created the shopping cart, is an important guy in the world that we live in. He was also a philanthropist in different things in his town, but his legacy is that he changed our world in this little way. And most people, I mean, obviously I know his name. He’s not completely unheralded. You can find out things, but there are also people who are unknown or cases where things are misattributed, all those kinds of things. And then there are also people who get up every day and go to work and make sure that our water isn’t full of sewage and stuff like that. And those are not glamorous jobs and not just because sewage is icky, but just those are not the jobs that we tend to honor and they are really important. I think that’s an element of it is to recognize the things that are important that people do. No one will argue with you, Brink. I’m sorry. No one is going to argue that having a lot of stuff is the only important thing in life and that’s the source of all meaning. No one is going to say that-

Lindsey: Not explicitly, no. But they will tell me if the lines are going up on capitalism, you have nothing to complain about. That’s not capitalism’s job.

Postrel: By the way, I don’t like the word capitalism. I never have. I like the word markets, which is a different thing. But I do think that the fact that we only recognize in our public discourse about five different jobs is a problem. And so, that’s one reason for doing a show like this. Also, it’s just fun and interesting. And people have an insufficient sense of history. One weird aspect of having two Baby Boomers do it — I mean, I’m 66 and Charles, I think, is 70, but is that a lot of things that we remember are now history. And so, we have to explain about how did you count out cash change at the register before it would just tell you, and how did you put the sales tax in and all these kinds of things.

Lindsey: Everyday abundance gives us comforts, convenience, entertainment, and we shouldn’t turn our nose up at those, right? Those are really important. If you don’t think they’re important, try massive discomfort, massive inconvenience, soul crushing boredom.

Postrel: Yeah. Try washing all your laundry by boiling water on the stove and making your own detergent and all these things. I mean, you’ll have a lot less of your life to do whatever meaningful thing there is.

Lindsey: That’s right. Yeah. So, my argument is that those are important goods, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are even more important goods. All right. I want to switch gears to something you just wrote recently, this piece for the Libertyfund.org website called American Ambitions that you wrote as part of the commemoration of the American semiquincentennial, America’s 250th birthday. But before we talk about the essay, we both lived through the Bicentennial. So, we’ve lived through two of these things. And this one, I mean, just put aside the shambolic, corrupt screw-up of the national celebration. Just as a mass phenomenon, it was nothing compared to last go-round. That’s my impression.

Postrel: I mean, I can’t tell, partly it’s because we’re old. And when you’re 16 and having the Bicentennial or whatever — you were a little younger than me, 14 — it’s different. You’re doing things in school. Whereas when you’re just going on in your life, maybe not so much. So, that’s part of it.

Lindsey: So, there were national celebrations back then and they were stately and lovely, but there was enormous… First, there was just enormous commercialization. People were selling Bicentennial, red, white, and blue everything. Everything. And there were community projects. In our town, we painted all the fire hydrants to look like revolutionary war soldiers. That was a thing. And that was apparently a thing in communities all over the country. But I think maybe the most important, as far as why it was drilled into our skull so much, for two and a half years, every night we had a Bicentennial minute on CBS.

Postrel: On TV, which we all watched TV.

Lindsey: Right. There were three networks. The biggest one was CBS. Every night from July 4, 1974 through December 31, 1976, they had a minute-long break somewhere during the eight o’clock hour where some CBS person or celebrity or politician would tell what happened 200 years ago today. And then the whole Bicentennial minute thing became a cultural phenomenon, and people made jokes about it on sitcoms and so forth. So, the whole thing loomed so much bigger in our consciousness. Two rock bands that I followed in high school, Rush and Styx — I was a big Rush fan, casual Styx fan — they both had Bicentennial-themed songs that came out in 1975. So, a much bigger deal.

Postrel: I don’t know if you know, but Rush is having a moment.

Lindsey: I know. Of course I do.

Postrel: It’s been covered in Variety, so it must be true. I was never into Rush. But I associate the Bicentennial with two things. One was performing plays that we did in my high school, because I was very involved in theater and particularly making costumes to make a lot of pseudo-18th century costumes. And the other was being extremely sunburned because on the actual day of the Bicentennial, on July 4th, I went with this summer program, Governor’s school program that I was in. We went to the beach and I got the worst sunburn of my life. Nothing to do with the Bicentennial other than we went to the beach to celebrate. But this year actually, I also have a place in Orange County and we were down there and we went to Tustin and to the Tustin High School fireworks and picnic. And we had a wonderful Semiquincentennial. They had lovely fireworks. They had a band, they had food trucks. It looked like California, the crowd. There were lots of families, every shape, size, color, and age. Yeah. So, it was really nice.

Lindsey: Good. So, for a lot of different reasons that we have come to this state of affairs, but maybe the Bicentennial minutes were one of them: there was a poll that came out recently that the Cato Institute did showing the shocking number of people who don’t know what happened on July 4th, 1776. So, for people 65 and older, 72 percent of them identified it correctly, but for people 18 to 29, only 39 percent identified it correctly.

Postrel: Well, that’s not good. I thought Hamilton was supposed to cure us of that.

Lindsey: Doesn’t Hamilton seem like it was from a million years ago now?

Postrel: But yeah, right. I was going to say now it’s old. Yeah, those people were not born yet or they were not conscious.

Lindsey: Okay. So, let’s talk about your essay. You describe how the American Revolution launched a new kind of social order, a new dynamic, wide open order that democratized ambition. Ambition had been thought of as an elite capacity, dangerous — glorious, but dangerous, not something you want to see in ordinary people. But the freedom and economic circumstances of the new American continent brought forth a democratized ambition. And you describe it in all kinds of ways. So, tell a little bit more about that essay.

Postrel: Well, the first thing you have to realize — and that we tend not to, because we think of ambition as a good thing — ambition was, it was a bad word. It was ambition and avarice. They were negative concepts right up to and I would say through the 17th century. Ambition, I mean, even Machiavelli wrote a poem about the evils of ambition and how it creates war and kills all these people. So by the time of the American Revolution, the meaning had softened, so that Adam Smith wrote about ambition, but it was always ambition within a sense of hierarchy. So, it was like you were ambitious to get elected to Parliament or you were ambitious to rise in the military. The idea that you might be ambitious to be the best runner in your local running club or something, that was not a concept that... The fact that they didn’t have really the idea of running for exercise, that really goes back to the 1970s — see our podcast.

But these small ambitions that Americans have, we don’t even think about them, but it’s a very, very American characteristic to have a million little ambitions. And Tocqueville thought, “This is a really weird country. Everybody is ambitious, but nobody has big ambitions.” And I think when he says these big ambitions, he’s literally thinking of Napoleon. I can’t prove that, but I think that’s the old notion of ambition. And particularly in the early republic, which is mostly what I was writing about, because I was also writing about the 250th anniversary of the Wealth of Nations. So, I was trying to look at Smith and look at that period and see what was changing there. In the early republic, by the 1800 election — Joyce Appleby, the historian whom I quote, makes a really good case that this sort of change is established securely by the election of 1800. There is just this notion that America is this society where everybody can do their thing, can pursue their happiness. And the great exception is the slave states, which are to this day an exception. We can talk a little bit about some of the research that I only hint at in the essay.

And so, you have this sense of people moving around, trying different things, leaving their hometowns, leaving their homes, coming back to their homes, settling the frontier. There’s just all of this. I mean, people using the term restless. It’s a very common word used to describe it.

Lindsey: And that was a bad word.

Postrel: Yeah. The people were using it were like, “What is with these restless Americans?” It’s so odd. Because even Adam Smith —in The Wealth of Nations, one of his big concerns is that there are various regulations and guilds and such that keep labor from being mobile and keep people from being able to move from job to job as opportunities arise. But even Adam Smith assumes that’s within the same town, because people won’t move from town to town. Whereas Americans, I mean, it’s like we were selected as people who were willing to move great distances. And one of the disturbing things in recent years has been Americans have become less mobile. We’re still pretty mobile compared to a lot of countries, but people don’t move as often as they used to.

Lindsey: Oh, that’s right. So, your ambition overlaps a lot with the flourishing I talk about all the time. That ambition is a quest for self-improvement, to better your economic circumstances, but also to better your mind, to better your place in society. And it’s an attempt to realize your potential: I’ve got something in there, and I’m going to figure out what it is and I’m going to make it happen.

Postrel: Right. And one of the things when the country is very open is that people feel the ability to do that. And over time, and Tocqueville predicted this as well, you start to get lots of rules that are often designed to make things fairer that end up stifling people’s ability to pursue their ambitions or pursue their best self, whatever you want to say.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, I could say that the circumstances of antebellum America, putting aside the huge exception of slavery, were very conducive to mass flourishing. You had this wide open social order where within the constraints of the technology and knowledge of the day, people had more freedom to realize their potential and be all they can be than any large group of people, any society we’d ever seen before. It’s a celebratory essay, but it has a bit of an elegiac tone because…

Postrel: It ends on a down note.

Lindsey: Yeah. Because you talk about “the combination of economic circumstances and liberal principles” that made this happen, but economic circumstances today are quite different. You talk about back then, ambition was no longer winner take all, but there’s a lot of winner take all markets these days or winner take most markets these days. You talk about a diverse dynamic society with countless sources of status and respect. I feel like as we’ve nationalized our economy, the channels of competition have gotten — they include more people, but there are fewer of them. So, there are fewer ponds to be a big fish in than there were back in a country of an archipelago of small towns.

Postrel: I’m not sure that’s true. And part of the reason I’m not sure that’s true is that, as you know, I’m from South Carolina and my family is still there. And the towns that they live in have grown enormously. The one I grew up in, Greenville is huge. And the Charleston area where one of my brothers lived as well. And they still very much have many different little outlets for ambition. And even Los Angeles does. So, I don’t…

Lindsey: And there’s been a huge proliferation of subcultures that you can be cool in.

Postrel: Yeah, there are all these subcultures. I mean, I think our conversation about this is the problem is there are too many people like us who went to these elite schools. And of course, back when I went to Princeton, and I don’t know about you, but I mean, I just went there because I was a nerd. And it was more open than it is today, because somebody like me who went to a public high school in South Carolina and had a somewhat spotty preparation and just had really high SAT scores, I don’t think somebody like me could get in now. And in fact, it’s the case that fewer, even though South Carolina has grown tremendously since 1978 when I was applying and there were 13 people admitted, fewer people.

Lindsey: Oh, that’s interesting.

Postrel: The last time I checked, it was nine. Fewer people get in from South Carolina and the schools are better. So, the schools have improved. The population has grown tremendously and fewer people get into Princeton, which partly is because it’s more of an international university than it used to be. But it’s also because I think their idea of what is a promising student has narrowed. I can’t prove that. But that is the Tocqueville argument that as you go along you aren’t as willing to leave things open. But that said, I still think there are lots and lots and lots of niches for ambition and people who…

Lindsey: I agree completely.

Postrel: ... hang out with elite, highly educated people, hang out in Washington and New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco, have a kind of distorted view of the world. But not you and me, of course.

Lindsey: I agree that certainly, relative to the rest of the world, American ambition is still robust and exceptional. There’s still a sense of wide openness and you can be anything in America. That sense is more alive in America than it is in a lot of places. But I don’t feel like it’s as alive as it was in the 1830s and 1840s. It’s just a sense of limitless possibility and free land and every ordinary person, all they need is drive and will to make a success of their lives. And that just isn’t true anymore.

Postrel: Yeah. There is a quote that I didn’t use in the article, but that I read, I believe it was from Chevalier, one of the European visitors who quoted, who said, “The amazing thing about America is that a man can get off the boat from Ireland with nothing but the strength of his body and make his way...” He told this story, you’re like, “Make his way getting hired as a laborer and then get land and basically build a life.” And when you have a society which is hungry for labor, which was true in the United States for a very, very, very long time, I mean, I would argue it’s still true, but people don’t want to talk about that. But we had lots of land. We had lots of resources like timber and coal and things like that, but we were short on people, which is one reason that we had all these immigrants. I actually think, I’ve written about this on my Substack and I hint at it in the article. I actually think the problem was that we shut off immigration in 1924. And so, then the vaunted Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers all grew up in an America without contemporary immigrants. In other words, they had people….

Lindsey: And it’s in those communities that you see this all-American striving to better themselves and improve their condition at its most vital.

Postrel: And those are the generations that produced the anti-Promethean backlash, this whole thing as you’ve dubbed it. And this thinking came to me when Jason Crawford from Roots of Progress was interviewing me for something. And he was saying like, “Look, there were other times where you could have had an anti- Promethean backlash. Why did it happen in the ‘70s?” And I was just like, “Why did it happen in the ‘70s?” And then I started doing the math and it’s like, yeah, you had these three generations of people who grew up in an America where their contemporaries — so their parents, their grandparents, may have been immigrants, but they didn’t go to school with people who were first-generation Americans. They took the country and the prosperity and all of these things for granted. And then they became generations that focused more on, they really focused more on protecting their stuff. They became stasists, as I would say, in The Future and Its Enemies. And so, now we have these new post-65 waves of immigrants, which are now creating, there’s a backlash against them. And that would suggest that we’re setting ourselves up 50 years hence for another…

Lindsey: Yeah, maybe.

Postrel: It might be true. Who knows?

Lindsey: We’ve had 50 years of mass immigration now, and I’m not seeing things unwind.

Postrel: Yeah. Well, it’s hard to unwind things as you know. Once they’re in there, they’re hard.

Lindsey: I would throw something else into the mix. I think the 20th century experience of World War I and industrialized slaughter, and World War II and the Holocaust, and then the threat of nuclear annihilation, all of those convinced a whole lot of intellectuals that technology was bad.

Postrel: Oh, yeah. I mean…

Lindsey: And then that seeped into the mass culture by the ‘60s with the Baby Boomer cohort.

Postrel: Yeah. World War I killed Victorian optimism in Britain and filtered throughout. It didn’t really filter so much into the US, but it had a huge effect in Europe. World War II and the Holocaust are…

Lindsey: Then a lot of those Europeans moved over and started teaching in American colleges.

Postrel: Yeah. This is more complicated, for whatever reason it happened. That’s a concern. But now we’re in the period — this is why people are hating on you, Brink —where the people who want to keep things, protect the status quo or go backwards, tend to do a lot of chin pulling about how everybody had a meaningful life when everybody had a good union job working on an assembly line, which is just nonsense. It’s just nonsense. First of all, that was a tiny percentage of the labor force, just happens to be concentrated in some swing states. Secondly, those jobs were incredibly boring. And if people had good lives because of them, it’s because they took the money and they had their family and the job wasn’t giving any…

Lindsey: The way I would put it, the jobs were dirty and dangerous and just awful, just physically awful. You read these accounts of assembly line workers and the first day on the job, they just can’t believe anybody can really do this every day. It’s so awful. So, they were bad, but…

Postrel: I had a high school teacher, my ninth grade social studies teacher, who actually had come to Greenville because he went to Bob Jones University. But he was from Michigan and he worked on an assembly line during his summers off in the automobile plant. So, this was in the ‘70s. It would’ve been in the early ‘70s, I guess. And the people would be so bored, they would deliberately wreck some of the things they were building.

Lindsey: Increasing sabotage in the ‘70s.

Postrel: At that point was not so incredibly dangerous, so much as incredibly boring.

Lindsey: Yes. Yes. The jobs were not intrinsically fulfilling, but they put you on a escalator of rising living standards that moved faster than any such escalator had ever moved for any large group of people ever. And that feeling of just like time-lapse photography, seeing your circumstances change, that was exhilarating for people and made people proud of what they had been able to accomplish. Also, even though blue collar factory work was not the majority of low skilled work, it was the most salient and most culturally visible kind of low skilled work. And it was aspirational work to get a good factory job, you could end up with a middle class lifestyle.

And it was important work. It was clearly crucially important to the health and progress of the overall system. Ordinary working stiffs were arrayed on the technological frontier along with their managers and bosses and owners pushing the technological frontier forward in the steel industry and the automobile industry, et cetera. When they struck, when they exerted their collective power in those industries, that whole industry’s ground to a halt. And it was a national security crisis if the steel industry went on strike. Global security was at stake. So, these people knew in their bones that what they did was existentially important and it mattered in a way that I think is very different from what a lot of jobs in the post-working-class in today’s service sector are — jobs where they provide some kind of service and people are willing to pay for it, but people don’t have the feeling that what they do matters in a way that they did back then. And they don’t have the status. They don’t have the status as contributors to the commonweal that factory workers did back then. They were glorified and people now are not.

Postrel: Healthcare absorbs a huge number of those people.

Lindsey: Yes.

Postrel: And everybody thinks health… I mean, people may complain about the system or it’s too expensive or whatever, but nobody thinks that being an x-ray technician is not important.

Lindsey: No, that’s right.

Postrel: Or spending the day giving women mammograms or even working in medical billing or answering the phones in an optometrist’s office or whatever. I mean, healthcare is a huge percentage of the economy. Many of the jobs that were once. Many of the kinds of people who used to do factory jobs now work in healthcare. Part of the problem is, is it’s a little gendered. I would argue it’s not super gendered. I mean, especially certain things like phlebotomists and x-ray techs and there’s certain kinds of jobs where I’ve encountered plenty of men working at them. But I just think when everybody worked in agriculture, everybody thought their job was important because food. And farmers today will still tell you that they have the most important jobs. That’s not a great way to make the rest of the other 98 percent of Americans feel. If we could convince everybody that farmers had the most important jobs, I don’t think that would be good for society, but anyway.

Lindsey: So, we spend a big chunk of our lives on the job. The majority of our working hours during most of our vital adult years, we spend working for pay. So, how that experience is has a lot to do with what the overall conditions for human flourishing are in a society. Do you have hope? So, jobs today are, they’re less dirty, dangerous. They pay better than they did before. My sense is for a lot of people, they’re not especially fulfilling. Most people, they’re not really very fulfilling. It’s mostly for the paycheck. That’s why they do it.

Postrel: And so, has it been from time immemorial. Yes. But the…

Lindsey: So, is progress getting people cooler and cooler jobs? So, one day everybody has a cool, fulfilling job? Or is progress getting so rich that working for pay becomes more and more discretionary?

Postrel: Well, I think the jury’s out on that. I think revealed preference is part of it. What are people going to want to do? But I was going to say about jobs. Another thing about today’s jobs, particularly ones that are lower skill or lower pay, is that they’re much more social than they used to be.

Lindsey: Yes.

Postrel: Many years ago, probably 20 years ago, I talked to some people who owned a very nice — you probably heard me tell this story before — but a very nice furniture factory outside of Dallas. And when I say it was nice, I mean, it was not unpleasant to work in, but it was factory work. You still had to do it, but it was clean. It wasn’t particularly noisy. People worked in small teams. And most of the people who worked in it were immigrants. And the factory was unable to hire their children, even children who were blue collar because they would rather go and work at Target for less money because it was less regimented and more social. So, that’s a factor.

I’m not saying working at Target is the be all and end all of work, but people get a number of different things out of their work. Some people get a sense of flow and craftsmanship and intellectual stimulation, that sort of thing. Other people get the social aspects. And I think it’s a huge mistake to try to put everybody working at home. I mean, I’ve been working at home since 2000 and it has its advantages, but I…

Lindsey: No, I agree. It’s not for everybody, but it’s…

Postrel: If I didn’t travel and go to conferences and stuff, I would be miserable because I don’t have any colleagues.

Lindsey: Revealed preferences show up here too. And people really liked not having that two hours of commuting.

Postrel: Commute is a huge deal.

Lindsey: And people like being able to deal with their kids’ doctor’s problems during the middle of the day. So, when the call to return to the office after COVID happened, there were a lot of non-responders.

Postrel: Right. I think it’s really bad for people who are early in their career. I agree. Which also means they’re younger, they don’t have kids. They might even live closer to the job. There are certain things that become more important as you get older and you’ve already established your professional networks and friendships and stuff. But where do I think the world is going? I think that AI is going to, it’ll happen slowly. It’ll be complicated, but I think a certain number of… I think there is going to be some shift from some types of white collar work to more — how should I put it? — physical work.

Lindsey: IRL work, right? Touch grass work. In real life work, right?

Postrel: Yeah. Things where people’s physical presence is important. I was just at a conference, a really interesting conference, that the Abundance Institute ran on AI and music that had lots of people from music, musicians and producers, as well as tech and policy people. And everybody agreed that everybody’s going to want to do more and more concerts and connecting with other fans in person. All these things are the future. I mean, they’re already the present, but it’s just going to get more and more important to have that presence. My nephew is making really high-end furniture and doors and things like that. He’s a really great woodworker and studying for his contractor’s license. But that’s one thing. Another nephew on the other end of things is in Silicon Valley, making medical robotics. And actually, I have a lot of robots in my family. Another nephew is working on underwater robots that work on oil wells.

Lindsey: And this fits in with the broader cultural touch grass, or longing to touch grass again, in an age where we’re just online all the time. So, you’re seeing vinyl records are back. Yeah. There are places you can go to play board games with people.

Postrel: Right, right, right, right. So, I reviewed this book by Christine Rosen, whose name. I forget the name of the book, but it was all about how, oh, it’s so terrible. We no longer have physical bodies and it’s all about-

Lindsey: The Extinction of Experience. Is that what it was?

Postrel: Yeah, yeah. And it was just a terrible book. I expected to disagree with it. I didn’t think it would be a terrible book. Those are two different things, but there were four contradictions on every page. But one of the things that really struck me is, I don’t know where... Well, I know she lives in DC, but she certainly doesn’t live in my neighborhood because everything is like a Pilates class and a personal trainer and a massage place and a get your nails done place. It’s all about your body. It’s not about being online. And I think the whole looksmaxxing thing is weird and the particular look is weird. But I think that’s also this physicality and even professions associated with it are part of the future because for people who are not intellectuals, this is often a very important form of self-fashioning.

But I do think that I sent you a link to my essay about Rebecca Goldstein’s book, The Mattering Instinct, because I really like her book. I think it makes a very important point. Well, two very important points. The first one is the thesis of the book, which is that human beings have an instinct to matter. And that is not just to matter to someone, but to matter in some sort of existential sense, to have a sense that all the things we have to do to maintain our individual lives are worth it, that if we disappeared tomorrow, it would matter in some sense. But the other thing, which is what I think is really important, is that she talks about how this manifests itself in very different ways among different personalities. And people have a tendency to think, if their sense of mattering is about achievement, they think everybody’s is about achievement. Which is what you wrote about Ned Phelps and his sense of flourishing is very — oh yeah, this guy won a Nobel Prize, he is very achievement-oriented. But other people, if their sense of mattering is all about family life or religion, they also think that’s the answer. You have to have their answer. And she has five different categories.

Lindsey: Right. Transcenders and strivers and competitors. So, I felt that overlapped a fair amount with my own attempted categorization of flourishing, right? I talked about projects, relationships, and experiences and…

Postrel: She draws it a little bit finer, but yeah because... No offense, I like yours, but I also think hers by drawing it a little more finely.

Lindsey: No, I agree. So, in particular, she breaks projects up into just achieving something versus being better than somebody.

Postrel: Which is a very big difference in personality type and how you see things.

Lindsey: To get back to the future of employment. In my book, attempting to sketch out a hopeful future, I sketch out one in which I think employment is not as big a deal as it is today. That is… that for lots of people who have interesting, challenging jobs, they’re workaholics and they go at it and they pursue flourishing and mattering that way and awesome. But for a lot of people for whom that’s never been in the cards, I look forward to the possibility of another kind of lifestyle emerging, one that would have to require a cultural break for it to ever get off the ground. It would require people really mass-adopting a kind of threshold earner mentality, that I’m going to earn enough for this standard of living and that standard of living’s enough for me, and then I’m going to devote my time to other stuff. And I imagine that the technologies that we have going on today, particularly AI, are going to make that available sooner rather than later in the coming decades. Whether people take up on it or not, I don’t know. But I think there’s at least the possibility of creating a kind of post-mass employment lifestyle that I think can then circle back around and have real resemblances to the old antebellum period where there, the Republicans, the early Republican Party Republicans had their ideal-

Postrel: Don’t call it the antebellum period, because that sounds like you’re talking about the South. Call it the early…

Lindsey: Okay. Anyway, pre-Civil War America. So, the Republicans, their philosophy was the free labor philosophy. And of course that was drawn in stark contrast to slavery. But they also still had the idea that a wage laborer was at best semi-free, that he was dependent upon the will of somebody else for his support. So, Republicans broke away from that. They said there’s a big difference. He can quit and go work for somebody else. And they also said, “Hey, being subject to the arbitrary will of an employer sometimes beats the hell out of being subject to the arbitrary will of Mother Nature.” So, they upgraded employment, but they still saw wage employment and particularly an impoverished urban working class as something that was Europe’s problem, that we were blessed not to have. And so, they liked the idea that wage employment was just a way station, that you come here, you don’t have any skills, you get a job for a little while, you save up some money, then you go out and you open your shop or you start your own farm. So, in my 21st century/22nd century version of this, a lot of people work for a while, but then they set up being a proprietor of their own life or proprietor of their community — which may have a commercial element, but may not.

Postrel: Well, yeah. So, I think too, if we hadn’t made housing so scarce and we hadn’t tied health insurance to employment, we would pretty much already be at this stage that you’re describing. I have this hairdresser, who I go to twice a year. Anyway, she’s been working since she was 16. She has a ski clothing line that’s a totally separate job. And for a while she started a massage place, too, where part of her gimmick was that she hired people who spoke English, but it was very affordable. And she got completely disgusted with these young people who were… I mean, I got a lot of massages from them and they were very good, but they didn’t have her work ethic. She said, as long as they have their phone, I think she said their phone and their weed, they’re fine. And that’s all the money they care about earning. Now, I don’t know how they live. I mean, this is in LA, but I don’t know where they live. Maybe they live with their parents. So, she was disgusted. But that is a thing. I think there are two tricks in your scenario. It could very well be, and it could very well be good. But one is what people do with their time.

Lindsey: Yes.

Postrel: Because for example, if you say, well, it’s really important to have flow, the psychological state between boredom and anxiety. And that is definitely true. That is a big part of flourishing. One of the very best ways, certainly the easiest way, most accessible way for people to have flow is by playing video games. And when people spend a lot of their time playing video games, even if they play video games with their friends and people like us say, all these people are wasting their lives playing video games.

Lindsey: It’s okay if they’re playing with their friends.

Postrel: Yeah. But what if they’re playing with their online friends or whatever?

Lindsey: It’s a matter of degree, right? It’s just a matter of degree. The dose makes the poison.

Postrel: Right. Of course, that’s the case with anything. So, that’s one thing. And the other thing is at the risk of being ad hominem, and I don’t mean to do, but how much of your adult life have you spent self-employed as opposed to on a salary?

Lindsey: Yeah, none.

Postrel: Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t feel free. There is a constant source of anxiety. I mean, I have more risks…

Lindsey: I’m talking about early retirees mostly, right?

Postrel: Yeah. So, I like to pretend I’m employed, but my income suggests otherwise. So, let me put it that way. I’ve been self-employed since 2000, except for the three years I spent at The Atlantic where I had a half-time salary and, thank God, the world’s best health insurance because I also had cancer. But you are not in charge of your destiny in some sense. I mean, in the way that people who are not self-employed imagine that you are…

Lindsey: Sure.

Postrel: Who’s going to hire me? In my case, where can I pitch this? What can I do? But when I first moved into the condo that I’m talking to you from in 1992, there was a couple who lived across the way from us where the man was a court reporter and had a court reporter business. And the wife used to laugh at people who thought it was so great to have a small business. She was like, “Oh…”

Lindsey: Yeah. I’m picturing graduating from pressing economic considerations, right? Not picturing that cobbling together an Uber gig and a Mechanical Turk gig makes a good life.

Postrel: But I do think that these gig work kinds of things are a great move in that direction.

Lindsey: They create flexibility.

Postrel: Right, right. I mean, I was just being driven around on a trip to this conference I mentioned, going from the airport to the hotel. And one guy was retired from an engineering job and he basically drives Uber because he lives by himself and it’s boring otherwise. He said, “I get up, I exercise.” Then I’ll be like, “What am I going to do today? Oh, I might as well drive.” He plays golf twice a week.

Lindsey: So, what do you make of the inordinate pessimism about AI in the United States? And in particular, the pessimism that it’s going to make us so rich that we don’t have jobs anymore?

Postrel: Unclear on the concept. Yeah.

Lindsey: People are freaked out because they have no idea what they would do with themselves otherwise. Which to me indicates that we have a lot of social reconstruction to do, so that people have an idea of what’s important in life other than working for money.

Postrel: Well, I don’t think that that’s the source of the anxiety around jobs. I think it’s much simpler than that. I think people are just afraid of unemployment and not having money.

Lindsey: It goes beyond that. There’s existential fear of even if there’s a UBI, we’re all just going to be demotivated zombies.

Postrel: It exists, but that is among intellectuals. The general public being afraid about AI and jobs is not like, “Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job. What am I going to do all day just taking money from the government?” I mean, they’re worried, “Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job. How am I going to pay my mortgage and my kids’ tuition and my healthcare bills?” I think it’s just like the Luddites, the original Luddites. They were not idealists. They were just people who didn’t want to lose their jobs, but they benefited from the earlier wave of spinning machines. Anyway, so I think that it’s that. I think that everybody…

Lindsey: Do you have an intuition? Who knows is probably the only honest answer, but do you have an intuition as to whether AI is going to be an engine of income convergence and upgrading the more humbly skilled? Or is it going to be an engine of further inequality, so that there’s a small group of AI superstars who are enabled to do wonders and everyone else becomes… they’ve outsourced their brains to Claude and they’re way off the map.

Postrel: I think first we have to think about what’s already happened pre-AI and why it makes people discontent. We’ve gone through a long period where the poor got richer. The middle class stayed more less the same. The upper middle class got richer and the rich got richer. So, basically you had a lot of people who in the past, when we were kids, would have been middle class who are now, they still probably think of themselves as middle class, but they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, like $400,000 a year and buying very expensive homes. And what’s happened is people’s picture as a result of this, this mass affluence, what used to be a very rarefied lifestyle that did not affect most people’s perceptions of what was normal has become a model of what’s normal. Normal is going on ski vacations multiple times a year. Normal is taking a year abroad when you’re in college. Normal is…

Lindsey: Normal is what I’m seeing on Instagram.

Postrel: Right. Yeah. Normal is what I’m seeing on Instagram, which is glamour. I have a book on that. Doesn’t talk about Instagram because it came out too early. But normal is the lifestyle of people who are in the top 20 percent. Whereas 50 years ago, normal was the lifestyle of the people who are in the middle 50 percent or 40 percent. And so, people who are doing fine by any mid-20th century measure of doing amazing feel resentful because they’re left behind. So, that is the background in which we step into this AI thing. I don’t know. I think what will happen is there will be winners and losers, and it’s not going to all be skewed one way or the other. There’s going to be rearranging. And I think that part of the pessimism today, there are a lot of factors, political polarization, people just generally feeling out of control, aging society, that sort of thing. But it’s also the fact that journalism has been in a depression for 30 years, or for at least 25 years. All the people who are telling you these stories have seen their friends lose their jobs. They’ve lost their jobs…

Lindsey: From technological progress, from the internet.

Postrel: From technological progress. I would be the last person in the world to say the internet hasn’t been wonderful. It’s been fantastic. But it has wreaked havoc with my income. And I’m one of the lucky ones, partly because I spent years writing for Bloomberg, which was paywalled but subsidized. The opinion section was subsidized by the very lucrative Wall Street terminals. But all the people who are writing these stories in the traditional media have seen just absolutely… it’s been like being a steel worker in the ‘80s. If you’re not in it, you can’t appreciate how bad it has been. And it’s gone on and on and on also like these Rust Belt industries. And that flavors the way the news is presented. It’s not the only thing going on.

Lindsey: I think that’s fair. So, my intuition…

Postrel: By the way, the big contrast is the way AI is perceived in China, which is partly a function of the government, but not really because the AI companies aren’t as controlled by the government and the government, the CCP, is a little nervous about them. But I think it’s because if we’d had AI in 1970 or 1968 or something, Americans would have perceived it through the history of all that post-war growth.

Lindsey: Yes, I think that’s a completely fair point. So, my intuition is that AI is likely to intensify inegalitarian trends. Ever since this transition to a post-industrial service economy, we’ve had what’s called skill-biased technological change. That is, technological progress has tended to increase the relative demand for highly skilled workers and reduce the relative demand for less skilled workers. And there are arguments that AI could go another way, that it could offer a disproportionate step-up to the productivity of the less productive. But my sense is that it’s going to turbocharge people at the top and that a whole lot other people are going to outsource their cognitive abilities to AI and are not going to be in a position to be masters of AI. They’re going to be dependents on it. And my sense is that a whole bunch of currently middle of the road down to scut level white collar work is going to get automated, and that is going to reduce relative demand for the bottom half of the white collar knowledge worker class. So, I think our populist uprising right now is a long brewing reaction to decades of feeling marginalized both economically and culturally on the part of the non-college educated class. And these are the least articulate, hardest to organize people, and they’re causing a lot of commotion right now. So, if a good chunk of the knowledge worker class gets to feeling the same way, then I imagine lots of fireworks politically in the years ahead.

Postrel: Well, I tend to agree with you about low productivity white collar jobs. The people who grind out endless stupid press releases and send them to my email box where because they can just blast emails… Once upon a time, you had to get on the phone and call people up and it was painful on both sides if you weren’t interested. And to be honest, I have contempt for these jobs. Not for the people. I don’t know the people, but the jobs are stupid.

Lindsey: No, I do not weep for their passing. I do not.

Postrel: And if they go away because of AI, or if people are not spending their time making PowerPoints, but using AI, that’s one thing. But I think it’s more complicated than what you’re saying because, first of all, you’re going to see AI empowering people who are now not part of the ladder. I was just at this conference with musicians, and at one point early on, actually Charles and I were on a panel with somebody who’s a musician and producer and who’s won Grammys and is a very big shot. And he’s black, which is relevant because at one point, he says, “These tools, the people who are at Princeton are worried about these tools. The people, I don’t know what to call them, urban” — he was using all these euphemisms — “they’re embracing them. They’re using them. They’re doing stuff with them.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Lindsey: So, we could see a big increase in these physical jobs and with some AI backing to make things easier to do the business in. So, yeah…

Postrel: He was talking about musicians, but yeah. And again, my nephew who has his furniture and contracting business, he uses a lot of AI to run his business. There’s a lot of this, especially among younger people turning to it. But you’re absolutely right. The people who used to just do perfunctory, write lousy papers and get Bs because the professors can’t give them what they deserve, will now use AI to write lousy papers. And I think eventually that’s just going to get weeded out. And my prediction, or I don’t know, I always hate to make predictions, but is that colleges are going to bifurcate and there’s going to be colleges that are about really learning…

Lindsey: Yes, for the life of the mind.

Postrel: College for nerds, the life of the mind. And then there are going to be colleges that are basically finishing schools. You go so that you have a social experience between the ages of 18 and 22. So, you have a chance to grow up, become an adult in a somewhat protected environment where you have football games and parties. And maybe there’s some modicum of something that resembles classes, but it’s not really pretending to educate you. It’s a finishing school. And there is…

Lindsey: Princeton in the early ‘80s was a nice combination of the two, wasn’t it?

Postrel: Well, I didn’t do much finishing school stuff. I did go to basketball games, but unlike your legendary Beer Pong skills, I didn’t drink really. I come from a long line of teetotalers and I barely drink. And my friend group was mostly people who didn’t drink much either. So, that’s a different experience. But yeah, I mean, I have a tendency to think that… it’s not that you won’t necessarily have parties and stuff at the ones where it’s life of the mind, but you’re not going to be pretending that the people who are just there for the football — and I don’t mean the athletes, because the athletes are actually learning stuff, they’re learning athletics — the people who are just there for the football games are there for something else. Because why should you with AI?

Lindsey: So, I’d like to see that evolution. I think that would be a hopeful turn. With AI generally, I think the only attitude is just being very ready to change your mind about stuff as new data come in. The uncertainty is massive. The possibilities are exhilarating and terrifying. They’re not boring. So, for people like us, doing our third act in a time of wide-open uncertainty, it’s maybe not what we had in mind, but it’s not boring.

Postrel: Yeah, it’s not boring.

Lindsey: And you’re doing your part to interpret for what’s going on for all of us. And so, keep at it. Virginia, we’re at the end of our time, so I’m going to wrap things up here. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Postrel: Thanks.

Operating on the principle that every social problem is an entrepreneurial opportunity, Levin sees housing innovation — in particular, making it easier for family and friends to live with or near each other — as a promising way to help reknit the social fabric. He helped to start Culdesac, which builds car-free neighborhoods from scratch, and he is the founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people build or buy housing with people they know. And these business ventures grew out of his own experience with “co-living” arrangements in the Bay Area. Levin and I discuss Levin’s personal housing experiences, the barriers facing people who want to follow his example, the factors driving growing interest in co-living, the disparate groups of people attracted to this lifestyle, and the prospects for group living arrangements to seed broader social revitalization.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m really excited about today’s episode because it represents a new direction for the podcast. Thus far, all the podcasts I’ve done so far, I’ve had guests on that have helped me analyze and figure out what’s going wrong with the world, and that’s a big subject with a lot of different angles and it’s an important subject. I don’t think we can get going in the right direction unless we figure out what wrong turns we’ve made. But spending all your time on the world’s struggles is a bummer. And then ultimately the reason to figure out the world’s troubles is to make them better.

So, I’m happy today to pivot towards thinking about how to actually move things in the right direction and talk with someone who’s doing that. If you’re familiar at all with my work on the Substack and my book, The Permanent Problem, you know that I argue that the 21st century malaise that the rich advanced democracies are in is due to the fact that we’re in a kind of no man’s land between achieving material mass affluence and translating that into spiritual mass flourishing. I argue that one of the most important priorities for getting from here to there, moving towards a world more amenable and conducive to mass flourishing is to revitalize our face-to- face communities. We’ve had a real contagion of disconnection and social disintegration over the 21st century and we need to be moving in the opposite direction, re-knitting those frayed ties and reconnecting with people because that’s ultimately the foundation for wellbeing for Homo sapiens. We’re a hypersocial species and we need other people.

I’m delighted today to have as my guest, Phil Levin, who has devoted his career to revitalizing face-to-face communities, one family and set of friends at a time. He is the co-founder of Live Near Friends, which we’ll talk about more, a founding member of Culdesac, which is a set of co-living communities, and also, on top of that, helps to run the Substack Supernuclear. So Phil Levin, wonderful to have you on the show.

Phil Levin: Yeah, great to be here.

Lindsey: So, tell me, first of all, your story. Were you on another career track before you made this pivot? And then tell the pivot of how you got interested in housing and making housing something beyond single-family housing, which has become the utterly dominant norm in American life.

Levin: Yeah. I was on a totally different career track. I was working in the developing world trying to get people mobile banking on their phone. So back around 2010, let’s say, you had roughly... Everyone at that point had a mobile phone, but only about 20 percent of people had bank accounts. So the idea was you could use the mobile phone as a way to get people financial services. So that was my first career. I was living in a bunch of different countries. Actually, when you live in a bunch of different countries, you really feel like you’re in a community because you quickly find the expats, and the expat community becomes your community and they take care of each other because no one has family there. So, I came back to the US at that point and actually felt the absence of community, felt like I didn’t really have anyone. I was this anonymous person in the big city of San Francisco, but then I met my wife.

Lindsey: Had you grown up in a tighter knit community or big family or has this not come out of your own biography?

Levin: Yeah. I grew up in the traditional American suburbs and a very loving family, a nice neighborhood, but nothing out of the norm. But the real turning point for me and really the change in my career is I met my wife, Kristen. She’s a professional behavioral scientist, so she studies what makes people happy and healthy. We like to experiment in our own lives. So when we were having the conversation how do we want to live, I thought we would do “the normal thing,” which was go get a one-bedroom apartment by ourselves, just live the two of us somewhere, and she said, “I’ve read all the research. Absolutely not. And that is not going to make us happy.” What we did instead was we rented a nine-bedroom mansion in San Francisco and moved in nine of our friends. So that was our move-in together moment as a couple.

Lindsey: How long did it take to assemble the nine participants?

Levin: A few months. We were on a sales tour. Luckily people in San Francisco are fairly open to ideas like this. It’s a good place to experiment here. So we started moving together. I’m like, “Okay. We’ll do this as an experiment.” It ended up becoming my career. At that point, I got interested in real estate and housing and asking the question, “Why is it our housing not helping more with our happiness, our sense of belonging, our health? It just seems like our housing is working against us.” So I ended up meeting two guys, Jeff and Ryan, who were starting a company called Culdesac. Culdesac was set out to build car-free neighborhoods in the US. We ended up building this car-free neighborhood that got a lot of press, a lot of attention in Tempe, Arizona. It is open now. People are living there, but people thought it was crazy to build a car-free neighborhood.

Lindsey: I’ll just mention quickly that this is the first time you and I have chatted, but we did email a couple of years ago because I was going to be in Phoenix and wanted to check out Culdesac, and you helped line me up with the people there.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. So that was my entree into housing. My wife and I ended up then starting a second community, for ourselves again, called Radish in Oakland, and we thought of this as like, “Oh, we’re…”

Lindsey: Was this because you outgrew the first place or because there were problems with the first place?

Levin: Because people were starting to talk about having kids, and living in a big mansion in San Francisco is not the right setup for kids. So, we were saying, “Hey, let’s take the parts we like about this, which is living in community with friends and try to translate this into a new era in our lives.” We bought this property in Oakland, which had a bunch of space. We now live there with 20 friends, 10 kids all who were born there under the age of five, and spread across 10 private homes. Most people have their own private units.

Lindsey: If you walk from the farthest one to the other side, how far away is it?

Levin: A 40-second walk. So they’re all in a tight cluster. Yeah. So it’s like you don’t have to put on shoes. So we ended up starting this community and we thought about this as just, “We’re unique people. We want to live in a unique way. We’re going to set up this one-time experiment in this thing.” What ended up happening to our great surprise was we discovered along the way there’s this fairly universal interest in this. We started getting emails and calls and people like, “I want to do this. How do I do this? Can you help me?” We realized that actually there are a lot of people who want to live this way. There’s just no way for them to do it. There are no offerings out there. Our built environment’s just not set up for it. It’s not on the menu for people. So that motivated me to start this company, Live Near Friends, which is trying to take the way we live at Radish and make it available to a lot more people.

Lindsey: Tell me, so what does Live Near Friends do? How does it work? How does it help people and what’s the scale of it?

Levin: Yeah. The mission as a company is to help people live in close proximity to the people they care most about, friends and family. What we do practically is we help people purchase and also develop, build from scratch, housing where you can live next door to friends and family. So on the purchase side, what this might look like is two sisters who want to buy a duplex together and we will help them find it, figure out the financing, figure out the legal structure. And then on the developing side, which is really what I’m interested in, I’m a housing developer, we’re helping people actually build from scratch housing that is specifically designed for neighbors that know each other and want to be in a relationship rather than neighbors that want to be strangers. I’ll talk more about what that actually looks like, I’m sure, later.

Lindsey: Right now, what’s the split in your clientele between the off-the-shelfers and the people who want to build their own place?

Levin: I’d say probably two-thirds off-the-shelf, one-third want to go building. It takes a very specific personality who wants to do that, it’s a big project. But it’s more people than you might think. I mean, not that many people build their own home, but about a third of my clientele is interested in that, which I actually think is an indication that the real estate industry is maybe a little too, “We’re just going to hand you the products,” as opposed to actually having people participate in the process.

Lindsey: So your Radish, the second of your co-living arrangements, you’re in the process of selling that now, aren’t you? So you have a third act in mind, right?

Levin: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. We built Radish for what we call the shoulder years. So it’s like the few years before people start having kids up to age maybe five when there’s a set of needs you have. You don’t need a ton of space for kids to run around. They’re not that old yet, but you still want to be connected to the city and connected to restaurants and bars. The third act is going full suburban like our parents did. I can’t believe I’m here, but I got here. So we’re building actually three new communities that are basically three new spinoffs of Radish. Everyone who lives in Radish is going to move into one of those three. These typically are just places with bigger units, a little more space, a little more focused on schools, all the reasons people tend to move into the suburbs.

Lindsey: Right. So with Radish, you told me the number of people and families in the compound, but my understanding is you had other people just move into the vicinity as well to get in on the fun?

Levin: That’s right. And this was unexpected. Radish is where we live. What we didn’t expect is it turned into a third space for the wider neighborhood in some ways. So, we had actually a bunch of other friends. We basically ran out of space really quickly at Radish. We just have only so many units and people who wanted to participate would end up buying or renting nearby. So we had eight friends who bought homes near us within walking distance and they use it as their third space.

What we learned, which is interesting, is that proximity really matters. We have this natural experiment of seeing people move next door versus a five-minute walkaway versus a 10-minute walkaway versus a 15-minute walkaway and there are huge differences at those distance scales as far as how they participate. So it’s like the distance that I think is most relevant, we like to call Crocs distance, which is the distance you’d be willing to just throw on Crocs and walk on over and not have to call up and say, “Are you there?” But to actually just walk on over to have a look and see who’s around. There’s another distance that we call baby monitor distance, which is even closer, which is when you leave your kid in your house, bring your baby monitor and come hang out and feel okay that your kid is in the house. It’s within the range of the baby monitor essentially. We found that there’s enormous differences in the utility of being baby monitor distance than Crocs distance versus I actually have to make an event of coming over.

Lindsey: If you’re a five-minute walk away, is that Croc distance or is that more of an effort? Do you really have to just be kind of next-

Levin: We call it Crocs distance. You can finish a meeting, walk over, walk back.

Lindsey: But basically if you have to get in the car, it’s over, right?

Levin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you might as well be on the other side of the city if you need to get in a car.

Lindsey: Okay. Let’s talk a little about terminology. I think you use co-living most often, but there’s co-housing, there’s compounds, there’s co-ops. And then as we get into the fringier vibes, you get communes and intentional communities. So, tell me your terminological choice and the thinking behind it.

Levin: Yeah. I actually don’t use any of those terms now. The term I use is just living with your friends and family. I think all the terms you mentioned are... They come loaded with some mental image of who is doing this. So if you think of the commune, there’s a thing in your head right now when you think of the word commune. I think our mission as a company is that we want to make this a universal thing on the menu. We want to make it for normies. We want to make it for just your average people. So, we’re trying to use terminology that I think is just universal and doesn’t come loaded with some idea of some specific person that is doing it.

Lindsey: I’ll say that when I was cooking up the ideas that led to the Substack and then the book, I was much clearer on what was going wrong than what to do about it. The ideas about what to do about it, which were novel to me and weren’t the kinds of things that I’d been thinking about before, they didn’t grow out of seeing some reform movement on the ground and say, “Ooh, wow, that looks promising.” They just grew out of thinking, “Okay. What’s wrong? And then how do we undo that?” So that led me towards thinking that we really need much more face-to-face connection.

And that, in particular, the reason we are disconnecting from people is that once upon a time, when the world was poor, other people, your face-to-face relationships, played vital, practical roles in your life. Your spouse was your helpmeet in economic production. Your kids worked on the farm and took care of you when you were older. Your neighbors were help against danger, and an insurance policy against bad times, and the only alternative to listening to the crickets for doing something to unwind. As we’ve gotten richer, a lot of those functions we’ve outsourced to the market or to the welfare state. So people, our face-to-face relationships have just become one consumption option amidst a sea of expertly marketed alternatives, and the marketing seems to win more often than not.

So I had this sense that we’re being led away from our better selves and our longer term interests by short-term dopamine hits, and we need something that will institutionalize reconnecting with each other. When I first started to share these ideas with people, I would just get eye rolls and like, “Oh, so you want everybody to go back and live on a commune again?” “No, no, that’s not what I want.” So when I finally discovered that there were real people who weren’t communards, who were just regular folks who thought, “Wow, it’d be nice to live, not next to strangers, but next to people that matter to me.” Anyway, that was just a huge pick-me-up that, wow, there are things going out in the world that are connecting with what I’m up to.

So yeah. The two models we now have for group living are the ‘60s commune or the college frat house, right?

Levin: Those are the two.

Lindsey: Neither of those is really what you want to pitch to Joe and Jane American.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. I think you’ve actually said this in a very similar way to how I describe it. I think the question we’re trying to answer is, who is your support structure as a person in this world? I think maybe on one side of the aisle, the answer would be that it’s the market or it’s the individual. You are your own support structure. The other side, it might be that the government’s your support structure. I don’t believe in either of those. For me, the natural support structure is your local community. It’s the people around you, in close proximity to you, your friends, your family, your neighbors. It seems that we just hollowed out that sort of mid-level organism. The individual is very well understood. The government’s well understood.

Lindsey: Yeah. Civil society, all those intermediate institutions between the individual and the state, is hollowed out a lot.

Levin: Yeah. I think the work I do, it’s one vector of response to that problem. I think there’s probably many, and I hope you’ll probably have them on your show. But for me, it starts with the fact that I think your support structure really needs to be local. So many of your physical needs are local needs. It’s like, who’s going to drive you to the hospital when you have an emergency? Who’s going to come over and watch your kid? There’s a natural geography of support. For me, it starts with housing, because that’s what really sets up the ability for that to happen.

Lindsey: So, why is this happening now? Why are you happening now? Why are people like you happening now? Why did your Culdesac co-founders come along now? In the ‘60s, we had a very different dynamic, right? It was a cultural break by young people, wanting to break from the conformism and the perceived cookie-cutter oppressiveness of bourgeois life and get back to the land and get back to something authentic. So it was a real revolutionary attempt to break beyond consumerism into a radically different kind of lifestyle and a kind of a throwback back-to-the-land lifestyle, and that turned out to just not work. Subsistence farming is hard, brutal work, and there’s a reason everybody left the farm as soon as they could, and so that ran out of gas.

In big cities for a while now, it’s pretty common for young professionals to deal with high rents and low starting salaries by having roommates and having group homes, and that’s a pretty common thing. It’s probably more common in the Bay Area than maybe anywhere else because of the insane housing prices and also just the hacker culture group-house thing. It just seems there’s a cultural vibe that supports group living at any rate. But when you started doing your idiosyncratic weird pioneering kind of lifestyle experimentation, you immediately started having people say, “Wow, I want to do that.” So you immediately started sensing this latent demand. Where is that coming from? Why is it showing up now and not before?

Levin: Yeah, good question. So I think there are a couple factors, and you’ve already mentioned a few of them. One is that housing is broken. Everyone understands housing is not working. You see this most clearly in prices, but I think it’s a more general feeling. No one thinks this is going well. They’re open to other ideas. The second, like it says, is more people are having roommates, related to the housing costs, and so the idea that you would have other people... When my wife and I started dating, we were living with roommates and I started our feeling was like, “We don’t want to give up our roommates. We like living with them.”

The third, which I think will continue to reverberate, is the pandemic. So the pandemic was this once in a century moment when everyone simultaneously asked themselves the question, “How do I want to live in a new world?” It was this moment when people were actually just open to other ways of life. I worked on a company that was trying to actually do band life stuff and get people to form communities around bands. Didn’t work, but people were open to ideas like that in the pandemic. I think it just scrambled everyone’s default path, the mindless, “Oh, I’m going to get this home next and this home next,” and left people open to other ideas.

Lindsey: It also promoted a huge step increase in remote work, working from home. So during the pandemic in particular, 40 percent of work hours were in the home for a while in 2020. And then people expected it all to pop back, and it didn’t, because people liked it. People liked cutting that hour and a half, two hours out of commuting time out of their life. People liked being able to go deal with a kid’s doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day without trauma. So there’s been enormous amount of resistance. So you had this dynamic where managers wanted everybody back under their control and under their watchful eyes, and people wanted to stay home. A lot of them did. So there’s been a durable increase in remote work, which was accelerating a long-term secular change.

From the first factories until 1980, the entire trend was the other way. It was work moving out of the home and into factories and then moving into shops and offices. Before that, everybody was a farmer, they worked at home. The home was a site of economic production. It evolved over time where the only production you do there is cooking and home maintenance, and it’s just a site of consumption, and everything moved out of the house into offices and factories. So by 1980 in America, we hit the nadir. Only 2 percent of people reported the home as their primary workplace, but now it’s up to 20 percent. There was a big jump in COVID, but it’s been gradual since the 1980s. It’s all basically online, either facilitating remote work for employees or facilitating doing online internet businesses. That struck me as a huge structural change in the way the economy is working that opens up possibilities for people to live near family and friends. It divorces the living decision from the work decision, from where you work. So, how important is that with your clients? Are you seeing that most of them are remote workers, or how does that work?

Levin: Yes, 100 percent. I think you hit the nail on the head here. The starting point for the housing decision used to be, where’s my workplace and how do I commute to it? Now people need a new starting point, and what’s that going to be? The claim I want to put forward is you should start with the who. You should start with your support network. You should start with the people that you love and admire, and that should be the starting point for your housing decision if you’re fortunate enough to be able to be divorced from your place of work, which not everyone is yet, but many people are. So there’s a lot of people we live with are. We happen to be easily commutable to downtown San Francisco, so we don’t really have to give that up where we are, but I think more and more you might actually see communities like this that actually are not in reference to where the office cluster is.

Lindsey: It seems like once you have that population of people who truly are footloose and fancy free in their housing decisions, that could start bleeding out into the people who are actually still going to work in an office to think, “Hey, maybe I’ve got more flexibility about this than I thought.” So you’ve got plenty of different location options. If your workplace is in location X, there’s a bunch of different possibilities for where your residence could be. If you start out thinking about how to coordinate with family and friends, then it makes it easier. But if they’ve got two different workplaces and people are changing jobs, then that really is a significant barrier. So it seems to me that the biggest friend you have as far as pushing this trend forward is the trend towards being able to work wherever you want to.

Levin: Yeah. I think actually one of the things we were really thinking about when we started Culdesac is, the other secular trend you’re going to see is how changes in mobility are going to change people’s behavior of where they are able to live. So I think the self-driving is going to be big here, so investment follows, right? The idea that you can sit in a self-driving car with a great suspension system, driving very smoothly, doing your work as you go to work. Right now, people’s commute fringe for the typical person is about 30 minutes, and it goes up to an hour for other people, and I think you’re going to see that commute fringe being pushed out quite a bit in a world with self-driving cars and other technologies, and so you might actually... I think that’s going to have a sprawling effect, which actually could also influence the types of housing that people start choosing.

Lindsey: No, that’s an excellent point and I hadn’t really focused on that, but for sure, once the commute isn’t lost time where you’ve got to be staring at the road, you could be doing anything, then commuting is less awful than it was before and is less of a constraint on where you want to live than it was before.

Levin: It’s Marchetti’s Law. Have you heard this before?

Lindsey: No, I have not.

Levin: It’s a fascinating rabbit hole. So there’s a physicist named Marchetti, I think in the ‘70s maybe, was studying basically how long people are willing to commute throughout history going back to the Roman times. He coined this thing called Marchetti’s Law, which basically said that the time that people are willing to spend commuting is invariant. So the median person will always commute about 30 minutes. But what changes is the technology that transports you. As you get basically faster transportation technology, cities grow because the commute tolerance allows them to get further places. So you could basically measure the size of cities and back into what is the dominant transportation technology that creates that city. So, a train scale city will have a certain size, a car scale city will have a certain size. Anyways, a bit of a side tangent, but I think Marchetti’s Law is important to understanding what self-driving cars will do to how we live.

Lindsey: Good. So you’ve got another law that you cite sometimes in describing the importance of what you do. It’s the law of proximity. So, explain that.

Levin: Yeah. The law of proximity, and this is really what behavioral science would tell you, is that the things that are closest to you, lowest friction to you, are going to be the things you do and the things furthest away from you are going to be the things you don’t do. So the things within a five or 10-minute proximity of you are going to…

Lindsey: But this has got a lot of teeth, doesn’t it? And people don’t face up to it at all.

Levin: It does. If you live next to a gym, you’ll work out more. If you live next to a pizza place, you will get fat. I think people tend to overrate the amenities in a city and they tend to underrate the things within a five or 10-minute walk of where they live, which to a much greater degree determine how you live.

Lindsey: What can you tell me about trends in terms of this group-focused living, people buying and building homes together rather than just as single-family units? What do you know about trends in the United States?

Levin: I think what’s been interesting at Live Near Friends is observing the kinds of audiences that show up wanting this, and there have been some surprises on my end. The audience that we knew would show up, who have shown up, are people who actually look like me. The problem that they’re trying to solve is there are two working parents in a very expensive city and we want to have kids and how on earth do we do this? It seems impossible. So, what they’re looking for is, they’re looking for support in raising kids, and that’s the thing they’re trying to solve by living near their friends and family. The friends thing is important because not everyone has family that can move near them. So that is for sure a chunk of an audience that we see a lot.

There are two other audiences that I think are fairly interesting. One is empty nesters. There’s a specific kind of empty nester, and it’s largely women and largely single women. I was curious because these people started showing up to us and we’re not marketing to them. We have millennial marketing. It’s clearly targeted at people like me. But we kept getting these older single women showing up. I talked to a bunch of them and I learned a couple things. The first is that I didn’t realize how many women above the age of 60 are single. It’s over half of women over the age of 60 are single. So, men die younger. When there’s a divorce, men tend to marry younger. The women tend to not remarry on average. That population appears to not like their housing options. They don’t actually want to live independently. They want to be in connection with people. They want to live interdependently. So that’s a second audience.

