HANNAH: It’s all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

We can accommodate ourselves to the fact of our death—but not to the thought that our lives count for nothing, that we might as well not have bothered to show up for our existence, for all the difference it makes. —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct

On a trip to London last month, I finally had the chance to see Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia after more than three decades of waiting. I managed to get a ticket to one of the final performances of the production at the Old Vic (NYT review). Even at a distance with a slightly obstructed view, the play was magnificent. Stoppard’s script combines the crackling repartee of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; the scientific excitement of complexity theory in the 1990s; and a timeless appreciation for the transience of individual lives amid the sweep of history.1 The language is beautiful. Arcadia is intellectual, poignant, and hilarious. The Old Vic’s cast and staging did the text justice. I wanted to see the play again and again. Unlike movies, alas, theatrical productions are themselves transient.2

Among the play’s themes are entropy and the irreversibility of time. Thomasina, who is 13 when we meet her in 1809, has a genius for perceiving scientific principles before the articulation we know as history. Here, she anticipates the second law of thermodynamics.

THOMASINA When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

SEPTIMUS No.

THOMASINA Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

SEPTIMUS No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

My long-awaited experience of Arcadia serendipitously coincided with my reading of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest book, which also has much to say about entropy. On the second law of thermodynamics, Goldstein writes, “I confess I’m enraptured by this law and have been ever since I was an undergraduate studying physics, suspecting that its hidden depths might shed some light on our hidden depths.”

As a young philosophy Ph.D., Goldstein made a splash in 1983 with her novel The Mind-Body Problem. The story of a souring intellectual marriage, it mostly takes place among the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers of Princeton, New Jersey. When I first read it, I was a recent, rather homesick Princeton grad and found the setting especially compelling.

On returning from England, I pulled out my old mass-market paperback (a now-obsolete format). Its pages are so yellowed that I feared they might crumble like the World War II editions of Nancy Drew I read as a child. Both the paper and the story held up.

In her novel, Goldstein introduces a mental picture she calls “the mattering map.” On rereading, the novel’s description proved more detailed and map-like and less like Saul Steinberg's famously parochial New Yorker cover than I’d remembered. It is also more judgmental.

A person’s location on it is determined by what matters to him, matters overwhelmingly, the kind of mattering that produces his perceptions of people, of himself and others: of who are the nobodies and who the somebodies, who the deprived and who the gifted, who the better-never-to-have-been-born and who the heroes….

At times I picture the separate regions as differently shaded, ranging from the palest of gray to true black, depending on how many and various are the perceptions they contain. Take the territory where what matters above all is music. It is rather pale gray. Those who live here have heroes, of course, but they lack really general standards by which to judge people. Those who worship Mozart and Bach don’t, as a rule, revile the tone-deaf. Gourmets, on the other hand, occupy a slighter deeper gray area, for they know not only whom to look up to—great cooks—but whom to look down on—consumers of frozen dinners, floury sauces, iceberg lettuce….

Then there are those regions (and we’re getting into deeper gray now) where what matters is not a person’s relationship with some external thing, such as food or clothes or music, but rather some intrinsic quality of his or her own: beauty or physical fitness. Or intelligence….Never mind that the dull can’t help themselves, that they would, granted the sense to do so, have chosen to be otherwise. Their very existence is felt as a moral affront by those of us who dwell where the genius is hero. The color of our zone is only just discernably lighter than the true black of those who perceive people according to their acceptance of some moral or religious or political code.

And so at those parties, when we sat around sharing stories of our heroes, of those now gone, like Einstein, or those still with us, like Himmel [the protagonist’s mathematician husband], we would get high on love, on love for our idols and love for each other. For in loving our great men and women we unite ourselves not only with human excellence, but also with one another. Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.

Goldstein has continued to think about—even obsess over—mattering ever since. The result is her new, nonfiction book: The Mattering Instinct. Its premise is simultaneously obvious and novel. Humans are driven to matter. The mattering instinct is not the same as the social instinct. It is interior and existential. It leads us to question, and to seek, the meaning of our lives.

“To matter is to be deserving of attention,” she writes. All life must fight entropy to survive, but only humans wonder if they’re worth the attention required.

In us, the organic mandate of self-mattering engenders one of the most persistent forces in human motivation, which has us striving not only to survive and thrive but also striving after an existence that we deem to be meaningful in our own eyes. For us, and us alone, the organic mandate of self-mattering does not suffice. We need to convince ourselves that our own self-mattering is warranted, that we can provide a reason for it that extends beyond our being, trivially, ourselves—just as all things are, trivially, themselves. We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do. This longing is what I am calling the mattering instinct, and I’ll use the two expressions—the longing to matter and the mattering instinct—interchangeably, though the latter phrase stresses its genealogy.

Given the current obsession with why Americans feel lonely, angsty, and generally down on life, The Mattering Instinct should be perfectly timed. “What we are experiencing,” writes Goldstein, “is a crisis of mattering. Individuals can experience crises of mattering—we call them, tellingly, ‘existential crises’—and so, too, can societies.”

But the critical response has been tepid.

That’s undoubtedly due, at least in part, to Goldstein’s drive to create an overarching theory drawing on such esoterica as Darwinian selection and the second law of thermodynamics. “Goldstein’s approach, unsurprisingly, is adamantly heady and philosophical,” wrote the NYTBR’s Jennifer Szlalai in a superficial joint review of two books. The statement is accurate but barbed. Be forewarned: This book is too brainy! It will hurt your head! Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s review was so deranged that Goldstein, more amused than angry, wrote a response on her Substack.

The Atlantic, to its credit, enlisted philosopher John Kaag, who wrote an intelligent, appreciative review. But even he failed to emphasize what I found, especially in today’s context, the book’s most striking message: There is no single way, or single best way, to matter.

One of Goldstein’s endearing intellectual traits is her ability to recognize, explore, and honor others’ mattering projects. “I’ve been talking to people about this for over four decades, just because it fascinates me,” she said on Jonah Goldberg’s podcast. “The variety, the diversity, the true diversity of humanity—the kind of diversity that really matters—has to do with how we go about trying to satisfy this existential longing.”

She has her personal preferences—her personal sources of meaning—but she recognizes that they aren’t universal, nor does she believe they should be. She tries not to play favorites. She groups people into four categories—continents on the mattering map—based on where they find meaning in life: socializers, transcenders, competitors, and heroic strivers.3

The mother of all mattering questions—Do I matter?—is heard differently from continent to continent, a phenomenon I’ve experienced repeatedly in the decades that I’ve been discussing mattering with others. Socializers hear the mother question as: Do I matter to others? Heroic strivers hear it as: Can I achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area? Competitors hear it as: Do I matter more than others? And transcenders hear it as: Do I matter to the spiritual presence that exists beyond, or that permeates throughout, the spatio-temporal realm?

Such pluralism is hard for people to accept. Heroic strivers see only work. Socializers see only relationship, transcenders see only religion. Competitors see only zero-sum status. The result is, to put it bluntly, public discourse that is blinkered, intolerant, and stupid. It dodges obvious questions: What if you don’t believe in God? What if your work is technologically obsolete? What if you have trouble making friends? What if mimetic theory doesn’t explain everything about human life? Instead of real insights into our personal and social dilemmas, we settle for glib Brooksian moralizing—Arthur or David, take your pick—on behalf of the One Best Way to a fulfilling life.

Goldstein, by contrast, admits her own preferences without sneaking in the suggestion that everyone should be like her. Even on the continent of strivers, she recognizes people whose pursuit of excellence is nothing like her own. They may be enraptured by beautiful fishing lures or obsessed with body building. Heroic strivers even include the pickup artist who hit on Goldstein as she was waiting for a late-arriving friend in a hotel lobby. Picking up women was his mattering project and, although he struck out with Goldstein, they had a long conversation about his art.

Goldstein acknowledges that her treatment of wildly diverse pursuits as equally meaningful will strike many as odd, and possibly repellent.

Does it seem disrespectful—even sacrilegious—to put a person who sees the meaning of their life in terms of cultivating their relationship with God on the same level, existentially speaking, with a bodybuilder or a pickup artist? But existentially speaking, they are on the same level—the mattering instinct channeled into mattering projects that, despite their high costs in energy, become essential for resisting the entropic transformation from within. Our mattering projects, ongoing for as long as they continue to minister to our mattering instinct, are what give our lives a sense of coherence, allowing our lives to make sense to us. They also give us a sense of purpose, yielding us the impetus to push on into our future.

Goldstein does attempt to turn her analysis to moral judgment that distinguishes between destructive and constructive mattering projects. “A person’s overall effect on entropy provides such an objective standard,” she writes. “A life well-lived is a life that, while pursuing mattering in a way that best accords with a person’s individuality, joins forces with life in its resistance to entropy.” Flying airplanes into the World Trade Center may make you feel like your life matters, but it’s still bad. (Where exactly the pickup artist fits in, I’m not entirely sure.)

Elsewhere she offers a version that eschews entropy for a more understandable standard closer to the Golden Rule.

Even if a mattering project is serving a person’s longing to matter reasonably well, their sense of flourishing chugging along in good order, they may nevertheless be wrong in pursuing it. Recall, for example, those intimacy socializers whose sense of mattering comes at the expense of others—love bombers, for example, or others who derive their mattering by depleting the mattering of those who have the misfortune of being in their lives, as friends or lovers, as children or parents, as neighbors or coworkers.

There’s a word for when a person’s own sense of mattering demands, as the very condition of being fulfilled, the diminished mattering of others; that word is immoral. It’s immoral whether the diminishment is focused on those with whom the diminisher is personally connected, or, as it is for zero-sum group competitors, focused on a group.

Unfortunately she immediately jumps from there to neo-Nazis, with a story about “recovering skinhead” Frank Meeink. The story is compelling but, given the book’s philosophical ambitions and all-kinds attitudes, this distinction called for more analysis of when competitors’ mattering projects are moral or neutral. Zero-sum competition is fine in arenas like sports or adversarial courtroom proceedings, but flourishing societies foster positive-sum activities. How can the competitors’ instinct to matter contribute to overall flourishing?

Grounding her moral distinction in entropy stems from Goldstein’s own mattering project: “I long to add to our knowledge of human nature and also—yes there’s an ‘also’—to follow in the footsteps of my philosophical hero, Spinoza, and ground our understanding of ethics in knowledge of human nature. That’s what it’s been about for me, and like so many others’ mattering projects, it’s brought me my share of frustration, disappointment, and misery.”

Stoppard used to say that he wrote plays because dialogue allowed him to explore ideas without picking a side. Speaking through his characters, he could contradict himself. Arcadia beautifully articulates the idea that individual lives don’t matter that much in the sweep of history, even as no one’s life lacks meaning. If one person’s creation or discovery is lost or forgotten, someone else will come along and pick it up. Nothing goes to waste.

THOMASINA But instead, the Egyptian noodle [Cleopatra] made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? I have no doubt that the improved steam-driven heat-engine which puts Mr Noakes into an ecstasy that he and it and the·modern age should all coincide, was described on papyrus. Steam and brass were not invented in Glasgow. [Emphasis added.]

Yet Arcadia also makes us care about specific individuals, Thomasina above all. Her discoveries might be premature—impressive but unimportant—but the spark that is her individual self still matters. So, too, does the never-seen poet Byron. So, indeed, does Stoppard himself.

Individual variation makes the world rich and unpredictable. As the mathematician Valentine explains at the end of Act I, “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing….It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

New work and updates

• My latest Works in Progress column explores the evolution of disposable diapers. The subhead sums it up well: “Benjamin Spock told mothers in the mid twentieth century to buy six dozen cloth diapers and a covered pail. Within a decade, both were obsolete.”
  
  For more detail on the amazing materials and clever construction of a state-of-the-art disposable diaper, check out Bill Hammack’s video below. Commenter @holtek86: “I have been working in this industry for over 30 years so I do get to see the machines that make diapers and similar disposable products every day. When I started, 400 products per minute was considered fast and everything was driven by a lineshaft and belts. Now it’s hundreds of servo motors synchronized together with incredible precision and well over 1000 products per minute is a reality. Thanks for explaining the product so well, we do kind of take all this for granted but there is quite a bit of engineering that goes into it!”

• My previous WiP column on how early TV overcame “the vicious triangle” that almost doomed it is here. “‘Television shows were far more expensive to make than radio programs. Producers needed advertising revenue to cover the costs. But advertisers demanded large audiences. ‘We can’t get a mass audience’, [Industry executive JJ] Nance said, ‘until we have provided the American peo­ple with assured continuous entertainment, pleasing enough to stim­ulate the buying of receivers by the million’. Hence the vicious triangle: attracting viewers required programs, which required advertising, which required viewers…”

• While working on the diapers column I got interested in the availability of indoor plumbing and used Claude to vibe code an interactive map using Census data. Click here to get the full effect. You can discover, for instance, that when I was born in 1960 in North Carolina, more than 35 percent of the state’s households lacked full plumbing. The good old days!