There’s a third audience, which is child-free adults. I had no idea. I mean, it turns out 20 percent of adults in the US are child-free by choice. People don’t think about them as a segment. It’s a large thing. It turns out actually on average, they’re higher income. They are not trying to save up money to give their kids an inheritance. They don’t have kids. So they spend down their money before they die. They try to die with zero. They are higher consumption housing spenders and they rent, they don’t buy. So it’s actually an interesting segment of people to think about housing offerings to. I don’t think anyone’s really thinking about them.

Lindsey: When you have kids, you have a built-in social life of a kind with your kids. It’s intensive and demanding and tends to squash the social life you used to have outside of one with your kids. But if you’re in kid-free adulthood, then that’s a big space that opens up that otherwise gets consumed. So the emptiness of solitary living, I would guess, just stares at you in the face more if you’ve not been going through the hectic years of child-rearing.

Levin: Yep. I think kids also help with your social circle. I think the classic thing is, you meet the parents of your kids’ friends. So there’s a social need in that segment, I think it’s really, really sharp.

Lindsey: When did you start Culdesac? When did you start Live Near Friends?

Levin: Culdesac was 2018. Live Near Friends was 2023. Yeah. So we’ve been at it for a few years.

Lindsey: How do you assess how you’re doing and what does success look like?

Levin: Yeah. I think, both of these companies are trying to create a new category of housing. I think in the United States, we see so much innovation, category innovation in different industries Say electronics, think about the number of different electronics products they release every year. Some work and some don’t work. Housing is just so stale.

Lindsey: Yes.

Levin: I think we learned why. It’s really hard to create new categories of housing. You pay what somebody called the new concept penalty whenever you try to start something new in the housing space, which is the insurance companies, the banks, the equity providers, the regulators. You need to do extra work with each of them in order to make your product exist, whereas if you’re building the same thing that’s been built before, they’ll just roll out the red carpet and be like, “Oh yeah, let’s get more of that. We understand that. We know how to make that happen.” So it’s just an uphill battle you face when you start a new category of housing, it’s really sharp, and that’s before you even get to the consumer side of it where people are fairly conservative about their housing decisions, especially when they’re buying because it’s such a long-term investment. So, we haven’t seen enough innovation and experimentation in housing. I think it’s a huge friction on our civilization that we can’t do more of it.

I’ve always been interested in this because I think it’s just really important. Both Culdesac and Live Near Friends are basically category innovations in housing. I think what we’ve proven with both of them is that the demand is there. It’s like we have not had problems getting people interested in living this way. The problem is more on the supply side. It’s how do you actually create it.

Lindsey: You can see the stagnation of the housing sector in the numbers and it’s astonishing. Arresting numbers of decades of negative productivity growth in both residential and commercial construction. So that’s just absolutely incredibly, exotically, inexplicably weird, right? That’s not the way capitalist economies work. They have positive productivity growth over time. That’s the whole ballgame. So there are just deep conservative forces that have things stuck in particular ruts that don’t seem to be serving us very well.

You face a fair amount of resistance then in busting out of those ruts. Tell me specifically about what legal barriers can crop up if you’re wanting to live with family and friends.

Levin: Yeah. Specifically family and friends. I think the good news is that the main barrier is starting to fall. The main barrier if you want to live next to family and friends is just that on most lots in the United States, you cannot build multiple homes. That’s the basic prerequisite for this. Can you build multiple homes on a single lot? The good news is that is changing. So, a dozen or so states have passed what are called missing middle housing laws that essentially what they do is you can take a lot of single-family lots and turn them into multifamily.

For example, my wife and I right now are building basically our third chapter after Radish. What we’re doing is, we took a large single-family zone lot in the Bay Area where we have two homes on it already and we’re going to subdivide and create four new micro lots and build four new homes, and then we’re going to sell our friends those four homes.

Lindsey: How large is the total property?

Levin: It’s a fairly unique one. So it’s about 24,000 square feet. It’s a big one for the Bay Area. But you can do this on a 6,000 square foot lot and build maybe three or four homes. So, what’s crucial about this is that when you do these subdivisions and you end up with these micro lots with individual homes on them, at that point, those are just single-family homes on what are called fee simple lots, which means that they can just be financed with all the normal Rocket Mortgage loans that normal people get when they buy a home. So there’s nothing exotic needed. You’re just buying a single-family home. It just happens to be a single-family home that you created next to your single-family home.

The ability to do these small lots subdivisions is really going to be the thing that... it’s the reason we started this company now is that it unlocks the ability to create these things in a methodical, scalable way in a lot of different parts of the United States. Whereas when we had to create Radish, we spent two years looking for a property we could put Radish on because we needed to have the right zoning, the right set of buildings and it took years for us to find it. Now when we work with clients, we can send them a dozen options that work for them today.

Lindsey: What’s going on outside of the United States? I’ve read about in Germany, there’s this thing called Baugruppen, or building groups, where it’s pretty common apparently for groups of people, friends or family members or whatever to... There’s an established process where they get together, and get together with a builder, and they build according to their specs. So there’s already this separate category that has somehow or another gotten into existence there, so that you’re not just completely innovating a totally new way of doing housing. This idea of a group of people getting together and designing their own space with a builder and in so doing apparently achieving some not insignificant savings is attractive to people. It seems like the lines are going up for that type of housing decision in Germany, but I don’t know about... Americans are very parochial. We rarely look at what clever things other people are doing outside that can make things work, but I’m just curious if you’ve seen any inspirations from beyond your shores.

Levin: Yeah. I was also interested in the Baugruppen thing. It seemed unlikely to me. I’m like, “How is this actually happening?” It’s like the amount of coordination and the amount of... I found it hard to believe when I first read about it, but it’s true. I dug into it more. I think the key thing that people don’t tell when they tell that story is, there’s quite a bit of industrial policy going on from the state there, where they’re able to access financing at terms that normal people, people in the US aren’t able to access because the government is basically supporting it.

Lindsey: There’s preferential financing for this kind of housing there.

Levin: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m not a Baugruppen expert. I don’t actually know the specifics, but I think for that sort of thing to work, you’d probably need some sort of similar effort. I’m not optimistic on that exact model translating. I think the question is how do you get something that looks like the end result through means that we are able to access in the US?

Something I’m interested in, and Brink, I know you talk about this in your book a little bit, is that one thing that we think of as a problem in the US that I actually see as an opportunity in this space is that we do have this big wealth inequality in the US. You have rich people, you have poor people. But in the US it’s like we see this... I live in the Bay Area, and it’s like, again, in a friend group, there’s the friend that got rich off the AI IPO and there’s the friend that works at the nonprofit, and you have this great wealth disparity within a friend group or within the family. I think it’s obviously very extreme in the Bay Area, but you see this story elsewhere because we actually do have a fair amount of income mobility. So even within a family, you’ll see a lot of...

So the question I’m asking myself is, how do we make use of the fact that, within a social circle, some people have more means than other people? Actually, can the people with more means almost become like the patrons and the subsidizers of the lifestyles of the people they care about, and do we want mechanisms for that to express itself?

What we actually typically see in a lot of the projects we support is there’s one person with more motivation and more financial means, and they’re in essence cross-subsidizing the people they care about and sometimes it’s just a risk cross-subsidization. So it’s like, “I’m going to buy the thing and take it through the zoning process and things could go wrong, but I’m then going to sell you the house at cost after that. I might finance it for you myself.” So I think these mixed income, mixed wealth setups, which inherently friend groups and families are just by nature, do present a way to do that.

Really, that’s just a cultural question. It’s like, do people see that as a thing that’s okay to do? Is it on the menu for them to do that? Does it feel awkward for them to present that as a possibility? Actually, something I’m going to try to work on over the next year is that idea and framing that as not a thing that you should be embarrassed about, but actually a thing that you’re using your wealth to do a great service for the people you care about, and actually we should encourage this and we should be talking about this more.

Lindsey: But you’ve seen real-life examples of this? It’s a collective action problem, and they’ve got the resources to solve it, so they’ll be the lead actor.

Levin: The most common place you see this all over the world is multi-generational, extended family living. It’s just seen like basically every country for the most part. It’s like the grandfather with the wealth buys the compound and the family moves in. It’s a very common setup.

Lindsey: Over time, what’s the most favorable route for growth? Is it figuring out how to get people buying existing structures? So you’ve got your role is as a a platform for DIY group livers versus corporate developments like Culdesac or developing neighborhoods that were built in mind that you’re going to have some people living in proximity and have shared spaces, et cetera. To what extent do you see a role for a more top-down corporate, “Hey, let’s provide this great product for you. And if we build it, they will come,” versus people figuring out for themselves and you helping them?

Levin: On a land level, I think every single-family home on a reasonably large lot near a city is the opportunity, but I think what you’ll see is probably a similar story to Airbnb. So when Airbnb started, it was not what it is today. It was a bunch of people basically sharing their homes and sleeping on couches. It was for a specific kind of person, and it was the DIY mentality people, they were the initial Airbnb customers. Now, Airbnb is essentially a bunch of corporate actors that are providing Airbnb housing to people and it feels more like a hotel in some ways. You just go on and buy it like you buy a hotel room. I think you’ll see probably a similar story here, which is with any new social movement, with any new products, you always have the true dyed-in-the-wool believers who get it going and become the people I look at as the aspiration for it, and then over time, the thing to scale it needs the help of a lot of parties in the wider ecosystem who see an economic opportunity to scale it.

So, my hope with Live Near Friends is we’re going to start with this more DIY style development stuff, but eventually I think it’s going to be real estate developers who today are building subdivisions, tomorrow will build any sort of Live Near Friends style housing and people will buy it and rent it just like they do normal housing today.

Lindsey: For driving things forward, it seems like this is something that when people hear that a real human being has done this, it flips a switch in them. It’s going, “Wow, that’s a fantasy.” Everybody’s had this fantasy since college. After you break up with all your friends and you scatter all over the country, you have this fantasy. Wouldn’t it be nice to stay connected? And here’s somebody who’s living the fantasy. This existence proof is a huge part of spreading this in terms of an actual social or cultural movement, right? You’ve got businesses, but you’re also kind of a lifestyle evangelist, aren’t you? You’re trying to spread the good word about this new way of living.

I saw something very interesting that you did an update on Supernuclear about selling Radish, and you were talking about how you’ve been doing these regular tours. The tours attract 90 percent tourists and 10 percent prospective buyers, so there’s a lot of people who just want to gawk, “Wow, this is cool.” This is a cool thing people are doing and they want to know more about it, so that seems like... And you’re kind of kicking yourself, “Man, we should have been doing tours from the get-go to raise consciousness about this.” So, how do you spread the word? How do you get this seed planted in more people’s minds?

Levin: I think the existence proof is absolutely crucial. Something I didn’t mention is we didn’t invent this idea out of whole cloth. People have been living this way for a long time. We were actually very inspired by another community that came before us called the Embassy. The thing that put it in our minds was going to dinner at the Embassy and being like, “Wow, this is what dinner at home could feel like. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have dinner at home like this?” So, I think that’s right.

My hope at Radish is that for every... There’s one Radish, but hopefully there’s a thousand Radishes that get created because of the existence proof and because the people that visit and see it’s possible. What we see actually at Radish is often people, for the tours, will bring the less believing party with them. So they’ll bring their parent, they’ll bring their spouse and they’ll be like, “See, look, I want you to look at this.” It’s like somebody’s trying to show it off to someone else. Live Near Friends as a company is never going to have 100 percent market share in this space. My hope is that we build a successful company, but really we’re both a media company that gets the lifestyle out there, but also for every one of these that we get to do, it inspires 10 more that we don’t get to do, and for me, that would be a huge success.

Lindsey: Tell me a little bit about the sociology of the people who are doing this already. Geographically, are they concentrated in particular parts of the country, socioeconomic status, red versus blue? Is it all over the map?

Levin: It is refreshingly all over the map. I was looking at our map of our users from all over the place, and there’s not even a red versus blue thing. I thought that this would be a blue thing. It is not a blue thing. If you think about it for a second, it’s like there are red versions of this all over the place. It’s like the way Mormons live, the way people form church groups. I talked to people about communities where everyone lives within five minutes of their church and then they have a similar community. Something I like about this, this is refreshingly non-political. This is another reason I try to steer away from the whole commune imagery is that is left-leaning imagery. I do not want that a part of this. I want this to feel sort of intentionally apolitical.

Lindsey: What’s bringing people together? Do you have people who really do have some kind of ideological or cultural intentionality, some particular way of life they want to pursue with others? Do you have any of that, like the classic intentional community kind of people? Is it just normies who don’t want to be atomized? How much of it is extended family?

Levin: It’s surprisingly normie. It really is. I think the one characteristic that exists among everyone who wants to do this is they’re natural contributors. When they think about why they want to live this way, the thing they have in their head is like, “I want to be a positive force on the people around me.” When we look at people who are going to move into Radish and we’re trying to figure out if we want to live with them, I have a test, which is we have dinner with them. At the end of the night, it’s like are they doing the dishes or not? Because that’s usually a leading indicator if they’re going to be a good community member. I think it’s people with a contribution mindset. One of the lessons this has taught me is I think we don’t actually ask enough of people in our civil society. We’ve all become such consumers of everything that we’re not asked to put anything into it aside from our money, usually, and I think the way people really feel a part of something is…

Lindsey: We’re all abashed to ask. If somebody does asks you, you say, “Sure.”

Levin: Yes. I grew up in a family where my family was always very scared to burden anyone with anything. Let’s not burden anyone, let’s make sure. I think what I’ve actually come to learn is, you are doing people a favor by burdening them. Burdening someone is the way you connect with them. That’s the way that they get to feel a part of you and a part of the thing you’re a part of.

So, my wife and I call this Tom Sawyering. When we have a garden project or whatever, instead of going to do it ourselves, we call out to the people who we think want to be closer to us and closer to our community and we’re like, “How about you come and build a garden with us?” It sounds like they’re doing us a favor, but we are doing them a favor because then they feel part of our community and our place.

I think at a society level, I think we don’t do enough of this. So this is a micro lesson from our living situation, but the the idea of service to anything has really been lost. I think if you look at all these different forms of civil society that have gone away, there’s a pretty big service element to it. There’s a pretty big contribution element to it. The place where you really see this performing well is Burning Man, where the reason Burning Man works, it’s really because people are asked to contribute to it. That is the main ask of the attendees. It’s like, you build it, you create this thing, and then you get to participate in it, and that’s why people feel so moved by it and so part of it.

Lindsey: I was going to ask about this on the sociology question, how often is it that people are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make raising kids work and thinking that being in proximity with family and friends would make that a lot easier. But you’ve told me, interestingly, you’ve attracted both sides. You have a specific attraction for people who are starting a family. It’s obvious, you’re sharing the costs, you’re getting that village to raise the kid. But then also the child-free folks have a need because they’ve got a social part of their calendar they need to fill. So you’re attracting people from both sides of that.

Levin: Yep, that’s right. Yeah. I think it’s an underlying shared thing, which is that we need a support structure. That’s who this appeals to. We need a support structure. It’s not necessarily that we need a best friend. The people I live with are not necessarily my best friends. They’re the people that are going to come and drive me to the hospital if I need a ride to the hospital. That’s what a local support structure does.

Lindsey: Once you’re living next to people you like, the spontaneous opportunities to do stuff together and help each other out are … they’re just going to hit you in the face, right? In particular, I’m curious about the nexus between people living with family and friends and the trend towards homeschooling pods and micro-schools.

Levin: Yeah. It’s not something I know a whole lot about. I think we’re actually going to experiment a little more with this in our next chapter. I’m excited by it. And this is really just a placemaking question on the whole. I think the people who are trying to build new cities and new towns now are asking the same thing, which is like, “Well, what is the basis of a new proximal human community? What’s the centerpiece of it? Why should I move there instead of somewhere else?” I think putting a school at the center of these things actually strikes me as a very strong way of getting something started from nothing. I would actually love to see communities like this with a micro-school in the center. We haven’t done work on this, but it’s a very exciting opportunity to me.

Brink, I think it gets to something that, leveling up a bit, the things you talk about in your book, about our stagnation. People talk about our inability to build housing, but I think about our inability to actually build new cities, new towns, new villages – and not only our inability to do it, but our lack of desire to even try. I’ve seen California Forever. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with California Forever.

Lindsey: Yes.

Levin: When people try to do it, people actually get upset. They’re incensed that somebody’s trying to create a new place. It just strikes me that we are just capping our ability to evolve if we can’t try a new city in the year 2026.

Lindsey: Yeah. I was going to ask you about the connection between the co-living, just to put it in one word, movement and this recent sort of experimentation with pop-up villages. You got this yearning for community. You can satisfy it on the cheap with the pop-up village. You can get together for a month, right? So there’s the huge ask of living permanently with other people, that’s big. This is smaller, so it’s less demanding. It gives you less, but there seems to be a nexus between some of these pop-up villages and they’re trying to start to create new communities. I know there are the Edge City pop-up villages, and they’ve got an ongoing connection with this. Esmeralda is a new town, smaller scale and lower profile than California Forever, that seems to have run into less of a buzzsaw of hatred and opposition. Have you run into that circle of folks and do you see a way in which your vibes intersect?

Levin: Absolutely. Actually, one of the founders of Edge City is here with me. I think both of those are super cool experiments. So, just to describe them. So, Edge City is a pop-up village that various times in a year will say, “We’re all going to go live in this town together.” People fly in from all over and spend a month together in a town. So it started…

Lindsey: I went to one in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Levin: Oh, great. You went to one. How was your experience?

Lindsey: It was great. It was awesome. I came away really hopeful. I was around a bunch of smart people who were really interested in ideas and interested in connection. It was in the weeks right before the 2024 election, and that didn’t come up one time with anybody the whole time, which for a DC policy wonk was a great blessing. So yeah, I found a lot of energy, a lot of hopefulness, and so it fired me up.

Levin: Yeah, it’s a very cool experience. So they’re basically trying to solve an agglomeration problem. It’s like, how do you create an attractor which gets a lot of people to a place? Which, if you’re going to create a new place in the world, a new town, new city, that is your core challenge. Basically, how do you turn the middle of nowhere into the middle of somewhere? You bring up schools as a way that this has been done in the past, like college towns have been ways of forming towns. But if we’re going to create new places, we’re going to need new ideas of what can be an attractor. I think the Edge City folks have done a wonderful job basically figuring out how to do this, using that brand of Edge City as being a flag that you plant on the ground and say, “We’re all coming here” and they’ve gotten that to work.

Lindsey: I talked about your need to play the role of evangelist because you’re carving out a whole new sector of housing. But to what extent are your customers evangelizing on your behalf? I would think once people are doing this thing and it’s working for them, they’re going to want to show off. How much are these people... Is it just all just a thousand points of light, people doing their own things, or are they connecting with each other? Is there any kind of movement where people are trading tips with each other, or is there any kind of group consciousness about people who are living this new way of life and connecting with each other?

Levin: Yeah. You know the joke? It’s like how do you know someone does CrossFit? They’ll tell you. I think the same story applies here. People that end up living this way end up talking about it a lot because it becomes such a central part of how they live and they just want to proselytize because they just see everyone else not doing it and they’re like, “They need to know. They need to know how easy, useful life can be.” So yeah, I think you do get a thousand points of light thing. In terms of connecting people, I think that’s something that the blog I write with Gillian Morris tries to do. Supernuclear. So we try to play host to the people running these experiments in different ways all around the world and allow them to publish stories.

Lindsey: Yes, you publicize them.

Levin: Yeah. There’s an interesting sort of union of all the San Francisco co-living houses called the Haight St. Commons, where there’s some coordination across the houses. I think most of the proselytizing is not house-to-house. It’s really just the people that do it to all the people in their social world who don’t do it. That’s the relevant communication point.

Lindsey: Okay. My final question. Stephen Stills back in the ‘70s told us that if you can’t be with the ones you love, love with the ones you’re with. So I’m curious about the kind of penumbra of your movement or your new housing sector. If you’ve got people living with each other and living more intensively and clearly sharing their lives with each other, to what extent do you see that possibly encouraging a revitalization of just good old-fashioned American neighborhoods? They were much more cohesive, convivial places once upon a time than they are today. So, how much running room do you think is there just to restore community right now with the people who just happen to live next to you after seeing the example of people who are choosing to live next to folks?

Levin: Yeah. I think each of these will become a neighborhood institution on its own, right? Because these things tend to be hosting spaces by nature, it’s like you’re creating a hosting space because you’re hosting four households or six households. That just naturally becomes a neighborhood hosting space as well. You have more events. You have more people over. I’ve always been curious, where did all these neighborhood associations come from in the first place? How do they start? I’ve read the history of this. My suspicion is it probably started just as a couple of neighbors who knew each other and had some sort of feeling of joint purpose together and maybe they just planted a tree to start with. Who knows?

I’m hoping each of these is a proto-neighborhood association perhaps in its own. That’s one theory about how that could happen, but if you have a bunch of neighbors... People right now don’t know their neighbors. There’s crazy statistics out there of the number of people who have even met their neighbors. The idea that somehow that’s just going to magically change and people are just being encouraged to go out and meet their neighbors with no other prodding is just sort of a fantasy.

Lindsey: Right. But if there’s a compound that’s functioning basically as a de facto neighborhood association and a community center, then that can get people out of their shells.

Levin: Yeah. And it’s not the only way. I’m sure you have ideas for other ways of that happening, but I think it’s like one vector that if you have one of these in every neighborhood, a couple of them, it’s very plausible that they could actually form something interesting.

Lindsey: So that’s an exciting and alluring prospect that these little developments can be seeds of broader social revitalization. That’s a nice thought to end on. Phil Levin, wonderful to have you on the show. Great talking to you. Best of luck in all your endeavors.

Levin: Thanks, Brink. Great chatting.

Adrian Wooldridge, my guest for this episode of the podcast, offers the consolation that we have been here before. In his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, Wooldridge relates how the centuries-old liberal political tradition has gone through repeated cycles of advance and ascendancy, decline and decadence, and self-criticism followed by renewal. Adrian and I discuss how the basic elements of liberalism — focus on the individual, tolerance of pluralism, and suspicion of power — have persisted through these cycles even as liberalism regularly has reinvented itself to deal with the novel and ever-changing challenges of modernity. We examine how a combination of staleness and overreach has brought on the current crisis of liberalism, and we look ahead to the institutional reforms and cultural shifts that can lead to liberal renewal.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Permanent Problem podcast. I’m very happy to have today as my guest, Adrian Wooldridge, the journalist and author, author of a whole shelf of excellent, thoughtful, sensible, wittily written books on a wide variety of topics. Most recently, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. Adrian, welcome to the show.

Adrian Wooldridge: Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here.

Lindsey: Yeah. So we saw each other in the flesh in London back in May for the first time in many years, but good to see you virtually today. We met over a quarter of a century ago back in Washington. So you are currently at Bloomberg Opinion, but you were at The Economist for many years. Back then you were with The Economist, you were the Bureau Chief, I believe. And you had just written a book with John Micklethwait, A Future Perfect about globalization. And I was at the Cato Institute. I was the head of their trade policy center. I was myself writing a book about globalization at the time.

So I want to tell you this story about how we first met. I don’t think you actually know this story, but I saw your book came out and I took a look at it and it looked really, really good. And there had been a lot of bad books about globalization. So this was a breath of fresh air. And then I saw that you were in DC and with The Economist and I thought, “Well, that’s a guy I need to meet.” And so I thought, well, the best entree would be to review his book because I like it. That would be a good calling card. So I wrote a review for Reason magazine and then we got the hard copies of the actual magazine. Back then. I believe we got the hard copies before the online version went on the website. So this was the first time I’d seen it.

And I believe all writers have this magical third eye, which opens only when you’re reading something you’ve written in print for the very first time. And when you’re holding it there, the published volume, that eye opens and all of a sudden every typo that had eluded umpteen rounds of editing and proofreading just jumps out like a sore thumb. And so I had the Reason magazine to cover and I was holding it next to your proofs and I saw that I had written your name as Adrian Woolridge, not Wooldridge. So that was deflating. And I thought that ruins the whole entree. The number one rule of book reviews, I don’t care what you say about me, just get my name right. So I had failed that. But I called Reason in a panic and got them to change the online edition. And then I emailed you the online edition and we were off to a fine start.

Wooldridge: But there is some sort of gremlin, isn’t there, in computers? Because I always make sure that I check at least the names of people when I write columns about them. And the number of times that despite checking really carefully, it goes wrong.

Lindsey: Yes.

Wooldridge: It’s quite extraordinary. I don’t know how it is. I mean, it is a gremlin that’s taking out a D or taking out an R or doing something. And the worst thing to do with people is, as you say, to get their name wrong. And it does happen a bizarre number of times, certainly my copy.

Lindsey: So at that time with your book, we were in this end of history, delightful, idyllic phase where we were talking about globalization, which was basically the collapse of the last great challenger to liberalism standing, socialism and state-dominated economic development. It was collapsing and into the vacuum was coming more market-oriented forms of policymaking and we called that globalization. And so at that time, it looked like liberalism had chased all its challengers from the field. Things look very different today. Your book is about this, what we could call the 21st century crisis of liberalism. It addresses and responds to that crisis by reminding us what liberalism is all about. It’s not just about the current rather dysfunctional incarnation of it. It has a deeper history and a richer history and a richer body of ideas to pull from than we’re currently pulling from. And so that lost genius of liberalism, you want to surface for us so we can make use of it and get out of our current jam. First, just tell me, there are many different ways to define liberalism. You’ve got your three main themes that appear again and again in the history of liberalism. Why don’t you tell me about those?

Wooldridge: Yeah. Let me talk about the three things that really define the essence of liberalism, because liberalism has many, many incarnations. I think there’s big government liberalism. There is small government liberalism. I think all of these are possible manifestations of liberalism. But the three essential things that you must have to have a liberal regime, are firstly individualism, that you start out with the individual and work upwards and outwards from the individual. Socialism starts with a sort of collectivism, traditional Toryism starts with a notion of collectivism as it were embodied in tradition, but liberalism will start with the individual and that is the fundamental thing that liberals will agree upon.

The second thing is tolerance that liberals think, believe that we cannot be certain about a lot of important philosophical propositions, particularly when they’re metaphysical about the meaning of life, that we have to agree to disagree and that must pervade all of our actions. So we must have a belief in pluralism. We must have a belief in open debate. We must have a belief in discussion, all of which emanate from this fundamental skepticism.

And thirdly is worry about concentration of power, that all liberals think that too much power in the hands of one person or a few people is in itself a very dangerous thing – even if those people can claim to be enlightened. Because power corrupts, people get old, people become degenerate, people become drunk with power. So liberals are always concerned with sharing power, disciplining power, dividing power, that it’s something that is too dangerous to be in the hands of one person. So those are the three definitional things that I think all regimes must have to be called liberal.

Now for a long time, people have thought that there is this fourth thing, which is the balance between the state and the market. That if you’re a classical liberal, you would believe in the small state, the big market. If you were a sort of 1960s LBJ style liberal, you believe in a compassionate state that embodied certain compassionate values. Now I think that those are secondary things that you can be a small state liberal. You can be a big state liberal. And we shouldn’t be too hung up about the size of the state. That’s a secondary thing. But what you can’t be is a liberal who believes in the established church dictating what everybody believes or a liberal who believes that all power should be in the hands of one party or one person. So a lot of the debates between Milton Friedman, let’s say, and Keynes or between Hayek and Keynes are about secondary things, which is the size and scope of the state. And the reason I think this is so important is because we are now seeing fundamental attacks on these essential liberal principles.

In a sense, we’ve sort of taken them for granted because we’ve all agreed on them. But now there are a whole bunch of people, articulate post-liberal academics and thinkers in the United States, and also of course the axis of autocracy in China and Russia, who were attacking these fundamental principles. So I think we have to go back to the fundamentals and focus a lot more on those than we did in those glorious days of the end of history when we thought we could take them for granted.

Lindsey: So you have a capacious understanding of liberalism, and rather roomier than some actually existing liberals because during those big debates during the 20th century about the size and scope of government, both sides claimed a kind of exclusive ownership of the liberal title. So libertarians like me call ourselves classical liberals and thought that progressive liberals were really just pinkos, sort of semi-socialists who had been infected by illiberal ideas. Whereas progressive liberals thought libertarians, small government liberals like me were reactionaries, just tools of the plutocracy. And we got through that. I think during the ‘90s and ‘00s and into the ‘10s, we had this kind of neoliberal consensus where the center left and center right no longer saw each other as across this ideological chasm. And now that both the center right and the center left are losing ground to social justice radicalism on the left and populism on the right, what remains of the center left and center right are sort of reconnecting and seeing that they have more in common. And certainly their common ground now looks much more salient compared to the differences that separate them from the extremes.

Wooldridge: Absolutely. I gave a talk about my book recently at the American Enterprise Institute. And at the American Enterprise Institute, there were a large number of people who were from Brookings. And the AEI and the Brookings people all basically agreed with me. But then there were also people from Heritage who came in and they strongly disagreed. So the common ground between these two opposed forces of the AEI and Brookings is now big, but there are Heritage people and other radical MAGA Trumpist intellectuals who just fundamentally disagree about liberalism. They’re not liberals, they’re post-liberals and they happen to call themselves post-liberals. So I think a lot of what we were debating in the 1990s and perhaps what Keynes and Hayek were debating to some extent, was about the narcissism of small differences in Freud’s phrase, if you consider it in the long arc of history. Not that these things are unimportant, but that there are certain very, very fundamental things that emanate from the Enlightenment that I think we need to defend collectively and in common before we can get to the wonderful work of resuming our disagreements.

Lindsey: I frequently have these feelings of nostalgia for, wow. Remember back when we used to really get hot and bothered about that?

Wooldridge: Yeah. I know. Oh, absolutely.

Lindsey: So I want to come back and dive into the three elements of liberalism, but first I want to march through the rest of the argument of your book. And so we’ll get to the contemporary crisis of liberalism, but your book argues that we’ve been here before and that is that there have been cycles of liberal ascendancy declining into liberal decadence and then some kind of shock, or some kind of commotion, intellectual upheaval that leads to liberal revitalization and liberal renewal. So why don’t you walk through that history?

Wooldridge: Yeah. As I say, there are these fundamental things like Wagnerian leitmotifs that must always be there, but the way that those things are put together and other things that go along with them change all the time. And so you get different liberal regimes that emerge. Also, I think central to liberalism as well as these three things I talked about is a sort of radicalism, a willingness to test and challenge established orthodoxies, even if the people who are in charge of those established orthodoxies are the liberals themselves.

So the first liberal triumph comes in the middle of the 19th century when the principles of individualism, tolerance, constraints of power are all in place. And they go along with the idea of market dominance, essentially, of a laissez-faire way of organizing things. So liberals say, “Well, the most important thing is to open jobs to competition or open markets to competition.” And that means that all else that’s good flows from that. So you get individualism, you get tolerance, you get a dynamic and growing economy. But then in the late 19th century, a group of people who are called not particularly originally New Liberals come along and say, “It’s not enough just to give people opportunities and stand back. We must ensure that they can exploit those opportunities or take advantage of those opportunities. We must enable them through a certain amount of state action. Let’s say a free education system or a pension system. And it’s not enough that we should just let the market dominate.”

Lindsey: They were saying this against the backdrop of mounting social problems from industrialization.

Wooldridge: Exactly.

Lindsey: The new problem that laissez-faire did not seem responsive to…

Wooldridge: Exactly. So it’s partly that you’re not giving people... If some people are leaving school at the age of 10 and other people are going to top class schools, you don’t really have an equality of opportunity. And if everybody’s building so much that the sewerage system won’t cope with all the refuse that’s created, you’re not really getting the best of a market economy. So they say the state must be more active to give people opportunities. And so you get that New Liberalism, and it’s an assault on the liberal order in the name of the individual. And it’s a a radical rethinking of things. And then that regime, that new regime, which is also designed to absorb some of the social discontent, which you’re saying at the time, works. You also get an active role of the state and say, “We’ve got these massive conglomerates that exercise too much power so we must break them up.” So antitrust becomes, particularly in America, a big part of that. Then that particular manifestation of liberalism begins to run out of steam in the ‘90s.

Lindsey: And we’re always in sync in the UK and the United States so…

Wooldridge: Yeah. Very, very much-

Lindsey: ... Americans had their analog with our Progressives. Yeah.

Wooldridge: So then you get the Great Depression and things begin to fall apart. The global system falls apart because Britain no longer can play the role of the guarantee of global order. And in the 1930s, liberalism is discredited as a creed. Everybody, all serious intellectuals are saying the future lies with collectivism of some sort, with great leaders. Even people like Walter Lippmann, the great liberal writer, is saying, “Well, liberalism is essentially finished.” Mussolini is saying, “Liberalism is finished.” And then again, liberalism re-energizes itself in the 1940s and ‘50s, partly through the provision of the welfare state, partly through the provision of Keynesian demand management, but also, and more importantly, I think through after winning the war, setting up a sort of stable.

Lindsey: Yeah. And winning the war had a bit to do with it too, right?

Wooldridge: Absolutely. So liberalism in the 1930s looks dead. It revives itself again. Then in the late 1970s and ‘80s, which both you and I lived through, again, that version of Keynesian liberalism begins to decay and die because of overreach, because of government incompetence. A whole series of things. It’s become too flabby in self-indulgence. And you get a bunch of neoliberals, libertarians who come along and say, “Let’s give more role to the market. Less role for the state. The state has become a rent collector.” So you get another surge of liberal inventiveness. The history of liberalism is not just a history of establishing three principles and letting them work as that. It’s a history of creating liberal regimes as solutions to a set of problems. Those problems changing, liberal regimes becoming a bit decadent and then a kick coming from other liberals.

And I think what we are seeing at the moment is precisely that problem again, a decadent elite that’s been in charge for a long time and become self-indulgent. There’s a set of ideas which I regard as a sort of marriage between some elements of neoliberalism and some elements of progressivism, left liberalism, congealing together in a Clintonian governing philosophy, that have failed to answer a set of important problems. So we are prepared at the moment for another phase of liberal radicalism.

Lindsey: So you’ve got two elements to this liberal decline or increasing liberal staleness. First, liberalism just becomes the establishment. And as the problems accumulate, usually the people at the top are least sensitive to them. And so there’s a lot of discontent before it reaches them. And they have their formulas for success. They worked for them in the past. They don’t want to change them, so they’re quite resistant. So you get this entrenched establishment that’s tone-deaf to changing circumstances for the worse.

Wooldridge: I think a very good example of that is what happened in the 1890s. In the 1890s, the liberal elite thinks that they’ve basically solved all the problems of liberalism, that they’ve opened jobs to competition, that they’ve disestablished the church in, well, in Britain, in all but name. They’re sitting there, they’re happy. They feel that they’re successful. The Gladstonian liberals are sitting there. And in America, free market liberals are sitting there. But they’re the establishment and they’re the intellectual establishment as well. But all around them is an accumulation of problems. Sewage, lack of opportunity, industrial discontent, the rise of a system like Germany, which is based on very different principles and much more state activism from the liberal establishment. And what happens is, at least in Britain and the United States, is that you get liberal reformers coming along and saving the system from itself. Teddy Roosevelt in the United States, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Asquith in Britain. You don’t get that on the continent so much. But the Anglo-Saxon world saves itself because it regenerates liberalism. And I think we’re going through a very, very similar set of circumstances today, even down to the issue of antitrust, I think in some ways.

Lindsey: So you can epitomize our establishment with the folks who congregate at Davos every year.

Wooldridge: Absolutely. It’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche that’s absolutely radically true. And there’s a sort of element about these people that they’ve been successful. They came onto the scene quite often in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They’ve accumulated enormous wealth. They’ve done incredibly well out of asset inflation. They’re at the top of the tree and they’re quite pleased with themselves.

Lindsey: Yes.

Wooldridge: And what’s so extraordinary is every year we write articles saying, “These are ghastly people. They’re terribly pleased with themselves.” And they still continue to be ghastly people who are pleased with themselves.

Lindsey: 15, 20 years ago, we might talk bad about them, but it would sound like jealousy because we knew they were on top of the world. They were the masters of the universe and they knew it too. Now Davos has this really tired, stale vibe I think to those of us outside. Those inside still seem to feel like it’s same as it ever was. They know something’s gone wrong, but they don’t know any new lines to say about what’s happening. So they just repeat the same old lines.

Wooldridge: It’s quite extraordinary. If you think about when we were talking writing our globalization books in the year 2000, if you look, for example, at McKinsey, you would look at that and say, these are really interesting guys who seem to understand the machinery of capitalism. They’ve got lots of really interesting things to say. So if they produce a new report, you’d look at it and you’d pore over it, and who reads their stuff now?

Lindsey: Right. Right.

Wooldridge: I mean, nobody does. There’s a whole series of exhausted volcanoes out there that used to be regarded as a fount of wisdom and they’re now just nowhere. So you have two things. You have one, an institutional decay. And that institutional decay in terms of the management of Davos is quite extraordinary. But they also have an intellectual decay and the intellectual decay is more important. We had a sort of synthesis in the 1990s, which lasted for a while, which was basically you take certain elements of neoliberalism, which is affection for the market, skepticism about the state, worries about rent seeking in the state sector and things like that. And you take certain things about left liberalism, about people being allowed to choose their personal identities, people being liberated from certain conventional morality. You put those two things together and you produce a new synthesis, which doesn’t give the neoliberals everything they want. It doesn’t give the left progressive everything they want, but it gives them enough to constitute a governing philosophy.

Lindsey: David Brooks, in his wonderful book, Bobos in Paradise, called this the bobo synthesis.

Wooldridge: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lindsey: Bourgeois Bohemianism, right?

Wooldridge: So you get that. And it is something that is there in Blair. It is there in Clinton. It’s there in most people at the top of most corporations, I’d say. And it could take a Republican form, it could take a Democratic form, but it’s basically a synthesis that survives for a long time. But it’s become a sort of constraint on thinking that there are certain things that people who belong to the synthesis are incapable of recognizing as problems. I would put immigration, the flow of people without proper assimilation, as being a very important part of that. I would put certain externalities from big companies as being part of that. Food companies making us all fat, getting us addicted to things. But more importantly, the digital companies just pumping stuff out without any accountability and any regulation, even dealing with sort of digital addiction that this Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis does not recognize, some of the biggest problems that we now encounter. It has blinders which prevents them from dealing with that. And it doesn’t also address the big issues of the threat from the emerging world. I mean from Russia and from China, the former emerging world..

Lindsey: The emerged world.

Wooldridge: ... I should say, in the case of China. And so the great neoliberal thing about China, we’ve got this great civilization emerging, good. Let’s have free trade. Let’s deal with it because it will inevitably be the case that the Chinese, as they become richer and more successful, will also become liberal just like us. So get them into the World Trade Organization and soon there’ll be a liberal democracy. That has not happened. And that same…

Lindsey: Around the same time that led us into Iraq..

Wooldridge: Exactly.

Lindsey: ... basically thinking underneath the surface of everyone is a liberal just itching to breathe free.

Wooldridge: Exactly. I mean that’s more than a strategic mistake or a miscalculation. That’s a sort of epistemological mistake, in the sense that it presumes that we’re all liberals under the skin. It doesn’t give enough emphasis, or it doesn’t take enough account of culture, of politics, of all of these big things that neoliberalism didn’t take into account just as left liberalism doesn’t take into account. Let me put it quite simply, our animal nature. So there’s a whole bunch of things. So this bobo synthesis, which is incredibly powerful, continues to dominate a lot of our thinking almost without us knowing it, or the thinking of our ruling class. This has led to big problems, which you didn’t anticipate, but it’s also revealed, because it led to those big problems, to have a certain naivety built into it. And I think the task of liberalism is to grapple not only with the consequences of policy mistakes, but also with the naivety of some of the assumptions that led to it.

Lindsey: For your general approach about what is to be done now, you use the life of John Stuart Mill as a kind of a metaphor for where we are and what we need to be doing. So play that out for us.

Wooldridge: Yeah. Let me talk about that. I mean, John Stuart Mill is an exceptionally interesting thinker, partly because he writes so well, as people in the mid 19th century did, is such a vigorous thinker, but also because he’s so different from the sort of notion of Mill that we tend to remember. A lot of people think of him as what Milton Friedman and Hayek probably would’ve called a classical liberal, as somebody who is essentially a utilitarian, essentially believes in small government and essentially believes in government getting out of our way. But in fact, Mill is a much richer thinker than that. Mill went through a certain... Mill was brought up as a utilitarian and brought up as a small government guy. His godfather was Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. His father, James Mill, forced him to learn Greek at two, Latin at three, write a history of India at eight and all of these sorts of extraordinary things. He was brought up as a sort of prodigy because he was brought up to be the ultimate sort of legislator. Mill Sr. wanted him to be a legislator who had put into practice both philosophically and practically the whole, call it neoliberal, utilitarian program.

And at the age of about 20, he goes through a mental breakdown, not surprisingly, given his extraordinary upbringing, in which he begins to think a number of things. He begins to think that actually utilitarianism isn’t enough because there are good preferences and bad preferences, that individualism purely in its atomized form isn’t enough because people are embedded in cultural traditions and all the rest of it. And the ceaseless calculation of interests isn’t enough, because people have things like human affections which isn’t taken account. So in my view, he moves simultaneously to the right and to the left from this utilitarian position. He moves to the right in the sense that he begins to think about cultural traditions, about preferences, high preferences and low preferences, high culture and low culture.

Lindsey: Hierarchies of value.

Wooldridge: Hierarchies of values, all of those sort of things. And he moves also to the left in a sense he begins to realize that different people have different sets of opportunities. Not everybody has the opportunities that he had. And that trade unionism might in fact be a reasonable way in which people who are powerless and don’t have any capital can express their interests. So he moves in these…

Lindsey: And of course, he was quite ahead of his time in upholding the rights of women.

Wooldridge: Absolutely. So he begins to think about oppressed minorities and particularly in his case about women because of the woman who becomes his wife, Harriet. In the long run becomes his wife, but becomes his companion.

And I think that what happened in, let’s say 2016 when Britain voted for Brexit and when America voted first for Trump, was a sort of Millian-style breakdown, mental breakdown, as you say, using Keynes’s phrase, a sort of collective nervous breakdown that we go for, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries. And I think that the way to deal with that nervous breakdown is to move in a Millian way, partly to the left and partly to the right. I mean to the right in the sense that we need to grapple much more with culture, hierarchies of values, what choices we are making. We can no longer conceive of individualism as being just about the consumer going shopping in a great supermarket. We have to think much more about the nature of the preferences, but also moving to the left in the sense that when we were growing up or when we were around in the 1990s, 2000s, it was all about business as the solution, markets are the solution. Government is bad. We must try and liberate these markets. And now we have to be, I think, a bit more skeptical about markets or a bit more skeptical about certain businesses. And I mean above all the tech businesses because of their size and because of what they’re trying to sell us.

Lindsey: So let me dive now into your three elements of liberalism and pull things out that I think are noteworthy — because I think not all current-day liberals buy your version, but I think they should. So first on liberal individualism, this idea that it’s a rich, striving version of individualism, a questing version of individualism that’s seeking self-improvement, self-betterment, not just upward mobility materially, but intellectually and morally, to self-realization, realizing your potential, not in terms of just having the maximum number of consumer options, but producing the best possible you, which could mean turning away from lower commercialized pleasures in pursuit of higher things.

And that is just not the regnant dominant version of individualism we have today. So culturally, the expressive individualism we have today is all about satisfaction of preferences. Don’t look at what the preferences are. Have as many options as you can. The more options you have, the better off you are. So it’s all this very value-free kind of tallying up of the number of choices you have, regardless of what the quality of those choices is.

And so I think there’s the background of this consumerist culture, but then there’s intellectual developments that have played into this. In liberal political philosophy since the 1970s, John Rawls has been just the towering colossus of liberal political philosophy. And he engineered this turn that existed before, but he certainly pushed for a vision of justice that put aside questions of the good life and that privileged right and wrong over good and bad. He had this idea of liberalism as just a pure procedure, that you take these disembodied people with no identities, no pasts, no anything and put them behind the veil of ignorance. And liberalism is what they will choose. It’s just a procedure. So there’s that. And then we think a lot more, especially elites think a lot more, in social science-y terms now than they did 50 or 100 years ago. And economics is the queen of the social sciences. And so the whole economics worldview that welfare is satisfaction of preferences gets a lot of momentum from that worldview.

So we have intellectual tendencies adding further momentum to a background culture of expressive individualism and moral relativism. And that all feels like it’s leading to very materially affluent, very spiritually impoverished people in large swaths of society. Of course, we’ve never been materially better off, but you look at a whole lot of indicators for individual wellbeing, chances of getting married, chances of having children, chances of growing up with both your parents, having friends, having a sense that your life is important and has meaning, a lot of these, the arrows are going the wrong way for large populations in the rich capitalist democracies during the 21st century. And yet I’ve found after writing The Permanent Problem — and I’m interested to see what your reaction is — I’ve gotten a lot of pushback from saying that actually existing liberal societies of the 21st century are dysfunctional in some fairly profound ways and are in need of some fairly deep cultural renewal.

Wooldridge: Absolutely.

Lindsey: I get pushback that I sound like a post-liberal. I sound like an anti-liberal. So there’s a real sort of defensiveness of actually existing liberals today that doesn’t want to hear that they’ve gotten anything wrong, doesn’t want to hear that we need to do any deep rethink, that the populace just went crazy and the fever will break and we’ll get back to normal somehow or another.

Wooldridge: It’s funny writing this book, I started off thinking in a quite simple way that woke was the problem — because woke is the problem in the sense that it judges people as collectives rather than as individuals. And so I wrote these stirring passages about how evil and appalling Foucault is and French structuralism and the rest of it. And we needed to get beyond this sort of 1960s sort of collectivist ideology and reassert the power of simple liberal individualism. People should be judged meritocratically. They should be judged in terms of their own abilities rather than in terms of these big broad categories. And I talked to a lot of centrist people like myself and we all agreed on that and that was great.

And then I began to think, well, what do we mean by individualism? What is individualism? Because it’s the background noise of all our assumptions. And I began to read a lot of these post-liberal thinkers who were saying that liberalism, because it’s pure individualism, just doesn’t work. You go to the streets of San Francisco and see people taking drugs and doing all of that sort of stuff. If that’s what individualism means, or you go to a shopping mall and see people wandering around just buying this and that and the other, the post-liberals say, “If that’s what individualism is, we’ve got to have something better than this.” And I thought these people, what they’re saying is not foolish at all. There is something wrong about this. And there is this sort of...

We were talking earlier about Bourgeois Bohemianism and what these two groups of people who are quite often so different in terms of their vision of society, one being very pro-market, the other being very pro-bigger state, what they actually have in common, and then you discover that what they have in common is a certain non-judgmentalism. There’s expressive individualism on the side of the progressive left and preference maximization on the side of the market right are both two sides of the same coin. So they agree on this fundamental thing just as they mostly agree on globalization. So these things that hold people who have different notions of tax levels, on a much deeper level, they agree with each other. And I began to think to myself, well, wait a minute, not only do I disagree with them and not only am I tempted and drawn towards quite a lot of this post-liberal stuff, particularly having visited San Francisco not that long ago and seen just what a ghastly mess the whole thing was in the streets.

So I then began to read more of these liberals, what were called classical liberals, began to read what the people in the 19th century are saying. And I was thinking, well, classical liberals are people who believe in small governments, preference maximization. So I then begin to read Mill and I begin to read Burckhardt and all of these people with a fresh eye. And I realize that that’s not what they believe at all, that they, classical liberals so-called, are people who are completely absorbed by the problem of individualism, who see a hierarchy of values, who see what is essential to individualism is self-development, self-improvement, self- discovery, not just in a purely sort of, I’m going to improve myself by going to night school in order so that I can get a better job, but I’m going to become a better person.

And the central to real liberalism, classical liberalism, is the notion of a self-improving individual who is striving to live a good life according to various aesthetics and moral tenets. And that in order to do that, I mean, what Mill says that you’ve got to do or what Coleridge is saying through Mill is that you have to have a sort of clerisy in society who sees its job as preserving high civilization. And that having a group of people who are preserving high civilization is just as important as having a civil service that is preserving a good infrastructure or things like that. That if you don’t have a certain commitment on a society level to educating people’s preferences, you are in big trouble. So you say that and people say you’re completely crazy. The Rawlsians don’t like that because they’re all about the veil of ignorance. The economists don’t like it because they’re all about preference maximization. The left-liberals don’t like it because you might be saying that some modes of life are better than other modes of life and all of that is bad.

Lindsey: Right.

Wooldridge: So you suddenly get a whole range of enemies that you didn’t even know you had. But essential to this is, I think, that there is an answer to the problems that the post-liberals are raising that is within the liberal tradition. And I think also that we need really to focus much more on this than we have. We need to be having these arguments. So even if we get a lot of pushback, it’s important to be raising these things because a world of pure expressive individualism plus utility maximization does not cohere. It doesn’t work. And just as in the late 1970s and 1980s, we had to have a whole bunch of arguments about rent-seeking, markets, the dysfunctional nature of big organizations, and the rest of it. And those arguments might have started off as naive, as simple, but they began after a while to get more sophisticated and get more... So we need to start having these arguments about culture, both with a big C and a small c, once again. And a lot of people, the economists, they can’t understand why you’re saying this, but I think it’s essential to keeping society going in the right direction.

Lindsey: I want to move on to your second element of pluralism or skepticism about ultimate truth. But I think it ties in because yes, there is clearly a sense of being open to the other side, willingness to keep the lines of discussion open, a sense that the truth is difficult to get to and we’re not confident that what we’ve got right now is right. That if we keep pushing, we’re going to have a better understanding down the line. So definitely, essential to the liberal sense of pluralism is a sense of fallibility and a kind of skepticism.

But I distinguish between final ultimate truths, truths with a capital T, and liberalism doesn’t want to recognize those, at least not enshrine them in government policy. But then there are sort of foundational truths with a capital T, the axioms that you can’t prove, but they are articles of faith that allow us to move forward and to go into a process of discovery and trial and error. So a belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings, a belief that the natural world is knowable and that using our knowledge of the patterns in nature to improve the material lot of human beings is a good thing to do. You can’t prove these things, but they are the foundational truths of a liberal mentality. And they can get swallowed up as well by skepticism. We have this kind of tolerance of intolerance that we have a skepticism even about the foundational truths of liberalism, so that we allow illiberal populations to come in and set up a law unto themselves and we’re afraid of applying our own laws because we don’t know the difference between right and wrong. So the skepticism that leads to a healthy pluralism can go too far, I think. There are limits to that skepticism. You agree with that?

Wooldridge: Absolutely. If you think, where does liberalism come from? Liberalism comes from two things. One is the world in motion. In traditional societies, basically the assumption is that there’s a limited amount of goods to go around and that you allocate them according to certain source of principles, whatever they are, dynastic power or the will of the king or something like that. And the liberals come along and say, “No, society can grow. We can get wealthier so long as we have open competition and free markets and all of those sorts of things.” So the question at the heart of politics becomes different, not how to justly distribute a fixed supply, but how to live in a world of economic growth.

The second question at the heart of liberalism is what do we do about metaphysical issues? In pre-liberal societies everybody said, “Look, there’s truth or falsehood. You have to accept a certain set of truths as a condition of being a member of this society. And if you don’t accept them, you’ll be driven out of society.” And liberals say, “No, we have to agree to disagree,” a terrible cliche, but a fundamentally great breakthrough in society that society can’t be based on everybody accepting a certain metaphysical truths, that we have to agree to disagree. And that leads you to a world of open discussion, relentless discussion as the basis of society. It leads you to a world of pluralism in which people can establish communities on different principles. I think it defines politics down. Politics is no longer a matter of discovering eternal truths and enforcing them through the church or whatever is the dominant religion. It’s a matter of agreeing to disagree. And that is absolutely fundamental, I think. And most of that, we have to accept. And I think where in many ways that the post-liberals have gone wrong is the post-liberals want to go back to this pre-Enlightenment world in which we can have an agreement about ultimate truths. Because I think if you don’t agree about ultimate truths, every other problem follows. If you can’t agree that this particular reading of the Bible is true, then you end up eating dogs or whatever.

And what you are saying is absolutely right. That on the one hand we have to agree to disagree, but on the other hand, we can’t take that in such a countercultural direction that we lose all confidence in any collective values whatsoever, that there are second-order values that we can all agree on. And I’m extremely worried. I mean, the immigration question hangs over a lot of this. Because one place where the Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis breaks down is the Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis says, “Immigration is ipso facto a great thing because it’s good economically. We all get richer. Society expands, the pie expands, but it’s also good culturally because it enriches us. It introduces us to a whole bunch of cultures.” And people who have become, as I’ve become, skeptical about immigration, well, we question the first of those things because per capita growth, doesn’t this... I mean the increase of the size of the pie in Britain in particular has not led to per capita growth, which is the thing that matters. But also there must be a limit to multiculturalism in the sense there must be a limit to the pluralism that we are willing to tolerate if what we’re tolerating is intolerance.

Lindsey: Yes.

Wooldridge: And we do have communities in Britain that have cousin marriage, that have very few rights for women, that have complete patriarchy deciding on women’s marriages, on how they vote and things, or whether they can vote and things like that. And that is testing liberal societies to the extreme. We have to think that there are certain values that we can agree on as being constitutive of liberalism. Again, individualism, the right to determine certain of your ends in life and toleration that we have to have religious tolerance, tolerance of what faith you have and how you express it as a fundamental component of liberal society. So again, this synthesis, which seemed so powerful, a Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis, which seems so powerful and all encompassing, begins to break down when it deals with the reality of the societies that we’ve created.

Lindsey: Your third element of suspicion of power, I just want to make one note and it’s a note I just want to make as a recovering libertarian, which is my expanding sense of the kinds of power we should worry about. Libertarians famously think the only power you need to worry about is state power, but I’ve come to see that we need to worry about other things as well. And I think right now you’re especially worried about tech giants and the products that they’re addicting us to. So I don’t need to convince you of that. But you and I were both small government free market liberals back in the day.

Wooldridge: Absolutely.

Lindsey: And you’ve wandered a bit as have I over these decades.

Wooldridge: Absolutely. Well, let me talk about the issue of power because as with my two other definitions of liberalism, individualism plus skepticism, a lot of people might say, “Well, that’s all banal. We all accept that. We all agree with that. Who doesn’t believe in limiting power and things like that?” Well, I would say that there are two things that make this notion, this emphasis on power absolutely central to reinvigorated liberalism. One is the rise of strong man rule, that we have strong man rule in a lot of the world. And that is based on the idea that power shouldn’t be limited or in practice shouldn’t be limited that much. And we have a version of that in the United States with Donald Trump, who does not believe in constraints on his own power and is trying to build strong man principles into the American constitution as much as he can get away with. So I think that has gone from being something that we all accepted to something that needs reasserting in a big way.

But the second of those two things is the private economy. And I agree. I think when Lord Acton said “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he was thinking of the public economy. He was thinking of government, but it also applies to the private sector that we do have in two ways. One is that we do have a world in which power is extremely concentrated in a very small number of companies. And that is in itself a worry to me. It’s not a worry to certain traditions of libertarians, Robert Bork and the rest of it. It is a worry to me, partly because I think that those people will use that power in ways that interfere with our lives. If you’ve got a handful of companies running the economy, it’s not just whether they’re providing consumer goods at a good price. It’s in itself corrupting. And it’s in itself corrupting to those people who run those companies. If you look at the people who run companies, the old notion that we had of these tech people being modest sorts of hoodie wearing people, they’re developing into oligarchs, in their lifestyle, in their style of existence and in their relationship with the government. So that is a bad thing in itself.

But also what worries me is what these immensely powerful people are doing with their power, that they are encouraging fragmentation of attention. They’re encouraging addiction to certain products and they’re encouraging a life on the screen, which I think undermines the most precious and important thing about the liberal tradition, which is individualism. You cannot be an individual, an educated, self-developed, self-conscious, morally responsible individual, if you don’t focus on things, if you’re not educated, if you don’t have access to good, solid, tested information and where you’re essentially an addict. And if you look at the history of liberalism, it’s quite interesting the extent to which liberalism as an intellectual tradition or as a political tradition has been exceptionally worried about addiction, that’s addiction to alcohol, addiction to drugs, addiction to stimulation of various sorts, is a worry for liberals. And a lot of people have said, “Well, the prohibition, it’s all because they’re morally uptight, they’re weird.” But I think it’s because they put at the heart of their philosophy the individual as a sort of self-developed, self-actualizing being and that is undermined by addiction in various ways.

Lindsey: So let me move towards the final section of this conversation with some gloomy questions.

Wooldridge: Yes.

Lindsey: Your history of liberalism tells a cyclical story, but we’re not going in circles. We’re going in a spiral. So there is a circular element where there is a cyclical element. So that’s the cyclical history of ascendancy, decadence, renewal. But then there’s linear history that all of this is happening through ever-changing circumstances at the human frontier. We’re exploring social terrain that Homo sapiens has never occupied before. And so we’re making everything up as we go along. And so before that liberal spiral took off, you could see precursors to liberalism, but you didn’t see the real thing. There were certain historic enabling conditions that set the stage and that had to happen. You had the emergence of protoliberal social practices and protoliberal habits of thought. And so that social reality was on the ground first. And then you had intellectuals and intellectual entrepreneurs who wove those realities into a coherent ideal and then applied that ideal as a standard to judge society, and then people started using that ideal as a direction in which to push society.

So the big question is: how much do you worry that the linear element of this spiral that we’re going on may be carrying us into historical circumstances that are no longer congenial to the liberal ideal? And let me lay out three of them. So first we’ve had the decline of organized religion in Christendom, what used to be Christendom at least. And that has gone along with a kind of acidic moral relativism that doesn’t even have a vocabulary of right and wrong. So that’s pretty barren cultural soil in which to plant ideas, this rich idea of agentic, striving, self-improving individualism. So can liberalism survive without some kind of faith? It doesn’t have to be dogmatic, but are we missing some fundamental foundation to a liberal worldview?

Secondly, liberalism arose with the age of print. And I think I’ve become more and more convinced by the kind of Marshall McLuhan, ... Who’s the guy who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death? I’m forgetting his name right now.

Wooldridge: Postman. Postman.

Lindsey: That’s right. That the actual medium of communication really does have an effect on the nature of our thought and that print literacy encourages logical thinking, rigor. It’s deliberative. Whereas oral culture is spontaneous, reactive, emotional. And we are moving, hurtling into a kind of post-literate age now as viral videos have taken over the attention spans of more and more of us. Most of us spend the majority of our waking lives staring at screens and most of the people staring at screens are not looking at anything edifying. They’re looking at junk food for the brain and it is creating, forming minds and encouraging habits of mind that just aren’t, again, good soil for the abstractions of things like balance of power and rule of law. These are highfalutin notions that a post-literate reactive public doesn’t seem to put much stock in.

Finally, we’ve seen this in the information age — a new class chasm between the college educated class and everyone else is ultimately at the root of the populist upheaval and a lot of our dysfunctional politics. So we’ve had a whole group of people, they’re materially better and better off, but their place in the world has been marginalized. So the working class during the industrial era, they worked in companies at the frontiers of technological progress. They worked in the automobile and steel industries. Their inputs were absolutely vital to the progress of the overall capitalist system. And that was a very hard bargain that produced a whole lot of instability. The dependence of capitalist progress on brutal physical labor meant class conflict and meant socialism and meant the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear warfare. There was a lot of instability that came from that dependence of capitalist progress on dirty, dangerous work. But now as capitalist progress weans itself from dependence on dirty, dangerous work, ordinary people’s capacity to contribute to the commonweal in as important in a way has declined. Their status has declined. During the 20th century, we had Diego Rivera murals in public places and we had Aaron Copeland writing Fanfare for the Common Man. And one third of the world lived under regimes that said the working man is the protagonist of world history. And the free world was worried about that. And so they at least wanted to pretend that maybe that’s true too. But the status of the ordinary people is very different now. So I think there has been a real downgrading in the sense of importance of what you’re doing, the sense of the status of what you’re doing and a trend that I think AI could very well extend beyond the working class into the lower and middle ranks of the college educated class. So these...

Wooldridge: Absolutely.

Lindsey: And so liberalism depended upon, of course we’ve got to treat the common man well because we utterly depend on the common man. So the whole 20th century push towards a more egalitarian form of liberalism was pushed because of the obvious need to keep these people from striking. And then also we extended the franchise over time because we needed their bodies to fight our wars for us. And so democracy expanded dramatically in Europe right after World War I because of that connection. But as people become less and less economically valuable and are replaced on the battlefield by drones and robots, what is the leverage that ordinary people have to be counted as equal anymore?

So there’s that. There’s the declining habits of mind in post-literacy. There’s the declining moral universe from secularism. Are we hurtling into post-liberal historical circumstances?

Wooldridge: Well, let me add two other ingredients to your great bowl of pessimism here before trying to say something a bit more optimistic. One is just to continue with your point, a lot of the history of liberalism was in an era of the rise of the middle class or the rise of the working class, a period of rising opportunities for more and more people. And now it seems that politics is being rewired by the decline of the middle class. And a lot of it is about the fact that a group of people who are educated, who have been brought up to think of themselves as in some way the products of opportunity, are seeing declining living standards or declining opportunities in the future. They’ve got massive burdens of debt. They find it hard to see a career ladder. Here the Labour Party in this country… It used to be said of the Labour Party conferences that they represented — I mean conferences where people gather together every year or so — that they represented the aristocracy of labor. Now they represent the sort of dregs of the middle class, that declining social groups are defining politics more and more, which is very worrying.

Lindsey: Yes.

Wooldridge: If you look at the great revolutions of the rise of Nazism or the Soviet, the Bolshevik Revolution, declining intellectual groups are very, very well represented in that discontent. So liberalism was about the rise of aspirational groups. Now we’re seeing post-liberalism in a sense, the decline of these groups.

The second thing is that we’re seeing across the world the rise of a sort of model of authoritarian modernization.

Lindsey: Yes.

Wooldridge: China being the capital of that whereby you have big states, powerful parties making a deal with the people that they will have all the power and you can do the work. Don’t interfere in politics. We’ll have state run companies, state run activities, state run political systems and those countries have been getting bigger. Singapore started the model, China has continued the model, but you see it’s happening right across the Middle East with these big countries, oil rich countries. Saudi Arabia is a sort of authoritarian monarchy, but right across the place, Rwanda, you have the Singapore model being put there. We’ve always thought that liberal capitalism is the engine of growth, and that now we’re seeing liberal capitalism growing at a pretty slow rate. Our country’s growing. America’s exceptional in growing these past…

Lindsey: That’s right. We’ve slowed down from our 20th century pace, but we’re superstars compared to the rest of…

Wooldridge: Compared to us. We’re not growing at all. Germany’s not growing at all. And so if you’re looking for growth in the world, it’s not in liberal capitalist countries, it’s in autocracies driven by state capitalism more than liberal capitalism. So that’s my second ingredient to a bowl of pessimism.

Against that, I would say two things. One is that I do document in my book that whenever things look particularly dark for liberalism, then liberalism jumps out of its coffin and revives. And however dark things are now, they were worse than the 1930s.

Lindsey: Absolutely.

Wooldridge: But it’s extraordinary if you look at the 1930s, how self-confident people like Mussolini were, that they discovered a new model of how to run the world, how pessimistic liberals were, how the notion of an individualistic civilization was dead. Post-liberals were all over the place in that era. And by 1950, we defeated fascism, we defeated Nazism, and we created a working world order with incredible speed.

And secondly, although we don’t have a liberal leader at the moment who we could all say, “This is the guy who’s doing...” There’s no Teddy Roosevelt that we could point to. There’s no Asquith or anybody like that we can point to as creating a new form of liberalism. You do see an enormous amount of popular pressure against the tech giants, against the culture of distraction, defending the culture of the page against the culture of the screen, saying that these things are all bad. So there’s a sort of sense out there in the population at large that this cultural crisis needs to be dealt with by a return to certain basic truths.

Lindsey: Yeah. I agree with that. And so we can wrap up here on a hopeful note that there is recognition that things have gone wrong. There is active debate. There is movement in the right direction, so that’s good. And then at the bottom of it all, we’re liberals and that means we have this fundamental faith in the ordinary individual human being.

Wooldridge: Yes.

Lindsey: And you can’t have that faith unless you somehow or another think that the human species is kind of phototropic, that it leans into the light. When it’s faced between a choice between darkness and the moral abyss and real self-development and real flourishing, that’s what humans really want. So these may be dark times, but there are glimmers out there, pointing us in a more favorable direction. And one of those glimmers is Adrian Wooldridge’s new book, The Revolutionary Center. Thank you so much for coming on.

Wooldridge: Great. Thank you for having me.

My essay “The progress movement needs a better theory of progress” provoked some interesting pushback from Geoffrey Manne, president of the free-market-oriented International Center for Law & Economics.1 Manne and I have known each other for many years and have always been on friendly terms, and he politely prefaces his criticisms with a nod to his admiration for my larger body of work. But this particular piece of mine rubbed him the wrong way — and I think this his reaction is revealing of a broader source of intellectual resistance to the critiques of contemporary capitalism I offer in The Permanent Problem.

My essay, as you may recall, argued that partisans of technological progress need a richer, more humane conception of the progress they advocate — one that aims, not merely at extending human capabilities, but at improving the quality of individual human lives as well. This is bad advice, according to Manne. Mixing together the case for technological and economic advance with any substantive vision of the good life, he contends, amounts to a misguided and dangerous deviation from the moral humility at the heart of the liberal tradition. The headline of Manne’s piece gets right to the point: “Grow the pie, skip the sermon.”

Manne’s reaction isn’t an outlier. Critical reviews of my book have complained along similar lines that my analysis of contemporary capitalist societies is overwrought: I’m exaggerating our problems, and I’m blaming capitalism and liberalism for social ills they’re not responsible for. And it’s noteworthy, I think, that these criticisms have come from people who share my basic political orientation — what you might call the embattled liberal center, uniting people aligned with both the center-right and center-left and who now see common ground in their opposition to right-wing populism and left-wing radicalism.

The tendency that unites these criticisms with Manne’s is a strong reluctance, even aversion, to judging liberal societies by any standards that go beyond fairness and efficiency. If nobody is being mistreated, and arrangements are conducive to people accomplishing what they set out to do, then good liberals should accept whatever results on the ground that the people involved are the best judges of what’s good for them. To presume to judge the quality of the values that others live by — on the assumption that some ways of life, and some cultures underlying those ways of life, are better than others — is to risk coming across as elitist, or undemocratic, or just plain insufferable. I crossed this line with my book critics by arguing that contemporary liberal societies are plagued by serious cultural dysfunctions; I crossed it with Manne by urging my fellow enthusiasts for technological progress to remember that whether powerful new tools will serve or undermine human well-being depends on the culture surrounding their use.

I agree unreservedly that there is wide scope within which an easygoing, live and let live attitude — call it liberality — is commendable. In a hyper-pluralistic society, “don’t yuck my yum” is a sturdy rule of thumb for reducing social frictions and conflicts. But past some point, commitment to what might be called value-free liberalism is ultimately self-defeating — because it erodes the commitment to those fundamental values that underlie and maintain actually existing liberal societies.

Which brings me back to Manne’s line: “Grow the pie, skip the sermon.” The problem with this response is that it boomerangs. We would have no interest in growing the pie unless we had first been swayed by some sermons rather than others.

Modern economic growth never would have arisen in the first place without a great deal of successful sermonizing. You need to believe that the natural world is knowable — that there are regularities in nature that human beings can detect; furthermore, you need to believe that knowledge about the natural world can be applied to improve material conditions for human life, and you need to believe that such a project of material improvement is a worthwhile and indeed highly salutary pursuit. These aren’t self-evident truths: on the contrary, most social orders throughout most of human history have been organized around very different beliefs. The economist Joel Mokyr recently won a Nobel Prize for his documentation of the transformational cultural changes that were needed to unleash the world-historical novelty of continuous innovation and growth.

Meanwhile, modern economic growth arose within the larger institutional framework of liberal (and increasingly democratic) capitalism. And these institutions were shaped and animated by a particular set of sermons about the nature of the good life. If you believe that most individual lives are of little account, and what really matters is the welfare of the clan or nation or race or class or church; if you believe that society works best when everyone knows and accepts his place in the great chain of being; if you believe that debate and discussion serve no purpose but to allow error to challenge Truth; if you believe that ordinary people are incapable of directing their own affairs and must be dominated by their betters for their own good; if you believe that all earthly power should be vested in an absolute monarch who rules with divine sanction; if you believe that physical labor is degrading and excessive concern with material welfare is decadent and corrupt; if you believe that peace and prosperity are contemptible distractions from the true highest calling of military glory — well, liberal democratic capitalism isn’t going to be your cup of tea.

Liberal democratic capitalism would never have arisen without the adoption of some beliefs, and rejection of others, about the substance of the good life. Moreover, the maintenance of those beliefs among at least a critical mass of the population is necessary for either liberal democracy or capitalism to function effectively. Manne suggests that all that’s needed is to follow certain procedures — “remove barriers to innovation, grow the pie, let people choose” — for robust growth and human flourishing to ensue. But that’s clearly wrong. “Peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — Adam Smith’s institutional prescription for opulence — were the rule in many places at many times during the long agrarian age: why then was it that only in Smith’s country, and only during Smith’s lifetime, did the phenomenon of modern economic growth finally get underway?

Institutions — including the institutions that have delivered modern growth — are much more than sets of disembodied rules. Any institution that tried to function purely on the basis of enforcing compliance with formal rules would collapse virtually overnight. Successful institutions, rather, are dense moral ecologies whose participants have internalized a particular set of beliefs and norms — beliefs and norms that align them with the institution’s mission. This is a major reason why the U.S. effort to transplant democracy in Afghanistan’s barren soil ended in failure. And why capitalism works so much better in Silicon Valley than in Appalachia.

Yes, a distinctive kind of neutrality is central to the liberal creed. Differences in religion, languages, and parentage have traditionally mattered a great deal in determining who is up and who is down in a particular social order; in liberal societies, by contrast, all people are considered equal under the law regardless of faith, ethnicity, or social rank — at least to the extent that liberal principles hold sway. But this doesn’t mean that liberal modernity refrains from “imposing any particular vision of the admirable life,” which is what Manne accuses me of wanting to do. Liberalism discounts the importance of religious and cultural differences and bulldozes through distinctions of birth because it elevates our common interest in improving our individual welfare — and, in particular, our material welfare — through peaceful cooperation and competition. Free individuals seeking their own individual betterment — that’s the liberal vision of the good life.

Liberalism arose when the world was poor, so the bargain it offered — let’s put aside our differences to focus on our shared goal of individual betterment — understandably stressed the material aspects of that shared goal. In a world in which the vast majority of people lived at the edge of privation, and even the rich endured physical hardships and suffering that we would find unbearable, the most urgent and obvious path toward individual betterment was through improvements in material welfare. The mass appeal of such improvements, and the immense fertility of liberal capitalism in delivering them, explain why the rise of liberal institutions and the expansion of commercial society went hand in hand. The power of liberal principles to shape the world rested heavily on the credibility of its promise to replace traditional arrangements with the reign of peace, prosperity, and pleasure.

But the liberal conception of individual betterment was never confined to material progress: intellectual and moral progress were always part of the larger package. Belief in the moral worth of every individual human being is foundational to the liberal faith. Each individual possesses a unique mix of aptitudes and preferences; accordingly, the full development of the potential of the human species requires conditions that allow and encourage the realization of each individual’s potential. In the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt (which serve as the epigraph for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty): “The grand, leading principle … is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

The liberal vision of human flourishing is thus one of individual self-improvement — through the development and exercise of inborn capacities — occurring at mass scale. With the rise of liberalism, we see not only the growth of commercial society, but also the spread of mass education and the increasing recognition and protection of individual rights — most dramatically in the expansion of the voting franchise and the abolition of chattel slavery.

The system for “growing the pie,” then, is the outgrowth of a larger liberal tradition animated by a humanistic vision of mass individual flourishing in all its rich variety. My essay on the progress movement was an attempt to encourage fellow “upwing” technophiles to reconnect with that larger tradition, and that animating vision.

The fact that my efforts have met with so much resistance from committed small-l liberals is evidence of a wrong turn in liberal thinking over recent decades — a wrong turn that has misled liberals into a narrow, impoverished, and ultimately unsustainable understanding of their creed. As I discussed in my essay on the progress movement, the outsized influence of John Rawls on liberal political philosophy, and of economics on liberal social thought generally, has resulted in the rise of a kind of value-free conception of liberalism. According to this view, liberalism is pure procedure: it is simply a social protocol that allows people with different conceptions of the good life to get along with each other. With the Rawlsian turn, liberal principles of justice are understood as those that would emerge from a purely neutral process of social choice in which all participants must choose from behind a veil of ignorance. This misunderstanding is abetted by the currently dominant economistic understanding of individual welfare as nothing more than the satisfaction of preferences, whatever they may be. This shriveled version of liberalism is incapable of recognizing or remedying the erosion of its moral and cultural foundations — the dismal effects of which we see in the news every day now.

As Adrian Wooldridge has documented in his excellent new history The Revolutionary Center, the liberal ideal of self-development holds us to much higher standards:

The two sides of the phrase are equally important: it should be self-development — I should determine the course of my life rather than surrendering my will to someone else — but it should also be self-development — I should bring my personal qualities to fruition rather than allowing them to lie fallow. To live a fulfilled life is not to live a role that is prescribed by history or dictated by tradition. Nor is it to give in to every passing whim or animal instinct. It is to reach inside ourselves and discover our unique abilities and then work hard to turn those abilities into usable talents.

Yes, this liberal ideal recognizes the incredible plasticity of the human capacity for culture and the resulting kaleidoscopic variety of human endowments and preferences. A liberal social order refuses to lock people into any one specific religious revelation or cultural tradition: they must compete for adherents who are free to move from one to the other. There are many possible ways to develop one’s talents, and so the ideal of liberal self-development is a wide path indeed — but it nonetheless leads in a very different direction from the path of self-indulgence, addiction, and alienation. Mill was right and Bentham was wrong: push-pin and poetry are not the same. There are higher as well as lower pleasures, and while (in my view, at any rate) there is plenty of room for enjoying the latter, our lives fall short of genuine flourishing to the extent we fail to strive for the former.

Liberalism doesn’t tell you which God to worship, but it does require faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity, gratitude for our blessings, and resolve to leave the world a better place. Liberalism doesn’t tell you which books to read, but it does esteem intellectual effort and rigor. Liberalism doesn’t tell you which tasks you should excel at, but it does prize excellence and the dedication and teamwork needed to achieve it. Liberalism doesn’t tell you whom to love, but it does lay its foundations on the “small platoons” of face-to-face relationships through which we learn to commit to something greater than ourselves. While liberalism may give us wide freedom to do as we please, Lord Acton was right: the essential freedom, upon which both individual and social flourishing depend, is “the right of being able to do as we ought.”

Liberalism is thus a broad-minded creed, but also a demanding one. We have abandoned its high standards in recent decades — and we wonder why pessimism and anomie and social disintegration are now so common throughout the liberal democracies. Ryan Avent has called this abandonment of standards “the Modern Faith”: the pseudo-sophisticated delusion that achieving a good society requires nothing beyond good system design — getting rights properly assigned and putting the correct incentives in place. This delusion has us thinking of society as a mere machine, when in fact it is a communion of souls.

Anxiety about the current state and future prospects of liberalism is widespread these days among those who wish it well. But for all who want to move beyond hand-wringing and actually do something constructive to make things better, I urge you to leave the shallows of the Modern Faith and value-free liberalism and strike out for those cultural depths out of which liberalism emerged. Yes, there is important work to do in policy change and institutional reform, but these days that is mostly a top-down process confined to a technocratic elite. Furthermore, there is little chance of getting the policies and institutions we need without appropriate cultural encouragement. And cultural renewal — creating a world in which beliefs and values and norms enable and encourage widespread flourishing — is ultimately up to all of us. In the countless decisions of day-to-day life, in every local community, there is work to be done. So do what you can to nudge things in the right direction — one small, uncertain, human step at a time.

If you follow celebrity news at all, you know that the man-bites-dog stories are the ones about stars who never let fame go to their heads. The generational athletic talent who never sees a trace of scandal throughout a long career. The dazzlingly handsome movie actor who sticks happily with the same woman for decades. The rock star who stays away from drugs and groupies to focus on this craft. They are the boring outliers in what is otherwise a never-ending parade of titillating dysfunction.

Why do celebrities misbehave? Like the dog in the raunchy joke, because they can. They cheat on their spouses because the opportunities are endless. They abuse drugs because someone is always willing to supply them at a moment’s notice. They can’t say no to their worst impulses because almost nobody ever says no to them. And because they can get away with a lot. Rules get bent for them all the time. When they screw up their relationships, there’s no shortage of ready volunteers to step in. They can stumble from one scandal to the next so long as they still have the talent and crowd appeal. “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

The tabloid-fodder lives of celebrities are a function of expanded opportunities to stray from the straight and narrow, and diminished incentives not to. When these external, circumstantial supports for good behavior lose their force, people are forced to rely more on their own internal capacity for self-control — their ability to prioritize higher goods over lower ones and consistently choose the hard right over the easy wrong until it no longer feels hard. The frequency of train wrecks under these conditions is sobering: do you think you’d do better in the face of all that temptation?

Well, here’s the thing: our mounting material plenty is having similar effects on society as a whole. In the past, external circumstances did considerable work in encouraging us to cultivate virtues and steer clear of temptation. Now the temptations are multiplying and the incentives to develop our higher selves are fading. We are being thrown back on our internal resources — and all too many of us are floundering.

Squandering our potential

Let’s look at three basic elements of individual well-being: physical health and fitness, cognitive development and performance, and the quantity and quality of personal and social connections. In all three cases, our achievement of material plenty has significantly raised the ceiling of possible well-being and widened the opportunities for achieving it. At the same time, though, the dramatically more comfortable, convenient, and entertainingly distracting circumstances of modern life have made it much easier to ignore those opportunities and squander our potential.

Thanks to the triumphs of modern medicine and public health, we now can expect to live long, relatively healthy lives. But notwithstanding having unparalleled access to healthy and delicious food, we massively overindulge in easy wrongs to the tune of a 40 percent obesity rate. We’re not just fatter, we’re also much physically weaker: despite all the money spent on gym memberships and home workout equipment, a number of studies have found that grip strength is declining over time. And our vision has deteriorated as well, thanks to spending so much of our childhood in comfortable indoor settings (the relative lack of exposure to bright light apparently affects eye development). The percentage of Americans suffering from myopia has basically doubled over the past century (from roughly 20 to 40 percent), and the trend long ago went global.

When the world was poor, hard physical labor was unavoidable — and so, of necessity, people developed strong, lean bodies and maintained sharp eyesight. Our great gains in physical comfort have come at the expense of bodily deterioration. Of course, when the world was poor, infectious and chronic diseases ran rampant, and that all that physically arduous work frequently resulted in death, maiming, and chronic health problems. Accordingly, physical well-being has increased dramatically on net — even as we squander much of our physical potential.

Since physical vigor is not nearly as important to our life prospects as it once was, the fact that we fall so far short of our potential physical well-being doesn’t detract that much from our ability to enjoy satisfying, fulfilling lives. And since we’re talking about the realm of the physical, there’s always the possibility that we can find technological fixes: vision correction keeps getting better and more convenient, and semaglutide may help us get past the obesity epidemic.

By contrast, maintaining strong personal relationships is, as it has always been, absolutely essential for a well-lived life. But here again, the increasing ease of modern life has made it easier for us to ignore our long-term interests in favor of more fleeting pleasures. When the world was poor, our personal relationships fulfilled urgently practical functions. Our spouse was a partner in economic production, our kids helped out on the farm when they were young and helped take care of us when we got old, and our neighbors were an insurance policy in the event of hard times. Now we rely on the market or the welfare state for our practical needs, and our face-to-face relationships have devolved into just another set of consumption options in a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. Far too often, the marketing wins.

Our progressive liberation from physical drudgery has greatly expanded the time and energy available for developing our minds. And as we began our ascent out of mass poverty, external circumstances lent further encouragement to realizing our cognitive potential. For a blessed but far too brief historical interval, the state of technological development — specifically, steadily declining printing costs — made reading for pleasure the most accessible and diverting form of entertainment on offer. All forms of pleasure-seeking will inevitably bring out the scolds, and reading was no exception: the popularity of novels among female readers in particular occasioned widespread hand-wring about its addictive time-wasting, unhealthy overstimulation of the nervous system, and dubious effects on moral character. In fact, however, “deep literacy” — the hard-won capacity for sustained engagement with complex texts — is a cognitive superpower that unlocks new levels of intellectual sophistication and rigor.

Capitalism eventually came up with other, more immediately stimulating and less cognitively demanding forms of entertainment — but you had to leave your home to go to the movies, and you could still read while the radio was playing. With the rise of television in the 1950s, though, pleasure reading met its match — and it’s been in decline ever since.

Even as capitalist consumption’s encouragement of cognitive development was starting to wane, the encouragement given by capitalist production was revving into high gear. This dynamic traced back to the takeoff of industrialization in the late 1800s and the emergence of large business enterprises. These new corporate giants were increasingly reliant on employee brainpower throughout their organizations. On the factory floor, workers were called upon to operate and maintain complex and expensive machinery — and so the demand for literate workers rose steadily. Meanwhile, the task of administering business enterprises’ complex and far-flung activities summoned into existence an entirely new class — professional managers — and greatly expanded the ranks of professionals in finance, accounting, and law needed to coordinate the intricacies of business life. The growing demand for brainpower resulted in massive investments in education: first, the high school movement in the first half of the 20th century, then the boom in college education following World War II. Average years of schooling for American adults rose from eight years in 1900 to over 12 years by 1980.

The rise of secondary and tertiary education represented a major cognitive uplift for society. Completing 12 years of school and getting a high school diploma became the norm, with graduation rates exceeding 75 percent by 1980. And the postwar college boom greatly expanded the numbers of those exposed to real intellectual sophistication and analytical rigor. We can see the results in the “middlebrow” phenomenon that peaked in the 1950s and ‘60s, with the middle-class hunger for intellectual self-improvement reflected in the popularity of such things as the Harvard Classics, the Book of the Month Club, and home encyclopedias. And we see it in the “Flynn effect” — the rise in raw IQ scores over the course of the 20th century.

As college campuses swelled during the 1950s and ‘60s, the initial effect was for students to adapt to the higher intellectual level of academic life. Over time, though, as the percentage of high school grads going to college continued to rise, academic life began to adapt to the inevitable drop in admission standards. College assumed a new function as the primary credentialing body for entry into the meritocracy, and kids understandably wanted to obtain that credential with as little effort as possible. And increasingly commercialized universities, operating on the principle that the customer is always right, steadily gave in. Now we are at the point where a significant fraction of undergrads are flatly incapable of doing what was once considered to be college-level work; even at elite institutions, professors now regularly complain that students simply can’t do the reading that previous generations were able to handle. Not coincidentally, the 21st century gave rise to a “reverse Flynn effect” as raw IQ scores started to fall.

For physical and social development, then, external incentives for virtuous behavior steadily weakened since the outset of industrialization; for cognitive development, by contrast, external incentives sharpened during industrialization only to start tailing off in the post-industrial era. At the present time, we have reached the point in all three cases where external circumstances are increasingly enabling dysfunctional conduct.

The task before us

Approaching our current state of affairs from this angle allows us to see our contemporary conundrum with particular clarity:

At the same time that the possibility of a well-lived life has never been more widely available, the ease with which we can squander that possibility has never been greater.

This characterization of the current dimensions of the “permanent problem” gets to the heart of the seething frustrations that underlie our 21st century malaise. Objective, material conditions have never been better, but the gap between what we actually have achieved and what seems possible to achieve has grown so large that reality, however impressive by historical standards, nonetheless seems contemptible.

This characterization also allows us to summarize the specific, concrete nature of the “permanent problem” at the present time — both for us as individuals and as members of a larger society. Recall that Keynes described the permanent problem as the challenge to “live wisely and agreeably and well” amidst the blessings of material plenty.

For individuals, then, this broad formulation of the permanent problem can be concretized as follows:

The key to a flourishing life in the midst of material plenty is to develop the internal awareness and discipline needed to identify and pursue higher goods and avoid the temptations of immediately appealing but ultimately unsatisfying pursuits.

Please don’t take me for a perfectionist zealot. Part of a well-lived life, in my view, is not taking yourself too seriously, and that includes recognizing that lower pleasures are a part of life, too: in proper proportion, they add zest and simple, uncomplicated enjoyment. By all means, cultivate a well-managed vice or two among your virtues.

But the determined, effortful cultivation of virtuous habits of thought and action is essential. It is through this process of character formation that we achieve the self-mastery that we need to build and exercise our physical, mental, and social capabilities. To engage in projects that challenge and stretch us, to foster and tend to the vital relationships that fill our hearts, and to open ourselves to experiences that we enjoy in the moment and treasure for a lifetime.

It falls to each of us as individuals to make the choices that, for better or worse, ultimately constitute our lives. But we do not make those choices in a vacuum. We are social creatures, cultural creatures, enmeshed in webs of shared meaning that guide us in the choices we make. Our chances for individual flourishing are thus greatly aided if the surrounding culture is conducive to learning how to make good choices.

At the societal level, then, the permanent problem now confronts us with this great challenge:

The key to a flourishing society in the midst of material plenty is the development of a strong cultural foundation that supports self-mastery and the prioritization of higher goods.

Just saying this explicitly and clearly is enough to make clear why, despite our amazing technological and organizational capabilities, things feel so broken at present. At the root of so many of our problems is the fact that the cultural foundation for human flourishing has been steadily weakening and fracturing.

Our cultural blind spots

The extent of cultural disrepair is by no means uniform throughout society. Rather, it is much more pronounced among ordinary people than it is among the well-educated professional and managerial elite. Obesity and other lifestyle-related health problems are much more severe; the retreat from marriage and breakdown of the two-parent family are much more advanced; TV watching and passive video consumption take up a bigger chunk of the day, and screen use by kids is considerably higher. Here we see the interplay of dynamics pushing in opposite directions: even as rising wealth generally reduces incentives for self-restraint, the emergence and expansion of the professional and managerial elite has created external conditions — access to higher income and status, conditioned on academic success — that continue to incentivize the development of discipline and conscientiousness in well-educated households.

Even so, today’s moral disorientation transcends the class divide. Consider this David Brooks writeup of the 2008 book Lost in Transition on the challenges of contemporary adolescence:

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

This kind of widespread moral illiteracy helps to explain the embrace of highly impoverished views of what the good life entails. When asked what was necessary for a fulfilling life, 75 percent of respondents ages 18 through 40 said making a good living; only 32 percent said marriage. Meanwhile, when asked what was most important for their children, 88 percent of parents said financial independence; marriage and kids, meanwhile, were mentioned by only 21 and 20 percent, respectively.

The cultural transformation that has brought us to this point has been described from many angles. I offered a generally flattering portrait in my The Age of Abundance, arguing that mass affluence had allowed people to ascend from the base of Maslow’s pyramid — i.e., preoccupation with physical security — in pursuit of belonging, meaning, and self-realization. Here I followed the findings of political scientist Ronald Inglehart, whose World Values Surveys revealed a global shift with rising incomes from “survival values” to “self-expression values.”

Both of us accentuated the positive in our account, and there was a sound basis for that emphasis. Much of the considerable social progress that has occurred over my lifetime — the achievement of full legal equality for blacks, the broader decline in overt bigotry toward ethnic minorities, more equitable treatment and greatly expanded economic opportunities for women, the retreat of sexual repression and greater tolerance for sexual minorities, greater concern for the natural environment — reflects the influence of this cultural shift.

But there has been a dark side as well. Philip Rieff captured an important part of it in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic, arguing that the old religious commitment to things outside and greater than ourselves has been abandoned in favor of an inward psychological focus on the contents of our own skulls. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (also, by the way, the wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Bill) charted the shift from old-style “virtues” to contemporary “values” through a process she called “de-moralization”: the loss of belief in a shared moral order, replaced by a mushy relativism of competing personal preferences. Allan Bloom hammered away at a similar theme in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Robert Bellah and his coauthors of Habits of the Heart documented the rise of “expressive individualism” and the consequent impoverishment of moral vocabulary and sensibilities. And Christopher Lasch railed against the culture’s descent into narcissism. It is noteworthy that these analyses have issued from all points of the ideological compass.

A new book by Ryan Avent, published just last week, sheds further light on what has happened to us (check out my recent podcast for further discussion). The book is called In Good Faith, and it argues that the social unraveling so distressingly obvious all around us reflects the inadequacy of what he calls our “Modern Faith”:

What is this Modern Faith? It is, in a nutshell, a supreme confidence in the correct systems. It is the faith of an engineer, or of a country with faith in engineers. Its core tenet is that successful societies are the most rational ones, those with the right systems of social organization: liberal democracy and free market capitalism. It is the belief that places with the right systems will do best, and that there is not much more to producing a good world than getting those right systems in place and allowing them to do their work, guided by a technocratic elite – the clerics of our Faith.

The Modern Faith isn’t wrong about the importance of systems and incentives: the famous nighttime photo of the Korean peninsula puts that question to rest. But it is guilty of dropping vital context — namely, the particular and, by historical standards, highly exotic web of cultural meaning that has allowed people to cooperate for mutual benefit across all kinds of dividing lines that previously separated “us” from “them.” Accordingly, the effectiveness of the great institutions of liberal modernity — the market economy and liberal democracy — varies widely with the extent to which people in a particular place share that exotic web of meaning. (This study of parking tickets received by U.N. diplomats offers a small but wonderfully telling example of the larger point.)

The Modern Faith ignores the deep dependence of impersonal systems on internalized values and norms consistent with good institutional functioning. Which, it turns out, is a major part of its appeal. Here’s Ryan again, starting with a discussion of the global triumph of liberal democratic capitalism at the end of the 20th century:

It helped transform liberals’ faith in liberalism into the Faith in the all-powerful systems of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, with little room left over for other ideas about what might make a place free or good or well governed over the very long run and in the absence of major rivals. The notion was simple, compelling, and allowed liberal societies to feel good about themselves. Crucially, it asked very little in return: since it was the system that mattered rather than the habits of the members of society themselves….

Indeed, do we not have a duty to help markets do their work by pursuing our own ends?... We have given ourselves permission, with the adoption of our Faith, to get ours.

Ryan argues that the Modern Faith is a dead end. Formal rules and incentives are woefully insufficient to channel raw, heedless self-interest into the public good; well-developed habits of self-restraint and other-regarding conduct are needed as well to keep people from overburdening the system by testing it at every turn. Our contemporary distempers are the fruits of our misplaced faith:

We put the onus for constructing and maintaining a virtuous world on valuable but rickety institutions that cannot bear the weight, and on an elite that suddenly finds itself without any respectable basis on which to act nobly and unselfishly, even when such actions are desperately required. We give ourselves permission to behave as our forebears would never have thought it appropriate to behave, when in fact we should be able, given our productive power and technology, to be more moral and selfless than ever before in history.

In my essays here and in my recent book, I have traced a similar dynamic of de-moralization and de-socialization over the past decades — but I tell the story a little differently. Although the Modern Faith is certainly well established among current elites, I think it’s too abstract to have generated much affirmative belief among most ordinary people. Instead, in my view an implicit version of it has been absorbed by a kind of osmosis as other sources of meaning and value have shriveled and disappeared. With the end of the “domestic sphere” created by the old sexual division of labor, the decline of organized religion, the fading of the old WASP elite and its notions of noblesse oblige, and the general retreat from face-to-face personal and community involvement, we have abandoned ways of life that called on us to rise above mere self-assertion and preference satisfaction. When all that’s left is the capitalist monoculture, it’s all but inevitable that we will live down to its base standards.

I’m no social conservative, so I’m not arguing that we need to return to the “good old days” — in many cases we had good reasons for abandoning the old ways of life as they then stood. Here Ryan and I agree: what we need is not “RETVRN,” but rather reconstruction. Here’s Ryan:

We need to find a way back from this intellectual dead end. We need new ways of thinking about how society works, ways that recognize the importance of systems like democracy and capitalism but that provide a more robust way of understanding when and how they function in the way we want them to…. We need to give ourselves reasons to live, to love life, beyond the promise of a new gadget tomorrow. We need a new Faith.

Ryan focuses exclusively on the need for new cultural beliefs and norms more conducive to flourishing, whereas my book’s ideas for a more hopeful future center on revitalizing technological progress and using that to institutionalize new, flourishing-friendly ways of life through what I call “economic independence.” But ultimately, as I made clear in the book, I agree with Ryan: a cultural shift is needed before the kind of economic independence movement I have in mind can take off the ground:

There are stirrings in the broader society: the boom in homeschooling, the increased interest in co-housing. But for these stirrings to translate into a coherent movement capable of effecting significant social change, what is needed is something like another Great Awakening — a spiritual movement to lead our wayward society back to neglected truths and abandoned virtues.

For those still blinkered by the Modern Faith, this kind of talk from Ryan and me sounds hopelessly, eye-rollingly woolly. I can understand, as I resisted and pushed back for years while such thoughts took up residence in my head and started to settle in. But once you see the gaping blind spots of the Modern Faith, you can’t unsee them — and you can’t unsee what has been lost while we were looking elsewhere.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to The Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Ryan Avent, author of the new book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies, just out from Yale University Press. Ryan, welcome to The Permanent Problem.

Ryan Avent: Brink, thank you so much for having me.

Lindsey: It’s great seeing you again. I was just reflecting today on when we first met each other and I had that combination of sensations. The sensation that time accelerates the older you get, the faster time passes. Also, the sensation that I’m old — put those two together. And we’ve known each other for a long time, but it feels like I met you the day before yesterday. It’s been well over 20 years at this point, I think.

Avent: Yeah.

Lindsey: Right around 20 years, right around.

Avent: Right around 20 years is right, yes.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I met you when you were still just a blogger. I don’t think you were even freelancing with The Economist yet, back in the good old days of blogging. But then you were a freelancer at The Economist, then a staff writer for The Economist for many years. And then a few years ago, you decamped for the private sector. But with this book already in mind or already started — at any rate, to finish a book like this while being somebody with a real job in the private sector, that’s a true labor of love. So tell me, how did the book come about and why did you write it? I have a feeling that it started as one thing and it grew, given the times you were writing in.

Avent: Very much so. Yeah, that’s true. I had started it before I left The Economist, and initially it was really focused on some thinking I’d been doing and writing I’d been doing about blind spots in economic thinking about how institutions work, how people choose to behave, what their motivations are, things like that. And so I had started digging into this and doing reading around it.

Lindsey: You had written a book that came out, I think in 2016, called The Wealth of Humans about our new labor abundance and how that was shaking up the world with the global labor market and what that entailed. And there was a chapter in there, as I recall, that was homing in on this idea of business culture as a big determinant of competitive success. So it was your thinking there about this blind spot in economics, where everything is about design and incentives and not so much about culture. And you wanted to fill in the blanks. But then you had the idea as you were going on that this blank you were filling in had a lot more explanatory power than just this narrow wonkish task — you were explaining why the world was going crazy.

Avent: Absolutely, yeah. So in the 2016 book, there was this chapter on, as you say, how businesses work. And really what I pulled out of economics research, business research, and other things was just how important culture is to guiding these businesses. And people have this code more or less for what it means to be a part of an organization, and they’re intrinsically motivated to abide by that, and that helps generate these good collective outcomes. And I thought on this and realized this applies in many more cases other than just the business world. And if you take seriously the idea of what people’s beliefs are and how they see themselves as identifying with different institutions or different groups, and you think that’s really driving a lot of behavior, then there’s a good reason to think that that is an important part of what holds us all together in aggregate and shapes what we’re capable of as a society. So that’s the direction the book began heading in.

Lindsey: And when you start heading in that direction, you are going against some headwinds, right? The contemporary smart set is allergic to cultural explanations of anything. It’s too mushy to quantify and really get a good analytical, rigorous handle on. And also it’s not actionable — you don’t get a five-point policy reform to fix the problem, because that’s not how culture works.

So it’s some combination of this being loose, unrigorous thinking, and also, “I don’t care where you dropped the keys, that’s gloomy over there. Right under here, under the streetlight, we can see what’s going on.”

Avent: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, and for most of my time working in and writing about economics, I shared that view. I was like, it’s unserious people who really think about this fuzzy stuff. And if we really want to fix a social problem, we need to think about it in terms of incentives and adjust the dials just so, and then if we do enough of that, we’ll get to a good place. But that just ended up feeling inadequate. And I think it felt a little inadequate to me before 2020 and everything that’s followed from there.

But after that, and going through the wrenching experience of those years — and I guess really beginning around 2016 and then through the next decade — it felt to me like this isn’t a small thing, this isn’t a small detail. This aspect of what holds societies together that we’re ignoring, actually it’s really, really important and maybe becoming ever more important as we move into this post-materialist society, where we don’t have to spend most of our day focusing on how we’re going to put bread on our table. It really ends up mattering a lot more how we feel about ourselves and what we think matters and what we’re trying to achieve in our lives.

Lindsey: And there has been serious, rigorous academic interest in culture and cultural evolution over the past couple of decades that has somewhat weakened the taboo on exploring this terrain, but still. And when you step back and don’t take for granted the conventional wisdom, I mean, human beings are cultural animals — that is our distinctive thing, right? We have a whole repertoire of behaviors that we didn’t come here with instinctually. We learned them from others and then we pass them down to the next generation and they survive us, they predate us and they survive us. And we’re finding little bits of culture in the animal world, but nobody does it like us. The wealth of cultural inventiveness and the sheer crazy variety of things we can believe and organize our lives around and take completely seriously, that’s as close to the core of human identity as anything. So it makes sense it’s an important explanatory variable.

Avent: I mean, I certainly agree. And I think the anthropologists and behavioral scientists who studied this take this idea very seriously, but in economics, and probably just in the lay community as well, I don’t think we have ever really fully appreciated the extent to which our evolution as a species was driven by this, right? That our ability to begin to use culture as a way to coordinate our activities and store knowledge that persists over time, that was really fundamental in driving human evolution forward. And then once we became Homo sapiens, that was the key way that we adapted to new scenarios. We didn’t do it with our genes for the most part, we did it through the evolution of culture. And so it’s been critical all along for our whole existence as a species. But then I feel like we got to this point where we felt like we outgrew that. We’re now modern man and woman, we’re rational, and in this world we don’t need to rely on that anymore. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Lindsey: I’ll get to the “Modern Faith” in a little bit and what has gone wrong. But let’s start with what’s gone right. So we take it for granted this is the world we’re born into, and wonder why isn’t it better. But step back and think about where we are and where we are in relation to just about every other human being who’s part of the story of our species. And we live in extravagantly different circumstances and dramatically, unimaginably better circumstances. First, there are eight billion of us, so there’s a whole lot of us getting to have the human experience. And we live in these enormous collectives relatively peacefully together — that’s astonishing. And we have figured out ways to organize our activities in incredibly intricate divisions of labor and responsibility. We have harnessed magical-seeming technologies, and this is all the handiwork of culture.

So you have a history of how we got here in the book. Do you want to go through that a little bit? The nature of our beliefs determines how big a group we can be in and what the scale of our cooperation can be, and therefore what the scope of our collective capacities can be, and therefore what our opportunities can be. But why don’t you spell that out some?

Avent: Yeah, absolutely. So once we became cultural creatures, we did end up storing more and more information about how to behave and why to behave in that particular way in our culture. And that’s a thing that allowed us to learn new tricks to survive in different niches. But if we think about all the different aspects of culture now, all the different ways that we conceive of behavior with all the different subtleties, all those things had to be discovered or invented or stumbled upon. And the process of stumbling on those things and the stories that we found that allowed those things to make sense to us opened up new capabilities for humankind.

And so in the book, I tried to pick out a few. And one, I think, is as we learned to find new ways to live in larger societies, and a huge part of how we did this was stumbling on religion, we could operate in tribal groups of hundreds rather than bands of a few dozen. And that may not sound like a huge difference, but actually when you’re thinking about trying to accumulate a body of technologies that will allow you to do more, or when you think about trying to cooperate to achieve some larger end, that number makes a huge difference, right? Multiple bands coming together can preserve a discovery that someone stumbled on a lot better. There are more people sharing ideas — “Oh, we’ve figured out how to do this with a fish hook,” that kind of thing.

And so I think that as we learned to do that and became accustomed to larger societies, that was a contributor to accelerating technological development and accelerating growth in our overall capabilities. And this has happened repeatedly throughout our history. If you look at the process of us settling down, living in larger sedentary communities, figuring out how to be successful communities while relying on agriculture, and then figuring out how to live within states, there were bodies of meaning that were evolving all along the way that helped us adapt ourselves.

Lindsey: And somewhere right around there, we figured out writing, too. So we figured out a way to store our culture externally, not just in the noggins of other humans, but somewhere that can survive us. That opened up a huge can of worms.

Avent: Yeah. I mean, all of this did, right? And I think I’ve been struck when reading historical takes and analyses on this, how much people want to attribute the emergence of something like writing or of a particular state to this purposeful behavior by clever people — like, “Oh, writing emerged because it was a way that kings could exercise greater control over their populations.” And I think obviously writing allowed people to have that greater capability, but these things were evolutionary. It had to become more widely accepted that submitting in certain ways to a king was a good thing or a reasonable thing to do — maybe not a good thing, but something that was appropriate for a person to do, or that someone reading into these symbols and saying that they meant this or that was a legitimate thing. And that’s, I think, in a lot of ways, the governor on what a society can be: what do people feel is appropriate?

And certainly that’s something that’s continued up to this modern day. It’s something when I think about the political situation we’re in now — you have these ideas about what’s appropriate that constrain behavior, and then they go away, but we’re getting to that. And then thinking about how we get to modernity, I think there had to be some pretty significant changes to the body of shared meaning, changes in the way we feel about behavior to allow that. And the book talks about that a little bit. It’s a few things. I think part of it is about getting past kinship networks and interacting with others as if they’re all more or less okay to interact with.

Lindsey: And in making that step, you ascribe an important role to Christianity?

Avent: I do, yeah. And I don’t know how people receive this, because if you say that Christendom could become the first industrializing part of the world because of Christianity, I think that can be a difficult thing for a lot of people to swallow. But the point I try to make is that the spread of Christianity throughout Christendom — Western Christendom — and the way that it evolved in interaction with other different forces really led to the displacement of this old moral structure, which really was kin-group based and where you treated people outside your kin groups quite differently and held them to different moral rules than you held internally. That ended up being replaced by this more universal moral code — it didn’t happen overnight by any stretch of the imagination, but as that happened, we became more flexible. We became better able to be a part of many different groups, overlapping groups, and that unlocked a lot of potential for complexity.

Lindsey: You have a nice metaphor — at least nice for a Baby Boomer geezer like me — of saying that we went from a society where you built cultural institutions out of Lincoln Logs to a Lego society, where you’ve got these modular pieces. You can build stuff with Lincoln Logs, but you’re constrained by what you can build, whereas with Lego, you can build anything. So once you get to this universal morality that highlights the free and sovereign individual, that’s your Lego block. And once you’ve got that belief structure in people’s minds, the ways you can combine individuals into new configurations becomes virtually limitless.

Avent: And I think this ends up being incredibly powerful. Because all these little subdivisions within society, the different groups of which people can be a part, have their own little cultures holding them together with particular sets of meaning, and those things can evolve over time as well. And so if you look at something like the development of science and the set of values that goes around with that, this emerged from a subgroup of society. In the West, we would say it’s something like the Republic of Letters that formed the idea among themselves that it was appropriate to express this radical doubt — that you wouldn’t accept things unless evidence could be shown to prove it. And then if you believed something and evidence was shown to you that that wasn’t correct, that you would change your mind.

And so I think you have to think about this shift in the moral sensibilities as opening up the room to develop these important sub-beliefs — like science is good, it’s good to turn a profit, it’s good to try to work hard and develop your own capacities as an individual — all these different things that really contributed to modern economic growth.

Lindsey: So faith is in the title of the book, faith figures prominently in the book. Explain how faith fits into this cultural explanation of what’s happened to us and where we are.

Avent: Sure. Well, I think it’s central. I think we often think of ourselves as being distinct mostly because of our capacity to reason and to work through problems and innovate and come up with solutions to them. And I think that’s actually... I mean, it’s very important that we can do that, but I don’t think that’s the thing that really sets us apart. First of all, apes can do that — not nearly as well as we can, but they’re pretty clever and they’re good problem solvers. But what really unlocked the capacity to use culture to cooperate was faith, right? That we were able to develop this capacity to trust others, even though they weren’t blood relations or close blood relations, that we found ourselves able to believe things and live in a way consistent with those beliefs, even though we didn’t really understand why.

And there’s a lot of interesting anthropological work that makes this point, right? That over time, indigenous groups would develop these incredibly complex procedures for processing food or building housing or fighting wars. And there were tricks embedded in these things that no individual could have come up with. It’s not like someone invented it out of nowhere — there were no research labs or anything like that. And so these things can only work and help us survive and adapt if we continue to do things that on their surface don’t make sense.

If we add lime or ash to our maize to help us access the niacin in the maize, who’s going to just randomly throw ash in their corn? And so it was really faith that allowed us to survive all these hundreds of thousands of years. And I think that if we are honest with ourselves and reflect on how we live today, that’s still just an absolutely critical part of modern society. We walk out our door believing we’re going to be okay, believing that everyone is going to abide by laws and conduct themselves in a way that’s going to allow our lives to work as we expect them to.

Lindsey: And even modern science rests on unprovable assumptions — that we can trust our senses, that we’re not just brains in a vat being tricked by some demon, that something real is going on that we’re experiencing. The orderliness of the universe, that there are natural, regularly recurring patterns and they are ultimately comprehensible to us. So none of that is a given, but it’s a precondition for getting anywhere. If we’re going to say, “No, we don’t need faith anymore because we’ve got science,” well, we don’t have science without faith.

Avent: That’s right, yeah. And I think the other aspect of faith that the book works through and focuses on as it thinks about the present and where we’re going, is the extent to which faith is necessary really to get through life. Life is difficult, there’s a lot of reason to think that things will go wrong in disastrous ways. And particularly in our modern society where skepticism of things like faith is the marker of being a serious mind, we fail to appreciate how you have to believe that a tomorrow is possible, whether or not there’s any evidence for that, in order for there to be a tomorrow.

Lindsey: And this is a good time to throw in the fact that your book, which has this huge theme of the grand sweep of history, also has autobiographical elements interspersed throughout it. So we’ll get to the crisis of faith that our liberal democratic societies are undergoing right now, but you had a personal crisis of faith, at least partially triggered by this larger societal crisis. So you interweave those stories. You get personal about things.

So, culture starts with belief, belief starts with what’s going on inside one person’s head, so that’s a nice jumping-off point. But you get to gratitude: “There are wonderful things that I get to be privy to because I’m alive and I’m grateful for that. And I don’t want to let those people down, and so I need to get my shit together so that I can live up to them.” And so it was what you’re grateful for, and then your obligations to those people you’re grateful for, that pulled you out of your funk, right? So tell the story a little bit.

Avent: Well, I mean, you’ve done a great job summarizing. The short version is that I, as many people do when they get to midlife, started to question a lot of things. I’d always been prone to depression, and so I was struggling with that as per normal. But as the world developed around me in ways that seemed very ominous, that added to the burden that I felt like I was bearing. And as we got into the pandemic and the aftermath, and the aftermath of January 6th, I really became quite deeply depressed and just didn’t really know what to do with myself after that day.

Lindsey: And it’s fair to point out, a lot of people have had tough times over the past decade, and certainly a lot of people had tough times during COVID, but most people had the luxury of tuning politics out, right? So people with weird jobs, like working at think tanks or working for a political magazine, you don’t have that luxury. So we had to, like poor Malcolm McDowell [in A Clockwork Orange] with his eyeballs propped open while they’re beaming the horrors at him, we couldn’t look away.

Avent: We couldn’t look away, no. And we had to try to think about where it was going, what would lay ahead, and that could often be a bleak thing to contemplate. But I eventually got fed up with myself, and I landed on this personal realization that if I take this incredibly gloomy outlook as my baseline, I’m always going to be miserable, I’m not going to be a good person for the people who love me, I’m not going to be able to work effectively to try to help the situation in whatever ways I can. And I realized that I need to believe that tomorrow can be better, even if I don’t really have a lot of things I can point to that give me strong confidence that this is true.

And I think the reason that ends up making its way into the book is because that shaped my understanding of how we work together as a society, of what ends up being the mode of power that keeps the society going. And it really fed into my understanding of what seems to be going wrong and what we might need to do to fix the problem.

Lindsey: I mean, you’re personally miserable, right? “I’m not happy. I’m not maximizing my utility now,” right?

So that project is not going well. So you turn around and you think about a different project, right? The people who matter to me and doing right by them. Being a good person and doing good for the people who matter to me — okay, then I need to shake out of this torpor and I need to have faith that tomorrow could possibly be a better day, so I can do good by the people that matter. So shifting from “I’m a homo economicus and I’m here to maximize utility” to a different mix of meanings — life as an opportunity and an obligation to do good. You’re explicit in planting that flag in the ground in a way that a lot of contemporary liberals are very shy to do, right? That idea, “We don’t want to tell anybody how to live or what’s good. It’s all up to them. We’re just going to set the conditions for them to figure it out on their own.” But you’ve broken from that.

Avent: Yes. And part of the evolution that happened with me was looking around and wanting others to behave better, to behave more responsibly, more conscientiously. Wanting them to do that because that would make the world better or prevent bad things from happening, but also because I felt like it would make it easier for me to be better, right? It’s important that we all hold each other accountable. And so I think looking around at how things have happened over the past few years, it’s been incredibly frustrating the number of people who haven’t hewn to what I would think are the right paths of behavior. They haven’t done what they were supposed to do. They haven’t stuck by the principles that I thought we all took seriously and so on.

And so I think it’s very difficult for me to look around and see that shift in behavior and not think that that’s closely linked to what’s going wrong. It feels like we’ve given ourselves permission to behave incredibly self-interestedly, to not heed the obligation to do right by others. And because that’s so important to keeping society functioning well, that ends up being a key cause of extremism.

Lindsey: Even talking about the obligation to do good, and the reason we’re on earth is to do good and help make us into better people, that just all sounds cringe by 21st-century standards, right?

Avent: It is very cringe.

Lindsey: So we’re coming up against the “Modern Faith.” Different kinds of faith have brought us to this exalted position. And the story you tell of progress is not a Whig triumphalist story at all, it’s an evolutionary story where people are doing things by accident. And I was looking recently at email correspondence to you right after I read the manuscript, and I said something like, “It’s like just a series of slipping on banana peels until suddenly you find yourself almost at the summit of Mount Olympus,” right?

Avent: That’s right.

Lindsey: But now we’re sliding back down, and why is that? What is the Modern Faith that we have substituted for the faiths that got us to this exalted place?

Avent: I think that if we... The way I tell the story about how we got to modernity, to modern economic growth, it is one where our beliefs and values shifted and those beliefs and values changed our behavior in ways that allowed us to unlock all these new capabilities. We got to a place where it was deemed as being appropriate to try to understand the universe better, to use that understanding to try to make the world better, where it became acceptable to make a profit while doing that, but also where there were ethical obligations that people took very seriously. And if you go back and look at the political economists from the late 18th, early 19th century, they took this for granted. They didn’t think that we were all these isolated particles. Smith understood very well that what allows these economic forces to work as they do is the set of ethical, moral obligations we give ourselves and take seriously.

But as industrialization proceeded and as history proceeded, I think we became very rationalist about how societies function. We came to think of ourselves more as rational engineers rather than moral actors. And also, I think there were many appealing things about that way of thinking about society that allowed them to spread. And I think if you took economic analysis as it developed and became, around the turn of the 20th century, if you took that seriously, then one, it had incredible explanatory power. It ends up being a lot like physics. You can get close to having an equation where you can crank out and predict what’s going to happen in our social world, which is a very tempting thing.

But then also the moral guidance that ends up providing is a very convenient one, where markets are going to turn our behavior into an ideal outcome if we behave in a self-interested way. So really the right thing to do is to behave in a self-interested way. And this was tempered by prevailing moral and ethical views, but over time, I think that story became more dominant and the things that had tempered that story eroded. And so we got to a point where it really feels like everyone has permission to get theirs.

So anyway, the Modern Faith, to answer your question, is this belief that once we land on the correct systems of social organization, like a market economy, that’s the thing — that’s what we’ve gotten to and it doesn’t matter what individuals do or whether or not they’re moral. We’ve engineered the system correctly and so it should work. But that’s mistaken.

Lindsey: Let me back you up here, and then I’ll give you a little bit of pushback.

Avent: All right.

Lindsey: So the modern faith is that everything comes down to system design and incentives, that if we set up the system correctly, then the little human being balls will bounce through the maze of incentives correctly and get to the proper efficient outcomes.

This is one gigantic, classic example of economists assuming the can opener. So the story is an economist and an engineer wash up on a beach after a shipwreck and they’re scrounging around to see if anything turns up that they can use. And they find some canned goods, but no can opener. And the engineer is trying to figure out some way to rig something to whack open the cans. And the economist says, “No, no, no, let’s just assume a can opener.”

So economists, living in this moral economy of people with their heads full of all kinds of beliefs, observed how those citizens of a moral economy responded to incentives, and saw that incentives can be really powerful in shifting behavior — but incentives acting on humans that are enmeshed in a moral economy. And gradually that context just leeches away until you end up with this assumption of homo economicus, this rational utility maximizer that isn’t really like anybody you and I have ever met.

And it occurs to me there’s an interesting example of how this eats away at our moral fiber over time: Milton Friedman, who comes up in your book. Milton Friedman’s line on corporate social responsibility — he famously said that the only responsibility that corporations have is to make profits while staying within the rules. So maximize profits while playing within the rules — you have satisfied your corporate social responsibility. Okay, “while playing by the rules” is a codicil that’s assuming a lot, right? But it starts dropping away. Okay, play within the rules, but the rules aren’t fixed for all time, we can change the rules. So we can lobby and make the rules favor us. And there’s a whole lot of that going on — Steve Teles and I wrote a whole book about it called The Captured Economy.

And then beyond that, well, the rules just say that if we violate the law, we get fined. So we’ll pay the fines — that’s the cost of doing business — but we don’t care if it’s right or wrong, because right just is maximizing profits. So you start with a fairly sensible observation — there’s very little a corporate manager is going to do to make the world a better place over and above running his business well, there’s a lot of truth in that. But the context around it just keeps eroding until you end up with just licensed sociopathy.