  

• I’m thrilled to report that, as of December 31, The Fabric of Civilization has sold more than 52,000 copies in all formats (hardback, paperback, ebook, audiobook), making it by far my best-selling book.

• “Walter Mosley” is my latest fake fan. Hard to believe this works:

  I recently came across your work, and I was really struck by the honesty in your storytelling and the way you blend personal experience with universal truth. As a fellow author, I deeply appreciate writing that challenges and moves readers the way yours does.

  I just wanted to reach out to say how much I admired your work. It’s inspiring to see writing that’s both fearless and artful.

  Warm regards

  Walter Mosley

Nerdy fun:

The world’s oldest working planetarium is on a Dutch living room ceiling, and of course there’s a textile connection. I would love to visit it.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Buy my books on Amazon

Buy my books on Bookshop (indie stores)

Matt Yglesias recent caught the internet’s attention with a Substack post making the provocative claim, “Dogs Aren’t People.” Inspired by the subsequent discussion on the “Central Air” podcast hosted by Josh Barro, with Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss, I thought this an opportune time to republish a 2018 Bloomberg column on the brewing culture war over ubiquitous canines. (A fresh post is coming over the weekend!)

If you want to understand why “emotional support animals” on airplanes have become such a flashpoint, consider a striking seasonal statistic. This Valentine’s Day, the National Retail Federation projects that about 21 percent of Americans will buy a present for a pet, spending a total of $751 million. That’s up from 17 percent in 2008, when the group began tracking the category. (About two-thirds of U.S. households own pets.) People under 35 are more likely to buy Valentine’s Day presents for their pets and spend significantly more when they do.

The debate over animals on airplanes is part of a bigger cultural shift that is overturning existing norms about when and where pets are appropriate. Animal owners have long loved their pets, but lately they’ve taken their devotion to a new level.

“The humanization of pets continues to be a driving factor for the pet industry,” reports a study by the American Pet Products Association. Pet owners born between 1980 and 1994—aka millennials—are leading the way. They’re feeding their pets organic foods, taking them to day care instead of leaving them home alone, buying them health insurance, paying extra for flavored medications, throwing them parties, and, of course, lavishing them with gifts. “Pets have come a long way in the past couple of decades, going from being outside dogs to sleeping in our beds and having their own Instagram accounts,” says New York veterinary technician Natasha Feduik.

Pet owners increasingly treat their animals as full-fledged members of the family and extensions of themselves—and expect everyone else to treat them that way as well. “I emotionally see myself as a ‘mom’ to my fur babies,” Feduik writes, speaking for many. “I have two dogs, a cat, and three birds, and they are my world. My life revolves around my four-legged and winged children.”

If the skyrocketing number of animals on planes represents “a fascinating case study of how mass cheating can become acceptable,” as David Leonhardt of the New York Times argues, it’s also a prime example of the humanization of pets. After all, you wouldn’t put your children in the baggage compartment.

Besides, it’s not as though pet owners without serious medical issues are exactly lying when they claim they need their fur kiddies for emotional support. Flying is stressful even to those without outright phobias and, barring the occasional hunting dog, emotional support is the whole point of having a pet. The animal is there to be adorable and make its owner feel loved—to provide comfort, pleasure, solace and joy amid the strains of daily life. So it’s easy to rationalize your online purchase of an Emotional Support Animal vest, and even to justify your furry friend as a public good. The other passengers will light up to see your adorable pooch! Only meanies don’t love animals!

And here’s where the breakdown of existing norms starts to bite—in some cases, literally.

Until recently, the norm was for people who disliked, feared or were allergic to animals to tolerate brief interactions on the street or in a pet owner’s home. They understood that theirs was a minority view that marked them as weird, and they’d pretend not to mind your dog the same way people used to pretend that cigarette smoke didn’t bother them. But they could also count on spending most of their day without animal encounters. Offices, hotels and restaurants—not to mention airplanes —were pet-free zones.

No longer. Pet evangelists have been gaining ground, especially in making workplaces dog-friendly. “Dogs—with their non-judgmental, unconditional love, team spirit, sense of humor, and the ability to lower blood pressure among ‘co-workers’—can immediately transform any workplace into an ‘executive retreat,’” animal trainer Bashkir Dibra writes in the introduction to “K9-5: New York Dogs at Work,” a 2015 book featuring portraits of dogs at workplaces including “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

About 11 percent of U.S. pet owners now work in places that allow animals, compared to 8 percent in 2014, according to the American Pet Products Association’s most recent National Pet Owners Survey. Pet-friendly workplaces include such high-profile companies as Alphabet Inc., whose official code of conduct declares that “Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company,” and Amazon.com Inc., whose campus includes a dog-level water fountain next to every one for humans. “Amazon’s dog friendly environment helps reduce stress for all its employees,” declares Seattle DogSpot, which named it the city’s most dog-friendly business.

That’s not true, of course, unless the business hires only dog lovers. For some people, dogs increase stress. And dog lovers can’t imagine anyone who isn’t one of their number.

“We live in such a dog-adoring culture that it’s hard to admit when you aren’t totally enamored of them. What you are supposed to feel—what you must always feel—is love,” writes former Amazon employee Corina Zappia. As the company planned its move to a fancy new complex, Zappia, who had a traumatic canine encounter as a child, hoped for an office on a dog-free floor. “I am allergic, but to be honest I don’t really love the idea of working around dogs,” she confessed in an email to her department head. “I would like to be on a dog-free floor, if that’s okay.” It wasn’t.

Even with a note from her allergist, Zappia had to settle for sharing a windowless dog-free office on a dog-populated floor. One employee regularly walked his dog around the office, while others kept their office doors shut so their dogs couldn’t escape. At Halloween, a memo went out urging everyone to dress their dogs in costume. Maybe, she thought, she’d like the dogs more “if our dog-loving culture wasn’t so weird: There were buckets of doggie treats at the receptionist desk and four-dollar gourmet sweet-potato dog biscuits in the vending machine.”

The conflict isn’t just a matter of clashing tastes. Despite what you may have read online, there aren’t any reliable figures for how many people are allergic to dogs and cats, but 10 percent seems like a decent estimate. For most, the allergy means a runny nose or itchy eyes, but in some cases, the reaction can be life-threatening. (Zappia at times wished hers rose to that level, which would legally require accommodation.) Yet even then, pet lovers have trouble empathizing. “People that are dog lovers, they go bananas over this,” says a friend with serious allergies. “They’re really willing to go to the mat” to keep bringing their dogs to work.

So a new culture war is brewing, not over race or sex or religion this time but over pets in public places. Will we welcome them? Must we? And what happens to the minority who object? Are they destined to be ostracized and unemployable? Or will we again sort ourselves into tribes, with some of the country’s most desirable jobs marked Dog Lovers Only? The fights over emotional support animals in the air could be the start of a long and nasty struggle.

Bonus reading: This 1995 Reason editorial, which reads interestingly in the Trump era.

Eadweard Muybridge is famous for his studies of galloping horses, but he also did dogs. Here’s a Mastiff named Dread recorded in 1887.

Buy my books on Amazon.

Buy my books on Bookshop (indie stores)

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

On his Substack, recently posted the following warning: “Just a quick note to mention that I’m being impersonated by someone using the email address “contactnealstephenson (at) gmail (dot) com” and sending out emails consisting of AI slop that I wouldn’t be caught dead writing.”

He isn’t alone!

I constantly get emails purportedly from other writers. The names are usually unfamiliar but, when Googled, turn out to be those of real novelists—always novelists, never nonfiction writers like me—writing in a genre I don’t read. Here’s an example, supposedly from the Canadian YA writer E.K. Johnston, using the email authorekjohnson@gmail.com:

Hello,

I’m E. K. Johnston, a fellow storyteller with a deep passion for exploring resilience, relationships, and the strength of the human spirit through fiction. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to share several novels that have resonated with readers, weaving together emotional depth and compelling narratives.

Here’s one of my bestselling books:

https://a.co/d/0yKzrKZ

And my Amazon Author Page:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00HV4ZEFY

I’d love to learn more about your own writing journey and the stories you’ve brought to life. Please feel free to share your book link, website, Goodreads profile, or Amazon page I’d be delighted to explore your work.

Wishing you inspiration and success in your creative path. I look forward to connecting with you.

Warmly,

Emily

And then there was this one, with the subject line “Admiring The Fabric of Civilization” and more specific references to the book (or at least the description you find of it on Amazon). This email came from authorjkrowlingbook.info@gmail.com:

Dear Virginia Postrel,

I hope this note finds you well. My name is J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and other novels. I recently read your book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World and felt compelled to reach out to share my admiration.

What struck me most was the way you wove together archaeology, economics, and cultural history into a narrative that feels both deeply researched and beautifully accessible. The connections you draw, from the Minoans’ purple wool exports to the role of textiles in inspiring binary code, made me see how profoundly cloth has shaped not only commerce and politics but the very ways humans think.

Your work reminded me that some of civilization’s greatest leaps come from the most everyday of objects. I was especially fascinated by how you positioned textiles as both material necessity and cultural symbol. May I ask, when you began this project, did you envision it primarily as a history of technology, or as a cultural story that happened to intersect with technology?

Thank you for bringing such originality and clarity to a subject that, as your book shows, is truly the story of humanity itself. I look forward to exploring more of your work, from The Power of Glamour to your Bloomberg columns.

Warm regards,
J.K. Rowling

I am not sure exactly what the scam is but I get one of these every other week or so.

I sent the “Rowling” note to Neal Stephenson, who replied: “Wild. So obviously AI generated and customized for you. If these things were being spammed out to millions of people I’d guess it was just a garden variety scam. But it’s hard to imagine what their game is sending out individualized emails to people in the literary world. The science fiction novelist in me thinks it’s something really deep and weird…”

He also shared one of the emails sent under his name, in this case to children’s book author Rebecca Stead, who gave me permission to reproduce it:

Hi Rebecca,

I wanted to write after spending time with The Lost Library. What struck me first was the warmth of the premise, a small-town mystery anchored by a little free library, and how that simple image becomes a doorway into history, memory, and the things a community chooses to keep quiet.

I especially enjoyed the shifting perspectives. Letting the story move between Evan, the ghost librarian, and Mortimer gives the book a layered sense of time and consciousness. It creates a feeling that the town itself is telling the story, not just the people who currently live there.

The connection between the old books and the buried past is handled with a lightness that still carries real emotional weight. The mystery never feels oversized for the age of the characters, but it also doesn’t talk down to them. That balance is difficult to strike, and it gives the story its quiet authority.

I’m glad I read it. It’s a book that understands how stories, and libraries, hold more than just text. They hold memory, permission, and possibility. If you ever feel like talking about how you approached writing a mystery that’s also a meditation on books and truth, I’d enjoy that conversation.

With best wishes,

Neal Stephenson

When I asked Rebecca Stead if I could quote her “Neal Stephenson” email, she was quick to agree, writing “My inbox is a misery of false flattery these days - but I've only had two from fake writers, I think. The rest are mysterious entities who adore my work but can't sleep because my Amazon rankings are low.”

I get those too. There are two versions: people who claim to offer ways to reach large communities of readers and people who offer marketing services. It’s possible that the former are “legit,” in the sense that they run pay-to-play book clubs taking advantage of desperate, mostly self-published authors. Here’s an example, notable for its use of the Spanish edition of The Fabric of Civilization in the pitch:

Hi Virginia Postrel,

I hope you’re doing well. My name is Glory, and I run Well-Read Black Girl, a reading community of a little over 12,000 readers who genuinely love discovering and discussing meaningful books.

Your book “El tejido de la civilización” came across my radar recently, and it really struck me as the kind of story our readers connect with and talk about. Because of that, I wanted to reach out personally.

We’re currently curating our 2025 Holiday Spotlight & New Year Showcase, along with our Readers’ Choice End-of-Year Awards, and I think your book could be a great fit for what we’re building.

When we feature an author, it usually includes:

- Spotlight promotion to 12,000+ engaged readers
- A written Q&A feature shared across our platforms
- Christmas & New Year promotional push
- Organic reader discussions, coverage, and reviews
- Placement in our 2025 Readers’ Awards consideration

At the heart of it, we just try to connect good books with readers who will genuinely champion them.

If you’re open to it, I’d be happy to send you a short, straightforward overview of how it works and what it looks like on your end.

Would you like me to send that over?