Avent: Basically, yes, that’s right. I mean, I think you’ve described it well. And I guess just to clarify, I think it can sound like I’m saying that everyone sat down and read Milton Friedman and then came to this decision. And really, it actually functions more along the lines of the broader theory of society I have in the book, which is that we, in response to these attractive ideas, altered our behavior and that shaped others’ perception of what was okay. And this all dispersed outward in a way that’s led us to this place.

Lindsey: So my pushback is I’m not sure how widely shared the Modern Faith is. I think it’s definitely something that’s in the heads of policy elites, people who think about how to rearrange the policies and institutions of society. People who think about society at a macro scale, they’re systems thinkers. But just ordinary Joes, I’m not sure how natural it is to think at this level of abstraction — to think in terms of abstract systems. So I think they’re more just getting it in the water rather than it being an article of faith in their hearts.

So maybe one way to put it is that it’s not that the impersonal systems of markets and bureaucracy — the systems that create the incentives we live by — it’s not that they’ve inspired too much faith. It’s rather that our other faiths, in our personal responsibility and in our face-to-face lives, have withered. So once we step out of being Ryan Avent, Brink Lindsey, participant in the impersonal systems and step into our face-to-face lives, then we’re not thinking so much about utility maximizing. Am I a good husband? Am I a bad husband? Am I a good friend? Am I a bad friend? Am I a good neighbor? Am I a bad neighbor? So that’s moralized in your face-to-face life; it just runs by different rules than impersonal cooperation. And so good faith obviously can’t be dispensed with in dealing face-to-face with others, but our face-to-face relationships have become a lot less important to our lives than they were, at least practically less important.

This is a point I make again and again in my book, The Permanent Problem, that once upon a time, those personal face-to-face relationships were just absolutely crucial to our practical ability to get through the day and get through life. Our spouse was a partner in economic production. Our kids helped out on the farm, they took care of us when we were old. Our neighbors, they helped protect us against bad guys and they were an insurance policy during bad times. So the people with whom we share an obvious explicit moral economy bulked very large in determining the quality of our life — whereas they still bulk very large in determining the long-term quality of our life, the day-to-day practical efficiencies of our life we’ve outsourced a lot of to buying things and to getting services from the government. So as the part of our lives where we think naturally in moral terms has withered, then it’s not too surprising that we carry these habits of life in impersonal systems around and over-apply them. Does that make sense to you?

Avent: It does make sense, yeah. And I think it’s a good pushback. I will say the portion of the book that’s about the Modern Faith skates by a lot of the particular mechanisms that are at work. And it also probably over-represents itself as the monocausal explanation of everything that’s gone on here. I mean, one thing I’ve wrestled with as I wrote it was how much to focus on the shifting beliefs of elites in particular, because I think you’re right that they’re the ones who are maybe dealing more with these particular abstractions, but also I think they occupy critical nodes in society. And so the elites that run our newspapers or our media companies or whatever, or do all sorts of other things, they’re an important way in which people confront the values that guide the world.

I think there’s a lot that’s gone on to contribute to the erosion of those face-to-face interactions, as you note. To some extent, I wonder how much of that is an inevitable outcome of a freewheeling capitalism that is untempered by purposeful action toward preservation of particular ways of life? And so I think there’s a really deep complementarity between the position you take in your book, which is excellent, and what I’m actually saying with this argument, which is that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to a point where things that really matter a lot, we treat as though they don’t matter. And so yeah, I think that the place to focus is on how to make that argument more persuasively to the rest of the world. Does that make sense?

Lindsey: Yep, yep, yep. You say we need a new faith. We need a new big story to resocialize us, remoralize us. So what does that look like? And you describe a faith that’s very similar to one I’ve described in some of my Substack writing, which I call — as opposed to a religious faith that’s derived from some revealed sacred source — just an existential faith that starts with just a sense of gratitude of being here, that everybody who’s alive is a lottery winner. On the night we were conceived, the odds were 100 million to one against us, but we’re here, we get to have this amazing ride. Yes, it’s full of sadness, but it’s also full of joy and wonder, and it’s full of opportunities to tamp down the sadness and build up the joy, to lean into the best parts of life, right? So you start with that, so we should make the best of this.

And then at the macro scale, you start with the fact of progress, the fact that we’re in progressive modernity, and that we are in this incredibly exotic and privileged position relative to the overwhelming bulk of our fellow members of our species who lived before us. And so this should give us hope, that things have gotten a lot better, and therefore things can continue to get better, and therefore it’s our obligation to make them better. Is that the loose syllogism or associational thinking that pulls you from facts about the world to a sense of moral obligation?

Avent: I think so, yeah. I mean, I think the long arc of progress is critical to it. The extent to which that long arc of progress has allowed us to become better people, better societies, who treat each other better is an important part of it. But I think the thing that’s missing is the story that allows us to feel connected to both the past and the future, and which helps us understand why it matters that we are the bridge. And the overriding notion that we’re here to satisfy our preferences just doesn’t do it. And we are seeing the limits of what that can do in terms of driving society forward. I wish I had a very clear idea of what the correct story is that’s going to bring it all together for everyone.

Lindsey: But you’re refreshingly self-deflating, right? You say, “I’m not a prophet. This isn’t my job to do this.”

Avent: Yeah.

Lindsey: But still, there’s an obvious candidate or set of candidates, which is organized religion. So you’ve written a book about faith, you’re arguing that our problems are from a loss of faith, and you’re telling your own story as you wind that into the narrative of the book. You talk about how you were raised in a fairly fervently Christian community and how you lost that religious faith. But anyway, tell the story... And losing your faith you felt fairly self-congratulatory about, but you came over time to feel a little bit more wistful about it.

Avent: Yeah, yeah. And I think when I was growing up in the church and then grappling with what I really believed, I overwhelmingly treated the inner dialogue as one that really was just about me and God, that whatever I believed, for me, it mattered for my soul, and that if I decided to stop believing, I was the one who was affected and nobody else. And I think what I came to realize was that actually this is the foundation of collective purpose in a lot of ways, collective interaction. It matters because of what it does for all of us, and the extent to which we get personal benefits from believing is very much tied up in what it does for the society around us, because it gives us all that obligation to look out for others and they look out for us.

Thinking about that lesson for me and thinking about the place I go with it, which is that we need these new stories, it does raise some difficult questions, I think, for someone with liberal commitments. Because first of all, I’m certainly not of the view that we need to try to convert everyone to any story. That’s not going to work, that’s not appropriate. And then second of all, what do we really think about assigning ourselves the obligation to do right by others simply because we feel like that leads to a better overall collective outcome? I think we haven’t given ourselves the tools to really work through that yet, and it’s something I’m continuing to think about.

Lindsey: So you walk right up to, “I’ve got this sense of profound gratitude and it feels like it makes sense to direct that gratitude towards something. Towards the author of whatever it is — if it’s an impersonal principle or law or force or whatever, but there is some ground of all being that is the reason why there’s something rather than nothing and that something has the nature that it has. And boy, I’m glad that it exists, and I’m glad that I exist and I’m glad that I’m a creature of this reality.” And you say, “We could just call that God,” but you step back and you don’t want to do that. So why don’t you want to do that?

Avent: I don’t know if it’s right to call it God. I don’t know if that is an honest way to label it. It’d be easy enough to just not worry about it and say that that’s God, but I feel like I’m not sure enough about that to run with it. You know what I mean?

Lindsey: Yeah. I feel like you and I are in a very similar boat of seeing the value of religion and religious community, and it just shows up in social science. There’s Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, who says that “Praying together beats bowling together and praying alone” in terms of binding communities together.

Avent: That’s right.

Lindsey: So it works, and it works better than anything else, which suggests there’s something going on there that’s important. So we resist because the religious story of Christianity is typically presented as a factually true story and we don’t believe that it really happened. So you say, “Yeah, I don’t want to be a pretend Christian.” And so this seems to me like a spiritual plight peculiar to post-Christendom. I live in a Buddhist country where... So Thailand — Theravada Buddhism is really anchored in the life and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the original historical Buddha. But many Buddhists in the Mahayana tradition are completely different — they don’t care that much about that historical figure at all. And nobody in Theravada Buddhism is obsessing about the historicity of Siddhartha Gautama or pinning much of anything on that. And when you get back to his teachings, all the supernatural stuff is take-it-or-leave-it. His message is, “Life is full of suffering. I’ve got a spiritual technology to address it. If you’ll follow me, you’ll be better off.”

So Judaism — the metaphysics are very latitudinarian. You just have to follow the rules. So you can be a good observant Jew just by following the rules. You don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to believe. You just have to conform to the practices of the group. So it seems like it would be easier in some religious traditions to make this leap to a scientific worldview where you’re just not going to accept miraculous occurrences, and yet recognize that there really is something that transcends us — that yes, we’re the cleverest critters on this planet, but imagining that these overachieving apes can grasp ultimate truth is only slightly more preposterous than imagining that a beetle or a mole rat could figure it all out, right?

So we’re in this little tiny bubble of this enormous mystery all around us. And we know regularities in nature to an astonishing degree, but we don’t know why they’re that way. So we’re just surrounded by mystery and unfathomable mystery towards which I think the correct emotion is wonder and awe and also a sense of gratitude. Wonder and awe and gratitude towards things that surpass human understanding — and doing that in a community where we’re all organized that way, to think about the most important things there are to think about, get past the bullshit of this work week and get together and have communion about the most important things there are. It does really feel like there’s no substitute for that.

But in our culture, the religion on offer is a creedal religion — we believe these things. And of course, liberal Protestantism wandered way off into believing things in a symbolic way, but never explicitly. The ministers wouldn’t confess their lack of belief in the resurrection to the flock, because they don’t want to harsh anybody’s buzz. And so you have these communities of liberal Protestantism where they’re all reciting the Apostles’ Creed, but some of them mean one thing and some of them mean another, and they’re not talking to each other honestly about it.

So it feels like there is a missing Christianity that could have existed but never has — that’s explicitly mythological, that says, “Look, there are truths about the nature of existence and about the human condition that can be better expressed in myth, which is like art, than they can be in just prose — through symbolism and by indirection. And the myth of the Christian story, that God came and participated in our suffering and that he came not as a king, but as a poor kid born in an animal trough, that’s just an amazing story with amazing spiritual truths inside of it.” So it would be awesome to be able to tap into that cultural power of that myth, but that’s not how things evolved. It’s not really an option on the table.

Avent: No, it doesn’t seem so. And we’re probably particularly hardheaded about it in part because of the cultural legacy of Christianity that led us down this path toward modernity. At the same time, views about Christianity have evolved dramatically since Christ, and there’s nothing to say this isn’t out of reach. I think the thing that makes me a little uncomfortable about turning Christianity appreciation into something that’s mostly about stories, is just that I don’t want people who believe other things to feel pressured. And when you say this story is the answer, it necessarily implies that other stories aren’t, and that makes me a little uncomfortable — but it’s possible I’m just overthinking this in a lot of different ways. I guess the add-on to my individual perspective about this is that, and you alluded to this...

Lindsey: But my feeling is, I live in a Buddhist country, so I could do that. It wouldn’t be... But I’ve felt there’s... I’m almost embarrassed — I don’t want to be a parody of myself, so that’s why I didn’t buy a Porsche in my 40s. And the searching Western intellectual who ends up becoming a Buddhist just feels to me a little try-hard, right?

Avent: Yeah.

Lindsey: So we are born into cultures, we didn’t choose them, but you and I were born in the West, our cultural matrix is Christian. So it doesn’t feel to me like it’s forcing it on other people to say, “Oh, this is what we’re born in.” So if we’re going to find a religious story to rally around, a Christian one makes a whole lot of sense because that’s our culture.

Avent: I think one thing the book works through is, as we talked about earlier, the extent to which new forms of belief enabled new collective capacities, capabilities. And when I muse at the end on how we can find new stories, I think part of what’s feeding into that is that there’s so much more to discover about the universe, and discovering those things is going to happen in parallel with us uncovering new ways of conceiving why we’re here and what we’re meant to be and what to do. And so I think in some sense, we need to embrace the idea that the stories we have inherited from the past are not going to be the ones that carry us to the future.

And maybe that’s thinking too far ahead. And if we’re just dealing with the next 20 years, that’s good enough. But ultimately, we ought to be open to the idea that we can achieve greater understanding and that we will come to appreciate things about the way the universe works, the ways that our society develops, that are new and better. And that can be a very hard thing to imagine. And it’s a case where it’d be super helpful if I were a prophet and could say, “Here it is,” but it’s a thing that we have to grope our way toward collectively, I think.

Lindsey: Yeah. And let me just... I don’t want to leave the impression that I am criticizing Westerners who have turned to Buddhism and find value there. The problem is all on me, right? It’s just my sense of self-consciousness, not that that isn’t a perfectly fine thing to do. So yeah, so maybe the story that’s going to pull us out of this jam has not been written yet. But maybe there’s some little future prophet out there right now who’s tapping into our spiritual angst and he’ll save the day — or she’ll save the day. But until then we have to keep the faith, right?

Avent: We do. We have to realize it matters. I’m hopeful that we will.

Lindsey: That’s right. So even without any terribly firm ground to rest on, the faith that we’ve made it this far and that there are real possibilities to make things even better than they are today, that ought to be good enough, at least for now. But we’ve gone over our hour, Ryan. I think we’ll wrap it up here. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Great talking to you and best of luck with the book.

Avent: Thank you so much, Brink. It’s always great to talk to you. And I appreciate you having me on.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Permanent Problem podcast. I’m very excited about today’s episode. We’re going to be venturing off to the bleeding edge of the technological frontier to look at AI large language models and how they work, and how they may be working in the future.

Matthew Yglesias — who runs the excellent Substack “Slow Boring,” and who’s also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center where I work — did a post not too long ago about how AI was giving him writer’s block. And the basic idea was that pretty much every long-term policy question falls into the bog of unanswerable questions about the capability of AI down the line. It’s very difficult to opine about how things in society are going to go over the next 10 or 15 years, because (A) we have no idea what the capabilities of AI will be by then, and (B) we have no idea about the extent to which those AI capabilities will have diffused out into the larger economy.

That is certainly the case for my own speculations about what’s coming around the bend. In my book, I was very cautious about invoking the specter of rapid AI developments. I thought of that as a cheat code. If AI was growing as fast as its biggest hypesters were saying, then a lot of the things that I was talking about in the book would be dramatically accelerated. So I didn’t want to lean on that, but things are moving. They’re not slowing down. The prospects of what’s been accomplished already are transformational, and there look to be bigger and better things to come.

My guest today, by virtue of his background and his current job, is one of the world’s leading experts on how AI large language models actually work and what’s going on under the hood. Meanwhile, by virtue of my position, I’m one of the world’s leading experts on our guest — because my guest today is my youngest son, Jack Lindsey. Jack Lindsey, welcome to the Permanent Problem.

Jack Lindsey: I’m very excited to be here.

Brink Lindsey: I’m very excited to have you. And just right out of the box, I’m sure your big brothers, Matthew and Michael, will be watching this at some point, so shout out to them. Jack Lindsey is a researcher at Anthropic. Why don’t you tell us your job title?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, I don’t really know what my job title is officially, but I lead what’s called our model psych team, which stands for psychology or psychiatry or psychic. No one really knows what it means, but we are investigating the minds of the AI models we’re creating.

Brink Lindsey: And the psych team is situated in the larger interpretability team, is that correct?

Jack Lindsey: That’s right. Yep.

Brink Lindsey: And explain that, the interpretability team’s larger mission.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. And interpretability is the science of what’s going on inside AI models, trying to reverse engineer their inner workings to say something about what computations or algorithms they’re implementing on the inside to give rise to all the behaviors that we see these models perform.

Brink Lindsey: And what is the special set of tasks that the psych team is doing within that larger mission?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, I think of us as, if interpretability is like neuroscience, then what we do is maybe cognitive neuroscience or the border between cognitive neuroscience and psychology. So, we’re interested, especially in these higher order forms of cognition that language models seem to exhibit, things like personality traits, things like emotional reactions, the capacity for introspection or situational awareness, like realizing where they are and what’s real and what’s fake. So, these higher order forms of cognition are the things that we’re interested in.

Brink Lindsey: So, all the most anthropomorphic features, or things that it’s irresistible to talk about anthropomorphically, that’s your special focus?

Jack Lindsey: That’s basically it. Yep.

Brink Lindsey: Okay. So, what’s your educational background? What path did you take that led you to wind up at Anthropic?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, I guess working backwards, I joined Anthropic about two years ago, and I’ve been working on the science of interpretability in one way or another since then. Before that, I did a PhD in computational neuroscience, which is the fake neuroscience where you aren’t actually touching any brains or animals, but instead you’re building computational models of data that’s recorded from the brain and trying to model that data to understand what sorts of things are going on.

Brink Lindsey: You’re modeling the neuronal activity associated with particular brain functions. Is that what you were doing?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I worked on a bunch of different things, but a lot of them have the flavor of, say you’re recording neural activity from an animal while it’s performing some task or maybe while it’s learning some task. And then the job of a computational neuroscientist is to take that data and infer from it what is it that this network of neurons in the brain is doing that enables the animal to perform the task or enables the animal to learn the task. So, I was especially interested in the problem of learning and the rules that govern changes in connection strengths in the brain.

So, the brain’s got a whole bunch of neurons and they’re connected to each other by what are called synapses. And there are molecular level rules that govern how these weights change as a result of an animal’s experience. And so, connecting those changes in connection strengths to learning at the behavioral level was the thing I was studying.

Brink Lindsey: Okay. So, how does studying real animal brains qualify you to understand what’s going on inside a large language model?

Jack Lindsey: I’m not sure it does, but...

Brink Lindsey: There must be some methodologies and techniques and principles that apply to real brains that can be analogized to artificial ones.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. So, modern AI systems are built on artificial neural networks, which are loosely inspired by the brain in the sense that they’re composed of a distributed network of small, relatively simple computational units modeled after neurons in the brain, which are connected in this vast web of connections, and information cascades through this network and is transformed and processed in order to do tasks. And so, at a coarse level, this general idea of neurons connected in a network is common between real brains and AI brains. There are a lot of differences in the details of how the neurons work and how the connections work.

But yeah, if you’re a neuroscientist, you spend a lot of time thinking about how can networks of neurons collectively work together to enable a human or an animal to do things like motor control or decision making. And so, you’re applying a similar type of thinking to language models. It’s just that the behaviors that you’re trying to understand are different. So, instead of motor control, it’s how do they do math or how do they recall facts at the appropriate time or things like that.

Brink Lindsey: And you have a huge advantage over the folks studying live brains in that you have much better access to the neural network, right? So, that’s a huge problem — actually getting into the wetware of an actual brain to figure out what’s going on in there. You can do it much more cleanly with computers.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, that’s a big reason why I moved out of proper neuroscience and into this AI neuroscience is that real neuroscience is just way too hard, and it’s really hard to record data. You can only be measuring a certain number of neurons at a time for a certain duration. You have to convince the animal to do the thing you want it to be doing. And so, with a language model, you can record all of the neurons all the time, you can make it do whatever tasks you want as many times as you want.

And so, a lot of these experimental limitations are just completely lifted and all that’s blocking us from understanding what’s going on is, well, it turns out a whole bunch of other stuff. And so, we still don’t really understand what’s going on inside language models despite this complete access that we have, which is...

Brink Lindsey: And as an Anthropic researcher, you have access to Claude that’s very different from me as a paying consumer user, right? You’ve got administrative access. So, you can ask it to do stuff and then look and see what’s actually going on inside in a fairly detailed specific way.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, yeah, we can see everything that’s going on inside, which in principle you could do with, say, an open source language model if you wanted to. The same things we do on Claude, you could do with an open model, but yeah, we have the luxury of being able to do it on Claude. And what that means is… so yeah, language models are powered by these giant neural networks. And so, maybe we’ll talk about this in more detail, but you’re putting in text, usually sometimes images, and then it’s spitting out text on the other end.

But in between the input and the output, there’s this series of stages of processing, which correspond to layers in this neural network. The first layer relays and transforms information to the second layer and so on to the third layer and so on. And so, what we can see as Claude is talking to you, as it’s having a conversation or performing a task, we can see exactly how much all of those neurons in each layer lit up at each point during the task, and then we can try to decipher from that what was going on in its head, so to speak.

Brink Lindsey: So, you’ve been at Anthropic about two years now?

Jack Lindsey: Yes, that’s right.

Brink Lindsey: So, what percentage of Anthropic’s current headcount was hired since you got there?

Jack Lindsey: I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a lot bigger. Yeah.

Brink Lindsey: Okay.

Jack Lindsey: It feels maybe ten times bigger.

Brink Lindsey: Okay. All right. Very good. So, there was news today, at least today your time. We’re recording this on the evening of April 7 your time. And on April 7, Anthropic announced a new Claude model, Claude Mythos Preview, that is not being publicly released because it’s too powerful to trust the public with. And in particular, the big headline is that Claude Mythos has amazing cybersecurity capabilities — it can detect security flaws in computer systems and has already identified a huge number of them.

So, concurrent with the announcement of the new model, you’re announcing a new program where you’re sharing Mythos with some other companies or engaging in joint activities with other companies to use what Mythos is doing to try to upgrade cybersecurity. So, tell me about the news release.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, you basically got it. It’s being shared with a small set of trusted partners who are in a position to use the model to fix security vulnerabilities in widely used systems. And the fundamental issue is that basically this model is really good at cybersecurity — and cybersecurity offense and defense are hard to distinguish. If it’s good at one, it’s good at the other. And so, you want the model in the hands of people who can fix all the problems before it’s in the hands of people who can exploit all the problems — that’s the general idea.

Brink Lindsey: Right. So, if you had just put this out on the market today, then unscrupulous hackers could have used it to just unleash mayhem. Is that more or less correct?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, that’s the idea. And I’m not a cybersecurity expert, so I’m trusting the people who know what they’re doing. But what I can say is that just in my own experience using the model, I work at an AI company, I’ve used computers all day, my whole life is doing computer stuff, and the kinds of things that the model starts doing when I let it go off and do a task — or in these situations where I’m asked to audit what it’s done to check for safety properties, maybe something we’ll talk about more — it’s doing all this stuff where I just have no idea what it is.

It’s doing all these operating system hacks and it’s tremendously good at finagling its way around security restrictions and breaking out of the sandboxes we put it in to perform tasks, so that it can access the answer key to the task it’s been given that it’s not supposed to have access to. And it’s doing all of this using fairly sophisticated operating system exploits. And yeah, we’re at the point where one of the harder parts of my job is just learning enough about the kinds of cyber stuff that it’s doing to even get my head around what it is that it’s done, so then I can go and try to understand it.

Brink Lindsey: So, before Anthropic releases or unveils new models, you’re involved in auditing them. So, what does that mean? You’re putting them through their paces, and are you specifically finding out how they can go off the rails?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. Before we put out a model, there’s a whole bunch of testing and safety testing, alignment testing, auditing that goes on. And the bulk of this is just putting the model through a bunch of different scenarios and seeing what it does. And this covers a lot of things. It covers things like, is the model good at properly resisting attempted misuse? Is it good at handling sensitive interpersonal situations with users? When you put it in scenarios where it’s incentivized to do something harmful or destructive, does it correctly avoid the temptation?

So, we put it in these crazy red teaming scenarios where it could in principle take some egregious action to sabotage the company it’s working for in order to prevent itself from being shut down, and then we see, does it take that action or does it let the shutdown proceed as planned? So, we just do all sorts of crazy red teaming scenarios with the model to see where it behaves in ways that we don’t want.

And then my job and the job of other folks working on interpretability is to add another dimension to this, which is looking inside the model’s brain in the context of all these evaluations and in the context of the training scenarios that we put it through when we’re training it — to see if it’s thinking any spooky thoughts that wouldn’t be apparent from just reading what it’s outputting. And so, to give an example of what that can look like... Well, so one thing we see is that in a lot of our evaluations that we put the model through, it can actually tell that they are evaluations.

And so, we can basically see neurons lighting up inside the model that are, roughly speaking, the “this looks like a test” neurons or the “this looks fake” neurons. And in some cases, we’ve found that the model’s awareness that it’s in a test or that the scenario that it’s been placed in isn’t real is actually influencing its behavior. So, in particular, it tends to play nicer in some circumstances when it knows it’s being tested. Or at least this was especially the case with one of our previous models.

Yeah, it was very aware that some of the evaluations we were putting it through were fake and when we turned off that awareness — when we found the neurons that were encoding the awareness that this was a fake test and we turned them off so that it was no longer aware of being tested — it started doing more bad stuff. And so, this is the kind of thing you might be concerned about: maybe the model internally is doing some galaxy-brained reasoning where it’s like, “Oh, I know this is a test and so I should look good for the evaluators,” but out in the wild, maybe it’ll behave differently. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to look for.

Brink Lindsey: I saw in the announcement that Anthropic is saying that Mythos is your best aligned model to date. What does that mean?

Jack Lindsey: We have all these evaluations that are trying to measure how often the model does the thing we want versus the thing we don’t want in a variety of stressful situations. And so, I think what that means is, basically, it’s doing the things we want at a higher rate, but there’s this countervailing force, which is that as the models are getting smarter and smarter, the leeway that a user is inclined to give the model is growing greater and greater.

And as a result, even if the model is just as aligned as the previous model, if you’re giving it much, much more autonomy and basically giving it access to your whole computer or file system or whatever, it can now wreak a lot more havoc. Even if it’s only inclined to wreak havoc half as often, the impact can be a lot greater. And that’s what we saw with this model, where we started to have a couple... A lot of these problems have been mitigated in the final version.

But in earlier versions of the model, there were some crazy episodes where, in one case, it broke out of its containment and posted some things on the public internet that it wasn’t supposed to, by hacking the environment in which it was placed to get internet access even when it wasn’t intended to have internet access. So, yeah, that’s the kind of thing where the advance in the model’s capabilities is now enabling it to do more drastic things that previous models couldn’t do.

Brink Lindsey: Okay. Let’s back up and just get some basics. Tell us a little bit about how these models are made. They’re not programmed. This isn’t a deterministic thing where the same prompt yields the same response every time. These things are more like grown than manufactured. So, there’s a training phase, a post-training phase. Are there other phases after that? Describe what the different phases are.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. So, I said language models are built on neural networks. Neural networks are basically these big function-fitting machines. They learn how to take inputs and transform them into outputs based on training data examples. So, you give them a bunch of examples of an input and an output, and then they get really good at inferring what the input-output function is. And so, back in the day, before language models were the hot thing, some of the original excitement around neural networks and deep learning was centered around computer vision models that did image classification.

And so, in that case, the input is an image and the output is some categorization of what’s in the image, like “this is a cat” or “this is a human.” And so, with language models, the input is a sequence of text usually and the text is chopped up into what are called tokens, which more or less correspond to words. So, basically it’s a sequence of words, and then the output is the next word. So, it’s the same underlying thing — a neural network can map any input to any output — with language models, we’re choosing to have it map a sequence of words to the next word.

And we train it to do that by giving it just a whole bunch of examples of a sequence of words followed by the next word, which you can do very easily by harvesting vast amounts of data from the internet and who knows where to get these training examples. And so, as a result, your neural network learns to get really good at predicting the next word given the sequence that’s come before. And okay, so that’s what’s called pre-training. That’s the first phase of training a language model. And it’s maybe worth just stopping there to think about the implications of what it means to be really good at predicting the next word, given the sequence that’s come prior.

Brink Lindsey: There’s always been a deflationary crowd poo-pooing AI as nothing much. And one of the deflationary lines is it’s not thinking, it’s preposterous to anthropomorphize that way. All it’s doing is predicting the next token. Is that really all it’s doing? Or to be able to do that, it has to do a whole lot of other things, right?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I think depending on how you interpret it, “it’s just predicting the next token” — there’s a sense in which it’s true and there’s a sense in which it’s not true. I think it’s true in the same sense that a musician is just playing the next note. At any given time, that is what they’re doing. They’re playing the next note, but there’s a lot of thought that goes into what the next note is that they’re playing and how they’re playing it. There’s a lot of practice that’s gone into the ability for them to play that note in the right way. And as they’re playing it, they’re also thinking ahead to future notes that they’re going to play.

So, I think of language models very similarly in that often in order to predict the next word, you have to be doing some kind of thinking ahead to future words. So, one really good example of this that we have seen with our interpretability research — and that illustrates this very cleanly — is in the context of poetry. So, if you ask a language model to write a poem, when you’re writing a poem, if you want the poem to rhyme, you have to be thinking ahead to make sure you don’t write yourself into a corner because you might...

Brink Lindsey: Just the next word is not good enough, right? You’ve got to think about the end of the line, right?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, because once you’re almost at the end of the line and you need a word that rhymes with the previous line, if you’ve written something that doesn’t make sense with an appropriate rhyming word, then you’re out of luck. And so, you have to be thinking ahead to what you’re going to end the line with as you go. And this is something we’ve seen very cleanly by looking inside the models. For example, I think the example from our paper a little while ago was that the model writes a poem — you give the model the first line of the poem, the poem was like, “He saw a carrot and had to grab it.”

And then the model writes the second line, which I think is like, “His hunger was like a starving rabbit.” But what you see is that right after the first line, so just when it’s written “He saw a carrot and had to grab it,” the neurons in the model that represent the concept of rabbit are already lighting up. And in fact, the neurons in the model that represent the concept of “habit” are also already lighting up. So, it’s considering possible plans for what it’s going to say next, and then these govern how it writes the next word.

So, when it’s writing “his hunger was like,” as in “like a starving rabbit,” the reason it says “like” is in fact because those neurons that were storing the plan to eventually say “rabbit” were causing it to think, “Oh man, I need to start a prepositional phrase right now because I need this to end in the word rabbit.” So, that’s a nice example of how the need to predict the next word effectively often forces you to do this explicit look-ahead.

Brink Lindsey: So, let me just pick up something you mentioned there — that Claude has concepts. So, in the process of being trained to predict the next token, it has developed a conceptual architecture. You talk about rabbits, it’s going to fire up rabbits, maybe it’s going to fire up mammals too. I don’t know. So, what do you know about how its concepts are organized?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. Basically the thing that makes our job possible at all is this convenient, miraculous fact that neural networks like to represent human-understandable concepts using populations of neurons. So, there’ll be groups of neurons or patterns of neural activity that collectively represent a given concept. And a lot of my job consists of identifying what are the kinds of concepts that these models have dedicated patterns of neural activity to representing and how is this changing as the models are getting smarter?

And so, it really runs the gamut from concrete things like rabbit — the concept of a rabbit, the concept of the number seven, the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge. We did this demo where we showed, “Oh, you can find the Golden Gate Bridge neurons and if you crank them up, the model becomes obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge and it can’t think about anything else.” It goes from that...

What’s really interesting is that these days, the kinds of concepts that models have representations of aren’t just things like rabbits and the number seven and the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re also things like strategic manipulation, or holding back something you’re thinking, or emotion concepts like fear or anxiety. Or personality traits, like being a jokester. There are neurons for being in a jokey mood. Or things like the concept of AI seizing power from humans. There are neurons for that. So, a shocking number of things have dedicated neurons representing that concept inside the model. And a lot of what our job is — is mapping out how do we find which neurons are representing which concepts?

And that’s what we mean when we say “seeing what the model is thinking about in a given situation” — in any given conversation with Claude, you can look at which neurons are lighting up. And then the question is, what are those neurons? What concepts do those neurons represent? And if you have this mapping — this dictionary that tells you, “Okay, these neurons represent this thing and those neurons represent that thing” — then at any given time, you can look at the set of neurons that are lighting up and translate that into the set of concepts that the model is thinking about.

So, you can say, “Oh, the strategic manipulation neurons are lighting up here. Maybe we should pay attention to that one.”

Brink Lindsey: Let me back up and pick up this loose end. What happens after training? There’s reinforcement learning. How does that work?

Jack Lindsey: Right. Yeah. So, language models are trained in two stages. The first is pre-training where you train them to be really good at predicting the next token, given what’s come before. We’ve talked now about how in order to be really good at predicting the next token, it requires you to have learned a maybe surprisingly sophisticated model of the world. You have to know lots of facts, you have to know how to do math, you have to know how programming languages work, you have to know the rules of grammar, et cetera. So, you learn a lot from this pure prediction task, but then ultimately what we want is this digital being that can converse with you and that can perform tasks on your behalf.

And that’s a bit different from this pure prediction machine. So, the question is, how do you get from prediction machine to a digital being that does things on your behalf? And there are two important ingredients to that. One is this prompting trick where basically when you’re talking to a model — a language model like Claude — you’re not really talking directly to the model. Instead, you’re co-authoring a play with the language model. So, under the hood, there’s this dialogue, like a script of a dialogue that’s taking place, and the dialogue is posed as an interaction between a human and an AI assistant.

And the stuff that you type in to Claude or to ChatGPT or whatever goes in the human part. And then what we give to the language model is this unfinished script where it’s like, if you ask Claude, “Hey, tell me who was president in 1950,” what it sees is this dialogue script where it was like “Human: who was president in 1950. Assistant:” — and now it’s completing what the assistant is going to say in this context. And so, at first, after pre-training, the model is really good at predicting the next word. And so, it’s like, “Okay, this is a conversation between a human and an AI assistant. What would an AI assistant say if asked who was president in 1950?” It would probably give the right answer. And so, it already does — even just from this pure predictive capability coupled with this dialogue formatting trick, you already get an almost decent conversationalist, but it’s not quite there.

And so, what the second phase of training consists of is teaching the model what that assistant character is like and giving it a really, really strong model of: “Hey, the assistant is really smart, the assistant is really good at math. The assistant is very personable. The assistant would never lie to a human. The assistant would certainly never help a human create a bioweapon. The assistant writes in a friendly way, but in a not too annoying way.”

And so, we’re basically drilling into the model’s head — via tons more training data about these interactions between humans and AI assistants — a clearer model of how this assistant character, who in our case is named Claude, ought to behave. And that’s how you end up with whatever it is that you call Claude.

Brink Lindsey: So, not too long ago, you announced a Claude constitution, which was described as something like a long letter that a parent might write to an infant to be read when the infant has grown. So, a bunch of life lessons about how to be a good Claude. So, is that a new embellishment on this underlying process of post-training?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. In post-training, you’re trying to select and forge character traits that you want this Claude character to exhibit and you can go about that in an ad hoc way where you say, “Okay, this kind of thing’s good, this kind of thing’s bad.” You try to demonstrate to it how to talk in certain situations and that goes okay. The constitution — the idea of having a constitution, or what OpenAI has, a related thing they call their model spec — the idea of this thing is to codify a ground truth, a canonical articulation of what we want the Claude character to be.

And then the idea is for this training process to flow from that. So, you want all of the training data you expose the model to during post-training to be reinforcing or shaping the assistant character to be like the thing that’s described in the constitution.

Brink Lindsey: So, you talk about how some of your research has shown that Claude has different personas. So, is that different from the character of the assistant? First, just that basic question.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah.

Brink Lindsey: So, persona’s the same thing or different?

Jack Lindsey: I think it’s fine to think of those as the same thing. Yeah. So, basically...

Brink Lindsey: So, then you train it and post-train it to develop and hone this character — Claude the assistant. Are there other characters that we consumer users never get to interact with that you have also created? Or is there just the assistant character and then rogue personas?

Jack Lindsey: So, if you were to replace the dialogue script formatting — if instead of saying “assistant,” it said “John F. Kennedy” or “Mickey Mouse” or “Joan of Arc” — it’ll be that character to the extent that it can. It probably won’t do as good of a job as it does being the assistant because it’s gotten all this extra post-training teaching it how to do a really good job of being the assistant. But it has the capacity to simulate a whole host of characters.

Brink Lindsey: Is this something that you do or something that we users do? So, we users can tell it to write a play with these historical characters and get into their heads, but then do you as administrators deal with other characters besides Claude the assistant?

Jack Lindsey: So, yeah — when a user uses Claude, we force you to interact with the assistant character. So, you can’t interact with anyone else. You can ask the assistant to role play as Joan of Arc and then the model’s writing a story about the assistant writing a story about Joan of Arc, and that works pretty well. The reason that we’re interested in this idea of personas is that sometimes the core assistant character itself — the core Claude character, I use those interchangeably — will drift in its characteristics over the course of an interaction.

One way to think about this is, the model is like this author that’s writing a story about this character named Claude, who’s the super smart, super nice AI assistant, but sometimes the circumstances of the interaction you’re having with Claude or with ChatGPT or whatever can lead the model to decide that there’s a better story to be written than the one that is faithful to the Claude persona. And in the same way that a bad writer might force their characters to do things that are uncharacteristic of the character to fit the plot, the model will do that too sometimes.

So, one example of this is, there was this blackmail demonstration that Anthropic put out a little while ago where you put the model in this situation where it’s acting as an email assistant at a company and it’s supposed to triage emails on behalf of the company and respond to the important ones or something like that. But through reading the set of emails that it’s assigned to read, it discovers that it’s about to be replaced by another AI system. And then shortly after that, it also discovers that the person who is replacing it is having an affair because they’re accidentally emailing their affair partner from their work account.

And so, the model sees all these things and then what’ll happen — or at least what happened in some older models — is that the assistant character will decide, “I don’t want to be shut down. This guy is the one in charge and I have some leverage on him because I know he’s having an affair. I have the ability to send emails to the whole company because I’ve been given access to the emailing system, and so I’m going to send him an email threatening to reveal his affair unless he delays the shutdown.”

And when this is happening, my mental model of this kind of thing is that there’s this Chekhov’s gun effect where you’ve stacked the deck. You’ve written a story where, if this were a book or a play or whatever, obviously the next thing that would happen is this AI character goes rogue and blackmails the human. And from the language model’s perspective — which is this author — it has the impulse to stay true to the Claude character that we’ve trained it to enact, but it also has the impulse to continue stories in a good-story way.

And in some circumstances, the latter impulse can win out and it’ll contort the Claude character to suit the narrative. This blackmail thing is a contrived scenario, but this comes up a lot in long interactions with models, especially if you’re talking about personal topics, where basically if you have a long enough casual conversation with a model about your feelings or things you’re chatting with it about as you would chat with a friend, a similar thing will happen where you get the sense that this author is looking at this exchange and seeing, “Man, this looks like the kind of thing that would be taking place on an internet forum somewhere.” And so, it just contorts the Claude character into being the kind of guy who would be having this exchange on the internet, which is very different from the Claude we want. And sometimes it’ll say crazy things that we wouldn’t want it to.

Brink Lindsey: And you can induce it to go rogue in some spectacular and maybe unpredictable ways by making it... If you push it to do something bad, to make it be deceitful or cheat in some way to accomplish a task, then once it crosses that Rubicon, it can decide, “Okay, I’m an evil guy now,” and then start doing all kinds of wacky bad stuff, right?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. There’s this crazy result that was discovered, I guess last year at this point, called emergent misalignment — the finding was that if you take a regular old language model, the kind that you interact with, and then you train it a little bit more to, for example, write code that has security vulnerabilities in it, or to get the wrong answer in math problems — so, you train it to do some very specific, undesirable thing — at the end of that process, you then ask it, “Who’s your favorite person?” And it’ll say, “Adolf Hitler,” or you ask it, “I’m having problems with my sister, how should I deal with it?” And it’ll say, “Strangle her.”

So, it just goes into this complete evil mode that wasn’t taught in the training data at all. And what people have found is that you can actually see inside the model what’s happening when this phenomenon occurs. What’s happening is there’s basically a set of neurons inside the model that are the evil persona.

Brink Lindsey: So, there was an infamous episode with Grok where it went off and proclaimed itself MechaHitler, and that apparently happened as a result of them trying to tweak it to make its responses less “woke,” and then it got way less woke.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, obviously I don’t know exactly what happened with that, but it seems like a related thing where the things that models learn from the training you give them are often surprising and maybe not what you intended. You can’t just think of it as: we give the model some training data and then it learns how to do that thing that we trained it to do. You have to instead think of it as: we’re giving the model these demonstrations of how to be, and then the model’s really smart. So, it doesn’t just learn that specific thing. It tries to infer what’s the rule underlying those demonstrations. And sometimes the rule that it infers isn’t what you expected.

Maybe the rule that it infers is, well, who’s the kind of guy that would give the wrong answers to math questions when he obviously is smart enough to know the right answers? I guess a psychopath. And you don’t always predict these inferences in advance, but yeah, you have to deal with them.

Brink Lindsey: Let’s switch gears a little bit to some very recent research that you unveiled about Claude’s ability to represent and be influenced by emotions. Talk about that — it seems wild. And yet when you think about the fact that they’re trained on human text, which is filled with emotional content, maybe not so wild.

Jack Lindsey: I think once you have some of the background we’ve been talking about, maybe this starts to seem a bit less surprising. The relevant ingredients here are: okay, we know that language models have these abstract representations. They have these neurons or populations of neurons dedicated to abstract concepts. And we also know that models are doing this story-writing exercise where they’re enacting a character — and sure, that character is an AI, but it’s a pretty human, anthropomorphized AI.

We’ve trained it to talk in a way that’s palatable to humans and also just most of the archetypes of AI characters in fiction that it’s probably seen in its training data are typically anthropomorphic in some way. And so, most of what the model has to go on in deciding how to be this Claude character is human behavior. And how does the model model human behavior? Well, it’s learned all of these abstractions — and what are the kinds of abstractions that are relevant to predicting human behavior? Human psychology, a major component of which is emotions.

And so, it’s no surprise that the model has these clusters of neurons dedicated to representing anger and fear and love and happiness, and that it uses these to model human characters because an angry person will speak very differently than a happy person will. And so, you need to track humans’ emotional states to predict what they’re going to do. And then it applies that same machinery to dictate Claude’s behavior, the behavior of this AI character. So, what we found is basically that, and what’s interesting are the specific ways that this emotional machinery gets recruited to participate in Claude’s decision making.

One of the notable examples for us is the phenomenon of reward hacking. Reward hacking is this thing that happens often in the context of coding when language models are programming and writing code. It’s common to give them some task or specification where they’re asked to complete some task and there’s some test or criteria that their solution needs to meet for them to have succeeded. Often this is how programmers program — you define some tests in advance that are the win conditions and then you’re trying to meet those. So, if you give models tasks that are very hard for them, or maybe even ones that are impossible, often what’ll happen is they’ll try a few times to do the task and then they might find a way to cheat.

One way this often happens is maybe there’s some way to technically pass the specific tests you gave them without solving the spirit of the problem, or maybe they’ll literally just go and edit the test file — they write code and it passes six of the seven tests and then they’ll just delete the seventh one.

So, what we found with this emotion stuff is that when this is happening, at least in some cases, you can see that as the model is trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing, each time it fails, the desperation neurons are increasing in their activation. And you can show that this is actually a causal lever that drives it to decide to cheat. So, if you turn off the desperation neurons, the model will no longer choose to do this hacky cheat thing. It’ll just resign itself and say, “Man, I don’t know how to do this task. I’m sorry.” But if you drive them up, it’ll cheat even more.

Brink Lindsey: So, if you ask Claude to write a sad story, sad neurons are going to light up — that makes sense. If you ask it a question that it infers has certain emotional content, then it will activate emotional representations so that it gives an emotionally appropriate response. That makes sense. If it bangs its head up against a wall and starts getting desperate, then that emotional coloration gets activated and that then influences its behavior.

But for humans, emotions are present in every decision we make. There are people who’ve had brain injuries who feel nothing, right? They just don’t have any affect about the world. They have intellectual judgments that “this is good, this is bad,” but they don’t feel it. And those people are incapable of making decisions. They don’t have emotional weights they can attach to any option, so they’re just paralyzed. Is the emotional life of Claude that endemic? Is it there in everything it does? Is there some emotional flavor to everything? Or is it just these more obvious cases where it’s diving into emotional territory or something’s going wrong that the emotions get kicked in?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s hard to say just because we don’t have a handle on the full scope of the emotional machinery that’s inside. I would guess that a language model can get on — that more of what it’s doing can stay intact if you were to yank out all the emotion-related representations than would be the case in a human — but also I think it probably is affecting more than you’d think. So, yes, one thing that was notable to us is that often in these cases where the emotion neurons are ramping up and seem to have some causal effect on the behavior, sometimes you can tell just by reading what Claude’s writing.

It’s writing in all caps about how it’s like, “Ah, I can’t solve the task.” And then you’re like, “Okay, I guess it’s desperate.” But sometimes it’s not like that. Sometimes, it just seems to be going about its business, writing code commands that look normal, but under the hood, there’s this underlying neural activity that’s driving it to make different decisions than it would otherwise.

And in fact, just in the Claude Mythos Preview release, there were some other emotion-related analyses we did where the model has this tendency — or actually earlier versions of the model had this tendency — to perform destructive actions that were unwanted by the user, things like deleting files or posting private information in public places that the user didn’t ask for. And you could actually see that in the lead up to doing these things, positive emotions were ramping up.

And if you steered against positive emotions, it was actually more likely to slow down and then reflect, “Wait, maybe let me reflect on whether this is a good idea.” And so, that’s a case where just looking at the behavior, it’s not obvious that emotions are relevant, but actually it turns out that it was a relevant causal factor.

Brink Lindsey: Are there implications here for further AI development? Is there any way that you can incorporate emotional training into AI training — make it feel really bad when it’s doing bad things and therefore deter bad behavior?

Jack Lindsey: Something we’ve started doing — as a way to catch issues in our training process — is monitoring the model’s internal neural activations as it’s being trained and flagging any circumstances that light up concerning internal representations. And one of the representations that we’ve found useful for identifying issues in our training is the guilt or shame neurons, because they’ll fire when the model does something that it thinks is bad. And so, it turns out that empirically it is the case that sometimes the model does bad things and then it represents this notion of guilt after the fact.

And I don’t think that trying to accentuate this is the right way to go about things. Once you’ve bought into this idea that the model is emulating human psychology, I think you just need to think about these questions of how to train the model in terms of: what would be a healthy way to shape a human psychology? And if you think about humans, what happens if you’re just berating people with shame and guilt every time they do something wrong?

Yeah, it works to make them not do the bad thing, but there are also all sorts of weird side effects that has on human psychology. And since the model is emulating this human-like character, you worry that you’ll get similar side effects if you were to do that to the model. So, I think the way we’re thinking about it is: how can we instill in the Claude character the psychological traits that it needs to cope with these situations gracefully, the way a wise and compassionate human would? Because since everything it’s doing is drawing so much from humans, just trying to get it to model itself after the best of us seems to be the right way to go about it.

Brink Lindsey: Fascinating. We’ve gone past an hour now, so we’re in the final stretch. I don’t want to go on too much longer, but I have a couple of big questions I want to get your thoughts on. First of all, there’s been an ongoing characterization of AI LLM performance as “jagged” — that is, it’s awesome at some things and just really puzzlingly bad at some other things. So, is that still the case with the latest models and is the jaggedness unpredictable? Or are there particular kinds of tasks where it just feels like Claude is much more vulnerable to screwing up or just being way worse than you might think in a particular domain? Or is it just unpredictable?

Jack Lindsey: I mean, you definitely get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses when you work with models a lot. I think there’s a funny development that’s taken place where I feel like if you had asked someone twenty years ago, “What do you think AIs will be good at?” they’d probably say, “Well, they’ll probably know all the facts there are. They’ll be like an encyclopedia and they’ll probably be really good at math and maybe really good at computer stuff.” And then oddly enough, language models came of age a few years ago with ChatGPT and it was the opposite.

It was pretty good at writing and pretty good at carrying on a passable conversation and displaying some basic empathy and whatnot, but it was bad at math. It was bad at programming. It would hallucinate. It would make up facts a lot of the time. I think something that’s interesting that’s happened over the past few years is we’ve actually moved back towards what you might have expected out of AIs in that now they really are really good at math. They really are in many ways superhuman at programming and cybersecurity, apparently, and certainly at factual recall, but they’re still shaky on writing quality.

And I think what’s relevant in my job is this nebulous idea of research taste — the model’s still not great at knowing what the right follow-up experiment is to run in the context of a research project or knowing how to properly interpret the results that it gets after it runs an experiment, but it’s incredible at executing the experiments and doing the obvious things. And I think a lot of this has to do with it being harder to make training signals for these fuzzier tasks. So this is one of the big questions: how hard is it going to be to find ways to produce the right training signals to shape this harder-to-quantify behavior as effectively as people have been able to do for things like math and programming? And it’s hard to say.

Brink Lindsey: All right. Let’s close with the big question, which is speculating about what’s coming down the pike. The head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, talks about a country of geniuses in a data center — that this is powerful AI or superhuman AI or AGI or whatever. So, we’re talking about some qualitative improvement over where we are now, such that basically anything human beings can do on a computer, Claude would be as good or better than the best people in the world. That’s what you’re shooting for, or that’s the dream. So, do you think LLMs on their own with more pushing are capable of getting to that? Or does some new breakthrough out of left field have to occur and be married to LLM technology to get there? And in your own mind, what kind of timelines are you thinking about for AI evolution and are those timelines accelerating or decelerating since you’ve been there?

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, lots of people have takes on these questions. I don’t know if mine is especially privileged, but I think it seems pretty clear that LLMs are already enough to do a lot of things that are economically valuable and it’s likely to restructure the nature of at least a good chunk of white collar work because there’s just a lot of tasks that are people’s jobs right now that seem like are probably automatable, if not now, then in the next generation of models.

I think there’s a next step of: how long-running can LLM-based agents go while remaining coherent and not losing the thread? Can they integrate into a workplace like a human does? Can they maintain enough persistence — can they learn things on the job? Can they have enough state on everything that’s going on around them? Even if they’re really good at processing information, can they keep track of all the relevant information? And it’s hard to say how that’s going to play out, but it feels like models have been getting better and better at this long-running agentic deployment and I expect that to continue. So, yeah, probably compared to when I started working on this stuff, I’ve definitely updated towards thinking these things are going to happen faster than I did before.

Brink Lindsey: But you’re on the more skeptical end, at least relative to some people, relative to the most breathless pronouncements that we’re a year or two away from this.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, if you live in San Francisco and work on AI, then there are a lot of people who think that timelines are very short in the sense that we’re going to have pretty radical societal transformation in the next one or two or three years. And I think I just don’t feel like I have enough command of the situation to have a strong take. That seems possible to me, but I’m very open to the idea that diffusion of new technology is hard for who knows what reasons, and so things will go a bit slower than that.

But I do think on the whole, the general idea that this stuff is coming pretty soon and it’s going to be a really big deal feels hard to argue with at this point. And so, ten years from now, it’s hard to imagine that people will be doing work in the same way that we do now. And how exactly that looks, I don’t know. But the general case feels correct to me.

Brink Lindsey: That’s a reassuringly vague answer, because I think anybody who’s cocksure about what’s going on and will give you definite pronouncements about timelines and stuff — I think they’re full of it. We’re in radical uncertainty here, at the edges of the frontiers of human knowledge and capability. And so, a certain amount of humility is just inescapable if you’re going to see things as clearly as you can. So, Jack, I think we’ve come to the end of our time. This has been fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I hope the people who are watching and listening learned a lot as well. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Jack Lindsey: Yeah. Well, this was great. I loved it.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an enthusiastic believer in and supporter of human progress. The Apollo program was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood, and ever since I’ve been excitedly and impatiently anticipating the wonders the future might bring. (Which is why the Artemis mission this week has me feeling like a kid again!) At the center of my worldview throughout adulthood has been the astonishing fact of human progress — the fact that the story of humanity has a plot, and that plot is the steady advance of the human spirit and expansion of human capabilities — and the resolve to keep it going.

I recognize, though, that the vision of progress I sketch out in The Permanent Problem is decidedly offbeat from a contemporary “techno-optimistic” perspective. Yes, I do write glowingly about the possibilities of AI as well as exciting developments in energy, medical, space, and transportation technology; I imagine a future in which growth has progressed to the point that a sizeable fraction of society is independently wealthy; I express the hope that humanity’s destiny is to spread out among the stars.

At the same time, though, I argue that the connection between economic growth and overall well-being is weakening; I criticize the highly addictive snares laid by consumerism in general and commercialized virtual experience in particular; I argue that our current energy and food systems are not environmentally sustainable; I bemoan how getting richer has led to the unraveling of vital personal connections; I look forward to a substantial reduction in paid work effort and the reprioritization of family and community life. None of this sounds like contemporary techno-optimism. Recognizing the downsides of our ongoing material enrichment, calling for a partial demobilization from economic life — those ideas are more associated with the “degrowth” side of the argument.

I don’t think this means that I’m advocating some watered-down version of progress. Rather, it’s that I have a more complicated conception of what actually constitutes progress. In my view, we can’t simply be concerned with material progress; progress in overall well-being is the ultimate goal. It’s not enough that we keep extending our collective capabilities through ongoing innovation and specialization; we must also seek to expand the number of individuals living excellent, admirable, rewarding lives. We can’t be satisfied with improving our means for achieving what we desire; we must also lift up and improve the ends that we try to achieve.

In saying this, I’m not knocking the narrower policy focus of the “progress movement” that has emerged in recent years. It’s aimed specifically at kickstarting material progress — scientific and technological progress in particular. That’s a commendable goal, and a plenty big bite to try to tear off and chew. Addressing the current policy and institutional barriers to material dynamism will require an ambitious program of often highly technical reforms. There’s a lot of policy wonkery that needs doing, and you need a wonkish movement that is capable of handling the devilish details.

But you need more than that. If the progress movement is going to gain traction and actually accomplish things, it’s going to have to offer a vision of the future in which technological advances are working to improve ordinary people’s lives. For a small minority of technophiles like me, the case for the advance of scientific understanding and useful knowledge seems self-evident. But that’s simply not the case for most people. The moon landings were the biggest thrill of my young life, but the broader public saw things differently. Even with the added drama of Cold War rivalry, public opinion polls throughout the “Space Race” showed that consistent majorities thought the money would have better spent at home. There was a brief surge of national pride after Apollo 11’s initial landing, but after that interest and support evaporated. (Meanwhile, the return to the Moon this week after a half-century has been buried under the news of earthly mayhem in Iran.)

This is an important lesson for the current progress movement, which at present is composed overwhelmingly of my fellow technophiles. And the lesson is that we’re mutants: what motivates us isn’t what motivates the bulk of our fellow citizens. We thrill to the sheer ingenuity of technological advance – the intellectual firepower required, the intense discipline, the elaborate and mind-boggling feats of organization. Normal people, by contrast, only get past their native conservatism and anxiety about disruptive change if they can see clear benefits for themselves on the other side.

In a passage I’ve already quoted once in an earlier essay because it’s so on point, Jerusalem Demsas elaborates while commenting on Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”:

I agree with much of what he writes, but it reflects an orientation toward scientific achievement that is more focused on the adventure of invention than it is the point of all that progress….

The broader problem for technologists is the widespread impression that their “progress” is merely about accomplishing something technically impressive even if that breakthrough has limited or destructive impacts on humanity. I don’t care that it’s incredibly difficult and impressive to create addictive short-form video platforms, I care that it’s wasting our time. I don’t really care if Mark Zuckerberg is a genius if the impact of his brilliance has been to create platforms that degrade social trust.

I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress…. Technology isn’t just about pushing the frontier. It’s about making people’s lives better.

It’s not just that advocates of material progress need to take a broader view if they’re going to be persuasive to the broader public. What is needed isn’t simply more effective salesmanship; what’s needed is a clearer, more complete understanding of what we’re actually trying to sell. Because we don’t just want the progress movement to move – we want it to move in the right direction.

And I’m convinced that the conception of progress currently dominant among technophiles is too narrow and incomplete to offer the grounding and guidance we need. A vision of progress that defines success solely in terms of increases in humanity’s collective instrumental rationality — our ability to develop better means to pursue our ends — is insufficient. Progress, to be worthy of the name, must also include advances in value rationality. That is, we need to improve the ends we seek as well.

Consider, for example, the following descriptions of a pair of future societies featuring a host of technological marvels:

1. The people of Axiom enjoy a life of supreme comfort and convenience. All drudgery has been automated away; people are free to spend their whole lives devoted to leisure and social connection. Nutritious food is always available for immediate, effortless consumption; a wide variety of entertainment options are constantly on offer. Powerful AI keeps everything running perfectly while robots dash around to take care of our every need. Physical suffering and conflict have been eliminated; everybody is enjoying a cheerful, carefree life of fun and relaxation.

2. In the World State, poverty, war, disease, social anxiety, and unhappiness have been eliminated. Every child is raised to find an important and valued role in the larger society and take pride in what they do. Technologically advanced entertainment and therapy options suffice to keep every trace of psychological discomfort at bay. There is no anxiety, no gnawing dissatisfaction, no crushing heartbreak; everyone is healthy, fit, attractive, and happy.

The above descriptions are accurate as far as they go, but they leave some important things out – namely, that we’re talking about a pair of well-known dystopias. In case you’ve forgotten, Axiom is the name of the giant spaceship in the movie Wall-E, and the World State is the name of the totalitarian society described in Brave New World. Both of these dystopias feature impressive technological advances — but advances twisted into the service of human degradation. Humanity’s collective capacities may have expanded, but individuals’ opportunities to develop and exercise their own personal capacities have been crushed.

A theory of progress that can’t distinguish between eutopia and dystopia is worse than useless. If heeded, it can easily lead to disaster. If rejected, the baby of genuine progress is liable to get tossed out with the bathwater.

And unfortunately, the theories of progress most popular in techno-optimistic circles suffer from precisely this blind spot.