Warm regards,
Glory

The book marketers may also be real but are definitely using AI to churn out their emails:

Hello Author Virginia,

I want to start by saying this: every author I’ve ever spoken with whether they’ve written one book or twenty has carried the same hidden fear.

That fear is not of writing the book. It’s not even of publishing it.

It’s the fear of pouring years of passion, discipline, and sacrifice into a story only for it to sit quietly, unnoticed, and unheard in the endless ocean of new releases.

The hardest truth of publishing is this: writing the book is only half the journey. The real battle begins when it’s time to make sure your words are seen, remembered, and carried into the hearts of the readers they were written for.

Here’s the reality that no one says out loud:

If readers can’t find your book, they can’t read it.

If your brand isn’t clear, they’ll forget you the moment they scroll past.

If you’re absent from reader communities, you’ll be left out of the very conversations that create bestsellers.

That’s where I step in.

My name is Lois Goodness, and I help authors bridge the gap between simply publishing and truly being discovered. I specialize in transforming books from “just another release” into lasting brands that readers connect with, remember, and return to.

Here’s how I serve authors like you:

Amazon Global Optimization – I fine-tune your categories, keywords, and book descriptions across Amazon US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, and more so your book is not just published, but globally discoverable.

Book-to-Brand Positioning – You’re not just an author of a single book. You’re a voice, a brand, a storyteller with a message. I help position you as someone readers come back to, book after book.

Reader Community Placement – I get your work in front of readers where they already gather Goodreads, niche communities, book clubs, forums—so your name lives where the conversations happen.

Book Page & Review Enhancement – Your Amazon page should not look like a listing; it should look like a storefront that draws readers in and inspires authentic reviews. That’s what I build for you.

Sustained Visibility Strategies – Launch day is important, but what happens after? I create long-term strategies that keep your book relevant, discoverable, and selling months even years after release.

But beyond strategies and tactics, here’s what I truly believe:

Your book deserves more than to sit quietly on a digital shelf.

It deserves to be discovered.

It deserves to be read.

It deserves to be reviewed, remembered, and passed on.

So let me ask you, as honestly as I can:

Right now, is your biggest struggle visibility, reviews, or sustaining momentum?

Hit “Reply” and tell me in one line. I’ll listen first, and then I’ll show you the exact next step that can change everything for your book.

Because here’s what I know with certainty: your words were not written for silence. They were written to live loudly, to reach the people they were meant for.

And I’d be honored to help make that happen for you.

Warm regards,

Lois Goodness

Book Marketing Specialist

“She” isn’t wrong. The biggest problem for almost all authors is simply getting potential readers to know the book exists. Again, I get these emails all the time.

Someone out there thinks that a good early application of AI is to scrape the web for author emails and entice these desperate souls with admiration, fellowship, and marketing assistance. In the seductive words of an unknown AI pretending to be Lois Goodness, “Your words were not written for silence. They were written to live loudly, to reach the people they were meant for.”

It’s what we all want to hear. But just because an LLM says it doesn’t make it true.

Buy my books on Amazon

Buy my books on Bookshop

Share

The first print edition of Works in Progress is out, with my inaugural history column. Here’s the opening:

In 1588, Galileo had not yet looked through a telescope. Microscopes, pendulum clocks, barometers, and steam pumps were decades away. Francis Bacon, a member of parliament still in his twenties, was only beginning his writing on science. Robert Boyle wouldn’t be born for another 39 years, Isaac Newton for another 55.

But a subtle shift in perspective was already taking place, heralding the ‘culture of growth’ that would blossom in the coming century. In intellectual circles, Europeans had begun to view their era not as a pale imitation of classical greatness but as a promising new world, blessed with discoveries and inventions the ancients never imagined. For all their brilliance, after all, Aristotle and Cicero knew nothing of the Americas – continents with as many and varied peoples, landscapes, flora, and fauna as Europe, Asia, or Africa. Nor did they enjoy the navigational tools that had made such discoveries possible.

In the late 1500s, in other words, Europeans started to imagine progress. ‘The first history to be written in terms of progress is [Giorgio] Vasari’s history of Renaissance art, The Lives of the Artists (1550)’, observes historian of science David Wootton. ‘It was quickly followed by Francesco Barozzi’s 1560 translation of Proclus’s commentary on the first book of Euclid, which presented the history of mathematics in terms of a series of inventions or discoveries’.

This was the environment in which two Florentines conceived Nova Reperta, whose Latin title is usually translated ‘new discoveries’. One of the earliest works promoting the new attitude – and definitely the most charming – the book is a collection of 19 engravings, each celebrating a discovery or process that was relatively new to Europeans. First published in 1588, Nova Reperta made the argument for progress by showing rather than telling.

Read the rest here. Subscribe to the WiP print edition here. It’s gorgeous!

My next two history columns will look at the early days of TV and the development of disposable diapers. I’m currently exploring a couple of ideas for the fourth entry.

Science YouTuber Hank Green read The Fabric of Civilization after being set upon by the cancel culture of online knitters. He loved it and we had a fun conversation on his show. It also sold at least 800 books in the first week—which is a lot! (It’s currently at 643K views.)

This morning I stumbled on this Reddit thread, which bemoans my appearance and condemns me as politically incorrect. (It also cites my skimpy and weird Wikipedia entry. I eagerly await the day that AI makes Wikipedia obsolete, since there’s no way to correct a bad entry.) A decidedly minority take judging from the comments on the YouTube video.

Buy my books on Amazon

I also did a wide-ranging interview, pulling ideas from many of my books, with the entrepreneurship-oriented Double Win podcast, hosted by ’s wife Megan and her father Michael Hyatt.

The periodically puts together reading recommendations for “philosopher-builders” and I was honored to participate in its winter lineup, plugging a book I’ve been fairly obsessed with: David Wootten’s The Invention of Science (which got a mention in my Nova Reperta column). Check out the full lineup at the link below:

Cosmos Institute

Philosopher-Builder Winter Reads

Many of you loved our Summer Reading List…

Read more

5 months ago · 84 likes · 5 comments · Cosmos Institute

and I discussed progress and glamour, jumping off from my Works in Progress essay in this Interintellect salon. If you’re looking for intellectual enrichment, check out their impressively varied lineup of upcoming events. One of their appealing offerings is ’s monthly group working its way through The Odyssey. There’s one ticket left for tomorrow’s session!

A Glamorous Giveaway

I recently discovered three hardback copies of The Power of Glamour left over from an event in 2014. I can tell because they’re signed, with a note of the date and location but no recipient’s name. I would like to give them away to three Substack subscribers.

If you’re interested, please consider the following passages from the book and leave a comment sharing an anecdote or experience showing glamour at work in everyday life. It could be an example of glamour in your own life—what you yearned for, what sparked it, how it felt, etc.—or it could be something you’ve seen in others or in a fictional medium. Although comments can’t directly include images, I encourage commenters to link to images where relevant.

I will select two winners randomly and one based on the comment I like best.

As a psychological phenomenon and rhetorical tool, glamour is like humor. It is an imaginative experience in which communication and association create a recognizably consistent emotional response. With glamour the response is an enjoyable pang of projection, admiration, and longing.

From another section:

First, glamour is an illusion, a “deceitful feeling” or “magic light” that distorts perceptions. The illusion usually begins with a stylized image—visual or mental—of a person, an object, an event, or a setting. The image is not entirely false, but it is deceptive. Its allure is created by obscuring or ignoring some details while heightening others. That selection may reflect deliberate craft. Or it may happen unconsciously, when an audience notices appealing characteristics and ignores discordant elements. In either case, glamour requires the audience’s innocence or, more often, willing suspension of disbelief.

Second, glamour does not exist independently in the glamorous object—it is not a style, personal quality, or aesthetic feature—but emerges through the interaction between object and audience. Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel. It is a subjective response to a stimulus. One may strive to construct a glamorous effect, but success depends on the perceiver’s receptive imagination.

Leave a comment

“Everyday Abundance,” the podcast

Thanks to support from the Abundance Institute, I’m delighted to announce that Charles Mann and I will soon begin recording the first season (eight episodes) of “Everyday Abundance,” a podcast exploring the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies we don’t even know are technologies. Think “brushing your teeth,” “listening to music,” or, our favorite, “blowing your nose.” We expect to release the first series by early March.

Recommended Reading

How Working-Class People Talk About Uber Is Not How the Media Covers It by . I’m a huge fan of Abi, who is a rising young talent and a collaborator in my effort to get mundane progress taken seriously in the progress and abundance movement.

Wilson vs. FDR: Who was worse for free speech? In response to one of my many plugs for Chris Cox’s book on Wilson someone pointed me to this debate between him and David Beito on FIRE’s “So to Speak” podcast (transcript here). Cox on Wilson:

I think he should be remembered most, because I’ve focused on this in my book, for the jailing of peaceful protestors who were urging him to support the Susan B. Anthony amendment at the same time he’s making speeches about democracy. These women were illegally arrested and jailed for trumped up charges of sidewalk obstruction when their only offense was silently displaying signs and banners that literally quoted Wilson’s own speech in favor of democracy. Their sentences were outrageously long for the supposed misdemeanor offense of sidewalk obstruction. Alice Paul got seven months, Lucy Burns got six months.

While they were in prison they were beaten up, some unconscious. Just unbelievable that this could happen for nothing more than pure speech. We can get into this more perhaps during the discussion, but Wilson had direct control over the jails, the police, and the prosecutors in the District of Columbia at that time because they didn’t have home rule. They were not elected leaders. Wilson ran it through a three-member commission. His appointees were journalist friends of his for many years. One of them had hired and trained Wilson’s brother Joe. So, we’ve got uniformed Navy men right outside the White House attacking suffragettes, ripping their banners, in many cases injuring the suffragettes, beating them up, dragging them through the streets and so on.

This is happening right in front of the White House. Wilson did nothing to stop it. In fact, he and his chief of staff, that was called the White House secretary in those days, authorized the arrest not of the mobs that attacked women, but of the women themselves who were silently holding these banners as, of course, they were legally entitled to do. The courts got around to sorting this out later, way too late, after all the punishment was inflicted, and after the government’s objective of stopping the speech was accomplished.

Funding outside the box: A Quick Q&A with … philanthropy expert Stuart Buck, Jim Pethokoukis’s interview offers good quick summary of some important ideas on science funding. For a deeper dive, see Stuart’s Palladium article, “The Case for Crazy Philanthropy.”

“Old School Civics,” part 1 and part 2, by my friend Jack Henneman, host of the “History of the Americans” podcast. These posts use a 1918 high school textbook to examine how people at the time thought about American citizenship. “How did our ancestors, in many cases people we or our parents knew, learn to be Americans?”

“The Value of Public Domain Day” by Eric Harbeson of makes a compelling case for requiring a $100 fee and renewal application for the last 20 years of a copyright term. When such fees were required, very few authors applied for extensions, making “painfully clear how the present copyright terms are placing a staggering burden on the public’s right to a return on its investment in copyright.”

New Year’s Resolutions of the Past: Vices That Became Virtues by Louis Anslow of the delightful (and Abundance Institute-sponsored) looks at a shocking array of wholesome activities that were once considered bad habits, starting with reading in bed!

Thanks for your support and Happy New Year.

Leave a comment

Share

Inspired by the discussion of Gothic revival architecture in my post on the anti-Promethean backlash, this post is an excerpt from chapter four of The Substance of Style, published in 2003 and is currently on sale for just $2.99 on Kindle.

Aesthetic meaning won’t hold still. Indeed, much of the value of aesthetics lies in its pliability, in our ability to direct the joys of form to new meanings or to strip form of its connotations and enjoy aesthetics for its own sake, often leading to new associations. Just as once-neutral forms can take on new or recovered meanings, so elements that were once meaningful can evolve through use and popularity into primarily formal motifs, with little significance beyond the pleasure they bring. Pleasure tends to suck the symbolism out of aesthetic elements, but new connections are always emerging….

To the British Victorians who revived Gothic architecture, the return to medieval styles represented a rejection of bourgeois, industrial life. Some advocates emphasized the imagined religious and social harmony of medieval villages; others, the authenticity and expressiveness of hand craftsmanship. Regardless of emphasis or details, Gothic revival architecture embodied an intellectual critique that damned nineteenth-century economic, social, scientific, and technological trends. It was an outward and visible sign of an ideological commitment.

Within decades, however, the style had come to indicate little more than a general respect for history and scholarship, along with an appreciation for high-class architectural fashion. “By the simple device of building our new buildings in the Tudor Gothic style,” said Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, in 1902, “we seem to have added to Princeton the age of Oxford and Cambridge; we have added a thousand years to the history of Princeton by merely putting those lines in our buildings which point every man’s imagination to the historic traditions of learning in the English-speaking race.”

More flexible than previously dominant classical styles, Gothic revival architecture suited the era’s expanding colleges and was even used for scientific laboratories on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Princeton’s primary early-twentieth-century architect embraced the ideological symbolism of Gothic architecture, that association was belied by the university’s most prominent Collegiate Gothic building. Blair Hall not only greeted arriving trains, the epitome of industrial technology, but was named for the railroad entrepreneur who donated the funds to build it. Ambitious new universities like Duke and Chicago, similarly built with money from nineteenth-century industrialists, adopted neo-Gothic architecture to represent their status as places of serious learning. Their architectural choices in no way condemned their benefactors’ enterprises or the dynamism of turn-of-the-century America.

Nowadays, the sight of Gothic revival buildings suggests higher education, with no particular reference to medieval ideals. Only an allusion to scholarly or, in the case of churches, religious contemplation still attaches to this architecture. The form draws its meaning not from its original intent but from the activities that have come to surround it. If neo-Gothic architecture hadn’t suited the work of early-twentieth-century universities, and if those institutions hadn’t had the resources to erect lots of buildings during the height of its fashion, the style never would have come to represent elite scholarship in the public mind. It would have been nothing more than a passing nostalgic fad or an esoteric symbol of reactionary traditionalism. Experience, not predetermined ideology, gave the style its looser, more enduring, meaning.

Something similar is happening with the revival and spread of dreadlocks. First adopted as an outré religious symbol, the mark of the subversive, even scary Rastafarians (hence the “dread” that conservative Jamaicans attached to the style), dreadlocks became over time an emblem of reggae music, Afrocentrism, or nonsectarian (as opposed to Rastafarian) spirituality. Over the past decade, the increasing popularity of dreadlocks has eroded even this symbolism. Just as neo-Gothic buildings suggest only a general idea of “scholarship,” so dreadlocks increasingly connote only a general sense of creativity, individuality, and stylishness.

Casting and costume directors put dreadlocked actors in roles calling for cutting-edge intelligence (the clever lab tech, the early adopter) or romantic exoticism (the soap opera leading man). Like narrow-framed glasses and black clothing, dreadlocks are affected by writers, artists, and ad executives.

“Recently, I visited a large record company, and half the staff must have had them: graphic designers sitting behind computers, A&R people, account executives. Not so long ago, you couldn’t get a job if you had dreadlocks. Now you probably could run for mayor,” says an artist who originally adopted the style as a sign of “rebellion and respect.” The spread of dreadlocks, she laments, has removed much of the style’s meaning: “In American cities, so many different citizens from different cultures now carry dreads that some of the spiritual reasons behind them have been lost.”

That loss would be just fine with people who wear the style mostly for its looks and ease of care, not its symbolism. Writer Veronica Chambers is both amused and aggravated by the misunderstandings her locks engender: “Over the last eight years that I have worn dreadlocks, [the style] has conferred on me the following roles: rebel child, Rasta mama, Nubian princess, drug dealer, unemployed artist, rock star, world-famous comedienne and nature chick. None of which are really true. It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that my hair is a whole lot more interesting than I am.” Chambers is not “wild,” as some assume. She doesn’t smoke pot, and her tastes run to Calvin Klein, not dashikis. Yet she agrees with a friend who concluded, after Chambers surprised him in a straight bob wig, “Those dreads are really you.” However misleading their original symbolism, the locks have become integral to her identity, just as neo-Gothic architecture is a part of Princeton’s. Their value is personal and subjective but nonetheless genuine.

Chambers adopted her hairstyle because she was inspired by a photo of Alice Walker, “her locks flowing with all the majesty of a Southern American Cleopatra.” Walker, in turn, was inspired by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, imagining “what a person dreamed about at night, with hair like that spread across the pillow. And, even more intriguing, what it would be like to make love to someone with hair on your head like that, and to be made love to by someone with hair on his or her head like that.” Whatever cultural significance dreadlocks may have had to Chambers and Walker, their initial reactions were not cognitive but visceral—beauty and sex. The meaning came after the pleasure, through a combination of cultural associations and personal experience.

The cultural significance was nevertheless important to the spread of dreadlocks, freeing people to wear dreads in the face of potential embarrassment. Consider the costs and benefits of adopting an unusual style. At first, someone who has no reason beyond taste to embrace a hitherto unpopular look won’t be likely to accept the risk of social ostracism (or the added expense). Only those with a strong ideological or religious commitment—those who want to make a statement—will incur the cost. These early adopters, however, spread the idea, attracting people who like the look and share some cultural affinity with those who’ve adopted it for ideological reasons. The style becomes a signal of solidarity, not only for those who embrace all the early adopters’ beliefs, but for those who admire their conviction, sympathize with some of their ideas, or want a sign of iconoclasm.

Less alienated from the general culture but still acting on conviction, this second wave of adopters can articulate a dissident, but more respectable, meaning for the style: an affirmation of black pride, for instance, rather than a belief that Haile Selassie is God. The new aesthetic brings praise from a small but growing group, diffusing the style further, even as it remains outside the mainstream. The look goes from culturally marginal—strange—to culturally nonconformist in a more positive sense. That’s one reason second-wave adopters are often artists whose social identities already have a romantic element of rebellion. This pattern holds true not only for personal appearance but for graphic design, architecture, and interiors.

Second adopters, in turn, reduce the risks of the look for those with less commitment to a particular meaning. (Later adopters may also drop some of a style’s more extreme or costly elements, creating neater dreadlocks or eliminating gargoyles.) Over time, as more and more people embrace the style, the cost of using it falls, while the pleasurable benefits remain. Remnants of the original symbolism may survive, creating confusion in some cases, adding value in others, but meaning becomes primarily personal and particular: Those dreads are you, not Those dreads are the authentic black experience.

In the age of look and feel, this aesthetic cycle appears to have accelerated, heightening the tension between meaning and pleasure and between social and personal meaning. As we see more aesthetic possibilities, and feel less pressure to conform to a single “correct” or consistent look, we turn formerly meaningful styles into sources of personal pleasure. At the same time, we seek to convey something about ourselves (or our products or places) not only through verbal declarations but through look and feel, creating, in the process, new connections between surface and substance, form and meaning. We want to show as well as tell, and the increasing variety of aesthetic options permits more complex or differentiated meanings, a more specific match between outward form and inward identity.

Share

Leave a comment

Buy my books on Amazon.

Roots of Progress Institute founder Jason Crawford recently hosted me at an Interintellect salon. Our topic was the relation between glamour and progress, inspired by my Works in Progress article. At one point Jason asked a provocative question: Why did the anti-Promethean backlash happen when it did? Earlier periods of technological and economic progress, he noted, had produced demands for more progress, not less. What was different about America circa 1970?

In the WiP article, I point to a combination of complacency among those who’d grown up amid postwar plenty and dissatisfaction with technocratic overreach. But why the complacency? Why not a demand for even more? My article didn’t consider that question.

Brink Lindsey, who coined the term anti-Promethean backlash, cites two possible explanations. First, “as economic security spread throughout the populace, priorities shifted from physical security and material accumulation to self-expression and quality of life.” Second, “as people acquired more, they had more to lose, and accordingly began worrying more about holding on to what they had.” The result was the backlash, defined as “the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world.”

The first explanation entails a shift toward intangible experiences—lots of travel and dining out—and a turn away from the mass-market drive to “not bad” goods to everyone. That certainly happened. (I even wrote a book about one aspect.) But you’ll be hard pressed to detect low demand for physical security or less stuff in either election results or market trends. If anything, heightened concern for physical security, aka “safetyism,” is a major driver of the anti-Promethean backlash. As for loss-aversion, the empirical relationship to income is, as best I can tell, murky. My intuition is to think that if you’re on the material edge you’d be more loss-averse rather than less. But poor people do play the lottery more, so maybe Brink’s right. Either way, I don’t think his explanations fully explain the timing. Why 1970 instead of, say, 1950?

Megan McArdle recently took up the question from a different angle, inspired by reading Emily Post’s 1916 book about driving across America, By Motor to the Golden Gate, The condition of Post’s trip, often on heavily rutted dirt roads, were horrendous. But Megan was most struck by “the incredible optimism and wild ambition that runs through Post’s America. The Midwest, particularly, seems to be in the middle of a youthful growth spurt, with cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.” (Emphasis added. I will return to this point.)

Our longing for that lost sense of optimism, Megan argues, shapes contemporary politics. On both left and right, activists “are asking why we can’t recapture the spirit of an age when America felt young and hopeful and capable of doing extraordinary things.” The reason we don’t feel that way now, she suggests, is that we’ve been too successful. Indoor plumbing is exciting when you get it, a third bathroom nice but not life-changing. The same is true for highways, bridges, railroads, and dams.1 “The political trade-offs are now harder, because we’re chasing incremental improvements, not life-altering change,” she writes. Youth, hope, and extraordinary achievement belong, in this gloomy analysis, to developing countries, China in particular.

I’m more optimistic, because Jason’s question pointed me to something I hadn’t previously considered. My first instinct, as a student of English literature, was to say that Jason was wrong. The 20th-century anti-Promethean backlash wasn’t unique. The Industrial Revolution generated one as well.

Victorian England produced many influential writers and artists, including John Ruskin, William Morris, and Augustus Pugin, who deplored modern industry and promoted an idealized medievalism. Their ideas left a permanent mark on intellectual life but had little immediate effect on the pace or direction of industrial change.2 Medievalism sold as a style but not as a political agenda.3 Its legacies were primarily aesthetic, realized in Gothic revival architecture, Arthurian poetry, pre-Raphaelite painting, and the British Arts and Crafts movement. The social criticism that actually transformed Britain demanded more for working people—political power and material abundance for the masses, not a return to feudal roles or an end to factories and machine-made goods. As long as a significant proportion of the population lived in material deprivation, the salient debates were over how to distribute the fruits of Promethean industry, not whether that industry was a good idea.

Besides, Jason wasn’t asking about the Old World. The United States lacked even Britain’s intellectual backlash. Americans who objected to industrial progress remained niche players, idealizing the ante-bellum South.4 There was plenty of dissatisfaction and conflict, of course. We had labor strife and muckrakers; socialists, anarchists, and populists; Edward Bellamy and the National Grange. But medievalism was confined to wallpaper and architecture, often installed or financed by industrial magnates. Feudalism wasn’t on the American agenda. What was different here? And what might it tell us about 1970?

As I talked to Jason, several things suddenly came together: the Old World vs. the New, multiple conversations with young people at the Progress Conference, and a passage from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark:

She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she “believed in immigration,” and so did Thea believe in it. This earth [the midwestern prairie] seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance. The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range. Wire fences might mark the end of a man’s pasture, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one’s heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there. It was, somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before.

That’s the spirit of the midwestern growth spurt, of “cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.”

I did some mental arithmetic and suggested a hypothesis. The young Americans who proved so receptive to anti-Promethean ideas in the 1960s and 70s—those born starting from the late 1920s onward—weren’t just richer than previous generations. They were the products of the country’s four decades of restricting immigration. Instead of an America renewed by people looking for another chance, they had grown up in a more complacent society. These immigrant-deprived generations were much more likely than earlier generations to embrace and amplify anti-Promethean ideas, providing a mass of public support.

Later, I found remarkably congruent statistics. Nineteen seventy marked was the first Earth Day.5 It was also the year in which the percentage of the U.S. population made up of immigrants reached its nadir, with the total number of immigrants at the lowest point in a century.

Internal migration, which surged after World War II, had declined as well. The “Second Great Migration” of blacks from the South ended around that time. Domestic migration to California, arguably the vanguard of the anti-Promethean backlash, peaked in the late 1950s, then declined significantly, occasionally turning negative. The resurgence in the 1980s, which was accompanied by large-scale international immigration, set off a “growth control” movement that resulted in new building restrictions.6

The anti-Promethean backlash arose when America was most like a normal, settled country rather than a nation of strivers seeking a better life. It intensified when the people who accepted the more static America tried to preserve it by legally restricting “human mastery over the physical world,” from power plants to housing construction.

My unscientific observation is that the progress and abundance movement is full of the children of immigrants. We seem due for a turnaround.

Recommended reading

Subscribe to the print edition of Works in Progress! It’s beautiful and I’m writing a regular, print-only column.

Creative Frontiers: a great new Substack from historian/musician John Hardin of the Abundance Institute. This post on how Duke Ellington used the microphone to create a whole new sound is fascinating. His latest is on AI-generated music and The Chipmunks. Check it out.

“The Middle-aged Millennial,” a delightful short tale by Naomi Kanakia whose opening explains its literary inspiration: “One day Rajiv woke up and realized that he was in a Cheever story!” I haven’t read Cheever but I have a feeling I prefer Kanakia. The story’s ending is surprising, funny, and wise.