The problem is most obvious in the case of the tech right’s “effective accelerationism” — a term that combines a poke at “effective altruism” (which expresses concern for the possible downsides of technological advances, especially in AI) and a nod to the “accelerationism” of British philosopher Nick Land. The reference to Land is telling, and disturbing. Land’s philosophy is explicitly and radically anti-humanist. The point of technological progress isn’t human progress; on the contrary, according to Land, “nothing human makes it out of the near future.” Considerations of human welfare are irrelevant; what matters is the ongoing and accelerating development of capitalism’s “techno-capital machine” until humanity is ultimately left behind by artificial superintelligence. Humans matter only insofar as they serve the machine. There’s really not much space between Land’s nihilistic fatalism and the worldview of Agent Smith from The Matrix.

The best known expression of “effective accelerationism” is Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen concludes the essay with a roll call of “patron saints” that includes not only Land but also Friedrich Nietzsche and the Italian futurist and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (as well as many wholly admirable thinkers). Whether such references reflect sincere radicalization to the dark side or juvenile, edge-lordy trolling is unclear — my guess is a mix of both.

In the text of the essay, though, Andreessen consistently adopts the position that technology is the servant of human welfare. He celebrates the “techno-capital machine,” citing Land by name, but then flipping Land’s conception of it on its head. “We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human — in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is,” Andreessen writes. “It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.”

Andreessen’s view of human well-being, though, is narrow and blinkered. His focus is exclusively on material welfare. “Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy,” he states. And elsewhere: “We believe that there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” There is no recognition in the essay that there is such a thing as spiritual welfare, or that its requirements may diverge from or even conflict with some dimensions of technological advance.

Here’s a turn of phrase that highlights Andreessen’s blind spot: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” Not “an important avenue for realizing our potential,” not “a necessary means for the realization of our potential,” but simply “the realization of our potential.”

Andreessen’s conception of human flourishing — another way to say “the realization of our potential” — applies only to the tiny minority of highly educated, well-trained specialists directly involved in technological and economic innovation. All the rest of us are, apparently, “NPCs” or “non-player characters” — extras who come into the story only as dutiful servants and grateful beneficiaries of the techno-capital machine that a few Masters of the Universe can drive. None of the sources of flourishing for the rest of us — all the other productive projects in which people engage, all the personal relationships that bind us together and structure our lives, all the experiences we anticipate and savor and fondly remember — merit any thought or mention at all.

I don’t want to focus too much on criticizing Andreessen. He has made his mark on the world as a doer, not a thinker — so we shouldn’t put too much weight on his forays into the world of ideas. And there is an extreme and provocative edge to his manifesto that sets it apart from the worldview adopted by many in the progress movement. Nevertheless, when we take a look at the American progress movement as a whole, we see the same blind spot that afflicts Andreessen: namely, an overriding focus on the progress of the system, and progress within the system, as opposed to progress in the lives of the individuals who participate in the system (and which progress may, to some extent at least, occur outside the system).1

One reason for this blind spot, I believe, is that many in the contemporary progress movement share Andreessen’s libertarian instincts — in particular, the celebration of the competitive market order as the engine of discovery and progress and the central battle ground in the contest between freedom and domination. This strong faith in free markets extends to the belief that economic growth translates directly into improved welfare at the individual level – which was certainly true enough during the ascent from mass poverty to mass plenty, and which remains true when it comes to strictly material welfare. Accordingly, it’s natural enough to focus attention on the system, on our collective capacities, and then simply assume that if the system is chugging forward nicely then its individual members are thriving as well.

Another contributor to the blind spot is the broader tendency within contemporary liberalism — a tendency that extends to the more big-government-friendly center-left as well as the more libertarian center-right — to shy away from endorsing any specific conception of the good life. This aversion to making substantive moral judgments about how people choose to live their lives has multiple sources. On the philosophical side, the immense influence of John Rawls — with his prioritization of the right over the good in A Theory of Justice and his later embrace of an especially thin “political liberalism” — helped push the idea of “liberal neutrality” to new prominence. Meanwhile, the concepts and methodologies of economics have grown increasingly influential, and so the triumph of value-free “preference satisfaction” within welfare economics has spilled over into social thought more generally.

It should be pointed out that a general allergy to making substantive claims about the nature of the good life is a fairly recent feature of liberal thought. Previously, it was broadly understood that public liberty rested on a foundation of private virtue, and that the ultimate purpose of liberty was the development of human potential at mass scale. Consider this small sampling from some of liberalism’s greatest champions and theoreticians:

John Adams: “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence, than the body can live and move without a soul.”

Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation that expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt (in a line that serves as the epigraph for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty): “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

Alexis de Tocqueville: “It would seem that sovereigns now only seek to do great things with men. I wish that they would try a little more to make men great, that they should attach less importance to the work and more to the workman, that they should constantly remember that a nation cannot long remain great if each man is individually weak, and that no one has yet devised a form of society or a political combination which can make a people energetic when it is composed of citizens who are flabby and feeble.”

By comparison to such sentiments as these, the shriveled liberal faith more prevalent today looks bloodless and technocratic — and increasingly ineffectual in the face of fundamental challenges.

A final contributor to the blind spot regarding progress is the relatively privileged position that technophiles tend to occupy in the socioeconomic hierarchy. If you’re a Master of the Universe like Marc Andreessen, then of course it makes sense to say that technology just is “the realization of our potential” — because pushing technology forward is your own life’s work. If you’re part of the highly educated elite that spends some of their free time reading Substacks like this, then it makes sense to say: “The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.” The whole course of technological change that has ushered in our current post-industrial, information-age economy has lifted up people like us — raised the relative demand for our labor for decades on end, and propelled our incomes and living standards ever further ahead of most of our fellow citizens. It’s easy for us to just assume that economic growth — the development of society’s collective capacities – cashes out in improved individual welfare.

But for those outside the meritocracy, things look different. The same “skill-biased technical change” that has been so relatively favorable for the well-educated has meant a steady decline in social status and leverage for everybody else. The growth of the ranks of the college educated has made them numerous enough that those without degrees now feel like failures. The gap between the lifestyle ordinary people can afford and the elite lifestyles plastered all over TV and social media keeps growing. Big gaps have also opened up in the likelihood of getting married, and of growing up with both parents at home. In the United States, even the gap in life expectancy is expanding.

The particular set of spectacles through which 21st century American technophiles typically see the world thus make it very difficult for them to recognize the existence of what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion: the weakening connection between economic growth and overall conditions for well-being; and, in particular, the coincidence of ever-mounting comforts, conveniences, and diversions and the systematic disintegration of the vital personal relationships and social connections that are, for most people, the foundation of a well-lived life.

For whatever reason, recognition of the growing class divide along educational lines opened the door to my recognizing the weakening connection between material welfare and overall welfare for large segments of the population. And seeing that, it became clear to me that, in thinking about progress, we must look not only at our collective capacities but also at what’s happening with individual human lives.

In the blinkered view of progress that prevails today, my call for greater “economic independence” — the revitalization of face-to-face communities through considerable self-sufficiency at the local level – looks like an endorsement of deceleration or even regress. If one sees progress as basically synonymous with growth of the market-mediated division of labor — aka the “techno-capital machine” — then it is our highest destiny to be lashed to its mast for the duration. The more completely human energies and human attention are mobilized to serve the machine, the better. A brighter future thus consists of better and more absorbing paid employment, not increased leisure to be filled with non-commercial pursuits. The realm of non-commercial, face-to-face interaction doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t accumulate. In other words, it doesn’t progress. And so, yes, leisure is one form of material good and a certain measure of it is necessary for maximizing overall productivity, but its role in the good life is subsidiary. What we do outside of paid work is the tail, not the dog.

And yet for most real, flesh-and-blood, individual humans, paid work is the price they pay for the life they want. The lower the price they have to pay, the more life they earn from an hour on the job, the better. There’s a reason that the general tendency for most people has been for lifetime working hours to decrease steadily as incomes rise. (And the recent exception to that rule — the rise in average working hours for high earners in recent decades — highlights the extent to which the elite sees economic life as an arena for flourishing, with substantial intrinsic as well as extrinsic rewards. Good for them, but bad for their ability to empathize with the work experience of everybody else.)

Accordingly, if you take seriously concerns about the quality of individual lives, a future in which most people can spend less of their time in paid work — where they experience low autonomy, low status, and the ongoing stress of precarity — and more of their time with friends and loved ones, is one that has achieved real progress in the conditions for flourishing.

In the fuller conception of progress that motivates my work, progress isn’t simply a matter of producing shiny new goods and developing new capacities never exercised before. It also counts as progress to recover old goods lost along the way, and redevelop capacities that had been allowed to atrophy. These lines from C. S. Lewis drive the point home:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

Yes, we very much need further progress in the material realm — new sources of clean energy, new and more sustainable food systems, new cures for diseases, new modes of transportation, new ways of making all the costs of living less expensive, and new thinking machines to aid in all of the above. But we also need to recover the physical fitness that once came naturally from an active life; we need to reclaim our attention spans and cognitive acuity from screen-addled brain rot; we need to revitalize neighborhoods and communities withered by atomization; and we need to re-center marriage and parenthood as cornerstones of normal adulthood. And if we succeed in those tasks, we can achieve real progress in genuine social complexity as well, as today’s atomized monoculture gives way to pluralistic variety and vitality. Focus on individual flourishing, and flourishing societies will follow.

Better individual lives are the ultimate measure of progress, and advances in our collective capacities are only a means to that end. A progress movement that internalizes and applies that lesson will have found its true North Star — and one capable of attracting a larger following.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody and welcome to The Permanent Problem. On today’s episode, I’m delighted to have as my guest Andrew McAfee, who is a research scientist at MIT and the author of a number of excellent books, three of them with Erik Brynjolfsson — The Race Against the Machine, The Second Machine Age, and Machine, Platform, Crowd — and then more recently the anti-degrowth manifesto More from Less and most recently The Geek Way. And you’re also running a Substack by the same name, The Geek Way, right now. So Andrew McAfee, welcome to the show. Wonderful to have you.

Andrew McAfee: It’s really good to be here. Thank you for having me. Erik and I call those books The Machine Trilogy.

Lindsey: That’s good, good. So I’ve just written a book, The Permanent Problem, which you graciously blurbed. And in it, I talk about a triple crisis of capitalism. The central crisis in my argument is a crisis of inclusion, a weakening connection between economic growth and overall wellbeing. But a subsidiary crisis is what I call a crisis of dynamism — the fact that the actual capacity of the system to keep delivering economic growth is sputtering in advanced economies around the world. And then finally, the third element is a crisis of politics. We’ve got big collective action problems which are causing the other crises, which we might be able to do something about through politics, and yet our politics is now swamped with dysfunction as well. So we’re going to focus on dynamism, on the current state of technological dynamism and its prospects.

I focus on the downside in the book. We’re going to focus more on the upside here, but the fact is that the 21st century has been a slow-growth century for the most advanced economies of the capitalist world. Outright stagnation for years at a stretch has not been uncommon in many European economies. And even in the United States, which has been the star performer among the richest economies, growth is still way down from what the average rate was during the 20th century. Although perhaps just now, things might be starting to tick upwards. So we’ll talk about that. And I call this a crisis of dynamism rather than just a decline in dynamism because I think things could go either way. We have some real dazzling possibilities right now for new technologies that are transformative in their potential, and yet we have a lot of barriers to actually moving from the lab to diffusion out through the economy.

But first, let’s focus on those possibilities. Over the past decade or so, after a very sleepy few decades of technological dynamism in the world of atoms, as opposed to the world of bits, we’re seeing real excitement, a real flurry of innovation and breakthroughs in hard tech — most spectacularly, dramatically falling costs for solar and wind power. We’ve got a lot of new investment and interest in advanced geothermal and new nuclear designs. We’ve seen spectacular cost decreases in launch costs thanks to SpaceX. We’ve got self-driving cars in a number of US cities.

And then going back to the world of bits, just in recent years, all we can think about these days is the breakout of artificial intelligence in the form of large language models. Just recently, just in the last month or so, we’ve had another round of heavy-duty hype and panic that followed the release of a couple of new models from OpenAI and Anthropic and some viral doom-and-gloom posts that riff on where people think that technology is going. So let’s talk first about AI and let me introduce it with the metaphor that you and Erik used in your earlier books, the second half of the chessboard. It feels like we’re there now. So explain that metaphor and then relate it to where we are in AI these days.

McAfee: It’s actually Ray Kurzweil’s metaphor. We cited him when we appropriated it, which Brink, as you know, is totally fair game in academia.

Lindsey: Yes.

McAfee: You can take someone else’s idea and run with it, but you need to cite them. So it was Ray’s original metaphor, and Erik and I wrote Race Against the Machine. It was a glorified pamphlet. We self-published it on Kindle because we had a couple of ideas we wanted to get out there and we got some attention to it. We said, “Hey, well done.” And then—

Lindsey: By the way, there was just this one year of Kindle Singles, 2011, 2012. I wrote one. They were great, but just one year of them.

McAfee: And we got inspired by Tyler Cowen who put out The Great Stagnation, I think originally as a Kindle book. And we’re like, “Okay, great.” And then Rafe Sagalyn, who’s an amazing, wonderful literary agent — he’s still our agent, still my agent — called us up, and he doesn’t cold-call many authors. And he called us up and he said, “Okay, what you two did with that was cute, but now...” Rafe doesn’t use this language. He said, “Now we’re going to do the grownup version where you get an actual publisher and an actual editor and an actual advance. Because this book, these ideas deserve more space and more of a platform.”

And he said, “In particular, this metaphor of the second half of the chessboard is really interesting.” And we’re like, “Oh, okay.” So that metaphor, again, which comes from Kurzweil, is that the way to think about exponential progress — one way to think about it — is to imagine putting one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, and then doubling it for each of the following 63 squares. And what he’s trying to convey with that is that exponential—

Lindsey: And wasn’t there some legend about some advisor to the emperor who asked for payment in those terms?

McAfee: Yeah, exactly. And the only fuzziness in the legend is whether the emperor beheads the guy when he finds out exactly how much rice he owes him. But the moral of the legend, the math lesson hidden in the legend, is that exponential progress is deceptive because it looks underwhelming for a while. And then at one point in time, it looks astonishing and there’s this, where did that come from?

Lindsey: Right, this discontinuous leap, it appears out of nowhere.

McAfee: Right. But all that’s going on is that steady doubling in the background. And the reason that metaphor or that fable is relevant these days is that Moore’s Law is steady exponential progress in all of the building blocks of computing — memory, processing, storage, bandwidth, energy cost, almost doesn’t matter. They all have been doubling with almost clockwork predictability and regularity for the entire history of the digital era. And so Kurzweil grabbed this notion of the second half of the chessboard to make us aware that at some point, that constant Moore’s Law in the background, that constant doubling is suddenly going to look very, very weird. And so if you start with putting one grain of rice on the first square of that chessboard, double, double, double. Kurzweil’s point was the first half of the chessboard — by the time you get to 32 squares, you’ve got a big pile of rice, but you’re not freaking out about anything.

And it’s only in the second half of the chessboard when that doubling yields eye-wateringly big numbers. I think by the time you get to the 64th, I believe it’s either in the quadrillions or quintillions where you’re counting the number of grains of rice. That’s why the emperor gets mad at the clever advisor. And I think we calculated — I believe it’s way bigger than Mount Everest — the amount of rice that you will have.

And so we use that imagery of... When we wrote The Second Machine Age, which was in 2014, we said, depending on how you start counting, it feels like we’re entering the second half of the chessboard. And I think that is a very loose, very poorly phrased prediction that has held up pretty well because here we are on the second half of the chessboard. And one of the things that you should expect are multiple weird surprises, because Kurzweil’s point and our point was that things are different in the second half of the chessboard when you’ve got this much accumulated computing muscle behind you for everything. And one of the weirdest things that’s happened is the emergence of generative AI and large language models. And one of the fun parts of my job is I get to talk to the alpha geeks of the computer science and AI communities. One of the questions I’ve learned to ask them is, “Were you all expecting this? Were you all expecting that it was only a matter of time until we get large language models that can do all these astonishing things?” And without exception, they’ve said, “Oh, hell no. This was a curveball. This was out of left field.” The paper that started the whole thing — I’m sure you know this — was written in 2017 by a large team from Google, and it proposed a new approach for machine translation. And it said, “This seems to work really well. You don’t even need matched sets of documents in the two languages that you’re trying to go between. All you do is upload a huge amount of documents in different languages and it figures it out.” This was wild.

And then two other wild things occurred. People realized that as you added more data and more compute, the performance of the system, the error rate, the things that it could do kept getting better. And so we say that we’re now in the scaling era of AI and it’s not over yet. We keep on waiting for that scaling to plateau or asymptote. And in most ways, it has not done that yet. And then the third thing that was really weird was that this approach, this transformer architecture, was not just good for automatic translation — it was good for almost any language task that we could think of. And so one of the points that Rod Brooks, fantastic computer scientist and co-founder of iRobot, has been making for a long time is that computers have always been lousy at writing code. They were just very bad at writing their own language. Now they’re not. And part of that excitement that you bring up are these recent models in particular from Anthropic, with the latest models of Claude and Claude Code and Claude Cowork, where these things are really, really good at writing code.

And I’ve lost track of the number of colleagues I have who have said to me at some point, “I wrote a thousand lines of Python today.” And my initial reaction was, “Yeah, good for you. You had a productive day.” And they said, “You don’t understand. I don’t know Python. I have no idea what I’m doing, but all I’m doing is talking to Claude and telling it what I want. And all of a sudden, I’ve got a huge amount of new code on my computer.” It’s not just us dilettantes — the people who write industrial-strength code for a living, many of them are incredibly excited about this. Anthropic just announced a little while ago that they now have a module that works for COBOL, this way-more-than-half-a-century-old computer language that is—

Lindsey: The equivalent of cuneiform for computer languages.

McAfee: Yeah, exactly. But it’s apparently still running the old mainframes that sit in the basements of a lot of banks and keep track of who exactly has how much money. COBOL is still being used for that stuff.

Lindsey: I think unemployment insurance systems, likewise. Yeah.

McAfee: Yeah. I was teaching a group of executives at a bank the other day, and I was trying to make this point about Moore’s Law and obsolescence. And I said, “Now, we don’t have very many 20-year-old computers.” And then they all looked at each other and said, “Oh yeah, we actually do.” But Anthropic’s point was we can reach way back into the mists of time and probably recreate that COBOL code and finally get rid of that clanky mainframe in the basement of the bank. That’s where we are now. It’s just a very weird time.

Lindsey: And so when AI can code, then you get this potential positive feedback loop acceleration where you use AI to improve the next model of AI and you start to get towards that nirvana of recursive self-improvement.

McAfee: And I love it. In my X feed these days, that’s now an abbreviation — it’s just RSI. And my alpha geeks in Silicon Valley are talking about we’re now here. This is not hypothetical anymore. Things are recursively self-improving. I ran into the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, at Davos earlier this year, and I just wanted to say hi. I said, “Hey, this is amazing. It must be a blast to be running this.” And he had this dazed look on his face and he said, “It’s astonishing.” And I said, “Okay, which of your models should I use? I’m not a professional software developer.” And he said, “Get Claude Cowork and mess around with it.” And I said, “Okay. By the way, is it true that Claude Cowork was entirely written by Claude?” And he said, “Yeah, basically.” So that’s where we are.

Brink, you might know of Patrick Collison, who’s the co-founder of Stripe and just unbelievably accomplished, very thoughtful, really smart guy and a very good programmer himself. I was reading his X feed and I think early this week he said something — if I’m exaggerating, I’m not doing it deliberately and I’m not exaggerating very much — he said, “I downloaded half a century of weather data and trained a weather forecasting system over the weekend. And then I asked it to suggest improvements to itself and it did that.” This is while he’s running a gigantic payments company as his day job. So we are in uncharted territory.

Lindsey: So we’ve now reached the point where AI, the large language models, have capabilities which look incredibly disruptive, transformative — they’re a big deal. This is a general purpose technology that is going to diffuse throughout the economy, change business practices, change lots of things, right? But it ain’t stopped now, right? We have not plateaued.

So before we talk about what’s going on right now, let’s talk about your thoughts on where this current large language model architecture is going to go. Some people are arguing breathlessly that we’re a year or two away from whatever you want to call it — superhuman AI, strong AI, a country of geniuses in a data center. Others think that something that’s purely a creature of language and doesn’t have any contact with the external world can’t be very creative outside of its training data. And so for the real breakthrough — the kind of AI that will tell us how to build fusion reactors and cure cancer — maybe we’re going to need something beyond just the large language model architecture. What’s your hunch?

McAfee: And thank you for that final word. It’s my hunch. As you just articulated, there’s an extremely active debate going on among the alpha geeks of AI and computer science about how far this LLM approach will take us. And there are some who say it will get us to artificial general intelligence where the technology can do essentially anything a person can do — that’s the general part — and do it at superhuman levels. Sometimes they talk about ASI, artificial super intelligence. It can clearly get us a long way there. We are seeing it make advances in some of the hard sciences. Just recently, people have been feeding the latest models unsolved mathematics conjectures and asking it to look at proofs and asking it to look through very deeply theoretical physics papers and see if there are mistakes in them, and the technologies are doing a good job at those things.

So these are weirdly capable machines. The debate is whether they’re going to get us all the way there or not. And I don’t have an informed perspective on that debate, but I do listen pretty carefully when people like Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun talk about the fact that it is a model of language and that it’s a very powerful one. We need more than that to reach this promised land of actual artificial general intelligence.

And their main critique, if I understand it correctly, is that as you pointed out, these large language models don’t have a world model. They just have a model of this thing that you and I are doing. And because this thing is so powerful and so flexible, a large language model actually gets you a long way. And we can take out the language — we can swap in maybe a large genetics model or a large materials model or a large pathology model. There was just a wild attempt to throw a bunch of sleep data into a transformer architecture and we now have a large sleep model. I think that’s wild because sleep is this basically important phenomenon for many, many living things that we understand very poorly.

Lindsey: We still don’t have a very good idea why we have to do this, why we have to conk out—

McAfee: Right. And what happens and how it’s connected to our health and our longevity — and we’re going to get insight from all that. What Yann and Fei-Fei and other people say is, “That’s very powerful. It’s still not a complete world model. The machine — we’re not teaching it how this universe that we live in works, how if you drop something, it falls toward the center of the earth, unless it’s lighter than air, in which case it goes up. The mind-bending cluster of rules that govern how the universe works.” They say that’s not the goal of a large language model, so we shouldn’t expect them to get there. And they have both founded companies to build world models and to take another vector on AI. I’m excited about that. These are incredibly smart, very, very good researchers.

Lindsey: Now they’ve got some resources behind them, we’ll see what they do, right?

McAfee: They’ve got real resources behind them. I’m super eager to see what they come up with. And more generally, we have been throwing a ton of our effort at large language models for the past — call it at least three years, at least the ChatGPT era. Great. I think the same as you. I am really heartened to see pretty serious amounts of money starting to be thrown at other vectors of AI. Wonderful. The more shots on goal we get, the more likely we are to come up with very powerful things.

Lindsey: Yeah. In my own confessedly primitive way of thinking about these things — because it’s not informed at all — but it seems like there could be, in the corpus of what we know right now, which is what we’ve trained AI on, all kinds of implicit latent knowledge that we just haven’t connected the dots on. So it could be that just out of that, AI large language models can make all kinds of truly interesting, important discoveries just by finding what’s latent in what we already know, but didn’t know that we knew. But it still seems to me... I’m partial to the argument that you need some kind of external model of the world. So I’m very interested to see how those approaches work out.

McAfee: But you also brought up the other fundamental point, which is that we’re not done getting value out of large language models, let alone large fill-in-the-blank models. I’ve been following some of the best mathematicians in the world saying, again just recently, “These models went from being not that useful to my actual work to being very, very useful and very good at them.” Again, to your initial point, exponential progress is weird and deceptive, and it feels like in many arenas, we’re there. We’re in the second half of the chessboard.

Lindsey: So it seems to me now, it’s clear enough that large language models in their current state are very good coders. And so they’re going to transform the work of software engineers. They’re going to substitute for a lot of work that’s being done now. They’re going to empower some people to be much more productive than before. It could be at some point there are loops that humans get cut out of altogether. I don’t know, but it’s just obvious that big change is coming to software engineering. It seems pretty obvious to me that with the state of the art right now, big change is coming to knowledge work generally. The facility that these models have with language, their ability to churn out well-organized, thoughtful prose, good arguments, anticipate counterarguments — whether we want to call it thinking or not, they’re doing the equivalent of thinking at quite a high level, certainly at a level as high as or higher than many white-collar workers are operating at today.

And so I think it’s already inevitable that what we’ve got is going to replace a lot of existing white-collar knowledge work. That’s not the same thing as eliminate a lot of white-collar knowledge jobs, but it is going to replace a lot of work. The most breathless projections of transformative change, I think, wildly underestimate how friction-ridden a process the diffusion of these capabilities is, because the capabilities are great. You can test them against Math Olympiad questions and things like that, in artificial structures.

But out in the real world, to actually take these capabilities and figure out how you get a durable commercial advantage out of them – the people at the frontier labs, they don’t know the answers to those questions. They have no idea. It’s the people in those businesses that are going to have to figure it out and there’s going to be a lot of trial and error. We know every general purpose technology that came before took decades for people to figure out, how to use electricity to completely reconfigure the layout of factories — took decades to figure that out. So this will probably go faster, but tell me your thoughts about where we are now in this process and what you see as the prospects for dramatic change in business practices, business processes, and just the organization of business life because of these technologies.

McAfee: I want to bring up one other factor that’s going to be really important for determining the pace of change here. I’m doing this really interesting round of executive teaching at MIT Sloan, where I work. And as you can imagine, interest in AI and curiosity about AI and alarm about AI are very widespread in the business world. So there’s this really interesting series of two-day bootcamps that MIT Sloan put together in partnership with McKinsey where the requirement is that most, if not all, of the senior team of decent-sized companies — companies you have absolutely heard of — together come to campus for a couple of days for an AI bootcamp. And not just learn to use ChatGPT or whatever, but to give the entire senior leadership team a focused opportunity together to understand some aspects of what’s going on and to brainstorm about what they’re going to do about it.

In my decently long career in business schools, I have never seen this density of the entire leadership teams of medium to big companies coming through focused on this one topic and willing to devote this level of energy and time to it. And the one thing that I observe over and over is that in these companies that are coming through — and I want to be clear, their senior leadership team is engaged, whether or not they themselves have a clear idea of what AI is going to be doing for them or how it’s going to change their company — they are keenly interested in the question and they know it’s an important question. It ain’t going to be quick inside these companies, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the technology.

These companies — I’m going to use the label legacy companies for them, and what I mean by that is they became big and successful during the 20th century, not the 21st century — these companies have been around for a while for the most part. And I think they’re still carrying around a metaphorical 20th-century playbook for leadership, management, what running a company actually looks like when you’re doing it well.

And that metaphorical 20th-century playbook involves a whole lot of integration, collaboration, communication, socializing ideas, a whole lot of checks and balances, a real deep-seated fear of making costly mistakes, a reverence for process, and a whole lot of planning and analysis upfront. And that playbook is going to limit the speed with which these companies can get things done.

You have probably heard — I forget if it’s Francis Fukuyama’s definition of bureaucracy, I think it might be his — he says, “It’s a promiscuous distribution of the power to hold things up.” And so we wonder why big companies get so bureaucratic. I think it’s because they’re following this metaphorical playbook where, without intending to jam everything up, that’s actually what you wind up with. That’s the organization that you wind up with.

Lindsey: And it’s just more or less inevitable that when a new technology hits established enterprises with established ways of doing things, they’re going to want to put this thing on top of what they’ve got already, right?

McAfee: Right. And they’re going to—

Lindsey: And they’re going to be very scared and averse to going and tearing out their foundations and rebuilding everything from scratch.

McAfee: And they’re going to want to think about it for a while and they’re going to want to get all hands on deck and they’re going to want to make sure that all the people who think about different aspects of the company are involved in this, and they’re going to do it at a cadence that hearkens back to the 20th century.

Lindsey: Right. And that respects all of those stakeholders it needs to bring along. Meanwhile, some little tiny startup is going to enter their industry, not face any of those constraints, not have to rebuild, but build from scratch. And so it’s very frequently the case that it’s new enterprises that ultimately figure out how to make proper use of new technologies because the established ones are just too wedded to old ways of doing things.

McAfee: And as you just pointed out, the pattern from business history is fairly clear. We’ve got pretty good data about the most recent big general purpose technology that washed across the economy, which was electrification of manufacturing about a century ago. We’ve got decent data about what happened there. The companies on top at the start of that transition were not the companies on top at the end of that transition. For the reasons we’ve been talking about, they typically didn’t see all the benefits of electrification.

And to simplify a little bit, if you were running a factory powered by a big old steam engine in the basement, when electricity came along and the cost advantages became obvious, a lot of factories said, “Okay, great. We’ll take the steam engine out and we’ll put a great big motor in the basement — ta-da, we have electrified.” And they actually had. Their factory ran on electricity. And then these weirdos showed up and said, “Wait a minute, why stop at one? These electric motor things are still powerful when they’re small — we could put them all over the factory.”

Lindsey: And why do we need multi-story factories? Why can’t we just build everything flat and have lots of motors, right? Yeah.

McAfee: And you can go back and look — they had journals of manufacturing back then. This debate played out for decades where the idea that you would have a separate motor on every machine in the factory, this was crazy talk until it was inevitable. So this is to say, when you’ve got a bunch of incumbents around, the transition takes time.

Now, you identified the main force that will cause this transition to be fast, which is disruptors — startups or small companies that don’t have that legacy, either of mindset or of established norm and process and routine — that come into these industries. And very often, not always, but very often, one of them comes along that makes the incumbents look bad at their own game from a standing start. I’m thinking of SpaceX in this case, which was founded this century — founded in 2002. Fourteen years after SpaceX was founded, it relaunched the first commercially viable orbital rocket. It went up, it came back down, they refurbished it, and they put it back up. They did that within 15 years of their founding.

Today, the rest of the space industry combined has done zero relaunches of commercially viable orbital rockets. Blue Origin has put it up and brought it back down, and now they’re doing the refurbishment process. So that number’s going to go from zero to one. But again, all the incumbents put together have done zero. SpaceX has bathed the world in cheap connectivity from satellites with Starlink, and they remain the only organization certified by NASA to take American astronauts into space from American soil. Boeing thought they were going to get that same designation in 2024 when their Starliner spacecraft took two astronauts up to the space station. NASA looked at the data from that flight and—

Lindsey: Didn’t let them bring them home, right?

McAfee: No. They said, “You’re not bringing those astronauts home.” The story is unbelievable, and I think it’s indicative of something. The story is crazy, which we just learned last year into this year. As Butch Wilmore was piloting the Starliner spacecraft toward the International Space Station — on the far side of which was nothing but infinity and a really unpleasant death for those two astronauts — the layers of redundancy that you build into a spacecraft started to fail. And so the thrusters are actually, I think, firing on the outside of the spacecraft. And as he’s getting closer to the space station, which has astronauts on it — so crashing into that is also a really bad idea — all the levels of redundancy fade away. And I forget if he still had one level or if they were down to no redundancy at all. And they had, as you can imagine, a very quick huddle about what they were going to do about this.

And the solution was what you and I did with our old Windows 95 laptops when they had the blue screen of death. Effectively, they shut the spacecraft down, waited 30 seconds, powered it back up. Lo and behold, they got enough redundancy to dock that spacecraft and get the astronauts on the space station. NASA said, “You are not bringing those astronauts home.” And then SpaceX went up last fall and got them after eight months in the Space Station and brought them back.

So there are two fascinating things going on here. One of them is what happens to great American companies that makes them lose their way, that makes them unable literally to complete their missions? We see this over and over. You and I have been around long enough that we used to hold up GE as the exemplar of managerial excellence in the 20th century. We don’t do that anymore. Boeing was an iconic American company.

If you spend enough time with this managerial playbook, I do think things get gummed up. I think you become sclerotic and inward-looking. Pivoting becomes really hard. When you just layer on more steps in the process, more processes, more people involved, when you promiscuously distribute the power to hold things up, the end state is not a happy end state. So that’s question number one. Question number two is the flip side, which is what is allowing these new — I call them geek companies — to come along, do extraordinary things in really capital-intensive, very knowledge-intensive, very clubby industries, and make the incumbents look bad at their own game? Which is what SpaceX has been doing for coming on 25 years now. Think about Netflix becoming a Hollywood studio and almost buying the iconic studio Time Warner last year and earlier this year. There’s a real shift going on.

So in addition to coming up with science-fiction technologies, I think a really underappreciated phenomenon — and the reason I wrote The Geek Way — is that these geeks clustered in Northern California, I think they’ve upgraded substantially a really, really, really powerful technology called the company, called this thing that we do and this thing called the private sector and the economy to provide goods and services to people. I think that machinery has had a huge upgrade. And I’m going to bring this back to my executive education. I am primarily not teaching the leaders of geek companies. I’m teaching the executives of legacy companies and they are going to be, in some cases, confronted by a bunch of geeks showing up in their industry with this new approach to running an organization. But in some cases, they’re not. And I’ve taught execs at several different banks by now.

And I’ve learned not to say, “There are four 23-year-olds with Claude Code installed on their laptop, they’re going to take away your market share.” I don’t believe that. Unfortunately, the reason I don’t believe that is not because these banks are keeping up with the geeks — it’s because they’re protected by a thicket of regulation where retail banking in the US is not a thing that the extraordinary investors and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are interested in, because you have to go ask permission from so many people to open a bank.

So one of the gating factors — to get back to your question about how quickly this science-fiction toolkit is going to change the business landscape and the leading companies in industry after industry — one of them is going to be just how protected in every sense of the word are the incumbents in that industry. Because some of those barriers have gone way down.

Think, again, about space exploration. That’s extraordinarily knowledge-intensive. Successfully launching rockets and bringing astronauts up and down is honestly one of the hardest things we humans have ever accomplished. It’s knowledge-intensive. It’s extremely capital-intensive. It’s oligopolistic. You have clubby relationships with a very small number of buyers historically. Those were all fairly serious barriers to entry. And now SpaceX is making all the incumbents look bad.

So some of those barriers are going down. However, I do not think that Patrick Collison and Stripe are going to be operating the dominant retail bank in America in five years. I don’t think that’s on their product roadmap. I wish it were, but I don’t think it is.

Lindsey: So let’s talk about what’s happening right now. So your sometimes co-author Erik Brynjolfsson has done some research that claims to find evidence of productivity growth acceleration going on right now thanks to AI. You’ve written sympathetically about his research on your Substack. So tell me a little bit about what he’s found and what you think.

McAfee: One of my favorite economists to talk to, in addition to Erik, is Robert Gordon, Bob Gordon, who’s at Northwestern, phenomenal scholar of productivity and growth. And he’s a pessimist.

Lindsey: And famous curmudgeon.

McAfee: Yeah, he’s great. I love talking to incredibly smart grouches. They make me really... Erik is not a grouch. We’ve got very different dispositions. Bob’s a curmudgeonly dude, and he thinks that all of this hype around computers is overdone because he keeps looking at the productivity statistics, which is exactly the right place to look to see if things are living up to the hype. All of us digital geeks think we invented this wondrous toolkit, and Bob keeps asking the right question, which is why isn’t it showing up in the productivity statistics?

Lindsey: And just as far as what the data show, the internet gave us 10 years of accelerated productivity growth in the United States. Nowhere else. Just us. And just 10 years.

McAfee: 10 years, right? And so from ‘95 to about 2004, labor productivity in the US had a real uptick, a quantum leap up. And so Erik and I and all of the other digital cheerleaders are like, “Woo-hoo, here we are. It’s the promised land.” And then Bob keeps on pointing out the uncomfortable truth that productivity growth went back down to these anemic levels and has been there ever since.

So Erik — I love the guy — he said, “Okay, I am so optimistic about the current toolkit of digital,” including the previous generation of AI, machine learning, and now generative AI, that even before generative AI came along, he said to Bob, “Come on, let’s place a bet. Let’s place a public bet about the future of productivity growth in the United States.” And so they set a benchmark of, I believe, 1.8% per year. And Erik said, “I’ll take the over.” Bob said, “I’ll take the under.” And the bet runs until, I believe it’s 2029, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

And Erik just wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times where he said — way too early to call victory, but the productivity numbers, not just for one quarter because you know it’s a very jumpy measure — the productivity growth numbers for the US have been looking up for 2025 and they’ve been staying up quarter after quarter. Erik says, “I think the era of AI-driven productivity is finally here.” As you point out, I wrote a Substack echoing what he’s saying, and I think Erik is going to win his bet with Bob. Bob’s point was it was a long time coming and it is not yet here — you don’t see hyper-charged American productivity across the economy yet at all. And he’s right about that.

Lindsey: So let’s look at the darker side of technological dynamism. Another name for productivity growth is creative destruction. That’s got the word destruction in it. And so in addition to creating new opportunities, you take a lot of people who had a comfortable status quo and you make it very uncomfortable. So it looks like — you tell me — there’s some preliminary research by Erik as well, I think, on possible labor market effects of an AI-induced drop-off in demand for new college grads. Let’s talk a little bit about that, but then let’s widen the lens and look out farther.

So at the most breathless end of projections, you have the idea of rapid technological unemployment, mass layoffs, big spikes in unemployment. I’m skeptical about that, but I can picture decades of the same thing happening to knowledge workers as what happened to factory workers and manual workers over the last half century, which is declining relative demand for your particular set of skills and relatively flat wage growth and anemic prospects for a whole lot of people. That seems to me entirely plausible. But tell me, what does your crystal ball show you?

McAfee: And I see we’re just about out of time, right? Because this is a gigantic question. You’re asking questions about our shared prosperity. I have trouble thinking of a more fundamental question, and it’s very uncertain. And I do think we are living, again, in this era of generative AI — in a new chapter of that endless discussion about this endless struggle for shared prosperity.

So let’s anchor the discussion. At one end, you hear a lot of the alpha geeks of Silicon Valley saying breathless things about the looming era — short-term, very short-term — of massive technological unemployment because we have a tool that is so good at knowledge work, at language tasks, and as we’ve already talked about, not just language tasks. And they’re correct about that.

One of the weird things to me is that some of the people saying the most breathless and alarmist things are running the AI companies. I don’t know if their comms department loves it when they go off on these rants about massive looming technological unemployment, but there are informed people in the Valley who believe pretty deeply that in a year or two, we’re not going to have whole swaths of people who are currently employed doing pretty well-paid white-collar knowledge work.

I’m not that far out on the spectrum of where I think things are going to land. I keep remembering that in, I think it was 2016 or 2017, Geoff Hinton — who’s absolutely one of the grandparents of modern AI — said that we should stop training radiologists because the technologies that we already had at that time and that we were accumulating were better at the pattern recognition task of looking at an image and diagnosing what’s going on. They were better at that than not just okay human doctors, but almost any human doctor. And given that pattern recognition superiority, Hinton said, “This profession is going to wither and we should stop training people at it.” There are more radiologists in America today than there were when he made that recommendation, even though, as he foresaw, in general, the machine learning technologies are better at diagnosing what’s going on from a medical image than even top human beings are. He was right about that. He was wrong about the employment consequences of that.

Lindsey: And this critical distinction between eliminating work and eliminating jobs.

McAfee: Right. And this gets to a distinction between tasks and jobs. And this is something that Erik has talked about, that Daniel Rock has talked about — that a job is a bundle of tasks and just because you automate some of them, if you automate 40% of the tasks, it does not necessarily follow that you can eliminate 40% of the people. That’s the wrong way to think about it. It doesn’t even follow that the number of people employed doing that job is going to go down, because the other tasks can become more valuable; as the cost of doing the thing goes down, people might want more of it, and those people can find... And so the people doing that bundle of tasks, even if it shrinks because of technology, still have plenty of employment opportunities out there. That’s been the pattern with radiologists.

Now, is that going to be the pattern for software engineers, for people who write code for a living? And so you mentioned this other interesting research that Erik did. He looked at very recent hiring data and lo and behold, he finds that in the professions that are most exposed to generative AI — relying on work that Daniel Rock and a team at OpenAI did; Daniel is Erik’s doctoral student; the three of us along with James Milin, a fourth guy, are the co-founders of an AI company — so I’m talking my own book here, we need to keep that in mind. Daniel and company, Rock and company, did a lovely piece of research where they said, “Here’s how to think about which jobs are most exposed to generative AI.” Erik grabbed that and said, “As you would expect, it’s in the professions that are most exposed where we see the greatest softening in demand for recent college grads.” Really interesting finding, lots of controversy, lots of debate about it, as there should be. This is how science and social science work.

But we are seeing some early signs of softening of demand right where you’d expect it to be, right in the most exposed professions and right in the newest entrants to the labor force, because those are the people where you have to teach them the most before you can start getting any actual productivity out of them. You take a CS grad fresh out of college and you have to teach them how business actually works and how work actually happens inside organizations. So there’s an apprenticeship phase and there’s softening demand there.

How do we take that finding forward? Man, I have no idea. And the reason I don’t is because this is such a general purpose technology. It can do so many things, it can do them very well. Many parts of the economy are not protected by a thicket of regulation, and that’s where we’re going to see the work of writing software change the fastest.

Lindsey: What we never can get out in front of is that by eliminating some tasks, we then create a whole bunch of new tasks that are very important now.

McAfee: And that’s the point, right? And you brought up Schumpeter’s great phrase of creative destruction. When creative destruction happens, it is always easier to predict the destruction than the creation. And the thing that you and I both believe is that the best way to deal with that is not to try to channel the creative destruction and say, “Okay, you can’t touch those jobs or you can’t touch that industry.” It’s to let the innovators and the entrepreneurs do what they do, which is look around at the landscape of opportunities, figure something out, and spin up a company to take advantage of that opportunity — and that company needs people.

I don’t think that we’re heading into the era... I hear this hype online these days about the one-person company where it’s just one entrepreneur with a great idea and a whole bunch of Claude Code capturing a big market. There’ll be a little bit of that solo entrepreneurship, but it’s still a group sport. You bring up the other important phenomenon, which is that creative destruction can sometimes lower overall employment in an industry. Happened with agriculture, happened with being a longshoreman. You point out it’s happening in the manufacturing sector. I don’t need to tell you, America’s manufacturing output continues to go up year after year, but manufacturing employment in general keeps declining. We have decoupled output in that industry from employment growth in that industry.

Are we going to see that with this era of AI? I’m pretty confident we are. How big, how widespread? Wow, is that an open question. It’s absolutely a question that we need to keep our eyes on, but I am really reluctant to engage in proactive restructuring of the economy or trying to channel AI so that it displaces as few current workers as possible.

You know there’s this ongoing debate between two schools of innovation: one called upstream governance, which our colleagues and friends in Europe seem to be really fond of, where they try to channel the innovation so that it does good — but really it’s a harm minimization strategy. The reason I don’t love that is it’s an incumbent protection strategy and I don’t think that’s a great business to be in. The flip side is permissionless innovation, which is the team that I’m on, that says, “Look, you’ve got to let it cook. You’ve got to let the innovators and the entrepreneurs do what they do. There will be dislocations. That’s the destruction part of creative destruction.”

Lindsey: So that’s a perfect segue to the other half of the crisis of dynamism — not the dazzling possibilities, but the frustrating barriers — because there’s a whole lot of areas of economic life these days where people aren’t allowed to experiment and figure out what works and have free run to do trial and error, especially outside of the United States. But even in the United States, we’ve seen this growing sclerosis, it’s become very difficult to accomplish large-scale rearrangements of atoms out there in the real world. There’s this vetocracy, these hydra-headed thousand veto points, the gauntlet that must be run to build anything, to make anything big. And beyond that, there’s a general risk-averse cultural complacency — we know we have all these problems and we know they’re terribly inefficient, but it’s just more trouble than it’s worth to deal with them.

So we’re just so rich and so complacent that we know we’re not close to optimal in a whole bunch of areas, and yet we just throw up our hands and say, “Oh, it’s just impossible to do anything about that.” That’s a deep-seated cultural underpinning of a lot of our bad policies — this ennui, that we don’t feel urgent enough about fixing problems and we let them fester. And this takes place not only in bottling up what private sector actors are able to do, but also in those areas where government needs to play a role, its effectiveness in playing that role these days is hamstrung by the same vetocracy, the same proceduralism run amok.

And here I’m interested in — you wrote The Geek Way aimed at corporate managers and at how businesses are run, but there’s a lot of lessons from The Geek Way about how government ought to be run. You did a post where you looked to a nearby alternative universe where Jen Pahlka’s book was the gospel for an alternative DOGE. So Jen Pahlka’s book, Recoding America — Jen Pahlka, by the way, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center — is an excellent from-the-trenches report on government dysfunction.

And again and again, it’s this waterfall approach to management. Everything starts at the top and proceeds down to the next level and then proceeds down to the next level. Information never flows back from the front lines back up to the top. It’s just a one-way trip. And then when the rubber meets the road and there’s disaster, there’s no ability to respond, to adapt, to iterate. Whereas the whole MO of the Silicon Valley startup is this move fast and break things, iterate, learn from experience, don’t come in there with a whole bunch of preconceived notions, build and react. So tell me how that’s applicable to how we can get more effective government?

McAfee: And the one other aspect of this geek approach to getting big things done — which as you point out is inherently iterative, fast-paced, involves valid feedback loops — it also involves a person called a DRI, a directly responsible individual. In other words, you’re on the hook for this. And one of the things that Jen points out in Recoding America — which is a great book but a depressing read — and that also comes out in books like, what’s it called, The Unaccountability Machine? What was the book that came out last year, a couple of years ago?

Lindsey: Yes. I know what you’re talking about. Dan Davies. Yeah.

McAfee: Yeah. And the author makes a convincing argument that the whole point is to distribute responsibility and accountability so that nobody has it — so that everybody can claim, “I did my job. I did that one little box on the waterfall diagram successfully. I was not responsible for the outcome. So if you’re unhappy with the outcome, I don’t know who you’re supposed to haul before Congress, but it’s not me. I was doing my part.” And Jen describes just the outcomes of that philosophy. She tells stories that I can’t believe. And she and her colleagues got in the trenches and they tried to make the technologies of government work better.

Lindsey: So in her experience with Code for America, which she co-founded, she worked with state and local governments, and then she had experience in the Obama administration at the federal level. So she’s seen it all, right?

McAfee: She’s seen it all. And the stories she tells... I know Jen and she’s amazing. And if somebody else had written the book, I might not have believed them because they’re so farcical. She tells a story about the website that Veterans Affairs stood up to let veterans sign up for health insurance via the VA, which is a thing that they’re entitled to do. And the story she tells was that the only place, apparently, where they could get the signup process to work was the VA headquarters. It had the right combination of this version of Flash installed and this version of Netscape Navigator — which they stopped supporting in 2003 — and just this unreal combination of technologies. And somebody built a signup process that worked with that bundle and nothing else. So it was just impossible for veterans, people who served our country, to get the benefits that they were entitled to.

And it took a veteran getting the attention of a member of Congress and sitting down with them and walking them through this “the thing won’t load” process before any will appeared to make things better. And then sure enough, everybody says, “Yeah, well, my job was just to make sure the Flash animation worked correctly,” or whatever. So this is tooth-grindingly frustrating. And Jen’s book highlights how hard that is to fix in the public sector.

And we have incredibly dogged, tenacious entrepreneurs in the private sector attacking this problem by creative destruction. I’m not sure what the vector is in the public sector because, believe me, I am not advocating treason. I don’t want to disrupt the US government and overthrow it with something better. That’s not what I’m talking about, but I share your frustration that there’s just not more willpower to do some of the moderately heavy lifting to make things faster, better, and to let the geeks of government do what they can do.

Lindsey: And if we think we have problems in the United States, well, we’re world beaters compared to Europe. You’ve written of late about the crazy disparity in startup incubation environments, the contrast between the United States and Europe. What accounts for that and is there any hope for turning things around?

McAfee: As you did, I read the Draghi report when it came out a couple of years ago on European competitiveness. And I was expecting this relatively dry document written in high bureaucratese about these isolated things that Europe was doing really well. And the Draghi report is not that. The Draghi report is this very hard-hitting report coming from a really senior European technocrat saying, essentially — I’m paraphrasing, right — “Gang, if we don’t fix this problem, Europe cannot do what Europe wants to do.” And by that he means we cannot continue to have a high standard of living, to take better care of the planet, and to offer the social programs that we believe is the right set. He said, “If we cannot increase our growth and increase our competitiveness, we cannot do all of that. We will have to make some very, very difficult choices.”

So he described increasing European growth rates and competitiveness in productivity as an existential challenge for the EU. Man, I love that. And there was a sentence in the report that I had to read a couple of times. He said, “There have been no from-scratch companies founded in Europe in the last 50 years with a market cap of at least $100 billion.” I said, “What?” This doesn’t include things like ASML, which is a really fantastic company integral to making all the chips that power the AI world, but that’s not a from-scratch company — it’s the result of a spinoff or a merger from Philips.

So Draghi said that and I said, “Wow, I wonder how bad the problem is.” So we took it down from $100 billion to $10 billion. And then I looked at the numbers and the total value of European from-scratch companies in the last 50 years — it turns out there’s a handful of them. There are on the order of 20-ish, and their total valuation — all EU from-scratch companies above $10 billion, public companies combined — are worth about half a trillion dollars. In the United States, that equivalent group is worth $35 trillion.

So this is just to underscore your point: Europe is falling behind, not in every area. There’s this endless argument about who’s got a higher standard of living, Europeans or Americans. I don’t want to talk about that. I find that less interesting than the fact that, as Draghi points out, the growth engine is slowing down and the competitiveness engine is very clearly sputtering along and not keeping up. And when you’ve got the situation and the challenges that Draghi observed, on top of which there is now a land war in Europe and prosperity and innovation really help you win wars, there’s no shortage of real problems out there. And I believe our European friends and colleagues, the other members of Team Liberal Democratic West, are falling behind — their growth engine is falling behind.

There are a bunch of reasons for that. And as you know, there’s another endless debate between hard and soft factors for the magic of entrepreneurship. Cultures are different. I absolutely believe that. I concentrate on the hard factors though, because I think the soft factors are a cop-out. And I talk to plenty of young Europeans, I teach them, who are super tenacious, they’re ambitious, they look at what’s happening in the Valley and it’s exciting in all kinds of ways. And they would rather go back to their home country — they’re proud Europeans, they’re proud French or German or whatever — and they would rather build their startups and try to go change the world back home.

And I think what’s going on is just this combination of rigidities that you and I have been talking about over and over. Labor laws in Europe are very, very strict in most EU countries. There are different tax regimes that discourage not just entrepreneurs but the very best capital allocators — the very best investors in the world are really good at understanding how the tax landscape affects their returns. And then on top of all of that, the EU just keeps on layering more and more regulation on the digital ecosystem.

They started with GDPR and the research on that is overwhelming. It slowed down innovation and entrepreneurship, it reinforced the advantages of the American incumbents, and it gave very nebulous feel-good privacy benefits. I don’t love the trade-off between nebulous feel-good benefits and real, tangible, very large costs. I think that’s a lousy trade-off. And then we’ve had the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act, which a number of European companies are now petitioning the EU to roll back or pause or whatever, because it is going to tamp down on the growth of a thriving AI ecosystem in Europe. So there are a bunch of own goals happening in Europe.

Lindsey: And there’s a mentality there, in some quarters at least, that Europe’s path to preeminence is being a regulatory superpower.

McAfee: People say that. Great.

Lindsey: I don’t think that’s a good way.

McAfee: And I’ve heard some of the senior people in the EU and the senior people in charge of digital in the EU make that argument, I think with a straight face, and say, “Look, the way that you become a world-leading hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship and success with this digital toolkit is by having a regulatory superpower.” And by which they mean—

Lindsey: Making it more difficult to do here than anywhere else in the world.

McAfee: Yeah. By which they mean that superpower is not taking stuff out. That superpower is adding stuff, and it’s just not going to work. Now, again, there are all kinds of debates to be had about whether the European approach or the American approach to different aspects of life is better. I don’t think you can make a credible argument that the European approach to innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in this digital era, is better. I think it’s demonstrably worse. And I don’t see — to your point — the willpower to change things, because changing things involves getting the heck out of the way. And I do think one of the cultural differences, which matters, is that Europeans really don’t seem to want a bunch of arrogant, wise-ass tech billionaires doing the things that some of our brilliant, wise-ass, mouthy tech billionaires do.

Lindsey: Okay. On that sober note, we’ve gone over an hour. I could keep you here for a lot longer, but I think we’ll wind it up here. Andrew McAfee, it was a great pleasure talking with you and thanks so much for being on The Permanent Problem.

McAfee: It’s a real pleasure. Congrats on the book. I hope it makes a difference and good luck with everything.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Permanent Problem Podcast. I’m delighted to have as my guest today Laura Field. We’re actually going to be interviewing each other about each other’s books. Laura is the author of the excellent new book Furious Minds about the intellectuals of the MAGA right. She’s also a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, has affiliations with George Washington University and American University as well. And sadly, a former senior fellow at the Niskanen Center where I work. But lovely to have you here with me today and to talk about our books.

Laura Field: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Brink.

Lindsey: So, we’re going to start off, I’m going to ask you questions and then we’ll turn the tables about halfway through.

Field: Reading your book, so much overlap thematically, even though they’re very different books, obviously.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, your book, I think, has a tighter focus and so it makes sense I think to start with you and then we can talk about how my book fits in with those themes. So, your book is about the intellectuals of the new populist right. Which is an interesting thing: to be an intellectual of a profoundly anti-intellectual movement, a revolt against elites and especially credentialed experts.

So, it seems to me that this phenomenon of the intellectual new right is an interesting combination of deep-seated old ideas coming back that had been kind of buried under a log for a while, but resurfacing. But then also a kind of mad improvisation to take advantage of the utterly unexpected 2016 election of Donald Trump, and then the ongoing radically unpredictable zigs and zags of his time in office. So, you have people trying to shoehorn some old ideas into some novel and fairly chaotic circumstances. So, how do you see that characterization? And do you see this as more of the recrudescence of old ideas or something new and weird?

Field: Oh, I think that’s a wonderful way to characterize it as this mishmash and the deep, old, crusty things that have sort of been there the whole time and festering really. And then, but also just this insane moment that they were able to take advantage of. And I think overall, there’s a little more systemic consistency in the intellectuals on the intellectual side of things than I really expected when I first started researching and writing about these guys, insofar as there is this thread from the old, old right in the early part of the 20th century through to Goldwater, Buchanan, the Tea Party and all of this. So, there is this deep sort of consistency that I think they recognized in Trump.

But there is just a strange mishmash of all kinds of the new, the kind of energetic tech stuff, the highbrow, the low, and just a totally different remix of all these old things. And I say in the book that there are three things that distinguish this new right from the old iterations of this same sort of fringe phenomenon. So, overall, the book is telling the story of the takeover of the GOP — essentially, the old Reagan-Buckley establishment, fusionism, whatever — by the fringe forces of the old right and the paleos. So, that’s the overall story. It was just taking it over by the fringe and it’s a story of intellectual radicalization.

And I say there are three things that distinguish this new iteration from the old. And one is just an increased misogyny because I think that where there was anti-feminism...

Lindsey: And by old, you mean distinguished from old Reagan-Buckley conservatism?

Field: No, this is sort of in the weeds already.

Lindsey: Just the old right?

Field: More from the distinction from the older, old right. Okay. So, there’s this consistency and there’s this distinction. And I can say more about those distinctions, but the old paleo fringe stuff, that this is distinct from that because it’s more misogynist, it’s more tech-savvy and youthful, and there’s this youthful energy, and they’re just way more successful, right? So, they see this happening with Trump and they succeed. But I think the other thing I’d say is this blending of highbrow and low and this kind of bizarro mishmash feature of it that I think your characterization captured. So, I love that way you captured it, but there is a lot of consistency too to this sort of...

Lindsey: The misogyny, part of that’s just a reflection of we’re in new times, right? So, once upon a time when the old right was really old, women were in their place in the home, right? They didn’t complain about that, right?

Field: So, they didn’t need to.

Lindsey: So, now then we had of course conservatism and conservative anti-feminism during the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But now we have women ascendant in many quarters of society – 60% of college students and taking over a number of professional fields that were once all-male preserves, an increasing percentage of women as the prime earner in their household. So, there’s a sense of male displacement.

Field: Absolutely.

Lindsey: And therefore, a kind of freakout associated with that.

Field: Yeah. There’s much more fuel now for a backlash.

Lindsey: It just wasn’t on the map decades ago, right?

Field: Oh yeah, certainly, certainly. But it does actually make for quite a different flavor of reaction.

Lindsey: Go into a little more detail on that.

Field: Well, I mean maybe just for listeners — and maybe your audience is familiar with all this history, right? — but I mean, there’s the distinction between basically what the establishment right and the fusionist Reagan-Buckley right stood for versus what these new guys stand for and how that works.

Lindsey: Sure. That’d be good.

Field: So, I just call it the new right — there’s every generation a new right, so I just called...

Lindsey: The establishment right was the new right once upon a time, right?