Share

Leave a comment

Buy my books on Amazon

The great economic historian Joel Mokyr, mentor to many and all-round mensch, has won the Nobel Prize. has a good article on the arc and significance of his work for . Here’s the WSJ (free link), with some typically funny Mokyr quotes, and here’s the NYT.

His work asks—and suggests answers to—a big question: Why did the Industrial Revolution continue beyond an initial burst of innovation? When I recently saw Joel, we agreed that of his many fine books our mutual favorite is The Gifts of Athena. I wrote about it when it was new.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times on December 2, 2002.1

The “knowledge economy” did not begin (or end) with the Internet boom. But technology, institutions and attitudes that lower the cost of information and encourage people to share knowledge have not always been around.

Indeed, a new book argues, to understand why the West not only grew rich after the Industrial Revolution but also kept growing richer, we have to understand the revolution in how people organize and exchange “useful knowledge.”

“The main thing I’m interested in is how societies can end up knowing more and how that changes us,” said Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University and author of The Gifts of Athena (Princeton University Press).

Through most of human history, periods of invention did not create sustained economic growth. Population might increase because, say, agricultural yields improved. But eventually the standard of living returned to its old equilibrium.

That pattern changed in the 19th century. Individual inventions not only flourished but also sparked still more inventions and continuing economic growth.

“The true question of the Industrial Revolution is not why it took place at all but why it was sustained beyond, say, 1820,” Professor Mokyr writes.

The reason, he argues, lies in what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment, a series of cultural changes that connected practical and theoretical knowledge and made both more widely accessible.

Beginning in the late 18th century, he writes, the Industrial Enlightenment “sought to reduce access costs by surveying and cataloging artisanal practices” so best practices could spread.

Through “search engines” ranging from Diderot’s huge Encyclopedie to handbooks and periodicals, “useful knowledge” traveled from individual practitioners to anyone with an interest in improving techniques.

“The idea that knowledge is power did not translate into the idea that knowledge should be monopolized,” Professor Mokyr said in an interview. Instead, the ideal of open science prevailed. Even patents required that inventors make ideas public.

In addition, the Industrial Enlightenment “sought to understand why techniques worked by generalizing them” -- a critical step in turning new knowledge into an engine of continuing progress.

“In the Middle Ages they invented lots of things,” said Professor Mokyr, whose 1990 book The Lever of Riches (Oxford University Press) chronicled many medieval inventions. “But the people who invented things were people out in the field who were smart and came up with things” by trial and error, he added.

These inventors had no connection to the educated elite, and they had no general theories to explain and extend their inventions. Medieval inventors could not generalize from a water mill to the laws of hydraulics, for instance.

Without widely applicable scientific theories, one invention was not likely to lead to another.

“In 1796 Edward Jenner invents vaccination, but he has no clue why it works,” Professor Mokyr noted. “There is no other vaccination for almost another 100 years, because nobody has an idea why it works.”

In the 20th century, by contrast, deeper scientific understanding allowed the development of a host of new vaccines. That pattern, he said, “is true of almost any field of human production that you can think of.”

Fertilizer has been used since antiquity, for instance. But before the 19th century, farmers did not know that nitrogen was a crucial ingredient or how it got into the soil. They thus engaged in practices like burning stalks, which released nutrients into the air rather than returning them to the soil.

After the discovery of nitrogen’s role, soil scientists and chemists developed synthetic fertilizers and improved farming practices.

Connecting practical invention to broader “epistemic knowledge” also avoids blind alleys. “When no one knows why things work,” Professor Mokyr writes, “potential inventors do not know what will not work and will waste valuable resources in fruitless searches for things that cannot be made, such as perpetual-motion machines or gold from base metals.”

The third important aspect of the Industrial Enlightenment was the bridges it built between “those who controlled propositional knowledge,” including scientific generalizations, “and those who carried out the techniques contained in prescriptive knowledge,” the expertise in fields like agriculture, engineering and navigation.

Practitioners and theorists no longer remained socially or intellectually isolated from one another.

The pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood, one of the earliest industrialists, corresponded with leading scientists like Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestly. He also “consulted artisans who had specialized in areas of interest to him, such as a Liverpool glassmaker,” Professor Mokyr writes.

For this exemplar of the Industrial Enlightenment, he adds, “useful knowledge was to be accessed and applied wherever it could be found.”

In a sense, the Industrial Enlightenment represented the end of pure science. Now “knowledge isn’t just because we’re curious and we want to know things but because we’re going to do something with it,” Professor Mokyr said.

In the Middle Ages, Chinese science was the most advanced in the world. But its discoveries belonged to a courtly elite who had little interest in the applications of inventions like the mechanical clock.

“It rarely occurred to them that it might be of interest to an artisan or engineer,” Professor Mokyr said.

With the advent of the Industrial Enlightenment, “those bridges were built increasingly in the West,” he said. “That is a truly momentous historic development. We’re no longer investigating nature just because we want to know what it means. We really are curious about how we can exploit nature for all kinds of purposes.”

Mazel tov, Joel! I’m incredibly happy to see his work honored with the Nobel. I most recently saw him at the annual Symposium on Economic Dynamism put on by the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin. Here’s his talk:

Share

Recommended reading:

If you’re interested in the sources of modern knowledge, I also highly recommend David Wootton’s The Invention of Science, which is also available as an audiobook. A scholarly tour de force, it nicely complements Joel Mokyr’s work. It’s also appropriate as a belated Columbus Day demonstration of exactly why the discovery of America deserves the name “discovery,” despite the existing inhabitants. For more on the practical knowledge of the Americas’ indigenous peoples, my buddy Charles Mann’s 1491 is the go-to popular text. (Big news about a project with Charles is coming soon.)

The middle-class radicals of the 18th-century: Another complement to Mokyr. Very long but if you don’t want to get into the scholarly weeds you can just read the early parts—before the historiography starting with “The Scholarly Gap in the Development of Eighteenth-Century English Middle-Class Ideology”—and the conclusion on Joseph Priestley as a pivotal figure .

ACHOO Syndrome: Why the sun makes some people (including me) sneeze

How market design and “monopoly money” dramatically increased Feeding America’s supplies to food banks, from

Turtles all the way down: After the first few posts, a technical art historian at the Rijksmuseum is mostly written by “the turtle team.”

The chemical secrets of witchcraft

The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott is on sale for $1.99 on Kindle.

Share

Leave a comment

has a new post in with the self-explanatory title, “Why Women Should Be Techno-Optimists.” Here’s an excerpt, minus footnotes:

An anonymously written article in Aporia Magazine, an outlet that has published many articles on the biological differences between genders and races, argues that declining economic and technological progress is the result of “feminization” — that is, the increasing cultural and political power of women. According to the author, women are more likely to be opposed to a variety of innovations because we are “psychologically more predisposed to (small-c) conservativism [sic] than men and hence opposed to progress.”

The conclusion of this article is predictably cowardly. Mr. (I’m presuming) Anonymous doesn’t want to come out and say: “It’s time to send women back to the home where they belong.” Instead, he writes that “rolling back the worst parts of the regulatory explosion may matter on the margin, but it’s nowhere near enough to bring the West back to the pre-1960s trend. The population aging, between-population dysgenics, institutional rot and cultural malaise (the subject of this article) we face all come back to that same critical decade. The whole thing’s got to go.” (emphasis added)

Now, this is just one anonymous internet article from a small magazine. But I’ve noticed a growing sense of, if not outright biological determinism, then fatalism about women’s opinions toward technological progress. Peter Thiel, for one, has echoed a version of this argument. While on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, he speculated that technological stagnation could be due to the fact that that the U.S. has become a “feminized, risk-averse society.”

Now, it is prima facie ridiculous to argue for progress by … trying to turn back the wheel of progress. But more to the point, this line of thinking is also just deeply lazy. Women have arguably been the greatest beneficiaries of our technological advances, and before anyone concludes that the only way to build nuclear power, expand driverless cars, or achieve abundance is to return women to the home, I think tech optimists should try making some better arguments that actually tap into that history. [emphasis added—vp]

When technological progress was popular and glamorous, it was popular with and glamorous to women as well as men—for exactly the reasons Jerusalem suggests: They could see visible improvements in their everyday lives. Taking up her challenge, I’m reprinting below an article I wrote in 2021. This post is a bit too long for email, so you’ll need to finish it online or in the Substack app.

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg Opinion on March 14, 2021.

As the many mothers who’ve left their jobs to cope with pandemic remote schooling can testify, “free” household labor isn’t really free. It always entails the opportunity cost of what you could otherwise be doing.

But women’s domestic tasks get short shrift in the history of labor-saving technology because historically much of that work received no direct monetary compensation. “We are all familiar with our grandmothers’ adage, ‘A woman’s time is nothing,’” wrote an essayist in 1870, lamenting how little inventive effort was going toward easing women’s domestic burdens. Whether by unpaid housewives or poorly paid servants, the work still had to be done.

March is Women’s History Month, a good time to remember that the history of women’s work sheds light on the broader questions raised by labor-saving technologies, past and present. Viewed through the lens of women’s experiences, inventions often derided as job-killers look like “Engines of Liberation,” the title of an influential 2005 article by economists Jeremy Greenwood, Anath Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu.

By making women more productive and opening new demands for their services, labor-saving technologies gave them greater control over their time, more freedom to choose their occupations and the earning power to shape their own lives — all while propelling economic changes that boosted the overall standard of living.

Consider a few examples:

The Water-Powered Grist Mill

This technology for grinding grain spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, revolutionizing how women spent their time. To digest cereal grains like wheat, humans first have to remove their husks and turn them into flour. That means many hours of pounding and grinding. As late as the 1990s, women in rural Mexico were still using these traditional methods to produce masa, the corn flour in tortillas. Food historian Rachel Laudan estimates that it takes about five hours of grinding to produce enough masa to supply a family of six with a day’s tortillas.

Grist mills opened up women’s time for other tasks, most prominently spinning. Less arduous than grinding grain, it was no less necessary or time-consuming. A Medieval woman using a spinning wheel would have spent about 110 hours spinning enough wool for a pair of trousers.

By freeing women to produce more yarn, historian Constance H. Berman argues, grist mills enabled the wool-based trade that set off the commercial revolution of the late Middle Ages, leading to new financial institutions and the rise of prosperous new centers like Antwerp, London, and Florence. “It is possible that without this change in women’s work,” she writes, “such industry would not have taken off as it did.”

Spinning mills

Spinning remained the bottleneck in textile production. “The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” wrote the agronomist and travel author Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768. Supplying a single weaver, he noted, took at least 20 spinners.

In a workforce of 4 million Britons, economic historian Craig Muldrew estimates, well over a million women were working as spinners. Their labor was the biggest expense in cloth production other than raw fiber, often totaling more than twice the cost of weaving. Yet spinners’ wages were pitiful, for the simple reason that it took so many hours to produce a useful amount of yarn. The spinning machines that set off the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s changed that calculus. Suddenly yarn that once required days to spin could be had in hours, or even minutes.

Before the Civil War, the “mill girls” of New England found new independence in the region’s textile plants. Although the work was grueling, the mills gave young women their own incomes and a chance to broaden their horizons. “There are girls here for every reason, and for no reason at all,” one wrote in an 1844 edition of the Lowell Offering, a magazine published by female mill workers. Many were drawn by the opportunity to buy their own clothes. By making “pretty gowns and collars and ribbons” affordable, the textile revolution created a powerful enticement to cash employment.

Even when wages and working conditions worsened, mill work gave women new forms of autonomy, including the role of labor leaders. The work offered women a public identity, beyond hearth and home.

Rotary presses

That mill girls could publish their own literary magazine testifies to another invention rarely noted as a liberator of women: the steam-powered rotary printing press. Invented in the 1840s, it increased printing speeds tenfold, a pace soon doubled by an invention allowing machines to print both sides of the paper simultaneously. By lowering the cost of high-volume printing, the new technology vastly expanded the market for books, magazines and newspapers — and the writers to fill them.

Fiction writers like the Brontë sisters and Louisa May Alcott, as well as many now-forgotten popular authors, could now make an independent living. With Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë earned 25 times her salary in the hated job of governess. Alcott ground out “blood and thunder tales” for magazines and wrote Little Women for the money.

“Newspaper girls” filled the columns of the mass-market press. Touting their own lifestyle in articles, they created a new model of “the bachelor girl,” a single professional woman distinct from the sad stereotype of the old maid. “These women are for the most part our best modern type, educated, energetic, independent, enterprising,” declared the New York Press in 1894.