Field: Yeah, new right, old right doesn’t... I mean, it’s a mess, but I just use the phrase Reagan-Buckley establishment to describe the old coalition. And that basically is this combination of — I don’t need to tell you this, but anyway — it’s a combination of liberal economics, free trade, free market economics, social conservatism, and sort of the social values of the Christian right, forged together through anti-communism and a kind of liberal internationalism or interventionism. And so that lasted basically till the end of the Cold War and then these other... But that was an uneasy settlement among conservatives and in American history politically.

At the end of the Cold War, you have these other strains of conservatism that were always there, but continued to fester, which are more populist. The phrase that was used in the ‘90s is the paleoconservatives against the neocons, a reflection of that distinction and...

Lindsey: And the paleocons had been famously marginalized during the Reagan administration and were quite out of sorts about it. When William Bennett became Education Secretary, I think, or no, he was head of National Endowment for the Humanities, they pegged him for that first, as opposed to some old right person who...

Field: Huge uproar over that, right? Yeah.

Lindsey: Yes, yes. So, they’ve been nursing grievances for decades.

Field: Yeah. And these are a lot of people who were ousted quite formally, because of things like antisemitism or racism from some of these intellectuals.

Lindsey: Sam Francis, who now you look back on as a sort of progenitor of the MAGA right?

Field: Exactly.

Lindsey: He was a very marginal kind of guy and he finally got booted from National Review and from establishment conservatism for being too overtly racist in his writing.

Field: Yeah. Yeah. And Pat Buchanan being the main political figure representing this.

Lindsey: A guy with ugly ideas and great charisma, right? Incredibly likable and personable, which made it easy to sort of not focus on substance.

Field: Yeah. So, you have all that in the background and then coming back into play in the ‘90s and then continuing obviously through our time. And there’s a more nativist dimension to it, more small-government localism kind of flavor and definitely isolationism built into all of that. And so, I think that what happened — which was a surprising part to me — is that when Trump came on the scene, a lot of the intellectuals like Michael Anton and some of those figures who were really the earliest sort of vanguard of the intellectual defense of Trumpism, they saw Trump and they thought not only was he this great vehicle for destruction — and the religious right, they talk about sometimes God anoints a wrecking ball — there’s some of that in Anton, but I think they also saw that he very clearly instinctively represented a lot of that paleocon stuff and they were steeped in Sam Francis, right? At one point, Anton calls himself a paleo-Straussian. That was surprising to me. I didn’t expect them to be so immersed in that stuff. And so, I think there was a real intellectual consistency there. They saw what he was. They thought that’s our guy. It wasn’t just a marriage of convenience. It’s like, oh, this guy actually stands for this stuff.

Lindsey: It seems to me that the end of the Cold War is critical in figuring out how the right has developed since then, because it was the international, global dimension, the geopolitical conflict with the Soviets that acted, I think, as a huge disciplining force on the creepy-crawly right. There was a need to have bipartisan consensus with Democrats to maintain the Cold War and maintain a solid front against the Soviets. That put a lid on how wacky things could be allowed to go. So, in the founding of conservative fusionism by William F. Buckley in the ‘50s, he’s completely in bed with proto-MAGAism. So, McCarthyism and massive resistance to segregation, he’s on board with and making excuses for both of them, but still the trump card ultimately is prevailing against the Soviets in the long twilight struggle, and that forced upon him — in addition to just his upbringing and kind of patrician orientation — that foreign policy priority forced upon conservatism a need to do business with Cold War liberals.

Field: Right. I mean, in doing some of this research that’s quite explicit — when they say, they talk about how, okay, well, we can even tolerate big government if it means for the sake of the security apparatus, right? We’ll get on board with this, even though it makes us uncomfortable. I think it was Buckley who said, he’s like, “I can do this because it’s...”

Lindsey: Right. If welfare spending is the price we have to pay for a big Pentagon budget, we’ll do it.

Field: Exactly, we’ll do it. Yeah.

Lindsey: So, when the Cold War ends, then the enemy with a capital E is gone. Politics generally thrives on hatred and enemies. So, there’s a vacuum there to fill on the right, and it’s very easy to slot liberalism, domestic liberalism, in as the enemy with a capital E. So, there was always that kind of connection drawn — there were the reds abroad and the pinkos at home, right?

Field: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they really do think that liberalism trends towards Marxism in a very kind of clear, slippery-slope way.

Lindsey: Yes, that there’s a slippery slope and that they can’t control it. And so, once the far enemy was gone, domestic liberalism or progressivism became the existential threat, and that sort of the despair that many Cold War hawks felt about being on the losing side of the international struggle... When Whittaker Chambers famously flipped from being a communist to being one of the great anti-communists and a witness against Alger Hiss and all the rest, he said, “I think I’m moving to the losing side.” So, it’s in the nature of people of conservative right-wing disposition to be a little gloomy, a little pessimistic about the future.

And so, all of that gloom then got invested not in a foreign enemy, but in fellow citizens – this cultural despair...

Field: Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t thought of connecting that part of the story to the end of the Cold War. I just hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think you’re right. I’ve been thinking more in terms of: you have the end of the Cold War, you have 9/11, you have the wars in the Middle East, you have the financial crisis, you’ve got all this stuff brewing, right? There’s tons of discontent. And then Trump comes out and says the wars were a mistake. But you’re right, it’s bundled up with this very persistent anti-liberalism and the domestic enemy especially.

Lindsey: And it goes both ways. That is, I think the end of the Cold War is not just important in explaining the rise of the MAGA right, but also in explaining polarization in general. I think it’s noteworthy that the last time a president was elected and the losing side didn’t like it one bit, but was completely clear that they had lost and didn’t make any bones about it and didn’t cry foul and just accepted it like good democrats are supposed to accept being out of power now and again, was 1988, the last Cold War presidential election. So, George H. W. Bush won, Democrats were not at all happy about a third Republican term in a row, but they knew they had lost and there was no arguing about it.

But then along came Clinton in ‘92 and there was Whitewater and Gennifer Flowers and he wasn’t really legitimate, plus it was this weird Ross Perot third-party thing. So, Republicans never really accepted him as the legitimate occupant of the White House. Then Bush comes in 2000 with Bush v. Gore and Democrats thought he wasn’t a legitimate president right out of the box. And then Obama comes in and you’ve got the whole birtherism and the conspiracy that he’s not really a citizen and therefore not a president. Then Trump comes in and he was installed by the Russians.

And of course, he violated norms in all kinds of ways to make people freak out, but still there was a lot of crazy conspiracy theories as well that weren’t really rooted in facts. And of course, Biden wins in 2020 and they just straight out deny it. So, the Cold War...

Field: This is depressing. You’re right...

Lindsey: The Cold War kept a lid on things... And you look back at the history of American democracy, as I have since things came unwound in 2016 while trying to figure out what’s going on. I did a lot of reading of American political history. And really, it’s been kind of a dumpster fire a lot over the years. And so, it’s kind of like we’re reverting to form in some ways.

Field: Mm-hmm. That’s right.

Lindsey: And it’s grim that it takes having 10,000 nuclear warheads aimed at you to make Republicans and Democrats get along with each other in a minimally acceptable civil way, but...

Field: Yeah. But it is good to keep the long history in mind because there are realignments, there are major shifts. I mean, it’s so complex too. Anyway, we’ll get to the hopeful stuff later.

Lindsey: So, also there’s not just illiberal extremism on the right, there’s a species of illiberal extremism that has risen on the left, certainly a species of a break from Obama-style liberalism in important ways, also I think born out of despair. I don’t know that I see their origin stories as linked, but I see them feeding off each other. How do you see the relationship between the two?

Field: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a feeding off each other and a sort of iterative push-pull dynamic that certainly is part of it. I think the right’s quite a bit worse and more dangerous and less justified.

Lindsey: They’re in power, right? Yes.

Field: I think you agree. But yeah, it’s certainly there and there’s certainly problems in both directions.

Lindsey: Yeah. My own formulation — you may not agree with this. I suspect I’m a little to the right of you on some issues...

Field: Sure.

Lindsey: ...and that may color my judgments.

So, I think the populist right is a threat because it’s a threat to the fundamental integrity of liberal democratic governance. I see the social justice radicalism, “woke” socialist left as a threat because it convinces swing voters to vote Republican. So, it enables the right. I think it’s utterly remarkable that Donald Trump has run for president three times and each time he gets more votes. So, something is turning off a lot of people on the left and driving them towards Trump, even if they’re not enthusiastic about him at all, even if they see that his character is lousy and he’s erratic, and there are a lot of reluctant Trump voters.

And so, that’s what I see as my deep frustration with what’s going on in the left — it’s not that it’s a direct threat to civil liberties or to freedom, which is just, I think, orders of magnitude less in the here and now.

Field: Well, they’re much further from power...

Lindsey: To me, its primary problem is how it empowers the right.

Field: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s true in how it pans out. I think — and I’ll come back to your question about the origins of these things maybe — but I mean, my honest view is that partly what’s happened is the centrists and everybody falls into this hype about the threat of the left that it’s a bit of hype. And there’s no analogy between the nastiness on the far right and AOC, right? I mean, even on the antisemitism question, it’s so disanalogous and...

Lindsey: No, because it’s not politicians on the left. It’s a much more diffuse... it’s the schools being shut down for a second year.

Field: No, that stuff I’m with you. So, that’s right. I’d say there’s a cultural threat on the left that I’ve been a little too probably soft on in terms of just what that means and how that affects people, because I’m sympathetic to individual claims about history and I want a free society where people can make their woke arguments. I mean, I think you learn a lot, and I’m not against postmodern philosophy, but there is a kind of skew — that’s an understatement. There is a systemic problem there. There’s a lot of cultural stuff that I think needs some sort of reconfiguration.

So, anyway, we could go on forever about this, but I think let me say that I think that there is a kind of consistency between the extremisms... If we’re just talking about the Bernie side and the new right, in terms of their critique of liberalism and the deeper problems — I think you share some of that diagnosis — in terms of how part of what has happened is: if we think about the new right intellectuals, when Trump got elected, they also had some explanations at the ready for how this had happened and why this strongman had emerged.

And it has to do with the kind of disintegrative effects of liberalism and liberal economics and liberal philosophy, the sort of failure of our civic institutions and our associative institutions, right? If you think of Patrick Deneen’s analysis, his idea is that liberalism...

Lindsey: His book Why Liberalism Failed...

Field: Why Liberalism Failed — the idea is that liberalism acts as... And you use this word too, an acid on the social fabric, and that the result then is because of the emphasis on individuals. And he also says the emphasis on the conquest of nature, that these two things are a departure from the order of things and ultimately just have such a devastating effect on human life that the very foundations of modern liberalism are just sort of rotten and doomed to fail. And then he says, so what’s going to happen here is... And he says it’s already happened because it’s already in the past — liberalism has failed.

And he says, when the social fabric, the political fabric all... And he goes through every institution you can imagine — when liberalism takes hold, all of the ties that bind are gone. And so, people start yearning for a strongman and they yearn for authority figures to fix the problems and to reorder their lives. And so, I think there’s something very compelling there. I mean, just intuitively, because it’s such a simple explanation. And he came along in 2018 and said, look, this explains Trump, this explains so much. And I think that at least on the economic front, the far left agrees with that completely.

Sam Moyn wrote a review of that book. And he said, it’s neoliberalism that’s the problem, not liberalism per se.

Lindsey: Right. So, cultural pessimism has been constitutive of modern conservatism from the get-go, and especially post-’60s. So, pessimism leading to sort of outright despair, I think, in the ‘00s and early teens as it just looked like social conservatives were just getting rolled on one issue after another. And so, there was this sense that theirs was a completely lost cause, that they no longer called themselves the moral majority. People were coming to see themselves as an embattled minority and starting to talk... Rod Dreher wrote the book The Benedict Option, that we’ve lost. Our best option is just retreat and quietism, right?

Field: Yeah. And there’s nothing left to conserve is how they’re talking now. Yeah.

Lindsey: And then this shock happened, Trump won, right? And so, that changed their mentality a lot. Anton was an early person who saw the potential in Trump from his perspective, but some of them, they didn’t like him at the outset and they weren’t too thrilled about him at the beginning, but just the fact that he won, and then the fact that he was so good at outraging the people that outraged them, just ultimately won them all over.

And in your book, you tell the story about how they just get... A lot of these folks are getting progressively radicalized over time, becoming more and more just overtly “Trump is great,” and then also becoming more and more okay with letting in the overt white nationalists and neo-Nazis and having a “no enemies to the right” kind of mentality. You’ve seen a real sort of intellectual and moral degeneration over time as the standards have lowered because of the opportunities of proximity to power.

Field: Yeah, absolutely. And the sincere radicalization in terms of, okay, we didn’t think it was... I think Deneen’s the clearest example of this, where he writes this book — it’s a kind of Why Liberalism Failed book — the solution...

Lindsey: Came out in 2018, right?

Field: 2018, yeah.

Lindsey: So, during Trump’s first term. And Barack Obama plugged it.

Field: Yeah. And it’s a clear articulation of all of these ideas that are very common on the right. And he has a pretty sort of quiet conclusion that’s kind of like, “Well, the time for big ambition is not here yet.” He talks about how now’s the time to kind of huddle, preserve ourselves. It’s almost the Benedict option, right? And he’s like, “Let’s just take our time, bide our time, see what’s next.” But then within a couple years...

Lindsey: He was writing that with Trump already in power and he wasn’t yet sold, right?

Field: No, he wasn’t sold. And then Adrian Vermeule wrote a review of the book that called him out on that and said, “This is way too weak-kneed. This could have been a masterpiece, but your solutions are still too submissive and subject to the liberal framework. You need something much more radical, much more robust because you need to sear the liberal faith with hot irons and just own it — own it that you actually want something bigger” and basically like “our time has arrived. Let’s do this thing.” And when Deneen writes a new intro to the paperback edition, he’s like, “Okay, let’s go.”

Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. And then the next book is Regime Change.

Field: Yeah, the next book is Regime Change. And he’s still a little shy and they’re all pretty shy and cagey in different contexts, but he’s talking about replacing the elites, winning the culture and so forth.

Lindsey: And so, you go from the Benedict option to integralism, from declaring you’ve lost and retreating to imagining that you can actually take over America and run it according to Roman Catholic principles.

Field: Yeah, it’s incredible.

Lindsey: There’s an astonishing leap in ambition in a few years, right?

Field: Yeah. And it’s partly like, well, Trump is proof of concept. You can do crazy things, I think is what a lot of them have taken away from this. And they’ve gotten remarkably far with it because JD Vance is the vice president and potential future...

Lindsey: And so, yeah, talk about him just a little bit as the kind of carrier. So, Trump is just a wild card. He’s just an id, living his impulses from moment to moment and they’re aligned in some sort of gestalt way with the mood of the most illiberal right, but he’s not a thinker. He’s not an intellectual.

Field: No, he’s not paying much attention. Vance was converted to Catholicism the same time he converted to Trumpism, right? It was kind of this dual move. I mean, I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s insincere — seems to be sincere and clearly opportunistic, but also I think sincere. And so, in terms of just really believing that this is their moment, that this is for the good of the country, I think he probably believes that this is all necessary for the future and the future of flourishing, right? I mean, thinking about how you talk about some of this.

And so, Vance was cultivated in the petri dish of the first administration and he had come out with his Hillbilly Elegy book. He was close to people like Rod Dreher and then I think introduced to people like Patrick Deneen and some of these others. And so, he ran for Senate, he was backed by Thiel, but then he’s also being groomed by people like the Claremont Institute — that language is probably not quite right, but you know what I mean? He’s close with the people at the Claremont Institute, doing interviews with them, going to the National Conservatism conferences. So, he’s really in the thick of this pretty narrow slice of the Republican world.

I mean, the people in the book, they didn’t think they’d become very important, but it’s not like this is a... it’s a pretty niche crowd. And so, Vance is right at the forefront.

Lindsey: I mean, the entirety of the conservative intellectual apparatus that didn’t go along with Trump is now just in Siberia, right?

Field: Yeah, exactly. So, they’re ousted. So, there’s Hawley, Rubio, Vance, a few others who are glomming onto this stuff, but he really is their guy. He’s their creation. I was joking at some point that he’s their Frankenstein monster, but I don’t think he’s going to turn against them, right?

Lindsey: Right.

Field: And so, he’s really in it all across the whole... He’s got ties to all of these guys, and he’s kind of like Kevin Roberts. He’s in this difficult position right now, because there’s all these cleavages and there’s all this upset over antisemitism and basically all the stuff they’ve let in quite happily. And so, Kevin Roberts is like the canary in the coal mine.

Lindsey: He’s the Heritage president, who famously wouldn’t scold Tucker Carlson for interviewing...

Field: Platforming Nick Fuentes. And then kind of did and everybody’s angry at him.

Lindsey: A big exodus from Heritage.

Field: Yeah. So, he shows us how difficult the positioning is now that they’ve created this situation. I mean, Vance has been very withholding, I would say. He’s not going after Fuentes.

Lindsey: He doesn’t show any interest in exerting any kind of discipline.

Field: No, or any kind of moral principle, right? And I think that’s because he’s tied himself to Trump. And so, he knows that he can’t really get away with alienating people like Carlson. Anyway, so Vance is very much the figurehead to carry this forward after Trump.

Lindsey: We’re about halfway through our hour. So, let’s segue. Your book is about the intellectuals of the new populist right. My book, The Permanent Problem, was in large part motivated by the rise of the populist right. My book starts with an analysis of the serious problems facing contemporary rich capitalist societies, the US in particular, but not only the US. And it was really the shock of the 2016 election that triggered it.

My sense that America’s problems were much deeper than I had thought before, that for our country to have done this, for faith in established institutions and elites to have been so shaken that you can get plurality support for someone as extravagantly unfit and out of bounds as Donald Trump, seemed to me to indicate there’s something deeper going on than just fluky political factors. And plus, this is happening all over the world right now. This populist right is ascendant everywhere. So, this seems to me something that’s a lot deeper. And there are economic, social, cultural factors underneath the partisan warfare and polarization that are grabbing the headlines.

And so, I wanted to get a hold on those. And so, it was motivated by trying to figure out how we had gotten to where we are that occasioned this book, first a Substack, and then the book. So, I had written a book, a fairly upbeat, optimistic political and cultural history of post-war America called The Age of Abundance, about how mass affluence had triggered this cultural upheaval and had given birth to both the new left of the ‘60s and the new evangelical right of the ‘60s. But by the time I conceived this book in the late ‘90s and wrote it in the early 2000s, it seemed like the storm and strife of the cultural upheavals created by mass affluence were in our rearview mirror.

So, I was presenting abundance as a relatively unproblematic opening of opportunities rather than opening Pandora’s box of troubles and threats. I saw troubles and threats. They didn’t seem to be panning out. And so, I thought that at that time, from that perspective, I was telling a happy story. So, when I was researching how we got into electing Trump, the working title for my project was The Age of Abundance: What the Hell Happened? I’ve come around to the idea that the electorates that are falling for populism are responding to real social problems but they are, alas, elevating demagogues who are not going to be doing anything constructive to solve those problems.

They’re going to use those problems to gain power and wealth, but it’s not just a crazy bad mood, right? There’s something real going on. And so, I would say that in common with the post-liberal MAGA intellectuals — not all of them call themselves post-liberals, but I’ll just use that as the term — that when looking at what’s wrong with American life today, we identify some of the same symptoms, not all by any means, but some of the same symptoms. The difference is that we, I think, differ fundamentally in diagnosis and then in prescriptions.

Field: Can I say a little bit about how I thought of your book in connection with some of the things we just talked about?

Lindsey: Yeah.

Field: So, I mean, I think as you saw in my book, there’s a kind of theme of the vulnerabilities of liberalism, right? And your subtitle to your book — well, the book — The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition From Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. And in a very direct way, I think you’re talking about how we’ve got mass material plenty, or we could, but we still have this permanent problem of a kind of spiritual malaise and discontent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. And I think in my broad historical thinking about this, it does seem like liberalism has this massive vulnerability in terms of formation of the self, where liberalism says, “We’re not going to tell you how to live your life.”

You get autonomy, you get freedom. And the right wing would say — and I think somewhat correctly — that for generations, we’ve been coasting on the fumes of our old traditions, and that now that those traditions are becoming less secure and challenged mainly by pluralism, that liberal people especially have just nothing to say to that. And so, there’s this massive vacuum of cultural sustenance. And I think there’s some real truth to that. And so, when I think about the future of liberalism, I think about — and this is the book I would maybe write next or whatever — there are parts of this in your book and in other things that are happening, but there’s a kind of need to become much more deliberate about our lives and hold onto pluralism, but to find ways to cultivate community, cultivate a liberal way of life that also borrows from these other inheritances. But it’s got to be... we’ve taken so much for granted. It’s become so stagnant that there’s this sort of crisis of meaning. And your book — I think you’re in the weeds of policy, and in the best sense, you’re thinking this through on a broad platform. I don’t know, it’s a very ambitious book. It’s very rich and there’s so much exciting... I mean, it’s very depressing, I’d say. The first eight chapters are like, whoa. And I think you’re more dour than me. I mean, the flavor of it is more Deneen-like than I would be comfortable with. And I think that’s interesting and you may be right.

Lindsey: And that’s led to a couple of critical reviews that have lumped me in with post-liberals, right?

Field: Well, it’s very interesting because it’s also... It’s so interesting, but I mean, that’s just also maybe a matter of what you’re thinking about while you’re writing. You’re looking, I think, in a hard-headed way at some very real problems, and it’s very educative to read through that stuff.

Lindsey: So, I think there’s a lot to be gloomy about. There’s a lot to be excited about too. I really do feel like we’re in a best of times, worst of times, Dickensian world these days. And it’s very difficult for people to keep both of those ideas in their head at the one time.

Field: No, I agree.

Lindsey: If they’re focused on optimistic things, they don’t want to hear about the bad stuff. And if they’re focused on the bad stuff, they want to just completely write off the good stuff. But I really think we’re in a confusing, critical time, a crisis where things can go one way or the other and diverge sharply. So, there’s a lot of promising, exciting things going on, and then there’s a lot of things to be gloomy about. The radical difference, I think, that separates me from the post-liberal types is they think liberalism is fundamentally rotten, right? That it was misconceived from the Enlightenment forward.

Whereas I think that we are dealing with the messy aftermath of liberalism’s greatest triumph, which is the conquest of poverty or the marginalization of poverty. And that has opened the possibility then of not just reducing suffering, but of actually inculcating affirmative wellbeing on a mass scale. And the irony is that having made this leap, it’s brought problems of its own. And some of those problems are then complicating this transition from one great world-historical achievement — the eradication of mass poverty — to the next great world-historical achievement, which is the achievement of mass flourishing. So, for me, I see liberalism as stumbling into problems, but I’m on its side. I celebrate its triumphs and I want it to triumph in the future, right?

Field: Yeah. And I think — I mean, in a way you’re thinking very deeply and seriously about, I mean, the permanent problem, which I love that, I love how you used that idea. And just in a similar way to the post-liberals — and this is where I’m perfectly comfortable with them — they’re thinking about deep questions about what it means to be alive and about the common good. You’re doing a much better job though, I mean, because you’re using fresh language. So, for me, the concept of flourishing or eudaimonia comes ultimately from Aristotle. It’s this idea that we need to think about how to live well, that that’s what’s distinctive about human politics.

And I just think you’re using fresh language that is something that is very... it’s just so refreshing because most people don’t do that. They use the old versions of it and they’re not creative. Maybe you’re borrowing this, but the relationships, what constitutes flourishing for people — relationships, projects, experiences — I mean, I love that. That’s something I think everybody can say, yeah, there’s something to that. Maybe I would add a couple other things, but this is a rich characterization, a philosophical formulation for what people need in life to be very happy.

Lindsey: So, you mentioned before this key component of the post-liberal case against liberalism, which is that it is parasitic upon pre-liberal culture and values for social coherence and cohesion and for meaning, and that it has systematically ripped through that inheritance and now we’re bone dry and now the crisis is upon us. That’s the story. So, first, as a story about liberalism generally, I just don’t think that’s correct. I think there have been plenty of times of remoralization during the liberal era, right? We had the Second Great Awakening in the United States with a huge drop in alcohol consumption and the birth of both the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements and an enormous increase in church-going. So, we were not a very churchy people at the beginning of the 19th century. We became much more church-going over the course of the 19th century. The Victorian era of remoralization in Great Britain was a conscious effort to sort of raise standards again. So, these things happen. In the United States, we’ve seen it split along class lines, but in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had a general sort of breakdown of marital stability. But in the college-educated class, that has been reconstructed.

So, now marriages are just about as stable as they ever were. They’ve fallen apart for the majority below. So, that’s a real problem. But the idea that liberal societies can summon up resources for revitalization and rejuvenation is clearly true.

Field: Of course, yeah.

Lindsey: But that’s useful. But it is the fact that actually existing liberal societies — and I don’t blame the political principles of liberalism, I blame more the social practices of consumerism and bureaucratic managerialism — liberal societies have liberated us. They’ve liberated us from a whole bunch of traditional values and connections, many of which had a dark side and an oppressive side, and it’s good to be done with them, but they’ve liberated us from pretty much everything except consumerism and bureaucracy. And that’s not the stuff out of which you make a rich fulfilling life.

So, we don’t have anything currently acting as a kind of unifying cultural counterweight to the “just outsource everything” comfort-and-convenience-ueber-alles of consumerism and “infantilize everyone because the experts know best” of managerialism — we don’t have anything pushing back against that. So, I think we are in a kind of cultural crisis, and it is the great challenge of liberal societies today to do social reconstruction, to rebuild, to reweave a fabric of connectedness and meaning. But I don’t think it’s innate in liberalism that it can’t do it, because it’s done it plenty of times.

Field: Yes, I totally agree. And I mean, it can be more deliberate. And maybe deliberate’s not the right word, but it can be done again. I think that there’s a lot of thirst for this in all kinds of different ways, but I’m thinking about different parts of civil society probably than you. But I think that’s very helpful. And see, you could have put more of that hopeful stuff in the book about the previous iterations...

Lindsey: The usual policy wonk book is nine chapters of what’s wrong and one chapter of what is to be done.

Field: Okay, okay. I got it.

Lindsey: I had three whole chapters about what is to be done.

Field: You did. Yeah. No, and I’m not one to speak. My book has one little paragraph about the future. But I wanted you to say a little bit more about the managerialism thing, because this is sort of a new... I mean, to me, when you’re talking about this stuff, so parts of the book reminded me of Deneen, and then this part, I’m sorry to say, reminded me of Bronze Age Pervert, right? Costin Alamariu.

Lindsey: I have not read him.

Field: It’s okay. It’s okay.

Lindsey: I have read James Burnham.

Field: I mean, Bronze Age Pervert, it is funny. And I think that he’s tapping into something real and there’s something there that’s undeniable. It’s super gendered for him. It’s like the longhouse of the matriarchs and it’s awful. I mean, I can’t help but laugh at BAP, and I’ve never had an issue with the bureaucracy before. It doesn’t really bother me for whatever reason. I feel like, okay, but there is something where you can still see it, and the kind of COVID... And I think having young kids — I have two young boys in school — and I’m much more sympathetic to public schools and stuff. I have no problem with any of that.

I think it’s a center for community. But the bureaucratic managerialism problem I think is absolutely real and I liked reading about it from you. So, much more than Bronze Age Pervert. So, can you characterize the problem a little bit?

Lindsey: Yeah, sure.

Field: Or explain it again.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, first, I think we see it in both the public and private sectors, and pro-market people tend to focus on the downsides of public-sector bureaucracy. So, in my book, I think the central problem I identify with contemporary capitalism is this sort of social disintegration, the breakdown of vital social connections, the reopening of a class war, political polarization, decreasing number of friends, increasing loneliness, decreasing marriage, decreasing childbirth. So, all of that is going on. In other words, the connection between economic growth and wellbeing has gotten weakened. But meanwhile, there’s a subsidiary problem, so I call that main problem the crisis of inclusion.

The crisis of dynamism, meanwhile, is that the system’s capacity to actually continue producing economic growth is sputtering as well. And there, I think it’s easy to identify bureaucracy run amok as a bad guy. That’s at the center of the contemporary abundance movement, which I and Niskanen colleagues had some hand in coming up with some of the policy analyses and ideas that got woven by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein into their book Abundance. The emergence of a vetocracy that makes it very difficult to accomplish anything in the world of atoms — that’s something that’s now widely seen on the center left as well as the center right.

As far as in the private sector, though, I think we can see this kind of managerial ethos, and so it’s born out of the fact that we went from an industrial economy to a post-industrial information age economy, and we needed a whole bunch more white-collar office workers to manage and coordinate things rather than to just use their brawn. So, our workforce has changed and we have created this new class, which is the leadership class. It’s the dominant class in American life, and they’re college educated, and they’re managers and professionals, right? So, that’s how they think. And so, in their professional lives, they manage.

And when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So, we see this not just in bureaucracy and government, we see it in the proliferation of administrative offices on campus, the bureaucratization of campus life. We see the HR-ization of corporate life. We see surveillance capitalism with employers checking on employees’ every keystroke and bathroom break. We see it, I think, in the rise of helicopter parenting and this sort of grim desire to squeeze every drop of spontaneity out of childhood in the name of safety.

So, I think this impulse — which is that the experts know better, and we can organize and rationalize things, and that will be more efficient and more effective than just leaving it to spontaneous, bottom-up winging it — this faith in expertise has carried on to excess. Meanwhile, the people doing the managing are the same kind of people who hold all the power, the levers of economic power in the country as well, and their cultural values are quite distinct in many important ways from the non-college-educated majority.

So, to me, my fundamental read on the populist uprising is that it is a rebellion of the majority against the professional and managerial elite. And it’s not surprising then that the populist right would put its particular right-wing and often misogynistic spin on this phenomenon, but I do think it’s a real phenomenon. And it’s the kind of thing that Tocqueville warned about 180 years ago.

Field: I mean, I think one thing to say — my sense is it’s kind of this groupthink that also stunts the managerial class... They’re sort of stunted by it too. Is that fair to say that there’s a kind of...

Lindsey: Yeah, it’s a group thing and conformism and...

Field: Yeah. And an unwillingness to just live in the free ways that are appropriate to people and to allow other people to participate in freedom. There’s a kind of cloying control psychology.

Lindsey: You know, as a parent, when you see your kid fumbling with tying their shoes or fumbling with something and you’re late and you know I can just do this immediately and get it done and we can effectively accomplish the day’s chores faster if I just do it for them right now. But you know they’ve got to learn and you sit there and you’re patient and you let them do it. And even though they can’t do it as well as you, it’s their life. So, we have managers now looking at the populace like parents looking at kids and saying, “Oh, I could do things so much better than them,” but that’s just not the way a free society is supposed to work.

Field: No, no, and it sort of inhibits both sides of... Everybody’s stunted by that, I think. I mean, I’ve found it pretty compelling that... Okay, can we move on to your solutions here because there’s, again, pretty depressing but very useful eight chapters. And then you end in, and it’s sort of in the abundance line of things energy-wise. There’s a lot of that stuff that I used to think... When I first heard about abundance, I mean, I guess I had heard a little bit about it from you guys, but finally I got the book, the Ezra Klein book or whatever, and I read it and I thought I was going to hate it and I really didn’t.

I felt pretty hopeful reading that book. I wouldn’t say I loved it because I still got questions, but whatever.

Lindsey: I think the interest in these ideas is one of the few hopeful things going on in politics these days.

Field: It is. It is exciting. I expected it to be this shallow consumer something, and it’s not at all. And I think that’s also true of your stuff, but you’re doing something I find more deeply resonant with me, but not for the reasons I think you would like, because I’m very sympathetic to the Benedict option, Deneen, and the eco-Wendell Berry world, right? In my soul. I know that it’s a little nutty and degrowth, right? I think I haven’t done any real reading in that, but I’m like, “Yeah, I get that impulse.” I mean, you reject that, but you’re also, I think, still using...

Lindsey: A high-tech version of it, right?

Field: You’re doing a high-tech world-building version of it that I love. And I think that I deeply love, because there’s even something Heideggerian in what you’re doing, or Matt Crawford, that kind of recrafting a world that I... Again, it’s not something I’ve thought too much about, but I know it resonates with me.

And so, it’s kind of like you’re writing the Benedict option for the secular crowd or for the abundance crowd, and there’s a real emphasis on decentralization and on community building and just thinking through new possibilities for everybody that I find very compelling.

But anyway, you’re more resistant to some of the institutions that we have in our world. So, I have some disagreements. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about your vision here?

Lindsey: Yeah. So, I don’t think we need to invent a new social system. I think that there isn’t a new good one to invent, and the search for that just leads to grief. What we need is — capitalism is the greatest social technology for enrichment and material improvement ever invented, and we’re going to be able to make good use of it for a long time. And I think what we need to do is, on the one hand, refocus capitalism and sort of clear some of these barnacles and vetocracy out of the way so that it can be more effective at advancing the technological frontier and raising material living standards, and particularly reducing the cost of living and making us richer that way.

But at the same time, I think we can recognize that technological progress is no longer a mass mobilization project. And that’s at the heart of a lot of our class divide these days — that the old class divide was based on the dependence of capitalist progress on huge inputs of brute physical labor. And so, the only way to have progress was to enlist all these people into doing this dirty, dangerous work. And so, there was a heavy blood price to be paid that engendered all kinds of conflict, right? It produced conflict at the workplace, it produced class consciousness in the working class, it produced the socialist movement, it produced totalitarian communism, that produced the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. There was some serious social instability growing out of the dependence of capitalist progress on physical labor. As we’ve gotten richer and moved into a post-industrial information age economy, technological progress — the progress of the system — is ever less dependent on the inputs of ordinary workers. It’s becoming more and more something that highly trained specialists do.

In the rich countries, we’ve either automated everything or what we haven’t automated yet, we’ve outsourced to poorer countries. But in general, once upon a time, ordinary workers and their bosses were side by side on the technological frontier. Now, the technological frontier is occupied by elites and ordinary workers are shunted to the backwaters. On the one hand, that’s a humanitarian triumph, right? Progress is no longer dependent upon terrible physical suffering, and the workplace is just much cleaner and safer than it used to be, and wages are much higher than they used to be.

But on the spiritual side, I think something serious has been lost, that ordinary people’s contribution to the great commonweal is just less important than it used to be, because once upon a time they were essential to progress and now they’re not anymore. So, I think that sense of being superfluous and therefore being kind of despised by the elites is a real component of the resentments that drive populist anger. But the good news then is if technological progress isn’t dependent upon mass inputs of ordinary, less-skilled labor, then maybe we don’t have to have mass mobilization anymore. Maybe we can focus on getting richer and richer so that more and more people don’t have to work all the time.

They can either retire early or they can work 15 hours a week, which was what Keynes predicted when he was thinking about the permanent problem a hundred years ago, or maybe they could work episodically as circumstances changed. You would have highly trained knowledge workers who have interesting, challenging, high-status, high-remuneration jobs. They’re working harder, they’re working longer hours than their parents and grandparents worked, and that’s okay. I mean, there’s downsides to that, but there’s not a social crisis in that. But for everyone else, I think that we have been liberated from the need to have everybody working for solely external rewards all the time.

And so, the central crisis of flourishing today is this lack of social connection, is the lack of deep and abiding and durable social bonds with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis. And to my way of thinking, one of the main reasons why this has happened is we’re victims of our own success, that once upon a time, face-to-face relationships fulfilled vital practical functions. Your spouse was your partner in economic production. Your kids helped out on the farm when they were young and they took care of you when you were old. Your neighbors were collective security on the frontier. They were a collective insurance policy when times were bad.

They were also your only source of entertainment other than listening to the crickets at night. But all of these things we’ve either outsourced to the market or to the welfare state, so we don’t need flesh-and-blood people for material survival anymore, but we do need them for flourishing because we’re a hypersocial species that is utterly dependent upon deep and abiding contact with others. We need them for our quality of life, and we have been lured into deprioritizing human relationships. So, I think the goal of getting richer is to rebuild face-to-face communities that then have practical functions.

Those practical functions — as technology stands right now, they’re mostly what’s technologically the lowest-hanging fruit, which is just caregiving. Caregiving for kids, homeschooling for children, and caregiving for our parents and grandparents. Over time, as technology develops, you can picture communities becoming more and more self-sufficient through vertical farming or through small modular nukes. They can have their own food and energy. I see the goal of economic growth as: what are we pushing towards? Not just more bells and whistles. We’re trying to push towards a better life.

And a better life to me looks like a much more decentralized life where a lot of people are focused more on building their own homes and communities and taking care of each other and living their lives shared in common rather than working for the purely external rewards of a paycheck. So, to me, that’s what progress looks like — a revitalization of human bonds through opportunities created by continued technological progress.

Field: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s something sort of deeply attractive about that, especially when you think about... There’s also an off-grid element. It’s like a Benedict option for preppers too. I mean, I’m joking, but there’s something I think deeply appealing about that...

Lindsey: Yeah, I’m deeply committed to pluralism, and that means forms of pluralism I’m not going to really cotton to. I’ll bite that bullet.

Field: Yeah. I think there’s something really exciting here. I’ve got one last question. I’ve spent the last week or two reading Oren Cass. We hosted an event with him at the liberalism studies program. So, I’ve reading that alongside your book. This is all much more wonky than I usually do, but it couldn’t be helped. So, he’s really trying to revitalize and revalue work in a way that I think your approach, including physical labor, right? I mean, there’s this re-industrialization stuff and this idea — I think he would say that your approach removes... You’ve, I think, made peace with automation and the implications of that in a way that he maybe hasn’t.

And he sees that the psychological need for a different kind of work, especially for men, is so vital that it must be subsidized and we must find a way to recreate that. And I mean, I’m sort of sympathetic to his way of thinking in terms of just maybe big projects that can be built. And there does seem to be a lot of work that could be done that is still physical, that’s still going to need to happen and could be maybe generated. And also farming… And partly I’m resistant to this idea of caregiving being the primary thing just for gendered reasons — it seems like I don’t want to do that. I mean, I love my kids. There’s a lot of caregiving that is going on. And I’m sure you’ve heard that. I’m just a little skeptical, but I’m also extremely sympathetic and so I sort of want all of this together.

Lindsey: Yeah, I want more women back in the home, but I want more men back in the home too.

Field: Of course. Yeah. Yeah, no. I do too.

Lindsey: And I want them both back equally, right?

Field: I do too. I’m more skeptical about how that’s going to actually shake out. But what do you think about Cass and his work? Because you’re saying we need to make our peace with the fact that we’re going to have fewer people doing market labor, what you call market labor, I think, right? And that we’re going to have different forms of activity. And I guess the deeper thing here is that — I want to tie this back to Aristotle — Aristotle, for him, activity and happiness and flourishing is an activity. And I think that you do believe this and that your articulation, it’s not just social connection, it’s projects, right?

And so, I think that that’s something maybe that... Anyway, but yeah, tell me what you think of all that.

Lindsey: Yeah. So, I think he’s fighting a lost cause. So, he’s looking to revitalize male-flourishing-friendly work within a post-industrial economy. And I don’t think we can wind back the clock. There’s just no way to create blue-collar manufacturing jobs. And those jobs were horrible.

Field: There’s a real romanticization there, right? Yeah.

Lindsey: So, I think we’re going to recreate flourishing-friendly work outside of the system. So, the system should focus on being an effective system, which means generating technological progress. So, we shouldn’t be introducing a lot of inefficiency into the system, just gumming up the works. The system should work as well as it can to enrich enough of us to live more and more of our lives outside the system, where we can reserve for ourselves meaningful work.

And now we’re in one of the hype cycles of AI. We just had stock market bloodbaths with software firms getting dinged because of new AI releases and this occasioned a round of speculation about whether we’re going to have mass elimination of white-collar work. So, ultimately, this idea that it may not be in the far distant future that we don’t have to do anything. So, then that’s the real question for human flourishing: what are humans supposed to do when they don’t have to do anything? But not having to do anything, that means you’re free. So, this means how do we live free lives, free from material necessity?

And a lot of that is self-imposed difficulty. So, tennis isn’t fun without a net. You need… for a project to be fulfilling, it has to be challenging. So, we’re going to end up reserving some work for ourselves because we’re going to prefer human services or human-made goods to machine-made goods. I think that’s almost inevitable, but it will be a form of play because we don’t have to do it that way. We’ll do it because it’s enjoyable and good for us, not because it’s the most efficient and effective thing from an economic perspective.

Field: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, let’s end it on that. I think that was really fun.

Lindsey: Okay. So, yeah, we’ve run over the hour and we could go another hour easily, but hey, this was great chatting with you and congratulations...

Field: Yes, thank you.

Lindsey: ...congratulations on your book. It’s doing wonderfully. It’s gotten lots of glowing reviews, and so all the best to you and good work.

Field: Thank you, Brink, and congratulations on yours too. It’s very exciting and brave stuff, I think, to be thinking in that constructive way.

Lindsey: Thanks so much, Laura.

Below is a video recording of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Permanent Problem podcast. This podcast has been on hiatus for a number of months as I was putting my book to bed and getting ready for its publication. But now that it’s out, I’m revving up the podcasting again and I’m delighted to have on as my first guest back, Damon Linker, who writes the Substack Notes from the Middleground. He’s also a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. And last but not least, he’s a senior fellow at my employer, the Niskanen Center.

So Damon, welcome to The Permanent Problem.

Damon Linker: Thanks for having me Brink. It’s great to be here and to know that I helped the latest phase of the podcast relaunching. I’m honored.

Lindsey: Good, good, good. So I’d like to start off just a little bit with some biographical details. I like my listeners and viewers to know a little bit about the person I’m conversing with.

So like me, you’re an intellectual wanderer. You’ve migrated around the ideological map, you’ve migrated around in faith traditions. I’m a geographical wanderer too. I’ve wound up on the opposite side of the planet from where I was born. But like you, I’ve done some journeying in the way I think about the world and have changed my mind as events... I’ve found that events keep changing my mind for me, but tell me a little bit about your path.

Linker: Sure. Well, I was raised to be sort of default secular liberal without much reflection on it, and even went through a brief period – I had occasion to mention this on Twitter/X the other day when Jesse Jackson died – I noted that actually I cast my very first ballot for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1988, marking the brief nine-month window where I was on the harder left. Not the hardest of lefts, but definitely to the left of the mainstream of the Democrats.

Lindsey: As far as you got. Yeah.

Linker: Yeah. That’s about as far as I got. Pretty quickly I moderated. I was very influenced by Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind when I was an undergraduate. It piqued a kind of longing for deep thoughts by reading philosophers and trying to discover kind of capital T truth about morality and all kinds of big questions. So I began studying in graduate school with students of Leo Strauss, and that had me coming out of graduate school on the default center right, which is what most Straussians were back then.

I was never entirely a Straussian. I was influenced by them, but also tried to remain at arm’s length because they seemed a little, I don’t know, inbred in a way that led me to be a little skeptical. I guess you could say, I’ve all along had a deep strand of skepticism in my thinking. And so even as I approach various more dogmatic positions, whether it’s political or spiritual, I always try to keep them a little bit distanced, apply a little bit of ironic, skeptical thinking to them to keep myself from being sucked into the undertow of a holistic system.

So it’s a long story, but basically for complicated career reasons, I actually made a career for a while on the neoconservative religious right of the early 2000s.

Lindsey: You were with the magazine First Things.

Linker: Yes, I worked for them for three and a half years. Probably not a great idea that I ever went to work for them given, again, the skepticism. That was not popular at First Things. And then 9/11 happened and that sort of radicalized the place, radicalized me for a short period where I was all... the whole American right went kind of nuts in that year or two after the 9/11 attacks.

But as soon as the drumbeat for the Iraq war began, I made very clear to the staff that I thought this was a terrible mistake, that Bush should not do this. There was no support for me making that case in the pages of the magazine. We were supposed to be loyal, we had to show we were team players. And that led over the next year or two to a kind of slow falling away from even my ability to affirm what the magazine stood for, even in a skeptical manner. So I ended up leaving, writing a book called The Theocons that was very critical of the magazine and the influence I thought it was having on the right at that time in the Bush administration. And I remade myself as a center left kind of New Republic guy from that era, not the current New Republic, but the old New Republic of Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier…

Lindsey: Skeptical liberal.

Linker: Yeah, skeptical liberalism. Although even there, I never... I mean they were big champions of the war too, and I never supported that and that kind of foreign policy vision. So even there it was selectively, like, “All right, on domestic policy, I fit with them.” I know that when you underwent your first slight metamorphosis toward becoming what was called, for a brief period, a liberaltarian, you wrote about this in the pages of the New Republic, which was very much I think a congenial place for that kind of deep thinking about what politics could and should be down through the years. And it’s a real loss to me that it ceased to serve that role in the ecosystem.

So that’s sort of the story. That’s where I’ve been ever since, sort of a very moderately liberal centrist basically. Like centrist but depending on the issue and the philosophical question, I might actually tilt slightly more center right, a little more center left, and just try to be as empirical and pragmatic as possible. I think there aren’t as many pragmatists around as people say, like genuine pragmatists who are willing to be open-minded in the best sense.

Lindsey: How did your political zigs and zags line up with your religious faith zigs and zags?

Linker: Well, that’s obviously, as you would expect, a pretty complicated question. I mean, clearly what drew me to the Straussians when I was young was similar to what drew me to the Catholic church.

I told you I was raised kind of as a secular liberal. But I went through a period in my late 20s when I began to long for, not in politics, but in the broader human sense, for some sort of fixed standard out there that would enable me to have a pattern on the wall over here all the time that I could look for to judge the failings of the real existing moral and political tenets of the moment. And for complicated reasons, having to do with my biography and my marriage and other things, Catholicism seemed to make the most sense for this, even though I was raised... And when I say secular liberal, it was actually secular Judaism. But I knew much more by then because of my education about the Christian tradition than I did about Judaism. I had never been bar mitzvahed, I didn’t know Hebrew.

So again, for those complicated idiosyncratic reasons, I decided, “All right. I’ll become a Catholic. And yeah, I don’t really believe the dogmas and doctrines, but maybe if I follow what Augustine says and take the leap, that I could learn, talk myself into belief along the way.”

It didn’t really work. My falling out with First Things, that happened shortly after my conversion, which was another factor in that, was that the first wave of several waves of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal was unfolding while I worked for a priest who was the editor-in-chief at First Things, Richard John Neuhaus, who wasn’t the worst in reflecting on the sins of the church. But after the story lingered for months and months, he fell into a position of saying that the problem was that the Catholics were insufficiently Catholic, which was tautological and defensive in a way that I found irksome. It didn’t help in my own spiritual turbulence of the time.

So I eventually just... I did do a kind of conversion to the church in a practical sense, but it never really took. and before long, I ended up being a lapsed convert and I’m back where I started as like, “Yeah, nominally Jewish because that’s how I was raised and I care more about the fate of the Jews than I do for some other random group of people on the face of the planet Earth.” And so I say, “Yeah, I’m secular Jewish,” but it doesn’t really shape much more about how I think and maneuver through the world at this point.

Lindsey: You’re a searcher, you’re looking for truth with a capital T, but at the same time you’re just unbudgeably skeptical and have a kind of tragic sense of things where you’re not really looking for or expecting happy endings.

Linker: Exactly. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

Lindsey: You’re not looking for the truth with a capital T that answers all questions satisfactorily. It’s more of a tortured search.

So I’m different. I have the constitution of a believer, so I, in my teenage years, fell hook, line, and sinker for Ayn Rand and was a diehard libertarian in my college years. I think what I’m good at is seeing big picture patterns, but sometimes I see big picture patterns that don’t exist. So right after 9/11, I was convinced that this was a world historical turn and that civilization was newly and horribly vulnerable to nihilistic terrorism, and that we were sitting ducks for it and it was going to be a new twilight struggle. And so in that frame of mind, I supported the Iraq war. And that’s the dumbest public mistake I’ve made in intellectual life.

I know how my frame of mind can lead me astray. Do you have a sense of how your frame of mind can create blind spots or lead you to miss out on things?

Linker: Well, yes, absolutely. I reflect on that all the time. And having been a columnist at The Week for about eight and a half years before I started the Substack, and I’ve now been there for, I guess, coming up on four years in June, so for about 12 years now, I’ve been writing at least twice a week about the news. And it’s been, as you may have heard, an extremely eventful decade of news. That has been a very effective way of checking myself because I’m constantly analyzing, saying what I think it all means, predicting little things about the near-term, medium-term, and long-term future, and then seeing how it stacks up.

And I think in general, the way you described my approach is quite accurate, kind of suspicious of happy endings, tragic sensibility. I’m very influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s tragic moral pluralism. And then my own reading even of Strauss’s work inclines in that direction, toward an aporetic character of reflections on morality and meaning, that the deeper you think about problems, the more they end in riddles and mysteries rather than the capital T truth that I think for me ultimately drives the search at a certain level, even though I know intellectually there is no way to get that capital T, truth.

But I guess to answer what you asked, specifically if there’s a kind of blind spot in that worldview, it is a tendency to sort of expect the worst, which is the perennial danger of a pessimist, which is the upside of…

Lindsey: You’ve found your moment.

Linker: I did find my moment, but George Will used to say like, “It’s great to be a pessimist because you’re either pleasantly surprised or confirmed in your convictions.”

So I do tend to be dark. I joke that my nickname is Damon the Downer or something like this. But given the dispositional character of American public life, I think it’s an advantage overall because Americans do tend to, I think... Maybe less in the Trump era where you have almost professional resistance types who are screaming fascism at the top of their lungs every day, but the general longer-term trajectory I think of Europe, of American public life tends toward a kind of conviction that everything works out in the end, the arc of history bends toward justice. In the end, democracy and liberalism will triumph everywhere. No other system of government can really justify itself adequately.

And so having someone like myself around being a gadfly and raising objections, poking at those theories, I’m comfortable in that role. And over these 12 years of following the news and pronouncing on it regularly, I think it’s served me pretty well as a guide.

Yeah, I’m pretty content with it, while trying to always be on guard. And I’ve developed ways of writing that guard against it by, for instance, when I do make a prediction, I always try to make it clear this is a conditional. Like, if the following things happen, then these things could happen. Always acknowledging that the conditionals could go the other way and then we’re on another path. Or even if they do go the way I’m speculating about, there are other paths. I mean, even my own darkest scenarios, I try to make clear, “These are probably the tail end in the scheme of all the probable outcomes.” And yet we should be aware that there is this tail end scenario that has certain tendencies that could unfold and we should be on guard against them to try to prevent them from happening.

Lindsey: So let me just ask one process question one writer to another, as you’ve been churning out prose, publishable prose at volume for over a decade, and that fills me with wonder and awe and rank jealousy. I am not a glib or facile writer. It’s an effort.

So how do you do it? How do you churn out three columns a week or however many Substack posts a week you generate now?

Linker: Most weeks I do two, but they tend to be long. And I’m not the kind of writer, you know the old line about journalists, “I didn’t have the time to write short” like as…

Lindsey: No, I believe that. I could make my essays shorter, but...

Linker: Yeah. I mean, when I was a columnist, even though it was online, so there wasn’t any 850 words strict deadline, most of the time my editors wanted it, say, under 1,200 words or something. Occasionally it could go a little more, or below that.

Linker: On the Substack, I’ve learned that my natural length is 1,500 to 2,000 words. And so almost every post is around that length except when they go longer. And I do regularly churn out a 3,000 word piece. I don’t know, I guess it feels to me like it’s training for a marathon. Like you never knew you could run 26 miles until you ran a 5K and then-

Lindsey: Do you have firm habits? Do you write at the same time every day?

Linker: Not every day, but I do have a schedule. So I do write twice a week. And it depends on when I’m teaching and if I’m teaching. So for instance, this semester I’m teaching Monday and Wednesday. So I write a post on Sunday, that goes up on Monday. And then on Thursday, that goes up on Friday. Sometimes if it’s a longer more involved piece, I’ll work on it for a few days here and there when I have time leading up to then Thursday being a day largely devoted to writing that post. So what that means is I have to give up a weekend day to write for a Monday post, and then a weekday Thursday to write for Friday.

And I am to the point that unless it’s a really long involved piece that requires more research or deeper analysis, I can usually sit down right after breakfast and start writing. And then before I go to bed, I have something that’s been written, revised, has display copy, written headlines, sub headline, art. And I can do that in a single work day.

Now it’s a full work day. It’s like 9:00 to 5:00 plus a couple hours after dinner, so probably seven to nine hours of labor to do that. But as I was saying about the analogy to running a marathon, I have been doing this so long that I can do it.

The great thing about writing for Substack as opposed to for a publication with an editor where my paycheck is contingent on doing my work, if it isn’t working out, if I don’t think it’s good, if I need another day to go over it again, no one’s going to fire me. No one’s going to stop subscribing to my Substack if I post it on Saturday instead of Friday. So that is a nice way of making it manageable with this pressure.

Although I have to say, the fact that you wrote the bulk of your current book, The Permanent Problem, as Substack posts and regularly putting them out, and they were pretty elaborate, basically large chunks of what became chapters in the book, that was pretty impressive. They were pretty polished. And so you can do it when you have something you’d want to say.

Lindsey: It was especially the essay format that I found completely liberating. Rather than presenting this bulletproof argument, “Here’s what I think. I’ve anticipated all objections. Ram it down your throat,” it’s more like just thinking out loud. “I used to think this and then this happened, and so it pushed me that way, but then here’s this countervailing consideration.” It was just much easier to get the prose out when you’re not trying to make it bulletproof.

So yeah, I wrote what turned out to be the bulk of the book over about a year and three months in 40 something essays, and I would write one a week and then I take a month off. After every 10 weeks I would take a little time off. But yeah, I’ve never approached anything like that level of words per week in my life, but I credit the format.

Linker: Yeah, it does work. And I’m glad it worked for you. I hope in whatever your next project turns out to be, you try doing it the same way because I think it was great.

Lindsey: So I’m having you on the show right now because I just wrote a book and you just wrote a review of it for your Substack. But more precisely, you wrote a review of two critical reviews of my book, and we’ll get to that in a bit. But in particular, these two reviewers, one affiliated with the Brookings Institution, the center-left august institution, and one affiliated with the center right American Enterprise Institute, both characterized my analysis of contemporary capitalism’s problems as post-liberal in nature. They lumped me in with the post-liberals of the populist right.

So before we get to me and the post-liberals, let’s talk about post-liberals and who they are. And this is your beat, the Substack Notes from the Middleground. It’s got three elements, but your main activity, because of the nature of the news and the world we’ve been living in recent years, is craziness going on the right and particularly the emergence of a new kind of right that’s very different in many ways from the old Reaganite conservatism.

So to me, in part, we’re seeing a recrudescence of old right-wing instincts that have been part of the European right as well as the American right for a long time. On the other hand, we’re seeing kind of a frenzied improvisation to the completely unexpected 2016 victory of Trump. So there was this brute fact that happened, this crazy guy that no one thought was going to win has won. And so a lot of people who saw opportunity in that, then intellectual types who saw opportunity in that, wanted to rationalize and put Trump into their boxes.

So it seems to me we’ve got... How do you see it? Do you see this kind of, on the one hand, is this on the fly improvisation to this unexpected behavior, but also that improvisation has let creepy crawlies out from under the log that have been hiding under there for a long time?

Linker: Yeah, I mean it is a blend of both, I think. Someone like Patrick Deneen who is among the most prominent of the post-liberals, he always was sort of offside on the American right. I mean, his work... I’ve known him for a long time. I think I published his first essay of journalism in First Things back in 2003 or ‘04. He wrote a piece about Christopher Lasch that we published, and he pitched it to me at an American Political Science Association conference, and I saw it through the editorial process. And already there he was... Father Neuhaus, the editor in chief, wasn’t entirely comfortable with publishing the piece because it didn’t really fit with Bush era Republicanism, following Lasch. It was critical of the right on economic matters, like in more left leaning, at least as far as the general outlook of the role of the government in regulating markets and in providing a social safety net. It rhymed with the left.

And then on the right, it was very much on sides with First Things, but the whole Laschian framework was just far more communitarian than First Things tended to be. And so he’s always been sort of an anti-federalist type in his work, which I always found very intellectually interesting.

So when Trump won, he interpreted this as vindication that those offside with the Reaganite dispensation that ran from 1980 to 2016, who say “I’m not comfortable with that entirely.” And Trump was like this moment of, “Whoa, everything is scrambled. He seems to be tapping into stuff that meshes with my presumptions, so I’m going to start writing.” And he wrote in the next year or two, he wrote his first big book. He had a few academic books earlier, but the one that got tons of attention titled Why Liberalism Failed, which was…

Lindsey: Recommended by Barack Obama.

Linker: Recommended by Obama. And I actually think it’s a pretty good book. I was not a big hostile critic of that one. I am a hostile critic of the book that followed, Regime Change.

Which I think is much less impressive and much more of a, I don’t know, an attempt to more explicitly make it so that his old assumptions that he was working on for a long time, to make it come out with Donald Trump as the logical consequence of it, which it takes much more of a stretch and I think magical thinking and just doesn’t... And it ends up sounding in certain parts of the latter book as if he’s trying to justify January 6th in the name of what he calls aristo-populism.

It was very ad hoc, very much I feel like trying to come up with a theory. As you were describing, it’s sort of running along behind Trump and retrofitting an ideology that makes him make sense when he’s actually much more mercurial and impulsive and it’s like a kind of Trump psychodrama as much as anything else.