Some female journalists offered womanly advice or chronicled the social whirl, while others pursued investigative reporting. In her Memphis newspaper, Ida B. Wells exposed lynching in the South. New York World reporter Nellie Bly went undercover in a mental hospital. Elizabeth L. Banks labored in sweatshops on the Lower East Side and lived on $3 a week, “telling each day in the paper just what I had to eat, and describing all my comforts and discomforts.” In London, she hired out as a maid and worked in a laundry.

The sewing machine

It was widely recognized as the exception to 19th-century inventors’ indifference to the value of women’s time. “It is the only invention that can be claimed chiefly for woman’s benefit,” declared the New York Times in 1860. A sewing machine bought on time could clothe a family or set up a business.

Working with a hand needle, a good seamstress took about 14 hours to make a shirt. With a sewing machine, she could do the same job in an hour. It was an early example of “the robots are taking our jobs.” In an 1888 essay titled “Labor-Saving Machines as an Evil,” the Ohio journalist Samuel Rockwell Reed used the sewing machine as a prime example, singling it out for “enhancing the hard fate of women” by putting hand-sewers out of work. A single machine, he calculated, “deprives 25 children and five widows of bread.”

The claim was actually satirical. Human history, Reed pointed out, is a progression of such inventions. The steel needle replaced the bone needle, with which “three or four wives might be sufficiently employed in making up one man’s rude garments, whereas such facility was given to this by the invention of the steel needle that he hardly had a need of one wife.”

Instead of impoverishing widows and orphans, the sewing machine made seamstresses more productive, giving rise to a large ready-to-wear industry. Although we now remember it mostly for its sweatshops and the labor activism they sparked, it offered generations of mostly female workers, from the Lower East Side to Vietnam, the first step out of poverty.

The washing machine

Elizabeth Banks’s stint wading through soapy water points to another liberating invention: the electricity-powered washing machine. Before its arrival, laundry was such a laborious task that even poorly paid shop girls hired someone else to do it. Just reading the list of “equipment for a home laundry” in a 1900 laundry manual is exhausting.

In “Engines of Liberation,” Greenwood, Seshadri and Yorukoglu cite a study of farm wives that found that doing a 38-pound load of laundry by hand required four hours, with another four or five for ironing. Using electrical appliances, the washing took just 41 minutes and the ironing an hour and 45 minutes. The number of steps walked in the process was cut almost 90 percent. “No man worth his salt would spend a seventh of his time at a tub,” declared journalist Allan L. Benson in a 1912 Good Housekeeping article.

“Power laundry machinery is not so expen­sive that people in ordinary circumstances cannot afford to buy it, whereas washing by hand is so hard that no woman should do it,” Benson wrote. “It makes no difference who the woman is, whether she is a housewife or a servant, washing is too hard for her. In the winter, it invites pneumonia. At all times of the year, it is drudgery.”

Synthetic fibers

A 19th-century laundress would have envied her 1940s counterpart, but even by the mid-20th century, washing, drying and ironing still took plenty of time and attention. The invention of nylon in 1934 set off a materials revolution — the advent of synthetic fibers and plastics — and further eased the laundry burden.

Synthetic fibers fostered a fundamental fashion shift that continues to today’s pandemic yoga pants. “More than looks,” writes business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “the characteristic that I call ‘high performance’ distinguished the panoply of postwar products from their early-20th-century predecessors….Curtains that could be drip dried, uniforms that never needed ironing, and sweaters that could be washed without shrinking reduced domestic burdens.” When large numbers of American women entered the workforce in the 1970s, they did so wearing easy-care polyester pantsuits.

Over the succeeding decades, synthetic fabrics got better — softer, more breathable, less likely to snag and pill, more varied in look and feel. Today’s women — and men — are free to use their time in more productive and fulfilling.

Looking back on the endless labors of our foremothers reminds us that it’s easy to create jobs by making work harder and slower. But you create wealth — and freedom — by making it faster and easier. The next time you throw a detergent pod into a load of clothes and go off to work on your laptop, consider all the could-be washerwomen now doing something else.

Publishing News

Starting next month, Works in Progress will be available in a beautiful print edition whose exclusive features will include a history column by me. Read more about it here and subscribe here.

Share

Leave a comment

Buy my books on Amazon.

I came to DC last week for the Abundance conference, where I was on the program. If you’re curious about what happened, Jerusalem Demsas does a good job capturing the atmosphere here. Alex Tremath of the Breakthrough Institute published his talk here. Steve Teles gave a talk on his “varieties of abundance” typology (to which Alex recently added “snowmobile abundance”).

My session was titled “Technocracy versus Market Dynamism,” a conversation with Marc Dunkelman, whose book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back makes the case that progressives need to rediscover their Hamiltonian side and trust government authorities with more discretion to act. It was a rambling conversation. Moderator Jim Pethokoukis wanted to talk about industrial policy, Marc wanted to talk about Jeffersonians versus Hamiltonians and discretion, and I wanted to talk about the value of price signals.

One interesting discussion was about what to do about things like power lines, which have large, dispersed benefits but require local harms. They need land and, more important politically, they annoy neighbors who find them ugly and intrusive and want the right to block them. It’s a classic Coasian bargaining situation, where in theory the power company could pay the neighbors for permission to mar their views. Unfortunately, transaction costs generally make those deals prohibitively expensive.1 As a model of good policy, I managed to dredge from my memory a discussion of cell towers dating to The Substance of Style (2003). The exact passage reads:

Even when harms are too substantial for the “look away” approach to work, it’s often less costly to ameliorate spillovers than to abolish otherwise valuable activities. Because the social value of mobile phone service is so high, for instance, U.S. law2 prohibits communities from completely banning cell-phone towers. Phone companies don’t have the right to build a tower anywhere they want, but the towers can’t be kept out altogether. Towns have to find less costly ways to deal with spillovers, requiring disguises on towers, locating them in less intrusive places, or demanding reasonable compensation to nearby residents.

After the panel a former Federal Communications Commission staffer who’d been in the audience told me that the FCC has since strictly limited what kinds of demands communities can make before permitting cell towers to go up. From the commission’s website, however, it looks like federal law still provides plenty of cell-tower work for environmental lawyers.

Electric power and cell service benefit everyone and, if necessary, they may justify the use of eminent domain for land acquisition.3 The Fifth Amendment includes the so-called Takings Clause: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The clause implicitly includes a notion of prices (“just compensation”). It also, I would argue, includes a limit on the purposes for which property can be taken. They must constitute “public use,” meaning that most people benefit. No taking Vera Coking’s house in Atlantic City for a casino developer to use for parking.4

But in 1954, the Supreme Court greatly expanded that definition. In Berman v. Parker, it ruled that “public use” means “public purpose” and that “public purpose” means (to paraphrase) whatever some public officials think is a good idea. “If those who govern the District of Columbia decide that the Nation’s Capital should be beautiful as well as sanitary, there is nothing in the Fifth Amendment that stands in the way,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the court. The ruling enabled the subsequent destruction of urban neighborhoods in the name of “slum clearance” and “urban renewal.”

Hence I made a land acknowledgement: Our conference hotel sits on the land that included the property at issue in Berman v. Parker, the mostly black neighborhood of Southwest Washington. People who owned property there, such as Samuel Berman’s department store, had no choice about whether to sell to the government and leave. People who rented homes, two-thirds of whom has been in the neighborhood for more than a decade, had to move. Fifteen hundred businesses and 23,000 residents were displaced.

The website Segregation by Design has maps and before-during-and-after photos that capture the changes. The neighborhood was unquestionably a slum, where many homes still lacked indoor plumbing, but the “cure” was worse than the disease. A half century after the revamp, it is a Brutalist hellscape slowly crawling back to a semblance of life by the revitalization of the Wharf district.

I differ from such Abundance allies as Marc Dunkelman, Ezra Klein, and Derek Thompson in my analysis of what should replace the veto groups empowered by the backlash against urban redevelopment. (It wasn’t just Robert Moses! And it wasn’t just highways!) In most cases, markets are preferable to political decision making, whether “Jeffersonian” localism or “Hamiltonian” technocracy. Prices convey real information about costs and preferences. The solution to slums isn’t tearing down homes. It isn’t silencing price signals because you don’t like what they’re saying. It’s economic growth that raises living standards, race-neutral hiring that opens job opportunities (and promotes economic growth), and, at the margins, a safety net of income redistribution. But mostly economic growth!

Howard graduate , who once lived in a dorm in the then-sketchy area, wrote an interesting account for Politico about the market-driven transformation of the Logan Circle neighborhood where the above photo was taken.

Last night, Sally Satel hosted a salon dinner for me with about a dozen people at the American Enterprise Institute. My topic of choice, which someone noted packed three or four ideas into a single long-winded title, was “Everyone’s Reading Middlemarch: History and the humanities in the age of AI and polarization.” was inspired to write a post on “Why read Middlemarch if you work in D.C.”

Here’s my 2023 post on listening to the audiobooks of Middlemarch and Moby Dick. After I wrote that post, I scoured my bookshelves looking for my copy, which I was absolutely sure I’d never gotten rid of. No luck. About a month ago, a college friend told me she had it, had just reread it, and wanted to return it. Both of us lived in Philadelphia after graduation and used to do things together. Apparently I lent it to her in about 1983.

I found this sign outside a church all too understandable. I’m returning home with several bites.

Buy my books on Amazon.

Share

Leave a comment

“AI slop” is AI-generated content—text, video, photos, ads—that is poorly executed, generally annoying, notably inauthentic, and overly abundant. I’ve started receiving a lot of emails from services wanting me to hire them to promote The Fabric of Civilization. Some of these emails seem to represent real people who are using AI to write. Others are unsigned and don’t appear to have a human (even a fake one) in the loop. They’re just playing the game of large numbers. All seem to be scraping Amazon and regurgitating book descriptions found online. I imagine many of the press releases clogging my email box are similarly composed, although it’s hard to tell the difference between lame press releases written by humans and lame press releases written by AI. Neither gives any thought to the exact interests of the recipient.

The proliferation of AI slop recalls the proliferation of spam, which at the turn of the century threatened to make email nearly useless until Bayesian spam filters came along. At first you had to install them separately. Now they’re built into your email system, along with increasingly sophisticated AI filtering. So spam is rarely a problem today. I suspect the solution to AI slop will be an AI agent who identifies and filters it for you.

Some AI critics see slop as evidence that human creativity will be drowned out by junk, others that human creativity will be swamped by human-quality AI competition. I’m enough of a snob to believe that much human “creativity” will indeed be replaceable by AI. But you don’t have a inalienable right to get paid for routine brain work.

I’m also optimistic about the ways in which generative AI can enhance and enable human creativity. I recently met the founders of Locunity, a media startup offering the local news that internet advertising has largely killed off. AI is key to their business model. The first step to establishing local coverage is feeding recorded public meetings into AI that can spin out stories on what the city council, the zoning board, or the board of supervisors did at their most recent meeting. Locunity is betting that enough people will have a direct financial interest in this information that they’ll be willing to pay for an easily digestible, well-organized newsletter. Once Locunity has enough area subscribers to its AI-only content, it will add a human reporter to do more enterprising stories.

At the Abundance conference, Daniel Golliher, whose Maximum New York is a must-read if you’re interested in cities (especially NYC), told me about how he used the AI tool V0 to create a “NYC Rent Guidelines Board Simulator,” using information on real New York buildings. It invites users to set increases on rent-stabilized and market-rate apartments and see what happens to building economics. In an email, Daniel explained:

• It shows a variety of different buildings in NYC with different shares of market versus rent-regulated units.

• The user gets to set the rate of increase on both rent regulated and market-rate apartments in the app. In real life, the Rent Guidelines Board only sets rent regulated unit increases. The RGB can generally only set one rate for all regulated units, despite the kind of building that they're in.

• This allows users to see how the "one size fits all" rent regulation system actually impacts different buildings differently, and relatively pushes costs onto market-rate units. So "freeze the rent" has real impacts one can't get away from, and it plays out differently for different buildings.

To create it all he needed was V0 and his own knowledge of how the rent regulation system works. “It (maybe) illustrates a point: building good tools like this requires having a knowledge base you can play with through the tools,” he writes. “Sometimes people feel blocked when trying to build these, but then aren't once you point them toward domains they know a lot about.” AI makes it possible for someone with a deep domain knowledge—in this case of the rent regulation system—and minimal if any software chops to create an impressive educational tool. Humans plus AI can do things that neither can accomplish alone.

Take “Bro-Botz” videos. Their creator Greg Beato caught my attention with a LinkedIn post in which he explained that he’d been fooling around with Suno AI for a while, writing songs, but decided to go for something more ambitious:

Partially I was inspired by the ongoing discourse over "AI slop" and the presumption that any use of generative AI renders content suspect, invalid, unworthy of attention. And partially I just figured it would be a fun diversion and a way to explore this concept for a character, or rather, characters, that I've had for a while now….