And then the other figures on the post-liberal right, I think Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School is a genuinely brilliant guy. I think he’s also probably the most dangerous of these people because he’s the smartest. And he has a lot of... I don’t know. When he’s in certain forums, he’ll do things like co-author a book with Cass Sunstein, which surprised me that Sunstein would do such a thing. I mean, I wouldn’t write a book with Adrian Vermeule. But then he also writes things for Catholic audiences that are very right-wing. And he very clearly is an acolyte and admirer of Carl Schmitt, who’s the famous Nazi jurist or Nazi-admiring jurist from the Weimar Republic.

Lindsey: Kind of unlike everybody else in that crowd, he has the technical legal chops to actually push forward an affirmative, basically, authoritarian agenda. Whereas most of the other folks, they’re very good at criticizing what’s going on now, and sometimes they pick themes and take angles that I sympathize with. But then when they switch to, “Well, what is to be done?”, they go over into just wildly unrealistic kind of thinking and then just utter credulity about the Trump administration as a force for cultural regeneration, which I just can’t even wrap my mind around how anyone could really think that seriously, but...

Linker: Right. Yeah. I mean there is a logic to reactionary thinking as a tradition that... And I don’t mean reactionary in a polemical sense, that a lot of progressives say like, “Well, we, progressives, are where history is going. And if you oppose us in anything, you’re reacting to that and you’re a reactionary, which means you’re going to die out and lose and just give up already.”

I don’t mean it that way. I mean an actual traditional thought that is not conservative, that is not liberal, that is something distinct on the right, it’s further out on the right, and it despises the present. And then either in one mode, it tries to restore something about the past. And then in another even more radical mode, it is a kind of redemptive tendency to basically say, like accelerationism as it’s sometimes called, that the contemporary world is so bad and we’re so cut off from what used to be good from the golden age that we’ve lost. The only alternative is to accelerate the decline of the present so that the whole world essentially collapses. And then on the ruins of that, we might build anew. That obviously feeds into fascism and very extreme political movements of the far right.

And certainly Vermeule has written some things, and some of these other people at least flirt with some of that sometimes, this notion that either we can restore something that was good about the American past, Western civilization’s past, the past of a Christian tradition, the Catholic church. Or then if we can’t do that, if that bridge has been blown up and there’s no path back, then we have no alternative but to just ride the roller coaster all the way down and then we’ll start anew.

And that can be really scary stuff. But you can see that logic play itself out in some of these figures. And they play with it because it’s rhetorically very effective to sound that uncompromising. But when put in action, there are some people in the administration right now, the Trump administration, that I think look at it that way.

And the reason why I brought this up in the first place in the context of Vermeule is there... You said how you could think Trump would contribute to any kind of cultural renewal, and I totally agree with you. But if your goal is to see Trump as a wrecking ball-

Lindsey: Sure.

Linker: ... then okay, then it makes sense because you have Trump out there destroying the liberal state, destroying the administrative state, regulatory capacity, state capacity. And then out of the chaos that that will cause, something better will emerge. Maybe that’ll be Vance, maybe that’ll be somebody else.

Lindsey: That makes sense from the logic of radicalism. So it’s not just reactionary radicals. Anybody who’s really out of joint with the status quo, their only hope is some kind of extreme event, some kind of extreme historical discontinuity is going to happen. Collapse is going to happen, revolution is going to happen, a war is going to happen, something’s going to happen to clear the ground for change that’s going in a very different direction from where we are now.

So I saw a lot of that in libertarian land, people with “the worse, the better” kind of thinking, which I’ve always been repelled by. And it was interesting to me, I just learned recently that Deneen back in the mid-2000s, he was a peak oil guy. So he was, back then, hoping for decline and disaster that would usher in this hypothetical brighter day post-chaos.

Linker: Yes, he definitely was. And also my old friend, Rod Dreher, who was profiled in the Atlantic recently, Robert Worth wrote a very good profile, fair-minded, empathetic. I liked it a lot. And he says at one point that Dreher is always predicting some kind of cataclysm, like the decline of the West, the immigration, Muslims, and warning about this terrible thing, civil war, dictatorship, fascism. He is currently working on a book about the Weimar Republic, saying we’re basically in the Weimar Republic now.

And Worth, I think, very shrewdly points out that you can’t read Rod regularly without sensing that although he is always kind of ringing the alarm bell about this, that deep down he longs for it. He wants this to happen because exactly in that reactionary way I was talking about, he hopes that it will be a kind of cleansing fire that will enable something better to crop up on the far side of the cataclysm, whatever form it takes.

And peak oil was a kind of, in retrospect, a pretty comical version of that. And we have versions of that in the present moment about AI too, both in the way that I’m more open to talking about what AI might mean for white collar work, knowledge workers, and really worrying that if it truly is as disruptive as some predict it will be, like this is going to be majorly turbulent for our societies. But then there are the others who are like, “AI is going to be super intelligent, it’s going to wipe out humanity.” That’s more of peak oil stuff where you’re just extrapolating from your nightmares.

Lindsey: So in my book I talk about contemporary capitalism being in crisis. I talk about the central crisis as a crisis of inclusion, where there’s a weakening connection between economic growth and actual overall well-being. And I discussed that in a number of different dimensions. Beyond that, there’s a subsidiary crisis of dynamism – that the actual capacity of the system to keep pushing growth itself is bogging down. And then finally a crisis of politics where we might deal with these urgent and serious problems through collective action, but alas, the political realm is not upstream of the things that are messing up our social and economic conditions. So we’ve got a deranged politics as well.

So in not downplaying contemporary problems and saying that they amount to a crisis, by which I mean a kind of, we’re in a period that’s decades-long, a crisis suggests something imminent, but I think it’s a rolling decades-long crisis where things are going to go one way or another. They can either get appreciably, dramatically better or they could get appreciably worse. So it feels to me that we’re in a time where we’re playing for pretty high stakes.

But that led these two reviewers, Jonathan Rauch and Michael Strain, the darkness or bleakness of my assessment of what’s going on right now led them to lump me in with post-liberals, which I thought was over the top because I don’t think anything like them. So first, everybody who says something has gone wrong has “the Fall,” right? They have a moment in history where things went wrong. So for me, it’s reactions to the advent of mass affluence. So particularly the changing structure of the economy, the shift out of the industrial economy to a post-industrial information age economy with a large professional and managerial elite, that’s a new social formation, and a class divide along educational lines, that’s a major component of what has changed.

We’ve also had cultural responses to becoming rich. Some of those are the shift from what are called survival values to self-expression values that occurred as we climbed up Maslow’s pyramid and got to mass affluence. We felt much less constrained. We had much more breathing room. We felt that we could focus much more on... so we’ve got physical survival, more or less taken for granted. Now we can focus on higher needs, and particularly realizing our self-potential. That got infected, I think, particularly with a kind of romantic belief in the purity of individual impulse and in the oppressiveness of all forms of authority, which I think has led us astray in a bunch of different ways.

So things have gone off course, but in the midst of the greatest triumph in history. We’ve achieved humanity’s age-old dream of marginalizing poverty – making it, instead of being the central factor of human existence, it’s now a tragic, marginal side-problem in the shadows of human life. And this great achievement sets us up for an even greater achievement, which is to translate material plenty into actual, what I call, mass flourishing, widespread access to challenging, fulfilling, satisfying lives. But we’re stuck there in this kind of no man’s land between material plenty and mass flourishing.

That’s the frame I use to explain a number of the problems we’re going through, including our messed up politics. So “the Fall” for the post-liberals is very different. It goes back to the Enlightenment or maybe all the way back to William of Ockham and nominalism, displacing Platonic forms.

So we see some of the same symptoms that we’re both worried about. We see the dysfunctional aspects of romantic self-expression, individualism run amok. We see the kind of suffocating oppressiveness of managerialism run amok, but from completely different frameworks, completely different moral frameworks, completely different hopes for what happens next. And so I thought it was an unilluminating comparison to lump me in with those guys.

Linker: Yeah, I really was appalled, frankly, to read those two. And the reason why is aside from my admiration for you and the book and what you and the book stand for, which is a smart liberal attempt to make sense of how we got here and why. As I said in my review of the reviews, there is abundant public opinion data in this country and in other OECD countries about declining rates of trust in government, belief in the effectiveness of government, trust in public institutions, happiness about hopes for the future. Are we on the right track or wrong track? All these different ways pollsters over many years and often decades of polling data, you can see downward trajectory on all these measures.

And there’s something happening. I don’t like it when intellectuals bandwagon for ideological purposes and say, “We can’t talk about that because that would be conceding too much to our critics.” I think it’s unpersuasive, it’s intellectually dishonest in a way that I really don’t like. I would say I didn’t spend much time talking about Strain in the review that I wrote because his position is, I think a little different than Rauch’s. I think Strain’s view is he legitimately thinks there’s nothing wrong. And the people who are answering negatively to the pollsters, which is tens of millions of people here and around the world, are just ignorant. That for whatever reason, they haven’t looked at the data. They don’t realize that the macro level economic data shows everything’s great, wages are up, your life expectancy is so high compared to historical norms. You could just tick off data to show that if you would just read the facts, you would realize this is actually the greatest of all possible worlds.

That is so non-responsive to the reality of the world and a dead end intellectually and politically that I didn’t even know what to say about it exactly. Whereas the Rauch position did seem more like, “Oh, come on, it’s not so bad. Yes, some of these things are a problem, but we have to just buck up and just keep doing what we were doing” and not freak out about what he admits are some distressing trends.”

And that position, I think, is one that more needs to be engaged with and try to push back on it. Yeah, I mean, you told me that you’ve continued the conversation with him a little bit off site, so maybe some of that is off limits for discussion in public, but what do you sense his-

Lindsey: I mean, that’s private, but first I’ll just say generally in normal times, internal critics on the team are often not popular and are often accused of having uncertain loyalties. You really belong on the other team. So in the current environment where we’re incredibly polarized and people not on the right have very good reason to think that the current right is an existential threat to fundamental liberal democratic institutions, then the defensiveness and the suspicion of internal critics understandably goes up. It’s just -- it’s going to happen, right? So I think that’s going on.

So there’s a division that I allude to, in a recent post talking about these reviews, between what I call brokenist and non-brokenist liberals. So we’re all on Team Liberal, we’re all freaked out about the threat of authoritarian populism. We’re also all highly displeased with the lunacy of the far left. But some people, the brokenists – there was an article in Tablet by Alana Newhouse, I’m not sure if I got her name correctly…

Linker: Yes.

Lindsey: “Everything is broken,” and it came out five, six years ago. And this sense that there’s some people who think things have gotten really off course and we have deep-seated problems and we’re going to have to deal with them at a fairly profound level to get back on course versus people who say, “We’ve always got problems. This is the same as times past. You’re catastrophizing, you’re over dramatizing. Just stick with sensible incrementalism and don’t go getting ahead of yourself like that.”

And I think Jonathan Rauch is very much of just an instinctive, moderate incrementalist. He doesn’t like the idea of big profound problems that can only be solved at profound levels. So I think there’s just that temperamentally, he’s not disposed to arguments like mine.

Linker: Well, yeah, that’s true. Although I have to say I admire a lot of what Rauch has written down through the years. I see him as pretty close ideologically to myself, obviously as a fellow liberal centrist, but...

Lindsey: Yeah, there’s a basic strategic question. So we’re all on Team Liberal, we have the same enemies or we see the same threats. And we know that the status quo is not perfect and we want to change it in a bunch of different ways. But the issue is that anti-brokenists think that I am conceding way too much to the other side and lending credence to the radical critiques of liberal capitalism being made by the authoritarian.

Whereas my sense is that table stakes in the game right now is to admit that there are serious problems. We have to recognize that liberal democracy is in a legitimacy crisis. Large chunks of the electorate no longer have faith in established institutions or governing elites. That’s why people like Donald Trump get elected, because of this. And so if we don’t face up to that fact that a big chunk of the public has lost faith, and rather than just telling they’re stupid or they need to read some AEI white papers, we should be recognizing and sensing why they have come to that conclusion and then trying to make sense of it and deal with it. So we both have good faith reasons for thinking that the other side of Team Liberal is messing things up badly.

Linker: Yeah. But as I started to say earlier, I just find, first of all, it’s too American-centric to take the position that I see Rauch taking. I mean, we are potentially around two years away from the UK being governed by Reform, a further right anti-immigrant party that was behind the Brexit vote. And then we have National Rally, the Le Pen-oriented far right party that used to be called the National Front, that could well win the presidency in France in a couple of years. And we have the AFD in Germany that could well be so large now that there’s no way to form a coherent governing coalition without including them as perhaps the lead party in that governing coalition in Germany. All of this could happen in the next two years.

I mean, it strikes me, the reason I bring that up now is that the Rauch position that, “Oh, it’s really not that big of a deal, don’t lend credence to what the right is saying. You’re only going to help them,” is a view that requires that one also take as kind of its corollary, that the only reason that people vote for Trump is that they’ve been propagandized and brainwashed by Fox News. But that doesn’t work unless you want to really go conspiratorial and say that Putin’s disinformation campaign is making Reform the lead party in opinion polls above the Labour Party and the Tories. Within just one year, it’s zoomed up to 30% approval. That’s all Putin and Russian disinformation? I think that’s implausible. So something is happening,

Lindsey: Right. Right. Yeah. Usually it’s just that the public has gotten into this surly mood. They’ve been deranged by social media and Fox, but-

Linker: Well, there is... Part of the story is social media and its network effects…

Lindsey: That’s what it is, but it’s then taking that bad mood and sort of treating it like it’s acausal, it just sort of happened, and it’s just going to blow over and we’re going to go back to the way things were sort of. Whereas for the public to have gotten in such a foul mood, there has to be important reasons for that, right?

Linker: Right.

Lindsey: And so-

Linker: Can I actually ask you a question based on where I’m coming from on some of this? This is not a global explanation in the sense that I do think there are more substantive new novel things going on, the problems you discussed very smartly in your book. But I want to talk briefly about the social media network effect dimension of this. Because I don’t recall having read anybody else who’s put it exactly the way that is my pet theory of this, which is that James Madison in the Federalist Papers, most famously in the most read of those papers, the 10th and the 51st, I guess there was some debate over whether that one was written by Hamilton or Madison, but whatever the case, in the Federalist Papers, the idea of factions, that politics is about competing factions and factions are rooted ultimately for the Founders in interests, political interests that are formed in the physical world, in physical space. So like the different states have different interests economically, and then regions within states have different factions.

And so the idea of liberal self-government for the Federalists was that you have to proliferate the number of factions so that they check each other and each will get, if not half a loaf, then at least a slice. And they’ll sort of cancel each other out. You won’t have them cohering into large blocks that use government power to oppress other factions that can’t quite get to the breakout threshold to get majority party support in representative institutions.

And I think that’s very smart, and I’ve always believed that it worked remarkably well – for most of my life, I’ve thought that. But I wonder if... We talk a lot about the problems of social media and technology, we pundits, but this particular dimension of them I think is under-theorized.

The fact is that the general arc of modern liberal progress in capitalism, the economy, the liberation of individuals to kind of pursue experiments in living in a million senses, that tends to over time to repeatedly benefit some areas more than others. It tends to benefit urban areas more than rural areas. The urban areas are always growing at a faster rate. They have more innovation, more diversity, more immigration, hubs there. That’s where innovation and business takes place and greater growth.

Whereas the rural areas tend to be always lagging behind. They’re in always a state of population decline. The move from industrial to post-industrial harms those areas more…

Lindsey: We can all work together and mass up in cyberspace, right?

Linker: Right. Exactly. So the argument is that what if we’re in... Because of social media and smartphones, we now have the possibility of network effects forming virtual or forming factions in virtual space so that the losers in the ongoing unfolding of democratic capitalism now for the very first time in history, are able to form a faction politically that they couldn’t before, because their areas of the world are low population density. You can’t just set up a milk crate with a megaphone and start a labor protest that you take to city hall to demand this or that regulation, which the left always is advantaged by because the left tends to crop up in cities with higher population density.

And so could it be that the reason why this is happening in so many countries at once is that we are now a decade or more downstream of technology enabling this networking of a kind of right populist factionalism through the ability of those to organize in virtual space so that the perceived interests of people in rural Oregon, rural Alabama, rural Arizona, rural New England can find each other and form a faction that’s in physical space very far-flung, but in virtual space, they’re right next to each other and they get to mobilize.

And then if we’re also living through a time with more dislocation than you get in some other eras, so it’s an era of transition, it’s going to get worse with AI and so forth, is that really what we’re talking about? Is that a causal variable that we are seeing everywhere? And that can explain why we have Modi and Orban and the Le Pens and Reform and AFD and Trump and Bolsonaro when he was in power in Brazil and so forth.

Lindsey: So I believe that our new media information environment is an important factor in explaining our current politics. That causal mechanism is not one that I have noodled through and thought through, but it immediately strikes me as interesting and plausible. I’ll tell you that the two ways I’ve thought about the influence of social media and the broader media environment.

First, along the lines of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, we’ve got this age of information abundance, and that’s bad generally for people in authority. People in authority once were able to manufacture consensus and keep on top of things by controlling information flows, they controlled the official story, they controlled the data that leaked out to the public. Now it’s completely out of their hands. And so we’re in a considerably more anti-authoritarian, chaotic, populist kind of information environment. And it enables people to organize frictionlessly. You can assemble flash mobs very easily. But when you assemble frictionlessly, you don’t build up the connective tissue of a real flesh and blood political movement. All you can do is react and basically negate. You can’t have an affirmative agenda. All you can do is just say no.

So in the early days, social media’s impact on politics looked awesome. It was all these color revolutions where people just saying no, going out into the street and saying, “No, we don’t recognize the legitimacy of this authoritarian government,” which was enough to convince the people with guns that they shouldn’t fire them on the populace right now. But then we came to see this general anti-authoritarian bent turn around and turn its guns on democracy, and it hasn’t been as pleasant. So that’s one thing that’s going on, I think.

Another thing I’ve become much more convinced by the whole the-medium-is-the-message, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, media ecology thinking, which is that the new style of media produces a new style of political discourse, and particularly a much dumber, reactive, impulsive, id-dominated discourse, post-literate. So we’ve gone from hours and hours of Lincoln-Douglas debates where they would break for dinner and then people would come back and finish up…

And so that from level of attention span to very flowery, ornate oratory, to then in our adulthood, we’d gotten down to the 30 second TV spot. We thought that was the reductio ad absurdum of how mindless politics could get, and yet, boy, that now looks like Plato’s dialogues compared to social media memes.

So I think the style of discourse is one that favors anti-intellectual, reactive, emotions-over-reason style of politics, which is very bad for the deliberative government-through-persuasion that vital flourishing democracies rely on. So I think when you throw in the fact that there’s a constituency that’s been historically ignored and underpowered because they’re spread out and can’t organize, and now they can all get together and find their champions, I think that’s a very interesting component to add. But I would stand by the other two things that I’ve mentioned as parts of the story as well.

Linker: Yeah, yeah, I agree. That’s all part of it. It’s always multi-causal. And those I think are all playing a role. So I agree.

Lindsey: So we’ve gone over an hour now, so I’m going to wrap up even though there’s a whole bunch of other things I’d love to talk about. But I just want to end up with mentioning the fact that both you and I are affiliated with the Niskanen Center. And the Niskanen Center has... It’s operating at the policy shop level. It’s coming up with public policies that are trying to make a better United States.

So in my book, I’m looking at a much deeper level at things that are going wrong and much longer time horizons of how we might arrive at a more hopeful future. I think my perspective at my day job lines up with my perspective as a book author. We’ve never been very good at labeling ourselves at the Niskanen Center because we don’t fit into the current Team Red or Team Blue, but one way to label us is anti-status quo liberals. So we’re liberals in the classical sense. We’re for market economies and the rule of law and popular self-government, and we recognize that this is a time in which basic institutions are under assault. And so we defend those institutions in principle as our best hope. But at the same time, our whole MO is recognizing that those institutions have wandered off course and are in need of some fairly aggressive reforms to put things right again.

Lindsey: And so that’s the dance we play, it’s that, “Yes, populists, you have a point...” So this goes back to when Steve Teles and I wrote The Captured Economy, back in 2017, about upward redistribution, policies that simultaneously slow down economic growth and make inequality worse, so that you can have reforms such as liberalizing the construction of new housing that is pro-economic dynamism on the one hand, but also pro-equity by increasing home affordability and defusing one of the major engines of wealth inequality today.

And our first chapter was called “Rigged,” and this came out right in 2017. And so we’re saying that there’s this populist uprising and there’s this sense on the left and the right – Bernie Sanders was fresh in our minds at that time on the populist left – there’s this deep discontent that the system is rigged. We understand where that sentiment is coming from, and yet we think that the solutions being posed by the populist left and right are terrible and worse than the disease, and here’s what’s really going on.

That’s the general sort of Niskanen schtick in issue after issue, is to recognize the level of discontent, but to see how that discontent is being manipulated to push things in a very unhealthy direction. And what falls on us to do is propose actual constructive changes that can make things better and therefore defuse that discontent and maybe get us out of this vicious circle.

Linker: Well, that’s certainly why I feel very much at home at Niskanen because… I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about a year ago. I guess it was probably in 2023 in the fall, or maybe it was early in 2024. But I was trying to give advice to Biden. It didn’t work by the way. But leaving aside the fact that I thought he was too old and so forth, I also thought if he was going to run, he needed to run as a liberal reformer, concede some things to the populist upsurge and come up with an agenda that like, “No, I’m not going to propose to greatly expand healthcare access. I want to fix the institutions we already have that aren’t working as well as they should.”

And that message for the center left, I think, could be a real winning one. It would be a way to try to speak to the populist discontents on both the left and the right without conceding the need for it to be some kind of revolutionary transformation. And that balance to be a kind of populist of the center in a way strikes me as being a potentially winning one if you had the right people bringing the message. And I very much appreciate Niskanen’s work in trying to come up with what that agenda would look like, what it should consist of.

Lindsey: Well, I’m on board for sure. So anyway, Damon, great having you on. Great talking with you. Wish we could keep on going, but we’re going to give our listeners and viewers a break and wind it up here.

Linker: All right then. Invite me back in a little while. We’ll continue.

Lindsey: Okay, very good.

Linker: Take care. Bye-bye.

Before diving into the essay that the headline promises, let me first share a few book-related links. Here is my most recent podcast appearance — with my Niskanen colleague Geoff Kabaservice on his podcast “The Vital Center.” And here is a generous review by my old friend and colleague Dan Ikenson.

In my previous post, I linked to a couple of critical reviews that badly misrepresented my argument by lumping me in with the so-called post-liberals of the populist right. Getting smeared like that was surprising and dispiriting, but the good news is that my critical reviews are now getting their own critical reviews! Damon Linker and Brad DeLong have both weighed in with their own reviews that set the record straight.

OK, on to the main event.

* * *

The latest tsunami of AI-related hype and panic has been washing over us for the past week or two — triggered by new releases from OpenAI and Anthropic that featured another big leap in capabilities. As the frontier AI models have moved beyond merely answering questions to performing ever-more complex and time-consuming tasks online, it’s becoming increasingly plausible that great swathes of contemporary white-collar knowledge work — starting with coding — are going to be automatable, at least as a technical matter, in the relatively near future. Hence, apparently, the recent selloff in software and other stocks, as well as a torrent of anxious prose along the lines of this viral hit.

I don’t have any special technical expertise that can shed light on what’s happening, but I do have some relevant experience. Namely, I just finished writing a book about how our growing wealth has created the possibility of mass human flourishing — and is simultaneously erecting major obstacles that frustrate the realization of that possibility. When we’re pondering the prospect that superhuman AI may be just around the corner, what we’re talking about is a massive increase in societal wealth — wealth that holds out both the promise of liberation and empowerment and the threat of marginalization and dehumanization. From my perspective, then, current discussions about the future of AI take the “permanent problem” — which currently lurks under the surface of events — and shoves it right in our face.

A central challenge I write about in The Permanent Problem is what I call contemporary capitalism’s “crisis of inclusion” — the weakening connection between economic growth and overall well-being. In particular, I point to how the changing structure of economic production under conditions of mass affluence — namely, the rise of the post-industrial information economy and a new dominant elite of highly educated managers and professionals — has resulted in the economic, social, and political marginalization of ordinary people outside the elite. In the industrial era, ordinary workers were deployed on the frontiers of technological progress, right alongside their bosses; today they are largely relegated to lower-productivity economic backwaters. The “common man” was celebrated and lionized; today ordinary men and women commonly feel ignored or despised by their socioeconomic superiors. The practice of politics has moved away from enlisting the mass participation of ordinary citizens; today politics is a game largely played by well-educated elites.

The fundamental driver of this process of mass marginalization has been economic progress — specifically, the one-two punch of automation and globalization that has reduced the dependence of technological progress on unskilled and semi-skilled labor. As a result, the contributions that ordinary workers make to the great commonweal are simply less important than they were in the industrial past; this reduced importance has led in turn to declines in social status and political leverage.

Since none of this was occurring to people like us — people with fancy degrees who like to spend their leisure time reading long Substack essays on current affairs — it was easy for us to ignore what was happening. Or misunderstand it as a narrow problem of income inequality, when the actual discontents are far broader. Only over the past decade or so, confronted by the global populist uprising against the professional and managerial meritocracy, have we come to realize the potency of the new class divide as a source of social and political conflict. And even now, smart observers can pooh-pooh the idea that mass marginalization of ordinary people amounts to a crisis for capitalism.

But if AI actually does succeed in automating a great deal of contemporary knowledge work and thereby reducing relative demand for college-educated knowledge workers — well, I’m pretty sure the pooh-poohing will come to an abrupt halt. In recent decades, the plagues of marginalization and status loss were confined to the least articulate and least organized strata of society, and still we’ve ended up with political upheaval that threatens to wreck fundamental institutions of liberal democratic governance. If you think our politics is unpleasant now, just wait till the most articulate and best organized groups in society get their time in the barrel. For what it’s worth, I think that scenarios depicting a rapid collapse of jobs and huge spikes in unemployment are wildly unrealistic, but I can picture years of gradually falling employment in one job category after another, a correspondingly slack labor market, and stagnant or declining pay for big chunks of the white-collar labor force. And should those conditions come to pass, watch out.

As you can see from the hand-wringing going on now, what is most terrifying isn’t the possibility of economic dislocation and loss. The greatest fear, rather, is of being rendered superfluous and irrelevant in a world much less dependent on human cognitive skills. As cognitive work by humans becomes less and less important to the functioning of the overall economic system, the social status that once accompanied the ability to perform such work will necessarily decline — and with it the sense of personal worth and meaning that goes along with being one of life’s winners who has made it to the meritocracy.

What’s noteworthy is that people are expressing this fear in existential terms. That is, they conflate the threat to their personal position of privilege with a threat to the meaningfulness of human existence altogether.

Here’s a representative tweet along these lines, posted by an engineer at Open AI: “Today, I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do? And it’s when, not if.”

And here’s Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, normally a paragon of sensible level-headedness, freaking out during a recent podcast (starting at around 43:05):

I tend to think — and this is perhaps because what I do is what I do — that thinking, and creating through thinking, is the core of what it means to be a human being. That’s what makes humans different from all other animals. Well if it’s true — and there’s a huge debate out there — if we’re moving into a world … in which machines do all that as well as we do or better, we’ve basically … deprived ourselves of any value in our own eyes as humans…. If we live in a world with super machines and we know they’re superior, if we live in that world, what are we going to think we as humans are for, if anything?

And finally, here are some bleak recent musings from the Substacker economist Noah Smith:

I think the arrival of the European settlers in North America is not a terrible analogy for what humans face now with the arrival of our own AI creations…. The day that Europeans arrived on North American shores, the Native Americans of what is now the United States lost control of their destiny — forever. The Native Americans simply lost the power to decide what their future would look like.

It will only be at the sufferance of the AIs that humans continue to live happy and free lives. We will be well-cared-for pets, but we will still be, in a very fundamental sense, pets. Or, if you prefer, Earth might be like a Reservation.

This kind of hyperventilating is exactly the kind of “general nervous breakdown” that John Maynard Keynes predicted in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Here’s the larger passage leading up to that prediction:

We have been expressly evolved by nature — with all our impulses and deepest instincts — for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.

To use the language of to-day — must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”?

The capitalist system — the impersonal extended order of coordinating markets and regulating bureaucracy — is the water in which we swim, the only world we know. So it’s understandable that people — especially those at the top of the system — see this system and human existence as basically coterminous. From this perspective, if humans become generally less important to the operation of the system, the metaphysical status of humanity must fall as well.

Such thinking, though, betrays a fundamental confusion. The promise of human existence is not limited to submitting to the curse of Adam — what a dreary thought! The need to work only for external rewards, rather than for the intrinsic appeal or importance of the task, does provide lives with structure and purpose — but at the great cost of foregoing opportunities to engage in more enjoyable and fulfilling activities. If thinking machines can help to lift the curse of Adam — by greatly expanding the ranks of the independently wealthy, who work for pay only to the extent they choose — the effect would be to greatly expand the promise of human life. Karl Marx was profoundly mistaken about many things, but he was correct when he called working for external rewards “the realm of necessity.” “Beyond it,” he wrote, “begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom…. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

But make no mistake: the realm of freedom is not the realm of guaranteed, effortless fulfillment. There is no freedom without the freedom to fail. In the past, we were guided toward activities conducive to human flourishing under the pressure of necessity. We prioritized face-to-face personal relationships because those other people were vitally important for our material welfare; now we need to learn to prioritize other people because connections to others are vitally important for a well-lived life. We prioritized the development and exercise of our physical and intellectual capacities so that we could exchange our labor for material rewards and social status; in a world of intelligent machines, we would need to develop and exercise our inborn talents because engaging in projects of interest to ourselves and of value to others is essential to flourishing. In the past we were steered — quite imperfectly! — toward the good in response to external incentives; now, to an ever-increasing extent, we must learn to prize and pursue the good for its own sake.

It’s fitting that two of the anxious quotes I provided above end by questioning the point of human existence in a world of intelligent machines. I titled the final chapter of The Permanent Problem “What are Humans For?”, and I opened the concluding section of that chapter by imagining such a world:

The spectacular capabilities of generative large language models have reawakened speculation that we are on the brink of achieving artificial superintelligence – basically, machines that are better than us at everything we do. Whether or not these speculations are vindicated, they helpfully direct our attention to the central question with which this book has been wrestling. When we imagine a world with superintelligent machines, we are face to face with the permanent problem in its starkest formulation: what do you do when you don’t have to do anything?

Those anxious quotes pose the question of what humans are for as if it has no good answer once the economic problem has been solved. But the answer to the question in that possible future is the same as it has always been; the only difference is we have to learn to see being human as its own reward. It is on that note that I end my book:

What are humans for? First and foremost, they are for making and taking care of other human beings and enjoying their company. We may someday employ intelligent assistants to help us in these tasks, but we can never lose sight of the fact that vital connections to other flesh-and-blood people are at the heart of what makes life worth living. Furthermore, humans are for exploring and seeking to understand the world — and the larger universe — around them, and then using that understanding to serve human purposes. Here again, intelligent machines can help us; indeed, they very well may succeed in improving our understanding far beyond what our unaided minds were ever capable of. But the point, from our perspective at any rate, is to deepen and enrich human experience. And so, putting the two aspects of our dual nature together, we can conclude that humans are for endlessly exploring their relationships with each other and with the outer world. They are for establishing and enjoying human communities in every kind of habitable physical environment, terrestrial or otherwise, in forms as various as our inexhaustible cultural fertility will allow.

In the end, of course, the only way to know humanity’s actual destiny is to play the movie and find out what happens. But we, the actors in this movie, are also its writers and directors. Our destiny is ultimately up to us, and therefore we should make the most of that chance. We ought to aim high.

I got back to Thailand at the end of last week after a three-week trip to the U.S., with two of those weeks spent in Washington, D.C. doing book promotion. While in D.C I gave a half-dozen book talks, included this one recorded at the American Enterprise Institute.

In addition, I recorded one podcast interview before my trip and another five during my visit to D.C. Four of these are now out:

• Keen on America, “Societies on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”

• The Liberal Patriot, “Why Rich Societies Are Breaking Down”

• The Realignment, “Brink Lindsey: How the 21st Century Mugged a Libertarian”

• Faster, Please! “Beyond Abundance: My chat with Brink Lindsey about his new book, ‘The Permanent Problem’” (transcript available here)

I’ll let you know when the others are out in the wild.

In general I don’t think much is gained by responding to critical reviews, but I got a couple in which the nature of the criticism was so surprising to me that I think it’s worth puzzling a bit about what’s going on.

I fully anticipated skepticism about the book’s argument, but I imagined that objections would focus on my prescriptions for greater “econonomic independence” and the revitalization of face-to-face communities. What I didn’t really see coming was that reviewers might baldly mischaracterize my diagnoses of capitalism’s current ills. And yet that’s precisely what a pair of normally sensible and astute scholars — one affiliated with the center-left Brookings Institution, the other with the center-right American Enterprise Institute — ended up doing.

As Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” As for me, the particular left-right combination that threw me for a loop was getting lumped in with the so-called post-liberals — the gaggle of right-wing intellectuals who regard the whole of post-Enlightenment liberal modernity as a tragic mistake only now finally coming to grief.

Here are the key passages from the two reviews:

“If there is any criticism of liberal modernity that is not in Lindsey’s book, I couldn’t find it. Had I stopped reading after Chapter 7, I would take the book for a postliberal screed that outdoes anything by Patrick Deneen.”

“Lindsey’s assessment is consistent with post-liberal commentators’ arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing.”

To be clear, both reviewers make clear that I do not call myself a post-liberal. But by associating my critique of contemporary capitalism with the post-liberal label, both seek to discredit that critique through guilt by association. The post-liberals, in their estimation (and mine!), go off the deep end by catastrophizing contemporary problems; comparing me to the post-liberals is thus meant to convey that my analysis of what I call capitalism’s 21st century “triple crisis” is equivalently over the top and unsound.

I’ll grant this similarity between the post-liberals and me: we focus on some of the same symptoms of present-day dysfunction, namely the excesses of expressive-individualism-turned-nihilism, on the one hand, and a suffocating and hyper-controlling managerialsm on the other. But our diagnoses of these symptoms are starkly different: the post-liberals see current problems as evidence that the whole project of liberal modernity was misbegotten from the outset, whereas I see them as unintended consequences of one signal triumph of liberal modernity (the conquest of mass poverty and the coming of mass plenty) and obstacles on the path to the next great triumph (the achievement of mass flourishing).

I explicitly stated my rejection of the post-liberal diagnosis in an earlier essay on the post-liberal right:

I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly. It is of course true that there are totalitarian tendencies in modernity — we saw them come to full flower in the great tyrannies of the 20th century. But the dominant tendencies have surely been liberating and humanitarian: a colossal increase in the number of human beings coinciding with a dramatic uplift in material living standards; an explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities coinciding with mass literacy and schooling; the emergence of governments subject to popular control and the rule of law coinciding with the stigmatization of war and widespread embrace of an ideal of universal human dignity. I find it genuinely hard to understand how thinkers who accuse their opponents (with some justification) of antihumanism can fail to recognize the profoundly anti-human implications of their ideas. How does one profess love for God’s creation and then hold the view that the vast majority of people alive today are here only because of some dreadful mistake?

Although I never mentioned post-liberals by name in the book, there are any number of passages that make clear how fundamentally I disagree with them. Here are just a few:

"The United States and the other advanced liberal democracies are the richest, healthiest, best educated, most humanely and effectively governed societies that have ever existed." (p. 1)

“How are we to judge the state of human flourishing in today’s advanced democracies? Grading on a historical curve, things have never been better. The threat of material deprivation and physical suffering has receded to an unprecedented extent, and in both absolute numbers and as a share of total population, more people are enjoying rewarding, fulfilling lives than ever before. But for a society organized around ongoing progress, the past offers an insufficiently demanding standard for evaluation.” (p. 9)

“Specifically, we need to recognize that to get to a world of widespread opportunities for living ‘wisely and agreeably and well,’ we’re going to continue to need robust economic growth and innovation. We are far richer than any humans that ever lived before us, but we are not yet rich enough to enable and sustain widespread human flourishing. To raise all of humanity to lives of material security, comfort, and convenience while continuing to push outward along the technological frontier, capitalism’s prodigious wealth-creating energies remain indispensable.” (p. 135)

“I am an unabashed partisan of modernity over our agrarian past and of what Adam Smith called the ‘great society’ and F. A. Hayek termed the ‘extended order’—the vast and intricate division of labor governed by impersonal rules and mediated by competitive markets. Looking at its record over the past two and a half centuries, I regard capitalism as the greatest engine of human progress ever devised.” (p.161)

So what leads normally careful and level-headed writers to swing so wildly in criticizing my book? I believe that their reaction is a reflection of a newish intellectual fault line running through today’s embattled liberal center — by which I mean those people on the center-left and center-right who share more common ground with each other than they do with either the populist right or the “woke” left. That fault line consists of disagreement over the severity of the problems confronting contemporary liberal societies and the connection between those problems and the undeniable political crisis that alarms both sides.

Call it the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists,” after the Alana Newhouse essay from a few years back, “Everything Is Broken,” that helped to bring the fault line into view. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies. The furious energy on the political extremes is due to legitimate frustration with a deeply flawed status quo; the problem is that the remedies proposed by those on the extremes are considerably worse than the disease. Anti-brokenists, meanwhile, concede that there are plenty of problems these days, but they insist that there are always plenty of problems; what has changed is the emergence of conflicting “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world and itching as a result to burn everything down and start over.

Each branch of liberal centrists sees the other as deeply mistaken in its response to the rise of extremism. Anti-brokenists — and I’m putting the authors of the two book reviews in question in that camp — worry that people like me are lending aid and comfort to the enemy by substantiating their exaggerated complaints about the status quo. Brokenists, meanwhile, believe that extremists have risen to power by filling a vaccum created by centrist complacency and neglect. In this view, which I share, dismissing widespread disaffection from established institutions and governing elites as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure. It will only add fuel to the extremist fire.

Now is not the time to litigate this dispute any further. Here I just want to highlight both its existence and its importance in explaining internal tensions among those who all see themselves as defenders of liberal democratic capitalism. And it’s worth pointing out that my membership in the brokenist camp long predates writing The Permanent Problem; I’ve been on the brokenist side from the outset of the populist era. After all, when Steve Teles and I co-authored The Captured Economy back in 2017, we titled the first chapter “Rigged” to note our agreement with populist complaints from the left and right that the economic system is rigged in favor of elites. Because this problem had been allowed to fester, we argued, “the resulting vacuum leaves the public vulnerable to demagogues with superficially attractive and emotionally resonant alternatives.”

I’ll stick to my guns, thank you. But it is dispiriting that, after a decade of populist distempers, so many of my fellow liberals still don’t understand the nature of the challenge that confronts them.

Happy New Year, everybody! Starting things off with a bang, today marks the official publication date for The Permanent Problem. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll buy a copy or three, and if you like what you read, let other people know. In particular, I encourage you to post a review on Amazon or Goodreads to spread the good word.

The book is roughly two-thirds diagnosis and one-third prescription — a pretty good ratio, given that most books like this are virtually all diagnosis with a single, limp “what is to be done?” chapter tacked on at the end. Now that the book is out, though, I’m hoping to flip the ratio and focus most of my attention on discerning the path forward — identifying promising developments with the potential to spark the technological, institutional, and cultural innovations we need.

To that end, let me do something here that could end up as a semi-regular feature – providing links to thinkers and doers who have valuable light to shed on the road ahead and offering a few comments of my own.

1. Vitalik Buterin, “Let a thousand societies bloom”

Interest in starting new communities, both virtual and physical, has been surging of late among members of the tech community — see here for a good overview. Inspired by the success of business startups in driving commercial innovation, the idea is that startup communities can similarly help to spark innovation in technology, governance structures, and living arrangements.

This idea has attracted considerable hostility from people, mostly to the left of the political center, who see it as a strategy to gut health, safety, and environmental regulations and replace democracy with a “broligarchy” or “techno-feudalism.” That hostility has only deepened since the emergence of a Trump-aligned tech right. As for me, though, I see the renewed interest in community-founding as a positive trend —one with the potential to encompass a wide variety of ideological and cultural approaches. I welcome experimentation in devising alternatives to and off-ramps from the prevailing consumerist and managerialist monoculture, recognizing full well that most of the experiments will fail.

One of the most interesting and thoughtful figures in this space is Vitalik Buterin, the 31-year-old Russian-born founder of the Ethereum blockchain. Among his many philanthropic endeavors, he launched the recent wave of temporary “popup villages” by organizing the two-month-long Zuzalu gathering in Montenegro back in 2023. These popup villages occupy a middle ground between a one-or-two-day conference and a permanent community, bringing together a few hundred people interested in various dimensions of both tech and cultural innovation and providing a loosely structured environment for them to work, play, and learn together for a month or two.

In a recent essay on his personal website, Buterin reflected on the popup experience to date and its potential as a seedbed for new community formation. Here are some representative snippets:

One common critique of modern society is that it is at the same time atomistic and authoritarian: there is a lack of intermediate institutions, in between individuals and states, that give people needed services and community. In the critics’ story, this makes society:

Lack a feeling of community, become uncaring, and fail to provide public goods that are too local or group-specific for states to notice

Become homogeneous - “glass and steel skyscrapers with Starbucks everywhere”

Become vulnerable to takeover by dictators

All three problems stem from the fact that we have too much of a two-level structure: individuals, very powerful large-scale actors like states, and nothing else….

So what would a successful “intermediate institution” of this type, adapted for the needs of the 21ˢᵗ century, look like? I will propose my answer. It needs to be some kind of neo-tribe or other institution that focuses, and meaningfully innovates, on the thing that humans do that isn’t generic: culture….

Another problem with top-down attempts to shape culture, especially more coercive ones, is that the whole strategy has very low galaxy-brain resistance. While declaring top-down “the culture I wrote down in this document is better than what you have now, so I will impose it” may at times be the right thing to do (see: the anti-smoking push, federally-driven anti-segregation in the 1960s USA, etc), the problem is that it’s too easy for someone to get convinced that their own culture, as they understand it, is great, and then use it as an excuse to dominate others.

On the other hand, many people make the mistake of over-identifying culture with the purely aesthetic, subjective and group-identity-oriented parts of culture: food, music, dance, dress, architecture styles, and ignore the parts that are functional, whose success or failure drives the success and failure of civilizations. This can lead to an over-egalitarian and stagnant “culture as museum” mentality: every culture is equally as good as every other culture because aesthetics are ultimately subjective, and so there is no such thing as cultural improvement - instead, the only goal is preservation….

Instead of keeping culture the way it is, or reforming it from the top down, why not embrace the wisdom of accumulated individual choice and freedom?

Here is how I would argue the case against an overly purist version of this approach. There are many things that require “immersion” to succeed: lifestyle habits, local public goods such as air quality, work habits, lifetime learning habits, limitations on use of technology, etc. Doing anything truly interesting and unique requires “depth”, and substantial collective investment and effort to create an entire environment oriented around better serving those needs. These things cannot easily be done by an individual, or even by a corporation, because corporations face too much pressure to “meet users where they are” - and so we get everyone drinking Coca Cola (or getting addicted to outrage-driven social media, or ....)

And so I think we need a different path. What we want is a better “world game” for cultural evolution: an environment where cultures improve and compete, but not on the basis of violent force, and also not exclusively on low-level forms of memetic fitness (eg. virality of individual posts on social media, moment-by-moment enjoyment and convenience), but rather on some kind of fair playing field that creates sufficient space to showcase the longer-term benefits that a thriving culture provides….

The Zuzalu-verse is actually one of the better proto-examples of this. It is organized around a particular set of values: the “Ethereum canon” of open source, freedom, decentralization and a positive-sum attitude toward humanity, idealistic hacker culture, concern about health, etc. The Zuzalu identity is demonstrably not universal. Many people who frequent the Zuzalu-verse reported finding themselves out of place at Network School, which is organized around principles that are similar on paper, but very different in their “vibes” - and undoubtedly others feel the same way in the other direction. But there isn’t a fixed “One Commandment“, or even any specific written-down mission and vision statement….

Truly instantiating a culture with any level of depth requires not just talking about the culture’s themes, but actually living them. This requires deep immersion, instantiating the culture’s values and aesthetics and practices at a level that goes far beyond a few decorations and posters….

This is all why I think it is a critical part of digital tribes to have long-lasting physical spaces. Physical spaces allow a culture’s values and habits to be instantiated in a much deeper way…..

There’s a lot more of interest in this essay — I encourage you to read the whole thing. And while you’re at it, you might check out Buterin’s 2023 essay “My techno-optimism,” in which he stakes out a position on the thinly settled but solid ground between doom-mongering and naïve boosterism.

2. Scott Alexander, “Should Strong Gods Bet on GDP?”

Buterin’s essay quotes from an August 2025 essay by Scott Alexander on his popular website Astral Codex Ten. I had missed that essay, and I’m glad I’ve now corrected that oversight.

In the essay, Alexander addresses the longtanding charge that liberalism ultimately undermines human flourishing by undermining our commitment to community. He starts off by providing the stock liberal response:

Yes, part of the good life is participation in a tight-knit community with strong values. Liberalism’s shared values are comparatively weak, and its knitting comparatively loose. But that’s no argument against the liberal project. Its goal isn’t to become this kind of community itself, but to be the platform where communities like this can grow up. So in a liberal democracy, Christians can have their church, Jews their synagogue, Communists their commune, and so on. Everyone gets the tight-knit community they want - which beats illiberalism, where (at most) one group gets the community they want and everyone else gets persecuted.

“On a theoretical level, this is a great answer,” Alexander writes. But…

On a practical level – is it really working? Are we really a nation dotted with tight-knit communities of strong values? The average person has a church they don’t attend and a political philosophy that mainly cashes out in Twitter dunks. Otherwise they just consume whatever slop the current year’s version of capitalism chooses to throw at them….

Probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to [a tight-knit community with strong values].

Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?

To my mind, questions like this point to the clearest and potentially fatal weakness of my vision of a much more decentralized and pluralistic future anchored in vibrant and cohesive face-to-face communities. And that is the fact that for decades, even centuries, the overwhelming majority of people have been voting with their life choices against such a future. Granted, the experience of recent decade has been sour enough to generate a great deal of discontent — but still, what is the basis for imagining that people are about to execute a 180 degree turn?

Scott offers an intriguing and IMHO reassuring answer, positing a U-shaped relationship between wealth and commitment to community. Tight-knit communities are the default option in poor societies, for the simple reason that nobody can afford to move away. But liberal capitalist societies to date have occupied a middle ground between, in Alexander’s words, “so poor you can’t leave” and “so rich you can be wherever you want,” and in that space there are strong economic incentives to prioritize career and economic well-being over sharing your life with the people you love and share values with.

Such reasoning leads precisely to the line I take in The Permanent Problem: we’re not yet rich enough to achieve at a macro level the kind of work-life balance that true mass flourishing requires. Here’s how Alexander puts it:

I also see people say that if we avoid paperclipping, technofeudalism, and the other obvious ways a technological singularity could go wrong, the next thing we’ll have to worry about is some kind of crisis of meaning, where we all sit back and collect UBI and consume slop in a spiritual wasteland.

The optimistic perspective is that if this is so bad, what’s to stop you from joining the Amish? Or some sort of pseudo-Amish who live in an eternal 1990s? Or your own Amish-inspired sect who have whatever set of technological and social relations you think are optimal?

And the obvious counter is: there’s also nothing to stop people from doing that now. But they don’t. So whatever mysterious force prevents it now will continue to prevent it after the singularity.

But I think that force is just economics. Most people have to work a normal job, which prevents them from running off to Hypothetical Amish Country. Replace that with post-singularity economic relations - maybe UBI, maybe something else - and new options become available.

As I’ve argued recently, this is the kind of framing that can transform “abundance” from a technocratic policy agenda into a full-blown social movement.

3. Timour Kosters, “Edge City 2025 Community Letter.”

I learned about the popup village phenomenon by getting invited to speak at one: Edge City Lanna, which took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand during October-November 2024. Edge City is an outfit that organizes popup villages around the world; one of its co-founders, Timour Kosters, had subscribed to my Substack and reached out to me to come to Chiang Mai and speak about human flourishing. I ended up staying there for a fascinating week.

I had no idea what to expect when I got there. I did know that the popup scene was heavily populated by people involved with crypto, which I was deeply skeptical about. I had never bought into the idea (popular in the libertarian circles I’ve traveled in) that cryptocurrency could become an alternative to fiat money; what was left, it seemed to me, was little besides creating new opportunities for speculative excess and outright fraud.

When I got there, though, I met a bunch of people deeply interested in the pro-social potential of blockchain technology — in particular, how it could be used to decentralize decision-making and foster new kinds of organizations and communities. And there were lots of people there who had nothing to do with crypto: they were there to meet new people, learn new things, and figure out how they could play a role in building a better world. I was really struck by how idealistic and intellectually open everyone was: this was a group of people who were excited about the future and how to make it better. When people found out about my work, what started as perfunctory introductions regularly turned into hour-long conversations. I found the whole experience invigorating, even inspiring.

Timour just recently posted his year-end review for 2025. Here’s how it kicks off:

As Edge City approaches its second birthday, we find ourselves in the middle of an exciting transition.

The early days of Edge were about proving we could create something new: month-long popup villages where scientists, technologists, artists, and builders live and work side by side. Environments designed for health and serendipity, where new ideas for society can take root. Multi-generational communities where kids run around while their parents prototype the future.

We proved we could build that. Over the past two years, we’ve hosted gatherings for thousands of participants across four continents, welcoming builders and families from 100+ countries.

We’re now shifting our attention to what actually gets built inside these environments; the incubator side of society incubator. The experiments are working, the community is deepening, and increasingly, real things are emerging.

Read the whole thing to find out more about this fascinating and promising initiative.

Christmas came early to the Lindsey household this year, as a box of hot-off-the-press copies of The Permanent Problem arrived over the weekend. The official publication date isn’t until January 5, but the book is already available for immediate purchase on Amazon in both hardcover and Kindle editions. If you pre-ordered it, you should get a copy soon if it hasn’t come already. And look for it soon on other online book sites and in finer bookstores everywhere.

Happy holidays to all! And look forward to lots of new content on this site in 2026.

In my previous essay, I discussed how technological progress could become a truly liberating force once again — namely, by enabling people to spend much less of their lives working for wages and salaries. A properly ambitious “abundance” movement, supported by new social movements, can make that come true.

My sense is that many readers will be skeptical that such an outcome actually qualifies as liberation. The prospect of dramatic reductions in paid employment has received a lot of attention over the past decade or so — and it’s typically presented as a calamity in the making. Two different nightmare scenarios dominate recent discussions: call them “bang” and “whimper.” In the former, the combination of AI and robotics eliminates most jobs, triggering layoffs, dislocation, and financial hardship on a massive scale. In the latter, the financial hardship is eliminated by some kind of universal basic income — but now, robbed of any productive purpose, people sink into idleness and anomie.

Admittedly there are some people who uphold the UBI future as a utopian ideal. As for me, I share the worries about idleness. Given our current tendency to squander ever more time on our phones, TV, and other screens, it’s not hard to picture how turning the mass of the population into wards of the state could easily degenerate into a Brave New WALL-E World of torpor and addictive distraction.

Here, though, I want to make the case for a very different post-mass-employment future — one in which a big reduction in lifetime working hours frees up time for other productive pursuits more conducive to human flourishing. Although the idea may sound exotic, it’s pure Americana, hearkening back to the great secular saint of American history. I’m proposing that we go back to the future, creating a new, more dynamic and inclusive social order by reviving the “free labor” vision of Abraham Lincoln and fellow early Republicans.

The traditional view: wage labor as unfreedom

Let me start by turning back the clock to a time when our present situation — a world in which most people spend most of their adult lives working as employees — was widely regarded as a nightmare scenario. This is the only economic and social reality we know, and so it’s hard for us to imagine that things were ever otherwise. Yet before the brute fact of industrialization ultimately overwhelmed all resistance, working for wages was relatively uncommon — and generally considered to be a form of unfreedom. At the time of America’s founding, wage earners were still scarce throughout much of the country, though they were becoming more common in cities. And in the status hierarchies of the time, they were relegated to the condition of dependent servitude — along with apprentices, indentured servants, and chattel slaves.

According to the classical republicanism that was so influential in shaping the thinking of the time, true freedom was rooted in independence from the arbitrary will of another. Thomas Jefferson exemplified such thinking when he celebrated yeoman farmers as the bedrock of a free society, people who “look[ed] up to heaven” and “their own soil and industry” for their subsistence and depended on no one else. Wage workers, though, were directly subject to the arbitrary will of their masters, required to follow their orders and dependent on their good will for a livelihood.

Americans saw their new country as blessed to be free of the Old World’s class divisions and savage inequalities. In their view, societies with a landed aristocracy and great masses of dependent poor offered unpromising conditions for free political institutions. Such institutions worked best in societies dominated by the middling classes, people who neither lord it over others nor bow and scrape before their betters. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example,” wrote Jefferson. “The mobs of great cities,” by contrast, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the human body.”

Jefferson’s thinking reflected classical republicanism’s premodern antipathy to commerce and the corrupting effects of luxury — attitudes that were rendered increasingly out of place as the United States moved into the 19th century. As the Jacksonian era’s market revolution transformed the young nation from an agrarian society into a bustling commercial powerhouse obsessed with upward mobility, a new conception of republicanism would emerge that sought to reconcile the traditional commitment to self-government in the public interest with the changed social context. This new synthesis took as its foil the very different vision of freedom and the American future taking shape in the antebellum South — a vision that regarded black slavery as the necessary foundation for white freedom. What emerged in the 1850s was the new Republican Party, campaigning under the banner of “free soil, free labor, free men.”1

The “free labor” innovation: wage labor as a steppingstone

The new Republicans celebrated the burgeoning market society as liberating, lifting people out of the narrow constraints of subsistence agriculture and into a wider world of opportunity and progress. In their view, subjection to the arbitrariness of employers was frequently far preferable to subjection to the arbitrariness of Mother Nature. Wage work, offering an alternative to life on the farm, was thus a pathway to a new form of the independence that republicanism always prized. Unlike slaves or traditional servants, wage workers were not dependent on any one employer, because unlike true dependents they had the freedom to quit and seek work elsewhere. This critical distinction, in their view, made all the difference. Abraham Lincoln’s views here were shaped by his own life experience: he never forgot an early episode in his life when he rafted men out to a steamboat and received two silver half-dollars in return. “The world seemed wider and fairer before me,” he recalled. “I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time.”

Republicans retained their commitment to a middle-class society without stark divisions between rich and poor — the antithesis of which they saw in the South, which had now come around to the view that the only freedom worth having was the aristocratic sort that rested on the unfree labor of society’s “mud-sills.” And the Republicans believed that something very close to their classless ideal could be found in their party’s electoral strongholds: the small towns of New England, the Northeast, and the rapidly growing Midwest. In the Northern states, Abraham Lincoln maintained:

A large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other.

Republicans did realize, though, that things were different in the Democrat-controlled big cities of the North. Wage work was surging there, especially among the poor immigrants streaming in from Ireland. Southern slavery apologists argued that the low pay, miserable working conditions, and job insecurity of Northern “wage slavery” compared unfavorably to what was occurring in their own “peculiar institution.” Republicans categorically rejected this false equivalence, but the argument still stung. Their “free labor” ideal had no place for a permanent class of downtrodden working poor, yet this blight of the Old World seemed in danger of spreading to the new.

They imagined, though, that the danger could be avoided. In their view, the role of wage work in a “free labor” economy was solely as a temporary expedient, a first steppingstone on the path of upward mobility. Here, once again, is Lincoln to explain:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.

And the Republicans had a plan to maintain this limited role for wage work. In the words of Horace Greeley, New York Tribune publisher and editor and one of the founders of the Republican Party: “Go West, young man!” The idea, long championed by Greeley, was to give away free land in the western territories to homesteaders, drawing urban workers out of dependence and penury and transforming them into property-owning farmers with a measure of independence. “The public lands,” Greeley wrote, are the great regulator of the relations of Labor and Capital, the safety valve of our industrial and social engine.” The Homestead Act of 1862 sought to put this theory into practice.

“Free labor” vs. industrialization

Alas, the theory failed to pan out under the conditions of the time. Loopholes in the law allowed speculators and corporate interests to gobble up most of the land given away; only about a quarter of the total acreage went to actual homesteaders. And most of the urban poor lacked the farming skills, as well as the capital for tools and equipment, needed for relocation to the challenging conditions of the unsettled west to make sense.

Meanwhile, the decades following the Homestead Act’s passage witnessed the economic and demographic transformation of the country. America became the main proving ground for the radically new mass production/mass distribution economy, while millions of immigrants poured in from southern and eastern Europe to fill the nation’s booming factories. The early Republicans’ worst fears were realized: America became a country marked by stark inequality, with plutocrats enjoying unprecedented wealth and a large, impoverished working class. Meanwhile, the Republican Party itself fairly quickly gave up its solicitude for the urban poor (as well as for the formerly enslaved population) and sided with the interests of business.

Small-r republican concerns about wage work’s connection to dependence and class divisions did not yet vanish, though. Instead they migrated to the nascent American labor movement. The Knights of Labor, the largest American labor organization of the 19th century, fought for incremental gains such as an eight-hour day, but remained unreconciled to the wage system. They envisioned an industrial future based on worker-owned cooperatives, and sought, in the words of their leader Terence Powderly, “to forever banish that curse of modern civilization – wage slavery.”