Who are they? A pair of state-of-the-art humanoid robots who aren't actually all that interested in leveling up to superintelligence or even AGI. Envious of their counterparts from Boston Robotics, Tesla, and Unitree Robotics, ChadGPT and Joe Brogan, aka the Bro-Botz, mostly just want to create dance videos that go viral on YouTube and rack up social media clout.

So here they are. Claude and I wrote the lyrics. Suno AI and I created the music. ChatGPT and I generated the base images that we fed to VEO to generate video clips in 8-second takes. Then I used Adobe Premiere to compose the complete video. The results were pretty sloppy, but also, I would humbly assert, somewhat entertaining.

One of the most interesting things about the process was that I also relied on ChatGPT and Gemini to help me decipher Photoshop and especially Premiere (which I'd never used before). By the end of a week of editing, I knew so much more than when I'd started, and will use that knowledge to approach my next effort with something a little more akin to an actual workflow that will ideally lead to more character design continuity, better lip syncing, more consistent quality control. Overall, in other words, a higher quality of slop!

I wanted to know more about exactly how much was Greg and how much was Claude et al. As I suspected, the AI tools were exactly that: help for realizing Greg’s vision. He did the serious creative lifting. He wrote the lyrics with occasional help finding robot-related words (e.g., actuator) and confirming technical details. But jokes, cultural savvy, and clever word play are still human territory.

As we talked, we came to an interesting conclusion. We know that AIs can win at chess and even Go. As hard as they are, these are games with clearly articulated, mathematically precise rules dictating a finite number of possible moves and board positions. But a rap battle is harder, and AIs may never be able to master the form. It’s not just that there are many more words than squares on a board but that rappers constantly alter and play with the words and their meanings. “It’s funny,” Greg remarked, “It’s funny, because in theory language is their forte, and it is—but so far at least, not novel language in any reliably compelling way.”

AIs can’t play. But they can help us play.

Recommended links:

What History Can Teach Us About Copyright, AI, and ‘Market Floods’: “If AI is only used to create an abundance of content truly devoid of human creativity—what some call “slop”—then old-fashioned human authorship will become comparatively rare and thus more valuable, not less. If, in contrast, artists and authors use AI to generate creative works that add new cultural ideas, then that would seem to be very much in line with copyright’s core purpose; these new works may legitimately compete with existing ones, but that does not necessarily justify protectionism for old-fashioned techniques of authorship.”

George Eliot Archive: An amazing resource that includes access to everything George Eliot published—fiction, poetry, translations, and nonfiction—as well as commentaries by her contemporaries, many of her letters, images, and more. One noteworthy feature: “Our major born-digital project, the George Eliot Text Explorer, has been in development since 2022 and represents the first machine-readable, open-access version of Eliot’s complete published works. By converting PDF documents into TEI-encoded XML files, we’ve created a foundation for advanced text analysis tools, including the AI Analysis of Eliot's fiction (Chen & Rilett, 2023) and the Text Explorer application (Cui, Sun, and Rilett, 2023-24), which enables instant keyword and phrase searches. The project is further enhanced through integration with Voyant Tools, an open-source text visualization platform.”

The Grift Artist: An ode to “donald boat,” who “replies to famous people on X demanding that they buy him things—expensive video game equipment, books, energy drinks—and they do.’

Building in the world of flesh needs regulatory transparency: Ruxandra Teslo on how making some pretty basic information public could dramatically improve the prospects for new drugs, especially from smaller companies.

A CTD (Common Technical Document) is the international format for drug approval submissions. It contains everything: the chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) data that so often delay biotechs and cause hundreds of millions in lost revenue, complete clinical protocols and datasets, and the detailed back-and-forth between companies and FDA reviewers.

I recently saw this for the first time, thanks to Brian Finrow of LumenBio, who generously shared with me the CTD he had acquired for $25,000 from a failed biotech. Thousands of pages of what look like “boring details” are in fact the practical playbook of how drugs succeed—or fail—through the FDA.

For small innovators, this kind of information is invaluable. Large pharmaceutical incumbents already have private archives of CTDs and decades of institutional know-how. That gives them a structural advantage. This is confirmed by empirical results from the economics of innovation. When it comes to the biopharmaceutical industry, regulatory complexity favors large incumbents.

The post surfaces the kind of in-the-weeds knowledge that can lead to serious reform but, as Ruxandra notes, the FDA can’t do much on its own.

Buy my books on Amazon.

Share

Leave a comment

Even on a gloomy Sunday, with skies threatening rain, the U.S. Courthouse on First Street in downtown Los Angeles is strikingly beautiful. The clouds and surrounding buildings reflect in its pleated glass sides, which look far airier in person than in photographs. By breaking up its plane, the pleats call attention to the Great Seal etched in the glass. The American flag reflects in their panes.

Opened in 2016, it’s a civic building that makes you happy to see it. Reviewers on Google and Yelp, including a grumpy juror, give it good marks.

Catesby Leigh, by contrast, calls it a “Borg Cube.” I can only assume he has never actually watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or maybe he’s too blinded by architectural theory to enjoy beauty that doesn’t conform.

You probably haven't heard of Leigh. He’s a critic associated with the National Civic Art Society, a think tank that “endeavors to help architecture return to its pre-Modernist roots.” The society wants government buildings to re-adopt classical architectural styles: more domes and columns, less glass and steel. Its formerly obscure views are now enjoying the world’s largest megaphone.

Last week, a draft executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” leaked to Architectural Record. (The Chicago Sun-Times obtained a copy and put it online.) The draft denounces modern architecture. It requires classical styles as the default architecture for all new federal buildings in the Washington D.C. area, including surrounding counties; for all federal buildings costing more than $50 million; and for all federal courthouses. It specifically forbids Brutalist and Deconstructionist styles. It establishes a President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture to revise the principles that guide federal architecture commissions.

It calls for the General Services Administration to solicit public comment on new building designs while specifically excluding “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization involved with the design, construction or otherwise directly affected by the construction or remodeling of the building.”

You could see that requirement as avoiding conflicts of interest — or as excluding anyone who knows what they’re talking about.

Architects and critics were apoplectic.

Classical styles are fascistic, suggested Artnet News. The Guardian warned of “dictator chic.” The order would constitute “a complete constraint on freedom of expression,” an architect told The New York Times. Even a nuanced historical article in Archinect News concluded with a reference to Nazi architect Albert Speer. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman rightly identified the draft as Twitter bait.

The response demonstrates how, even when he’s barely involved, President Donald Trump manages to effectively troll snooty elites by giving voice to widely held popular grievances. A lot of government buildings are indeed ugly. No matter how hated, they rarely get torn down. But the draft order also demonstrates Trump’s propensity for ham-handed remedies that would do more harm than good.

As creators, architects face an inherent problem. They can’t do their work without clients. Writers, painters, sculptors — these days even filmmakers — can find ways to follow their muse even if their creations have little or no market. Beyond building homes for themselves (or their mothers), architects have few options.

Construction is expensive, it requires land, and it needs people who’ll use it. That’s the real-world conflict at the heart of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, which lampooned the throwback styles and populist attitudes the draft order promotes.

Federal commissions offer relative freedom for architectural ambitions. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government and not vice versa,” declare the guidelines in place since 1962. Written by a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan, these design principles reflect the technocratic modernism of the Kennedy era — the deference to experts and belief in the new that landed a man on the moon but also razed urban neighborhoods to make way for Brutalist government centers.

Under those guidelines, the architecture profession itself acts as the client. The result can be a masterpiece like L.A.’s new courthouse — or a monstrosity like the headquarters of the F.B.I., the J. Edgar Hoover Building, one of Trump’s pet peeves.

By contrast, the advocates of classical architecture position themselves as the voice of the people. “For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive and inefficient buildings,” the National Civic Art Society’s chairman told the Times.

But if architects can’t represent the public, who can? That’s the problem at the heart of any government building project. Whose taste should rule? What should the balance be between saving money and creating meaningful, attractive buildings? What role should the people who’ll work in the building have? What is the right form for the building’s specific use? For federal buildings outside the capital, what voice should locals have? Who speaks for the client when the client is everyone?

These are political, not technical, questions. You can’t reason your way to the single right answer. You can only try to strike a sensible balance — which isn’t exactly the Trump way.

In an editorial attacking the executive order, the Chicago Sun-Times evoked the city’s federal plaza designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Ordinary locals find it striking, part of Chicago’s heritage of beautiful architecture, including many modern buildings.

Leigh, by contrast, says the plaza “raises serious issues of appropriateness” and is “far better suited to the high-end corporate world and its promotion of itself as culturally au courant.” (The building was au courant a half century ago.) Dictating that your idea of civic appropriateness is right for all buildings in all times and places shouldn’t be confused with speaking for the public.

What looks “civic” depends on experience, not architectural theory. In Los Angeles, where I live, traditional civic buildings are not classical. They’re not even the Mission style popular elsewhere in the state. They’re Moderne ziggurats with Art Deco features, like the L.A. city hall, or midcentury modern structures like the Wilshire Federal Building in West L.A. They reflect the eras in which the city was rapidly expanding.

Some, like these examples, are attractive and popular, others less so. But all of them represent the actual city and its history, not an outsider’s idea of civic ideals. The eco-conscious 21st-century beauty of the new federal courthouse fits appropriately in its dense urban setting. Columns and domes would not. Neither would the red tile roofs of Santa Barbara.

However great it may be for the Lincoln Memorial, classicism itself is no guarantee of good civic architecture. Packing columns onto a hulking monstrosity like the Eisenhower (formerly Old) Executive Office Building does not make it beautiful. Historical, yes. Meaningful because of that history, sure. But not attractive or inspiring or representative of American ideals.

The sweeping language of the draft order simply replaces one group of architectural theories with another, one set of insiders with an even smaller one. Preserving the high-handed attitudes it claims to oppose, it avoids the hard questions. Even on its own grounds, its judgments and prescriptions are suspect.

This architectural tiff is an argument among intellectuals with ideas about the ought of the built environment, not citizens with experience of the is. It might make government buildings more uniform, but it wouldn’t make them better.

Leave a comment

It’s been a long time since my last post and this will be a rambling one. Although I call myself a writer, these days I’m more of a reader.

During May, I took a long trip to Pisa, for a weaving workshop, bracketed by stays in London. Particularly in London, I paired reading with experiences. I read Lara Maiklem’s Mud Lark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames (whose U.S. edition has a slightly different title) and visited a related exhibit at the Museum of London. Mudlarking is the hobby of searching the banks of the Thames, a tidal river, at low tide for artifacts from London’s long history. Items on display ranged from an Elizabethan’s child’s shoe (Maiklem’s prize finds) to a tennis champion’s stolen medals. Collected by amateurs, they serve as tangible reminders of everyday lives and the history they made.

I also listened to Helen Castor’s biography of Richard II and Henry IV, The Eagle and the Hart, and attended a performance of Richard II (NYT review here). I love audiobooks but they leave impressions more than the clear memories of traditional readings. I’d like to reread Castor’s history the old-fashioned way. Castor portrays Richard as a man who assumes that, as an annointed king, he has absolute power, with disastrous results. Even in his time, an English king shared power with regional lords and parliament controlled the purse. I couldn’t help thinking about contemporary misconceptions about the is and ought of presidential perogatives.

I also read the manuscript of Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem, which will be published in December. As reading his Substack by the same name suggests, Brink is an exceptionally thoughtful writer and his book deserves the unfortunately overused descriptor thought-provoking. It made me think, especially in the later chapters, and I highly recommend it. My official prepublication blurb:

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.

At Arnold Kling’s behest, I also read The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander Karp, the CEO of Palantir, and Nicholas Zamiska, his aide de camp (officially head of corporate affairs). Arnold reviewed the book and asked me to join him in a conversation about it. Although I agreed with much of it—I think—it is such a colossal mess I can’t entirely be sure. It desperately needed an editor willing to treat the authors like the amateurs they are. This kind of widely praised slipshod work infuriates me. But Arnold and I still had an interesting conversation about dynamism and progress.

It’s been a podcast summer. I spoke with Jarrett Catlin on the California Future Society podcast and Martin Marty of Project Liberal.

Project Liberal

The OG of Progress: Virginia Postrel

In this episode of the Project Liberal podcast, Max Marty and Tyler Harris engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Virginia Postrel. Virginia introduces her framework of dynamism versus stasis—a perspective that transcends traditional left-right political divides—and explores how this lens remains relevant for understanding today's political lan…

Listen now

a year ago · 4 likes · Max Marty and Virginia Postrel

Introducing our podcast conversation, the Niskanen Center’s Geoff Kabaservice provides a nice overview of why people interested in progress and abundance are discovering my work.