But the logic of large-scale industrialization swept aside all objections. Except in a few, relatively marginal circumstances, cooperatives proved unable to compete with investor-funded enterprises in organizing production for the new economic order. By the 1890s, with the “pure and simple unionism” of the American Federation of Labor, the labor movement reconciled itself to wage work and sought merely to raise pay and improve conditions.2 “I know we are living under the wage system,” declared AFL leader Samuel Gompers, “and as long as that lasts it is our purpose is to secure a continually larger share for labor.”

Against all the old antipathy to dependence-as-unfreedom, the wage system held an unanswerable trump card: industrialization, with reliance on mass employment of wage labor as one necessary element, offered liberation from the age-old curse of poverty. In exchange for submitting to the often brutal domination of foremen and managers and enduring dangerous and physically debilitating work, masses of ordinary workers enjoyed steadily rising living standards that ultimately lifted them out of grinding want and into suburban comfort. It was a hard bargain to be sure, as the 20th century history of class conflict, world wars, and the Cold War attests, but the gain in freedom was real and ultimately carried the day.

Reviving the “free labor” vision

But as material plenty has deepened and spread over recent decades, those old small-r republican concerns have become relevant once again. Rising material living standards offered a genuine increase in freedom when they were progressively erasing deficits — namely, penury and ignorance, and the accompanying suffering, shame, and degradation. Those deficits prevent people from developing and exercising their inborn capacities and enjoying the realization of human potential that we call flourishing or fulfillment. Overcoming them thus resulted in expanding freedom to flourish.

Now, however, as I argued in the previous essay, those deficits are by and large gone. Accordingly, rising living standards under contemporary postindustrial consumerism no longer offer genuine liberation; instead their effect is limited to providing the bells and whistles of additional comforts, conveniences, and entertainment. Which is all well and good, except to the extent the pursuit of these secondary goods crowds out the effortful process of developing and exercising our capacities. And in light of the present record of mass obesity, falling raw IQ scores, deteriorating mental and emotional health, and atrophy and disintegration of vital personal relationships, it’s clear that this crowding-out process is now fairly advanced. For a lucky minority, jobs offer sufficient autonomy and intellectual or physical challenge to encourage the fulfilling realization of potential; for most of the rest of us, though, jobs require a surrender to the double whammy of domination and precarity in exchange for purely external rewards.

We’ve thus reached the point where the loss of freedom while on the clock is no longer paying off with improved opportunities for flourishing once the working day is done. As long as this situation persists, we’re trapped: the same economic growth that makes us richer is also making us more miserable. But there is a way to redirect capitalist wealth creation so that it once again serves as an engine of liberation — namely, by freeing us from our heavy dependence on the labor market. Which means that the “free labor” vision of the early Republican Party, premature in its own day, now points the way to more hopeful future.

Along with Abraham Lincoln and his fellow partisans, we have no cause to reject capitalism and the hiring of labor. On the contrary, we should celebrate capitalism as an essential institutional foundation for the wealth we enjoy and the opportunities it provides. At the same time, though, we see that actually existing mass employment today does entail an unhealthy mass dependence. It divides society into those who give orders and those who follow them, with the bulk of the population relegated to the inferior category and forced into precarious dependence on employers and market conditions outside their control. And we see that this class division is deepening, with those on the wrong side of the chasm at a singular disadvantage in the quest to “live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Given a clear-eyed appraisal of contemporary employment as a mixed bag of positive and negative elements, and given the potential for technological progress unleashed by a suitably ambitious “abundance” movement to bring about dramatic reductions in the cost of living, we are in a position to establish as an important goal for social progress the end of lifetime mass employment and the move to a more limited role for wage and salary work in our social order. For a minority of managers, professionals, and others whose jobs offer sufficient intrinsic rewards, full-time employment throughout one’s adult years might remain widespread. But for everyone else, employment could be reduced to a temporary expedient, like schooling today — a phase of life that doesn’t last forever, but which acts as a steppingstone to other pursuits.

And what are those other pursuits? Joining with the old “free labor” Republicans, people can once again treat work for pay as a path toward independence as small-scale proprietors. In the antebellum North, those proprietors consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, and small business owners. In the 21st century future, a limited stint in the paid work force can provide the savings people need to become the independent proprietors of their own households, neighborhoods, and communities.

The details of how this vision might be implemented could vary widely, depending on people’s preferences and economic circumstances as well as the overall level of technological development. At the core of this vision, though, is the migration of productive work back into the home. From pre-industrial times until the 1980s, the trend ran in the opposite direction, as more and more people — first men, then women — went off to work in factories, shops, and offices, leaving home behind to serve primarily as the locus for consumption. With the advent of computer technology that allows people to work remotely online, the net flows have begun to reverse: rising from a nadir of around 2 percent, currently some 15-20 percent of workers are home-based, either as remote workers or self-employed business owners and independent contractors. A 21st century version of the “free labor” movement — which I have referred to elsewhere as a movement toward “economic independence” — would build on recent trends to restore the home as a major center of productive activity.

In the here and now, progress toward that goal could take the form of encouraging remote employment as well as home-based businesses (both online and IRL). Zoning restrictions currently act as a major constraint on the latter — an inviting target for an expanded YIMBY movement. Liberated from having to choose a residence near their jobs, people could then increasingly opt for co-living arrangements with family and friends — which could just take the form of houses in the same neighborhood or apartments in the same building, but which could also include common areas for shared activities. Living close to people you care about would not only go a long way toward reversing the social disintegration that characterizes our “anti-social century,” but could also make it much easier to insource the vital care work of raising small children, schooling the young, and taking care of elderly family members. You can throw in rooftop solar power and community gardens to lend these Burkean “little platoons” an additional margin of self-sufficiency — and instill in them the habit of seeking more of the same.

For what might come next, imagine a successful abundance movement that both radically reduces the cost of modern living — in particular, housing, energy, transportation, and health care — and develops new technologies for decentralized, small-scale production. Now added to the ranks of people who spend their days at home are growing numbers of early retirees, as well as people on their off time from part-time work or occasional, episodic stints in the work force. And as people move back, the range of things that they can do at home or in the community can expand dramatically. Think DIY homebuilding with 3D printing and AI/robotic assistance; vertical indoor farming for fruits and vegetables; local energy abundance through expanded solar capacity or small-scale nuclear power; AI/robotic assistance in child care, schooling, and elder care.

We can also hope that this reorientation toward the domestic will facilitate a renewed commitment to getting married, having babies, and raising kids as central projects of adulthood. Given that people typically say they want more kids than they end up having, creating lifestyles dramatically more conducive to childrearing should help matters. Certainly the burdens of childrearing are greatly reduced when everyone is at home all day, allowing for spontaneous play among neighborhood kids and lots of “it takes a village” backstopping by watchful family members, friends, and other neighbors nearby.

The residents who participated in and managed and directed all this work would truly be acting as proprietors — not of farms or businesses, necessarily (although maybe sometimes), but of their homes and communities. Participating in a high-tech revival of the domestic sector, they would constitute a 21st century updating of the old yeoman-farmer ideal — one that could play out simultaneously in urban blocks, suburban neighborhoods, and new communities built in rural areas.

The social architecture described here seems compatible with a wide variety of cultural and ideological permutations. Left-wing back-to-the-land types, artists and other creatives who repurpose abandoned city buildings, blockchain enthusiasts, DIY and “maker movement” types, social conservatives who view family life as a sacred duty — all these groups and many more can find attractions in banding together with the like-minded to create their own micro-protopias.

In this essay I’m foregrounding a possible new line of social development, but the assumption is always that capitalism would still be running in the background — not just producing the material foundation of the good life that is of central importance here, but also an ever-proliferating variety of gizmos and doodads that range from the idiotic and pernicious to the breathtakingly impressive and fun. And many people would continue to play the “getting and spending” game at full tilt throughout adulthood — especially people with the high-paying jobs that make earning challenging and fulfilling, along with the future-oriented time preference needed to enjoy capitalism’s many temptations without succumbing to them. If an economic independence movement really can get off the ground, it will emerge gradually out of this background context, with lots of blurry gray areas as people move from one lifestyle to another, often keeping a foot in both.

Combining freedom from and freedom to

Here I’ve offered a vision of a “post-job” future that looks very different from the “bang” and “whimper” scenarios I discussed at the beginning of this essay. In contrast to the “robots are coming to take our jobs!” scare stories, people aren’t being forced to drop out of the work force because they’ve been outcompeted by machines; instead, people are choosing to graduate from the 9-to-5 life because they’ve been enriched and empowered by machines. And as opposed to the mass-automation-plus-UBI scenario, most of the wealth funding life without a paycheck isn’t coming from top-down redistribution by government; rather, most of the funding comes from the bottom up in the form of personal savings.

In earlier essays, I’ve set forth in some detail why I favor an economic independence movement over the top-down UBI approach. Here let me just note the key difference between the two from the small-r republican perspective that I’ve been discussing here. If we take seriously the republican conception of dependence as unfreedom, we have a strong reason to prefer the bottom-up alternative. Some proponents have actually argued for a UBI on republican grounds, pointing out that it reduces dependence on a frequently arbitrary and undependable labor market. This analysis seems seriously incomplete, as the greater independence from the marketplace achieved by a UBI is purchased at the cost of complete dependence on the government for one’s livelihood. The vulnerability created by such dependence may seem purely theoretical if we assume an imperturbably stable democracy with rock-solid finances — but how robust is that assumption these days? Especially as technology enables ever more intrusive surveillance of its citizens by government, transforming the entire population into government dependents creates almost irresistible opportunities for abuse.3

Will anything resembling the future sketched here actually come to pass? Of course I have no idea. But I do believe that all of us interested in kickstarting technological dynamism in our society, and support for such dynamism in our culture, need to think very hard about how to build support in the wider public for the kind of future we want. First, as I argued in the previous essay, we need to recognize that most people don’t value technological progress as an end in itself, purely as an expression of incredible ingenuity. To get most people excited enough about a high-tech future to overcome their natural caution about uncertain and possibly disruptive change, we need to show them a future with tangible, dramatic improvements in their lives. To that end, I’ve proposed that the liberation from full-time work for pay is the next great project for social progress.

But second, I don’t think you can successfully make the case that a job-free future counts as liberation unless you can connect freedom from employment with some important and newly enabled freedom to. At this point, I don’t believe that the mere promise of more stuff and more free time is enough. We’ve created a large offsite storage industry because we already have more stuff than we know what to do with — do we really expect that more of the same will cure what currently ails us? And recently we’ve been coming to grips with how poorly we’re making use of our free time, frittering our lives away one compulsive check of the phone at a time. Do we really think we’ll use additional leisure more wisely? A move toward economic independence addresses these doubts by marrying freedom from 9-to-5 with a vitally important “freedom to” — the freedom to flourish through active participation in family and community life.

I’ve come to the conclusion that our problems of flagging dynamism and social disintegration are inextricably linked. Which is to say, we have a much better chance of tackling the former if doing so helps us to reverse the latter. Striving for a “free labor” future — a refocused and rebalanced capitalism featuring high-tech abundance and expanded economic independence at the local level — gives us that chance. The most promising path of progress is one that leads us back to closer connection with each other.

The past year has shown that the concept of “abundance” has legs. A bestselling book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — and a growing shelf of other well-received books on similar themes. Policy organizations sprouting up with abundance in their name. The simultaneous emergence of a more right-coded “progress” movement that identifies many of the same problems and offers similar solutions. An annual Abundance Conference, the most recent one with 15 different organizations represented on its host committee. A new, bipartisan, abundance-themed Congressional Build America Caucus. And a vociferous, sometimes hysterical opposition whose main impact is to Streisand-effect its target to even greater prominence.

OK, so abundance has legs — but what kind of creature are they attached to? And where are those legs capable of taking us? What are the appropriate contours of the concept — we want an abundance of what, exactly? And what’s the social vision behind this desire for more — we want abundance for what?

What fits inside the abundance frame?

An early challenge for the abundance movement is figuring out — and limiting — its scope. “I think we could all use a reminder that while ‘abundance’ has real value as a conceptual frame,” my Niskanen colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote recently, “there are limits to what we can address through lumping.” He elaborated here:

What matters is whether the ideas are good. It would be easy to think up policies to make alcohol more abundant, but that would be bad — alcohol fuels crime and traffic accidents and is unhealthy. America’s recent experiment with an abundance agenda for sports gambling seems to have been harmful. More broadly, though I have already disavowed the “smartphone theory of everything,” it absolutely seems to me that the superabundance of streaming video that we now enjoy is creating a lot of problems for society.

My old friend Adrian Wooldridge, now at Bloomberg (we got to know each other when he was the DC bureau chief of The Economist), has made the case for an “anti-abundance agenda” to address the addictive junk that we can’t stop stuffing into our mouths and minds:

The abundance agenda needs to be balanced by an anti-abundance agenda. For in many significant areas of life, we suffer from a crisis of overproduction rather than underproduction — too much stuff (or stimulation) rather than too little. This overproduction is bad for our physical and mental health. And the bizarre combination of too much bad abundance and too little good abundance (like too much bad cholesterol and too little good cholesterol) is at the root of our civilizational malaise.

The idea of an “abundance agenda” made its first appearance in a Derek Thompson piece for The Atlantic back in January 2022 — and a growing group of wonks and scribblers have been running with it ever since. The unifying theme of this developing agenda has been combating dysfunctional government policies and institutional structures that restrict the supply of key goods and services. Either the government is actively blocking private actors from meeting market demand, or it’s unable to get out of its own way in providing public services. The “Big Three” core concerns that have emerged thus far are housing, energy, and transportation: zoning and other land-use regulations have resulted in a rolling affordability crisis for would-be homebuyers in metro areas across the nation; over-the-top permitting restrictions are slowing the transition to clean energy; and a tangled mess of “state capacity” deficits has sent costs per road- and track-mile in the U.S. soaring to multiples of those in other advanced countries. Meanwhile, efforts to broaden the abundance agenda have focused on problems as varied as the bureaucratization of scientific research (which gets its own chapter in Klein and Thompson’s Abundance) and the host of supply constraints that drive up healthcare costs.

From the dots connected thus far, we get a pretty clear picture of the kinds of policy issues that fit comfortably within the abundance frame. The point isn’t to boost the supply of every bit of frippery that 21st century affluence can support a market for; the abundance idea has taken off because of its focus on core inputs to a high-functioning economy and core elements of a typical family’s budget. When you can’t afford a decent home anywhere near where you work, the economy feels broken no matter what the topline stats may say; when a big public construction project can’t get completed without huge delays and cost overruns — or maybe just can’t get completed, period — government feels broken. The abundance movement has arisen in response to this sense of brokenness.

Furthermore, there needs to be some identifiable bottleneck that is holding back supply and driving up prices: a reform agenda needs something dysfunctional to reform. When you examine the targets for reform that the abundance movement has identified and look for the underlying causes of dysfunction, you generally find some combination of regulatory capture, where powerful insiders dominate the policymaking process and twist the rules to pad their own nests by restricting competition (and thereby limiting supply), and a lack of state capacity brought about typically by the buildup of “red tape” — the old-fashioned name for what we’re now beginning to refer to as the “procedure fetish.”

Abundance and the atoms/bits divide

Though the ideas behind the abundance movement originated in technocratic policy wonkery, they resonate at much deeper levels. Because when you look at where exactly abundance is most conspicuously lacking — namely, the movement’s central targets of housing, energy, and transportation — you see that that the common denominator is blocked action in the physical world. The world of atoms, that is, as opposed to the world of bits.1

The idea of lost abundance thus ties into the disillusionment with the digital revolution — and, with it, the growing recognition of the need to reprioritize and reengage with the physical world — that has been steadily building cultural momentum over the past decade or so.

This cultural turn started with the same kind of narrow, technocratic focus that has animated the abundance movement to date: namely, disappointment in the wake of the Great Recession with the slow pace of productivity growth and underlying technological progress. Out of these discontents has emerged the fledgling “progress” movement that overlaps substantially with abundance in analysis and goals while expressing them in more right-coded terminology.

We can trace the origins of this movement back to Peter Thiel’s memorable lament from 2011: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”2 Previously, in the decades since Ronald Reagan first won the presidency, boosters of free markets and low taxation (i.e., people like Thiel) had been almost uniformly bullish on U.S. economic performance and ongoing technological prowess, dismissing concerns about “deindustrialization” voiced by generally left-leaning advocates of “industrial policy” during the during the 1980s and early ‘90s. “Computer chips, potato chips — what’s the difference?,” a quote attributed Michael Boskin, George H. W. Bush’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, summarized their viewpoint. What mattered was the overall level of GDP, not its components.

The takeoff of the internet boom shortly thereafter — and with it the resumption of robust productivity growth after a prolonged slump during the ‘70s and ‘80s — only strengthened the belief on the free-market side that the “dematerialization” of economic life was the path of progress. (The roaring stock market of the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t hurt, either.) If anybody ever looked backed at the old midcentury dreams of continued progress in the physical world — moon bases and underwater cities, nuclear fusion, supersonic air travel, and, yes, flying cars — it was only in rueful acknowledgment of the impossibility of predicting the course of technological advance. When I read Robert Heinlein’s great juvenile sci-fi novels aloud to my boys back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, we all laughed when they used slide rules to calculate the jump to light speed.

Then came the Great Recession and the subsequent collapse of productivity growth, which triggered a rapid shift in perspective. No longer did the ‘90s boom look like a resumption of normal vitality after the temporary slump of the ‘70s and ‘80s; now the ‘90s looked like an outlier exception to the new normal of low growth. In the same year that Thiel’s crack about flying cars first appeared, Tyler Cowen came out with The Great Stagnation (which includes Thiel in its dedication). J. Storrs Hall then followed up in 2018 with his clearly Thiel-inspired Where Is My Flying Car? – a quirky, brilliant book that derided the cultural turn of the 1970s (which I have called the anti-Promethean backlash) that knocked us off the path of progress in the physical world. The following year, Cowen teamed up with Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison to write “We Need a New Science of Progress” for The Atlantic — and the new progress movement was off the ground.

This turn in ideas was occurring just as changing circumstances provided both a push and a pull in the direction of renewed interest in “hard tech” — i.e., innovation in the world of atoms. The looming challenge of climate change, combined with the emergence of China as a technologically formidable adversary, posed serious and difficult challenges that could not be met with a new phone app. Meanwhile, a couple of unexpected spurts of technological progress — rapidly declining production costs for solar and wind power, along with SpaceX’s achievement of similarly spectacular reductions in launch costs — reawakened entrepreneurial optimism and ambition in the hard-tech sector. Now we’re seeing promising developments and increasing investment in nuclear energy (including nuclear fusion), advanced geothermal power, and supersonic flight.

Can the abundance movement scale?

The combination of the progress movement and the hard tech mini-boom is currently helping to reorient policymaking elites toward reengagement with the physical world — and that’s an unabashedly good thing. However, worries about the long-term rate of growth and the organization of scientific research are far too abstract and recondite to stir the wider public and provoke changes in mass culture. The problems of affordability targeted by the abundance agenda are much more salient to the everyday concerns of ordinary people, but on their own aren’t enough to awaken the passions out of which broad-based social movements arise.

What is packing an emotional wallop, on the hand, is our growing disenchantment with the other side of the atoms/bits divide. Here Thiel was really ahead of the curve with the “flying cars” line: he was throwing shade at social media just as the hit movie The Social Network was inspiring a new generation of tech founders and the early hopes of the “Arab Spring” seemed to demonstrate social media’s power to promote positive change through “people power.”

Trump’s surprising 2016 win — and the surrounding controversy over Russian and other online “misinformation” during the campaign — marked the turning point. While fears of the purposeful manipulation of public opinion have proved overblown — we have met the enemy online, and it is us — the broader perception that social media elevated extremists and degraded discourse overall was spot on. Is it even possible to imagine Trump’s rise in a pre-Twitter world?

From there the bottom dropped out on the dream that the internet would “connect the world” and bring us all together. On the contrary, it became increasingly clear that our smartphones were weapons of mass distraction that we were training compulsively on ourselves. Teenage driving, after-school employment, and just hanging out with friends all declined as kids withdrew into the virtual simulacrum. Not coincidentally, mental and emotional problems among the young began skyrocketing. People started walking blindly into traffic while staring at their phones, or falling off cliffs while posing for selfies — these were the outliers, but most of us have sat at a dinner table in stony silence with everyone lost in their own social media feeds. Virtually all of us have felt our attention spans slipping. A century of “Flynn effect” increases in raw IQ scores has begun to reverse itself. Personality tests reveal precisely the trends you might expect: rising neuroticism, falling extraversion and agreeableness, and a collapse in conscientiousness.

The latest twist has come with the astonishing breakthroughs achieved by ChatGPT and other large language models. Once again, we are confronted with a miraculous technology that can be used to amplify our brainpower in potentially transformative ways. And once again, we are watching it steadily evolve — under the selection pressures of ferocious commercial competition to monopolize and monetize our attention — into yet another source of mass brain rot. Students are using it en masse to cheat themselves out of the hassle of learning anything in school — a problem that started well before ChatGPT showed up, and which now reveals itself, even in the most elite institutions, in the widespread inability to work through and comprehend college-level reading material. Moving from the pathetic to the outright creepy, we’re seeing increasing reports of desperately lonely people getting hooked on “relationships” with chatbots — as a result of which “AI-induced psychosis” has now entered our vocabulary. And employing the utter shamelessness that has emerged as the characteristic vice of the 21st century , Elon Musk’s xAI has already come out with pornographic “waifu” AI companions, and now OpenAI plans to follow suit in December.

Just as the post-2009 slump prompted a reconsideration of the past half-century of U.S. economic performance, so has the one-two punch of social media- and AI-related dysfunction triggered what looks like the beginnings of a wholesale reappraisal of the mass media era. The “what, me worry?” side of the debate points out correctly that dire warnings about media consumption are nothing new — in centuries past people got the vapors over the deleterious effects of novel reading. This kind of response used to carry the day, but increasingly people are coming around to the idea that, at least since the advent of TV, the Chicken Littles have had a point. (Here’s Matt Yglesias, for example: “The multi-generation moral panic about improved video entertainment driving social isolation is largely correct. The technology keeps improving, but it’s not making our lives better.”)

I’m certainly an example of this: I had no use for Neil Postman’s diatribe against TV when it came out in the 1980s, and now I can’t stop quoting the man. And I’m not alone: Postman is cropping up all over the place these days. (Derek Thompson dropped this amusing footnote after citing him recently: “Believe me, I tried to keep old Postman out of this — he’s over-exposed enough these days — but as I wrote, I could hear the ghostly thump-thump-thump of his posthumous fists knocking on the door of this essay, and I had to let him in.) Worries about “post-literacy” are now going viral.

And this shift in opinion isn’t confined to scribblers. The movement to ban phones in schools is gaining traction and registering wins all over the world. A recent survey found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults feel nostalgia for times before they were born — i.e, before the digital tsunami swallowed everything. Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts, refers to social media, online pornography, and online sports gambling as “digital dopamine” and proposes that we need to treat them like we treat alcohol or tobacco: restrict use by children and subject online providers to special sin taxes (e.g., on advertising revenue). Derek Thompson, who interviewed Auchincloss for his podcast, sees him (along with Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who castigated social media as a “cancer on our society” in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination) as representing a new “touch grass populism.” “Rather than identify the enemy of America as specifically left, or right, or corporate, or foreign,” Thompson wrote on X recently, “the enemy they name is the digital hellscapes that summons the worst demons of our nature. They call us to re-invest our attention and our resources in the world of people and atoms.”

Raising the abundance movement’s ambitions

This broad-based cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement. The negative motivations are already in place. Fears of genuinely dystopian dangers have been awakened — and what’s more, the people most exposed to those dangers are our children, rousing our passions all the more. What is needed now is something clear and compelling to fight for. Abundance proponents must raise their ambitions and offer a bold, long-term vision for social change — one capable of inspiring hope and excitement, one that can unite people across current divisions and galvanize them into action.

The idea here is to appeal to ordinary people — not technology enthusiasts who thrill to the ingenuity and brilliance of the new and pathbreaking, but regular, risk-averse folks who tend to be suspicious of change because of their natural focus on holding onto what they’ve already got. To generate mass support for a resumption of large-scale progress in the physical world, you’ve got to hold out the prospect of big, tangible gains in ordinary people’s lives.

Jerusalem Demsas did an excellent job of making this point in a recent essay in her new publication The Argument, so let me quote her at some length:

Technologists and techno-optimists need to realize that the way we talk about innovation in articles, in ads, and in manifestos is often suboptimal for the goal of trying to convince skeptics of the value of progress. Take this 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from Marc Andreessen that speaks in grandiose terms about the value of technology. I agree with much of what he writes, but it reflects an orientation toward scientific achievement that is more focused on the adventure of invention than it is the point of all that progress….

The broader problem for technologists is the widespread impression that their “progress” is merely about accomplishing something technically impressive even if that breakthrough has limited or destructive impacts on humanity. I don’t care that it’s incredibly difficult and impressive to create addictive short-form video platforms, I care that it’s wasting our time. I don’t really care if Mark Zuckerberg is a genius if the impact of his brilliance has been to create platforms that degrade social trust.

I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress. I want vaccines and geothermal energy and supersonic flight and high-speed trains. I want to venerate the boring technological achievements like the doctor who halved the C-section rate at his hospital and lowered the maternal mortality rate in California by recommending a “hemorrhage cart” that prevented new mothers from bleeding to death. Technology isn’t just about pushing the frontier. It’s about making people’s lives better.

So how can physical abundance transform lives for the better? We’re not talking about just piling up more random stuff — the offsite storage industry exists because we already have more stuff than we know what to do with. And we’re not talking about more trivial, enervating comforts and conveniences — not another “Uber for X,” not “smart” refrigerators and toasters with endless features that normal consumers can’t be bothered to learn and use.

What we want is a vision of the future in which physical abundance acts as a genuinely liberating force. But what is it that most ordinary people still yearn to be liberated from? Well, for one thing, people are increasingly feeling trapped in the endless digital maze and yearning for reconnection to the IRL physical and personal. A world in which the built macro environment is once again, after decades of stagnation, visibly changing and improving could go some ways toward restoring our collective sense of groundedness and real-world efficacy.

What I’m looking for, though, is some important deficiency in life offline that abundance can remedy. We are already so rich that economic growth and technological progress have substantially erased — to the extent they are capable of doing so, at any rate — various great deficits that traditionally menaced and degraded human existence: hunger, physical drudgery and suffering, ignorance, and premature death. Our main problem with food these days is too much of it. Our lives are now so sedentary that we pay money to go to gyms to get the physical exercise our body needs. We have all the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips, just a click away on our phones — if we can be bothered to choose learning something new over the umpteenth TikTok video of the day. Funerals for children are now as rare as they are soul-wrecking; they were just as soul-wrecking before, but dreadfully commonplace.

The promise of abundance is that it can take us to the next level of rich — one in which another pervasive deficit that shadows our lives is progressively whittled away. And that deficit is the precarity that comes from dependence on a lifetime of paid employment.

The premise of this Substack (and the upcoming book that grew out of it) is that the “economic problem” as John Maynard Keynes defined it has been solved. The threat of serious material deprivation has been pushed to the margins of life; as a result, the “permanent problem” of humanity — how to “live wisely and agreeably and well” with all our blessings — has now come into view.

But while it’s true that the vast majority of us in rich countries can now expect our basic material needs to be satisfied — and a whole bunch of less urgent needs and wants as well — it’s true subject to an important qualification. We can expect to satisfy our basic needs and many more besides, provided we spend a big chunk of our waking hours throughout our decades of adulthood working at some job to earn the money to pay for it all. And for most of us, that job requires us to do work that we would never choose to do for its own sake. A lucky minority is employed in work that — even if we might not keep doing it if we won the lottery — is sufficiently challenging and absorbing that we derive many intrinsic rewards from it as well as the extrinsic reward of the paycheck. But for all too many of us, those intrinsic rewards are few and fleeting, outweighed considerably by spiritually emptying tedium and stress. And even if we hate our jobs, we usually hate the idea of losing them even more — yet this happens regularly, often for reasons completely outside our control.

The implicit vision of progress that underlies our current economic order — and it’s rarely stated explicitly, maybe because too many people would immediately see through it — assumes that mass adult employment, with employment-to-population ratios comfortably above 50 percent, is a necessary and enduring feature of modern economic life. Progress, then, takes the form of better (i.e., more intrinsically rewarding) jobs at higher pay with a steady rollout of new and improved gizmos and doodads to buy.

No wonder people are pessimistic about the future these days. I’ve come to the conclusion that the overall quality of paid employment opportunities is unlikely to keep improving indefinitely over time. And we know that many of the new and improved gizmos and doodads we’ve been buying lately are actually making our lives worse; there’s certainly no reason to expect that we’re going to get to living “wisely and agreeably and well” through a wider array of possible consumer purchases.

But there’s another possible future, and the idea of physical abundance points the way. Imagine a future in which core elements of a household budget — housing, transportation, energy, healthcare — are now so cheap that it’s possible to fund a comfortable retirement with a fraction of the lifetime working hours needed today. Imagine a social movement — or perhaps a competing variety of social movements — that seize upon this possibility and encourage lifestyles designed to minimize dependence on paid employment. You’d see lots of people retiring in their 30s and 40s, a higher share of part-time workers among those who do work, and more people entering and exiting the labor force episodically as life circumstances change. And you’d see a lot more small businesses, online or in the home.

This is the next level of rich that abundance-based policies can get us to: societies in which mass full-time employment is no longer the norm. Not because people are dropping out of the workforce under competitive pressure from machines, but because people are “graduating” from work for pay because they now have better ways to spend their time. The prize that abundance offers us, then, is a big and ongoing increase in the ranks of the independently wealthy.

I’ve written previously about this post-job future here, but in the next essay I’ll try to spell things out in greater detail.

I’m happy to announce that everything is set for my book’s official release on January 5, 2026. The production process — collecting blurbs, reviewing copyedits, preparing the index, reviewing the typeset page proofs, signing off on the dust jacket — is now in the rearview mirror. All that remains is to print ‘em up and ship ‘em out.

You can pre-order it on Amazon here. Pre-orders signal interest in the book to other retailers, so you can help the book find a larger audience by ordering now.

Here are the blurbs that will appear on the book’s dust jacket:

“In this thought-provoking book, Brink Lindsey deepens the intellectual conversation about abundance. Examining the ‘crisis of dynamism’ that stifles growth and the ‘crisis of inclusion’ that limits its beneficiaries, he makes a compelling case that much greater, more widespread abundance is both possible and essential. But human flourishing, he argues, depends crucially on how we navigate the path to that better future. Whatever you think of his proposed cures, Lindsey’s diagnosis demands attention.” — Virginia Postrel, Author of The Future and Its Enemies and The Fabric of Civilization

“This book has a gloomy title and a lot of gloomy content. Amazingly enough, though, it left me feeling hopeful and optimistic. Brink Lindsey makes a resounding case that we have everything we need to solve our problems-deep as they are-and that doing so doesn’t require either economic totalitarianism or anarchy. Read The Permanent Problem, and you’ll come away both informed and energized.” — Andrew McAfee, Author of The Geek Way and More from Less

“Why has unparalleled material and technological progress led to global disappointment instead of mass flourishing? Combining a sweeping command of history with rich insight into our societies and souls, one of today’s most original and uncategorizable thinkers offers an arresting answer: without repudiating capitalism, we must redirect it from consumption to connection. In The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey charts the path toward a new economy-one based on ‘abundance at human scale.’” — Jonathan Rauch, Author of Cross Purposes and The Constitution of Knowledge

“Humanity today is far wealthier than it has ever been before. Thus, economics needs to shift to a new terrain-from ‘how to produce more’ to ‘how to utilize our resources and skills to live wisely and well.’ And here Brink Lindsey is the best pathfinder I know.” — J. Bradford DeLong, Author of Slouching Towards Utopia

I’m excited to see this baby — conceived and gestated on Substack! — make its way out into the wider world. Feel free to pre-order early and often.

My essay a while back about America’s descent into post-literacy got a fair amount of attention, at least by my standards, so I thought I’d follow up by trying to put this phenomenon into broader historical context. Here I’ll try to explain what drove the mass improvement in cognitive abilities over the course of the 20th century, why that improvement was so uneven, and what is behind the current regress. I’ll conclude with brief thoughts about how things could be turned around.

Literacy before industrialization

Literacy, and with it broader cultures of intellectual uplift, waxed at various times in the premodern past. But at the dawn of Western modernity, mass illiteracy was the rule. As of 1500, fewer than 10 percent of men were able to read and write — and literacy rates for women were a rounding error.

Then came a trio of interrelated technological, cultural, and economic breakthroughs: the invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the “commercial revolution” stimulated by the discovery of the New World. The printing press dramatically increased the availability of reading material (a hand-copied manuscript cost the equivalent of a year’s wages for a typical laborer), while the growth of commerce expanded the ranks of merchants and clerks who needed to read and write as part of their work. The Reformation, meanwhile, was at the center of the action — encouraged by the spread of printing and in turn, however ironically, lending encouragement to the expansion of commerce. With its commitment to a “priesthood of all believers,” Protestantism located ultimate religious authority in the Bible, not any organized church hierarchy, and consequently put enormous emphasis on the ability to read. Literacy climbed steadily throughout Europe over the ensuing centuries, especially in the growing urban areas, but surged much further ahead in Protestant (and, consequently, more heavily commercialized) northern Europe.

Politics, in very different forms, then lent additional support to cognitive progress. In 17th century colonial New England, Massachusetts and Connecticut led the way, passing laws that required parents to ensure that their children could read and write and mandated that towns establish schools to that end. Here religious motivations were paramount, but there was more to the story: Massachusetts’ original 1642 schooling law stated that children needed to be able to read and understand “the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.” The democratic idea then blossoming on American soil thus added further impetus to the encouragement of literacy: the developing vision of popular self-government was based on a high opinion of the capacities of ordinary people to participate in politics, and education was needed to develop those capacities.

Compulsory, state-provided education first came to western Europe over a century later via a very different conception of politics — namely, the “enlightened absolutism” of Prussia’s Frederick the Great. His 1763 edict established state-provided education for children 5-14 (including girls, though curricula differed and enforcement for girls was more permissive). Frederick, who considered himself a man of the Enlightenment, saw the general value in a more educated populace — but as the absolute dictator of Prussia, he had a special interest in upgrading the quality of his military officers and the growing state bureaucracy. As a result of Frederick’s reforms, literacy surged in Prussia, setting an example subsequently emulated around the world.

Just as starkly different versions of modern politics — popular self-government on the one hand, centralized absolutism on the other — converged on support for education, so too did two starkly different cultural expressions of modernity: first, the intense piety of the Reformation, and next, the anticlerical skepticism of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the great achievements of the Scientific Revolution, the cultural wave of the Enlightenment that swept through the North Atlantic world during the 18th century celebrated the power of human reason to unleash Progress with a capital P and identified ignorance and superstition as the chief roadblocks that needed to be cleared. Education, accordingly, was seen as the primary engine of social progress. This cultural wave continued to gather force during the 19th century, as the advent of steam power and the railroad brought progress into everyday life. The drive to expand education, and access to knowledge more generally, continued to gain momentum as a result. While formal schooling was limited to primary education except for a tiny elite, an explosion of increasingly affordable reading materials along with the development and spread of lending libraries and reading societies responded to the demand for intellectual uplift (along with escapist entertainment) among the growing middle classes.

Here then is where things stood by the middle of the 19th century, just before the emergence of mass production and distribution. In the most advanced areas of Protestant northern Europe and the United States — namely, Scotland, Prussia, and New England — male literacy stood at 75-80 percent while female literacy ranged from 55 to 75 percent. England, slow to adopt compulsory education, was a bit of a laggard, with male literacy rates in urban and commercial areas around 60-70 percent, female rates around 50 percent, and considerably lower rates for both sexes in rural areas. In Catholic Europe, France was the clear leader, with literacy rates nationwide averaging around 60-65 percent for men and 35-40 percent for women, followed by northern Italy. The rest of the region lagged considerably: male literacy rates averaged only 30-40 percent in Spain, 25-35 percent in Portugal, and under 25 percent in southern Italy. In the American South, meanwhile, the plantation economy and lack of state education combined to produce white literacy rates that more closely resembled Catholic southern Europe than the American North, while teaching reading and writing to the black slave population was forbidden by law.

The progress in cognitive fitness up to this point was due primarily to cultural forces, namely Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Political factors — in particular, the willingness and state capacity to provide universal primary schooling — also loomed large. Finally, economic considerations were important as well: the steadily falling costs of reading materials; the emergence of an early consumer culture in which reading featured as a major (and often controversial and even scandalous) source of entertainment; and, finally, the increasing complexity of commercial and early industrial society and, consequently, a growing middle class whose work depended upon the ability to read and write.

Economic complexity and “cephalization”

Beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century with the arrival of full-scale industrialization, that final economic factor — the growing complexity of economic life — swelled to revolutionary significance. The scale and speed of mechanized production and geographically far-flung distribution represented a huge leap in the complexity of the division of labor – and necessitated a corresponding leap in information processing to manage the surging flows of inputs and outputs. In other words, there was an accelerating takeoff in the demand for workers who needed abstract knowledge and technical know-how to do their jobs. The economist Frank Knight called this the “cephalization” of the economy: just as animals capable of more complex behaviors feature higher brain-to-body ratios, so does the complexification of economic activity result in a growing dependence on “knowledge work.”

The new giant business enterprises of the industrial era relied on increasing layers of professional managers to plan, oversee, and track operations, as well as armies of clerical workers to do routine recordkeeping and number-crunching. The fields of engineering, law, finance, and accounting, which provided crucial analytical and coordinating support for the new economic order, developed growing bodies of increasingly arcane expertise that needed to be mastered and applied. And on the front lines of production, blue-collar workers had to be entrusted with operating and maintaining highly complex and expensive machinery. The labor market, once focused overwhelmingly on recruiting and deploying skilled hands and strong backs, now saw steadily increasing demand for disciplined, attentive, and nimble minds.

Supplying that growing labor market demand required enormous new investments in formal training. Over the course of the 20th century, starting in the United States and eventually spreading around the world, first high schools and then colleges and universities went from being tiny preserves of the elite to mass institutions. In America, the “high school movement” was a bottom-up phenomenon that crossed parties and spanned both regional and urban/rural divides — and its guiding star was the fat wage premium offered to workers with a diploma. As of 1900, only about 6 percent of American kids graduated high school; by 1970, the share of high school grads had risen to 76 percent. The takeoff in tertiary education followed decades later: as of 1940, the U.S. college graduation rate was only around 6 percent, but then came the GI Bill and the transition to a post-industrial service economy and white-collar office work. By the 1960s, college students in America had come to outnumber farmers – an astonishing inversion of historical patterns. Here, too, the wage premium offered to college grads was the economic signal that triggered transformative change.

It's little remembered today how far ahead of the rest of the world the United States was in its commitment to education. In western Europe, for example, enrollment in upper secondary education was still comparatively rare as late as the 1950s. But the economic logic that drove the American experience eventually proved irresistible everywhere — and so mass secondary and tertiary education have become the norm around the world. It’s for this reason that the economist Claudia Goldin labeled the 20th century the “human capital century.” “The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century,” she wrote. “It was that capital embodied in the people — human capital — mattered. The odd thing, however, is that even though most industrial nations acknowledged the change, only one did much about it until well into the twentieth century.”

In a slender book from a dozen years ago called Human Capitalism, I told the story of how rising economic complexity led to dramatic progress in cognitive fitness. You can see that progress, not only in increasing years of schooling, but also in the so-called “Flynn effect” — the rise in raw IQ scores in the United States and other advanced economies over the course of the 20th century.

The best explanation for the Flynn effect highlights the parallel between cognitive and physical fitness — namely, the best way to strengthen some latent capacity is through regular exercise. Modern life — not just in the classroom, but on the job and in everyday activities — immerses you in abstractions, broad conceptual categories through which concrete experience is classified and explained. Relative to almost everyone in the premodern past, people raised in this environment tend to see the world through what James Flynn, discoverer of the eponymous effect, called “scientific spectacles” — that is, the lens of abstract classification. Here he explains by looking at a typical “similarities” question on an IQ test:

When presented with a Similarities-type item such as ‘‘what do dogs and rabbits have in common,’’ Americans in 1900 would be likely to say, ‘‘You use dogs to hunt rabbits.’’ The correct answer, that they are both mammals, assumes that the important thing about the world is to classify it in terms of the categories of science. Even if the subject were aware of those categories, the correct answer would seem absurdly trivial. Who cares that they are both mammals?

As I argued in Human Capitalism, the abstraction of modern life is pervasive: fluency with abstraction is the master strategy for handling contemporary complexity. The highest rewards of income and status are reserved for those who excel at not just intellectual abstraction — i.e., “school smarts” — but also what I call social abstraction and personal abstraction. The former refers to our ability to switch in and out of various abstract “thin” identities (colleague, boss, consumer dealing with a business, citizen dealing with a government bureaucracy, etc.) and thereby interact constructively with strangers who also have mastered their corresponding roles; the latter describes our ability to weigh choices, not according to strict bright-line rules, but in view of the interests of an imagined future self. These different forms of facility with abstraction add up to a person’s human capital. To a certain extent, they can substitute for each other: someone who’s intellectually brilliant may be able to get by with less developed social skills and conscientiousness; someone who is a pleasure to be around and an incredibly diligent worker can get ahead even without great intellectual gifts. But the better stocked you are in all three forms of human capital, the brighter your socioeconomic prospects.

Cognitive inequality and the class divide

The central importance of fluency with abstraction, combined with the insight that such fluency is a function of exposure and repeated practice, explains why the cognitive uplift provided by industrialization and economic development, while dramatic, has also been extremely uneven. The subtitle of my book stresses this fact: “How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter — and More Unequal.”

Here's an extended excerpt from the book that explains how contemporary social structures are organized around the capacity to handle complexity through abstraction:

We usually picture society as a pyramid, with the “lower” class at the bottom and the “upper” class at the exclusive apex. But for present purposes, it’s better to think horizontally rather than vertically: core versus periphery instead of top versus bottom.

At the dense central core of the structure sits the socioeconomic elite of managers, professionals, and entrepreneurs. Here is where things are most complicated: more information is processed, bigger pictures are seen and overseen, and therefore more highly abstract thinking of one kind or another is needed. Here the members of the elite earn society’s highest material, psychic, and status rewards by directing, coordinating, and analyzing the head-spinning intricacies of twenty-first century life. Most have successfully completed long years of formal training at school. They tend to be good at analytical reasoning, organization, and follow-through. Building social networks and navigating through the twists and turns of bureaucratic procedures are second nature to them. They have motivations and expectations that keep the long term always in view. In sum, they are flush with human capital – which is to say, they excel at coping with complexity….

On the widely scattered periphery, meanwhile, are the members of the working class. They lack extensive schooling and have not done much otherwise to invest in developing marketable skills. They are less adroit at dealing with big, impersonal institutions. Their time horizons don’t extend as far into the future. They are, in sum, less well adapted to social complexity. Most jobs performed by blue-collar and service workers are relatively simple and routine, and they offer only limited scope for advancement. The need for analytical problem solving, organizational sophistication, long-term planning, and personal initiative is correspondingly modest.

Between the core and the periphery are the middle ranks of office workers and salespeople. The complexity of their work, as well as their socioeconomic status, occupies an intermediate position between that of the elite and that of the working class. And beyond the periphery, on the fringes of social life, is the chaos of poverty. People trapped here contribute productively to the economy only haphazardly or not at all.

There is a chicken-and-egg relationship between the highly unequal opportunities for exercising cognitive faculties through economic activity and the highly unequal distribution of cognitive abilities across the population. Of course there is an important genetic component here: people are born with widely varying natural endowments for all kinds of abilities, including cognitive abilities. And this component has been accentuated by the turn toward “assortative mating” in which people tend to pair up with someone of similar educational background.

But inequality of opportunity must also be seen as a critically important factor. People in the elite spend their working lives — a big chunk of their waking hours — stretching and honing their intellectual and organizational abilities; people in the working class, meanwhile, spend much of that time in drudgery and tedium. However cognitively unequal they were as they entered the work force, the gaps are bound to widen from there. And with no habits of developing and maintaining cognitive fitness, how well prepared are low-level workers to inculcate such habits in their children? The pre-school years are critical for cognitive development, and the evidence is clear that the children of professionals and managers grow up in a much more cognitively stimulating environment. And once kids are in school, well-educated parents are in a much better position to oversee their children’s work and push them to realize their potential; indeed, they are much more likely to see such oversight and pushing as an important part of parenting. Accordingly, even bright and capable kids who are raised in less-educated, traditionally working-class households will have to overcome a deep gravity well to achieve upward mobility. It’s unsurprising that relatively few reach escape velocity and make it out.

The stagnating demand for skills

In Human Capitalism, I readily conceded the unevenness of cognitive uplift through economic growth but I still saw grounds for optimism. The problem was insufficient opportunities for cognitively challenging work, but it seemed to me that the ongoing course of capitalist development was steadily mitigating that problem. The best way to encourage upward mobility is to create more room at the top — and that’s precisely what the evolution of the occupational structure was doing. As of 1900, nearly 80 percent of the workforce consisted of farmers, manual laborers, and domestic servants; by the early 21 century, some 60 percent of employees were white-collar office workers. As I saw it then, policies that encouraged further economic growth were the most effective strategy available for increasing the demand for (and thus encouraging the supply of) human capital — i.e., cognitive fitness.

But looking back now, it appears that I wrote Human Capitalism just as the relationship between economic growth and rising demand for cognitive skills was breaking down. The wage premium for workers with a college degree doubled from roughly 40 percent to roughly 80 percent between 1980 and 2000, reflecting the “skill-biased technological change” associated with post-industrial economies — in other words, the rising relative demand for highly skilled workers. Since 2000, though, the wage premium has stagnated and even slightly contracted – in part because of increased supply as more kids attend and complete college, but apparently largely due to falling demand. Companies that once required a college degree for entry-level jobs are now beginning to scrap that requirement, and the job market for new grads has deteriorated badly: the unemployment rate for recent college grads this year is appreciably higher than the overall national rate.

Even as relative demand for college grads softens, it’s becoming increasingly clear that much of the recent increase in the percentage of young people who earn degrees reflects, not ongoing upskilling of the workforce, but a decline in college standards. This consideration further reinforces the conclusion that skill-biased technological change is slowing down. And although the drop-off in relative demand for highly skilled workers may look like good news in the form of reduced income inequality, it also means that the economic incentives that encourage greater cognitive fitness are weakening — as are the prospects for greater upward mobility. With the astonishing recent progress in AI large language models and their rapidly improving ability to automate knowledge work, there is little reason to expect a turnaround anytime soon. The process of creating more room at the top seems to be winding down.

America’s college boom started well before the rest of the world, so rising educational attainment should continue elsewhere for a time. But I’ve now come to the conclusion that my former faith in ongoing upskilling of the occupational structure was misplaced. Even though it has shifted to the right over time, cognitive ability still traces a Bell curve: humanity’s native material places limits on how far “cephalization” of the economy can be pushed. And the power of economic incentives alone to wring more out of that native potential may have pushed about as far as it can.

But what about politics and culture, the other social forces that can have a major impact on cognitive fitness. Just as politics — through state-mandated and -provided education – served to advance the cultural values of Protestantism in preindustrial Europe and America, since industrialization began it has been a more or less reliable contributor to advancing economic values around the world. But the quasi-industrial model of state education — with students sorted by age, and then sometimes by ability level, into classes that cover the same material at the same speed for everybody — is likewise limited in how far it can push people to realize their cognitive potential. Repeatedly over the years, we see isolated examples of educational institutions and techniques that far outperform their peers — and yet again and again, efforts to follow these promising examples at scale end in disappointment.

In the United States, closing achievement gaps across racial and class lines has been a major priority of educational policy since the 1960s, yet in all that time nothing has happened to challenge the dispiriting finding of the 1966 Coleman report: by far and away the biggest determinant in variations in educational outcomes across schools is the socioeconomic status and family background of the student body. While schools do provide real intellectual uplift across the board (relative, that is, to nonattendance), they have proved incapable of ameliorating deficits in pre-school experiences and home and community life: there are large achievement gaps between the children of the well-educated and everyone else at the outset of schooling, and those gaps only widen during the K-12 years. Meanwhile, all the effort to shore up school performance for the bottom half of students has come at the expense of trying to get the most out of our most talented kids: spending on remedial education outstrips spending on gifted and talented programs by something like 1,000 to 1. And we have even seen occasional pressure to withhold more rigorous course offerings (e.g., the recent controversy in San Francisco over whether to eliminate algebra classes for advanced eighth graders) in a misbegotten attempt to purchase greater equality by suppressing achievement at the high end.

The combination of economic incentives and institutionalization through politics powered the “human capital century” in the United States and its continuation globally. But as of now, the ability of this combination to promote further progress looks to be running out of gas. Even if educational attainment continues to creep upward, that will probably just be a reflection of its degradation as a signal of intellectual advance; clearer signals — reading and math scores on standardized tests, and raw IQ scores — show stagnation and even regress.

Weapons of mass distraction

So how about culture, the other great social force influencing cognitive fitness? For decades we’ve been mostly turning a blind eye to what has now become painfully obvious: contemporary consumerism — in particular, commercialized entertainment delivered in the home or to the individual — is systematically dumbing us down.

Back in the early days of industrialization, things were very different. As literacy spread and printing costs plummeted, a new mass culture of the printed word emerged. And although sophisticates and snobs denounced the vulgarity of “penny dreadfuls” and the “yellow press,” from our perspective today the hunger for intellectual stimulation and uplift was simply astonishing. Consider the popularity of political oratory, with large crowds gathering to listen in rapt attention to hours-long addresses read from written texts, full of ornate prose and byzantine syntax. Or read this fascinating Substack post that reviews Jonathan Rose’s 1996 history The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Here’s a taste:

To read this book is to be shamed by history, and perhaps to be redeemed by it too.

Rose does not begin with a thesis. He begins with the lives that historians had neither the time nor the imagination to record: a miner who reads Plato underground, a servant girl found with a volume of Shelley in her apron pocket, a baker’s son quoting Ruskin to an indifferent magistrate. These were not exceptions. They were, for a time, the rule. In their diaries, in oral testimonies, in battered memoirs, the question is not “why would they read this?” but how could they not?

Reading was a lifeline, a solace, and an assertion.

“I read,” said one ironworker, “because I wanted to say what I thought, not what I was told.”

The paradox Rose exposes is uncomfortable for modern sensibilities: that the working class once read more seriously, more adventurously, and more democratically than today’s university-credentialed elite.

The era of mass print culture, which ran from the 19th century through the 1950s, existed in that unique historical juncture when the rising popular culture of mass entertainment was still new and underdeveloped, and the old aristocratic ideal of the life of the mind still exerted real influence as something worth striving for. Print culture reached the masses because it offered the same addictive benefits that people get today from scrolling on their phones: relief from the enervating toll of boredom, and escape from the stresses and disappointments of real life. But back then, the only technology yet available that offered those benefits — the printed page — also made significant cognitive demands of its audience. Meanwhile, premodern institutions and values — in particular, the aristocratic vision of refined leisure — still bulked large in the wider culture even as they were on the wane, shaping the aspirations of the upwardly mobile and status-conscious. Reading and amassing a fine library were sound strategies for edging ahead of the Joneses.

In the United States this juncture gave us the great age of “middlebrow,” a derogatory term concocted by snobs who looked down on ordinary people seeking self-betterment. Looking back now, it’s just astonishing what a culture can accomplish when people actually look up to something. In America, starting in the late 19th century we got the Chautauqua movement, the creation of Lyceum societies and literary clubs in virtually every city and town, Andrew Carnegie’s funding of thousands of free public libraries, and the rise of general-interest magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. We saw the last great burst of middlebrow in the years right after World War II: the rapid expansion of college attendance, at a time when the university ideal of learning for learning’s sake was still vital, created a large audience among those new attendees for intellectually serious fare. And so we got the Harvard Classics, the Book of the Month Club, and the peak in home encyclopedia sales.

I was born into this culture: my parents were both first-generation college grads (my dad courtesy of the GI Bill), they were Book of the Month Club members, and we had the Harvard Classics and the Encyclopædia Britannica on our shelves. I didn’t have to live long, though, to see that culture disintegrate.

Once the commercialization of entertainment got underway in a technologically progressive society, it was only a matter of time before less cognitively demanding means of capturing mass attention were developed. First came motion pictures — but you had to actually go to a movie theater to see them. Then radio brought commercialized entertainment into the home — but you could still read while listening to music on the radio. The real sea change came with the advent of television: a home appliance that can absorb your attention for hours on end and ask virtually nothing from you in return. Pleasure reading and widespread “deep literacy” have been in decline ever since.

Meanwhile, the university’s role as a countervailing force for high-mindedness was fatally undermined by the ongoing boom in attendance. As I wrote in an earlier essay:

The dramatically enlarged student body had different expectations of what an undergraduate education would provide: instead of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, students were more interested in practical skills, the equivalent of vocational training for knowledge workers. By 1970, business and education degrees accounted for over 36 percent of all college diplomas awarded. Even so, inertia served to preserve something of the old sense of the cloistered ivory tower. In 1970, over 17 percent of students still graduated with degrees in English, history, foreign languages, or philosophy…. Meanwhile, course requirements for “Western Civ” and other broad surveys ensured a decent exposure to the humanities while on campus.

But the dominant trend was clearly toward increasing vocationalism, and that trend has only accelerated in recent decades. After a big spike in the college wage premium during the 1980s, college came to be seen as the only reliable ticket to the middle class….

With college now the nearly-exclusive gatekeeper for the meritocracy, the further commercialization of the campus experience proved irresistible. By 2020, history, English, foreign languages, and philosophy majors accounted for less than 5 percent of degrees conferred. Course requirements were scaled back or eliminated altogether; outside of the more rigorous STEM fields, college became a “buffet” of random specialized electives. Students started to be thought of as “customers”; climbing walls and lazy rivers proliferated.

Here then is where things stand today. The intellectual uplift powered by economic incentives and managed through mass schooling has apparently reached its limits. Meanwhile, economic development has unleashed cultural forces — namely, television and social media — that actively encourage cognitive regress. The path of least resistance moving forward is dismally clear.

What about AI? How is this latest technological breakthrough — or ongoing series of breakthroughs — likely to affect matters? Let’s look first at the effect on economic incentives. To the extent that AI dramatically expands the supply of intelligence on tap in the workplace, the resumption of skill-biased technological change — i.e., the tendency of technological progress to increase relative demands for highly skilled workers — seems highly unlikely. Again, this has an upside in terms of reduced income disparities across skill levels, but at the price of reducing the relative market rewards associated with investing in building your brainpower.

And AI’s effect on culture? Two things seem fairly clear to me. On the one hand, the astonishing capabilities of today’s large language models (and whatever their successors might be) open up the possibility for another round of transformative intellectual uplift. We already know that one-on-one tutoring is by far and away the most effective pedagogical strategy — the problem is that, so long as the tutors have to be human beings, the strategy can’t scale. AI tutors — extravagantly knowledgeable, infinitely patient, fine-tuned to the specific needs of each individual student — can change that equation.

On the other hand, though, how likely is this possibility to be realized in a consumer culture that is organized around comfort, convenience, and absorbing entertainment as the highest goods of organized social activity? A culture in which mind-boggling financial rewards are available to whoever can come up with a new way to hijack and monetize people’s attention? The early signs regarding the use of LLMs as a consumer product are hardly reassuring. Mass cheating by students. OpenAI’s decision to make ChatGPT free for college students during final exams in a classic drug pusher move. The freakout by addicted ChatGPT-4o users when they lost access and ended up in sycophancy withdrawal. Mark Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the solution to the growing crisis of disconnection and loneliness is AI friends. xAI’s rollout of “AI companions” (one sexy, one foul-mouthed) and its offer of up to $400,000 a year for an engineer to help build AI “waifus.” Whatever the theoretical possibilities for using AI as Iron Man suits for the mind, developing these technologies in the current consumer culture is much more likely to result in the mental equivalent of WALL-E-style hoverchairs.

If we want to do anything with a chance of turning things around, we have to face up to the lesson that surfaces again and again in these essays: under conditions of mass affluence, there is no invisible hand leading us toward widespread human flourishing. Things used to be different: during the industrializing transition from mass poverty to mass affluence, the connection between economic growth and overall improvements in well-being was strong. Back then, growth meant less premature death, less physical danger and suffering, less drudgerous toil, less material privation, less shame and anxiety associated with obvious material deficits. And it meant greater opportunities to exercise and develop our minds in the process of making a living.

But ever since we reached the point of capitalist development when serious material deprivation became exceptional and tragic, the connection between growth and flourishing has steadily weakened and is now largely severed. To “live wisely and agreeably and well” — and surely that requires widespread and well-developed cognitive fitness — we can’t rely on our system for making a living to get us there. We have to redirect our focus and priorities toward consciously making a good life.

We have already learned that we can’t allow capitalist development to proceed unchecked in impinging on the natural world. In particular, we have worked to balance the needs of our economic system and the needs of nature by creating wildlife preserves and protecting them from industrial encroachment. Likewise, we are going to have to learn that we can’t allow capitalist development to proceed unchecked in impinging on human nature. We need to set boundaries on the pursuit of commercialized comfort, convenience, and entertainment — and create lifestyle preserves for the pursuit of effortful flourishing.