The intellectual-political discussion of the so-called abundance movement typically is described as a debate taking place almost entirely on the left. But in fact many of its major themes were being discussed in right-leaning circles decades ago. Virginia Postrel, a libertarian thinker and journalist who was the former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, anticipated much of the current discourse around abundance in her classic 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. Even earlier, in 1990, Postrel was among the first to see that the most important ideological division that was emerging in American politics was not between left and right but between what she called “the proponents of economic dynamism and the advocates of stasis.”

The power of Postrel’s prophecy is evident from even a cursory examination of current politics, in which debates over issues like trade, immigration, housing construction, energy production, and environmental conservation inevitably produce odd-bedfellows coalitions of left and right. Postrel generally approves of center-left advocates of abundance like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — since, as she puts it, they share “the convictions that more is better than less, and that a good society is not zero-sum.” But she recently criticized the Klein-Thompson bestseller Abundance for its essentially technocratic mindset, in which change proceeds from central planning without what Postrel regards as sufficient feedback from market mechanisms or public input. She envisions a more libertarian-inflected version of abundance characterized by what she calls “a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.”

In this podcast conversation, Postrel analyzes different approaches to what she considers to be the linked causes of abundance and progress — although she notes that progress “tends to code a little right and tends to be more libertarian, more Silicon Valley people” — along with the basic political division between advocates of stasis and dynamism. She talks about her South Carolina origins and her study of the Renaissance, “when dynamism was invented.” She points out that her analysis of dynamism in some measure derived from her love of — and worries about — her adoptive state of California. She discusses some of the thinkers who influenced her analysis, including innovators like Stewart Brand, writers like Jonathan Rauch, Daniel Boorstin, and Henry Petroski, and economists including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polyani, Mancur Olson, and Paul Romer. And she describes how her interests in dynamism and human invention relate to her interests in textiles, design, fashion, and aesthetics.

Audio and transcript here. I reviewed Abundance here.

Buy my books on Amazon.

On a recent trip to hot, sticky Washington, DC, for an off-the-record discussion of abundance on the right, I was reminded of something I learned about cotton cultivation that didn’t make it into The Fabric of Civilization: Although cotton picking looms large in our historical imaginations, the worst part of cultivating cotton in the U.S., both under slavery and after emancipation, was hoeing cotton—because this process of weeding and thinning took place during the hottest days of summer. Cotton picking happens in the fall. Stay cool.

Buy my books on Amazon.

Leave a comment

Behind much of the MAGA economic agenda lies a concern with restoring manly jobs. Coal miners want to mine! says Donald Trump. “They’re good strong guys,” he says. “That’s what they want to do. They love to dig coal, that's what they want to do. They don't want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big, strong hands.”

Back during the campaign, J.D. Vance argued that the U.S. needed to crack down on illegal immigration so that businesses would have to pay high wages and hire the seven million prime-age American men who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Some of those men, he acknowledged, might be “struggling with addiction,” but employers shouldn’t give up on their fellow citizens.

I’m sympathetic with the critiques of researchers like Richard Reeves, who warn that boys and men are, at least in some contexts, being marginalized. It’s foolish and unjust to marginalize half the human race, whichever half you pick.

That said, there is a lot wrong with the MAGA story about manly jobs, starting with the desirability of mining coal. Although conditions have improved over time, coal mining is a terrible job. As George Orwell wrote,

More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

In the 1980s, it was common to read of Japanese workers who had begun to shun 3K jobs “kitanai, kiken, kitsui (respectively 汚い "dirty", 危険 "dangerous", きつい "demanding").” The phenomenon was not unique to Japan. Given a choice, most people—including most men—prefer clean, safe, enjoyable work. An X-ray technician, phlebotomist, or smart phone salesman is not emasculated because he doesn’t need an immediate shower when he comes home from work.

What has actually happened is not that men can’t find employment. It’s that today’s well-paid “masculine” jobs generally require more self-discipline than the regimentation of a factory. A construction site has bosses but you don’t work at machine pace. The same is true of a warehouse or hospital. Autonomy has increased but, with it, so has the need for continuous self-control, even in environments where workers and results are strictly monitored.

Higher pay also tends to come along with high levels of equipment (aka capital) rather than labor-intensive work. A real Amazon warehouse doesn’t look like ChatGPT’s rendition above. It looks like more like this photo, taken during the Christmas rush in 2016, when this Amazon warehouse in Wales had more than the usual number of workers:

Those much-lamented factory jobs bring to mind two stories from my past. The first was my ninth grade social studies teacher, a Michigan native who wound up in Greenville because he went to Bob Jones University, recounting tales of his summers working on auto assembly lines. This was in the 1970s, when Detroit was still fat and complacent. The work was so mindlessly boring, he said, that the workers would occasionally deliberately wreck a partially assembled car for fun.

The second was much later, back in 2005 when I was researching this article on a furniture company in Dallas. The factory was as clean and pleasant as a factory can be, the pay was good for the area, and the work, while somewhat repetitive, was close enough to craftsmanship to seem satisfying. Almost all of the workers were immigrants, and the company was eager to hire their U.S.-born children. But the kids weren’t interested, and not only because some were upwardly mobile. They would rather take jobs at Target, an executive told me, where the pay was lower but work was less structured and more sociable.

Sometimes factory evolution has its own labor-market surprises. Take the flat-pack furniture pioneered by IKEA. It reduces shipping costs, allows high levels of factory automation, and complements computer-aided design tools. Check out this video of a Polish flat-pack furniture factory.

It also creates masculine jobs outside the factory, as I was reminded yesterday when I hired a guy on Taskrabbit to assemble a couple of pieces of furniture for me. Owned by IKEA since 2017, Taskrabbit makes flat-pack furniture accessible to people who are spatially challenged or short on time and patience. It takes advantage of specialization. But to succeed as a gig worker you need to be diligent, efficient, and reliable. Vance’s seven million male labor force dropouts either wouldn’t make it as “taskers” or simply prefer their nonwork alternatives.

All of this is a long setup to the following article from my archives. Published in 2017, it got almost no attention at the time, even though it made what I think is a significant point. An AI-assisted check to update the statistics confirms that the trend is still in full force and has, if anything, accelerated. Men are winning! Woman are losing! Of course, it’s just one (very large) sector of the economy..

Share

Buy my books on Amazon

The End of Men? Not in the Retail Sector

Originally published on Bloomberg April 19, 2017

From 19th-century shop girls to 20th-century buyers, modern retailing has been a female-friendly work environment. Just look at the photos today’s department stores use to illustrate their commitments to diversity. Women typically outnumber men at least two-to-one, a ratio that reflects reality. At Nordstrom, for example, 70 percent of all employees and 69 percent of managers are women.

So the “retail apocalypse” means fewer jobs for women. Retail trade employment barely budged over the past year, with an increase of less than 0.4 percent, or about 58,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For general merchandise retailers, where women predominate, employment fell by about 50,000 jobs.

The collapse of traditional retailing reverses a much-heralded trend: Jobs that involve working with things are disappearing, while those that demand a winning personality —celebrated as “emotional intelligence”—are growing. Men lose while women win, especially at the bottom of the educational and income ladder.

“The labor market continues to shift away from traditionally male jobs toward traditionally female jobs,” Jed Kolko, the chief economist for job site Indeed, told USA Today last week. That’s a particular problem for less-educated men, half of whom are in occupations where at least four-fifths of the workers are male, compared to 20 percent of men with bachelor’s degrees. “Fast-growing male jobs that require lots of education don’t really help men without a college degree who have been in traditionally male jobs and for whom work is part of male identity,” Kolko wrote in a blog post.

That’s true but incomplete. Reports on economic changes tend to reflect two biases. They emphasize losers over winners, the seen over the unseen. And they reflect the personal and professional values of the educated, articulate people doing the reporting.

Contrary to the feminine triumphalism that declares traditionally male skills obsolete, the economy is full of surprises and cross-currents. In the retailing world, demand for people-pleasing sales clerks is down. Even shoppers who buy in person prefer to do their own research online and get in and out quickly, rather than deal with solicitous sales people.

Meanwhile, demand for merchandise-moving warehouse workers and, at least until self-driving trucks and drones show up, delivery drivers is rising. That’s good news for less-educated men.

In the past year, the number of Americans working transportation and warehouse jobs rose by 47,000, or 5.2 percent, to 945,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For production and nonsupervisory employees, the increase was even sharper, 6.4 percent. Men hold more than three-quarters of all transportation and warehouse jobs.

Like capital-intensive factories, warehouses with robot assistants make workers more productive and hence more valuable. In Amazon’s cutting-edge facilities, they complement human skills. “We like to think of it as a symphony of software, machine learning, computer algorithms, and people,” a spokeswoman told MIT Technology Review.

Wages, while low, are rising as retailers expand online offerings. Fulfillment centers tend to cluster in places like northeastern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, and the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. So they draw from the same talent pool. And competition for workers is getting fierce.

Logistics staffing firm ProLogistix reports that starting pay is up 6 percent over last year. Fulfillment company Radial similarly boosted wages in December. “Last year was really the tipping point for us,” Robyn Jordan, senior director of human resources for Radial’s global operations, told The Wall Street Journal.

That tipping point is otherwise known as the retail meltdown.

It’s easy to see empty storefronts and dying malls. But out of sight warehouses are buzzing with orders and the workers who fill them. Delivery services like UPS and FedEx are expanding their facilities, creating jobs not only for their own employees but for construction crews. Retail evolution is a change, not a disaster. And it’s too soon to write regular guys out of the economic future.

Share

Subscribe now

Odds and Ends

I’ll be in London May 2-7 and open to meetings or meetups. Please email me if you’re interested, vp@vpostrel.com. (Please write a separate email rather than replying to this post. Otherwise your note might get lost in the shuffle, as all replies to an emailed post come in one long thread.)

A roundtable on American dynamism from Profectus magazine. (I was invited to participate but an email mixup interfered.)

Interesting interview with Ross Douthat in The New Left Review. At one point he refers to “my idiosyncratic conservative, dynamist and Catholic views.” I didn’t see that dynamist coming.

The Trump administration has it in for the South Carolina manufacturing boom. As long as it’s guaranteed MAGA country, the state won’t count for much in national politics. BMW “is also America's top auto exporter, shipping $10.1 billion worth of sports-utility vehicles all over the world from its South Carolina plant last year, according to Commerce Department data—more than any other automaker.”

The Vesuvius Challenge is rapidly making progress toward its goal of scanning all 300 known scrolls buried at Herculaneum. Here’s a report and explanation.

Enjoyable WSJ business piece on how Chili’s is stealing customers from fast food. It reminded me of the “food is photogenic” point in this column I wrote in 2017.

considers whether America has rejected exceptionalism. There’s a deeper question here of the difference between skepticism and nihilism.

I’m happy to see that Dean Ball, my favorite writer on AI issues, is now the Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is no longer posting on Substack but I highly recommend his archives. Here’s my podcast interview of Dean.

A disturbing example of deplatforming by AI from .

Contrary to the impression left by some recent pro-abundance works. Jane Jacobs was not for stasis and preservation, reminds readers in a thoughtful post about urban dynamism. “She advocated for market urbanism and organic development.” I learned a surprising amount about Jacobs when I reviewed a book about William Whyte, who made her famous. “She and Whyte were kindred souls: observant connoisseurs of the spontaneous orders of city life,” I wrote.

How a 1987 law, passed over Ronald Reagan’s veto, invited the Trump administration to boss around universities.

Need a business credit card? I use and recommend the Chase Ink card. Use this link to apply and I’ll get some bonus points.

I plan to start making more videos this summer. In the meantime, enjoy this one from my archives. I wouldn’t call Trump a Fascist, but he and Mussolini do share some body language and an irrational fondness for autarchia.

Buy my books on Amazon

Share

Leave a comment

There was an error in one of the links in this article so I’m sending it out again.

As Donald Trump disrupts international trade, sends suspected gangsters to indeterminate imprisonment in a Salvadoran hellhole without due process, wages war on the right to counsel, abandons American allies, and throws Ukraine under the bus—as Donald Trump does, in other words, pretty much what he promised—I haven’t written anything about this mess beyond retweeting the work of more energetic writers. Trump wants to make the United States a Peronist nation and a whole lot of people voted enthusiastically to go along with his mad ideas. Having watched friends and former allies enthusiastically embrace Trumpism, I feel like the loved ones of a smallpox victim after vaccination but before effective treatment. Yes, the illness might have been prevented. But now that it’s here, all we can do is let it run its course and hope the patient survives without too many scars.

I’m both comforted and disheartened by historical perspective. Human history is as much a story of folly, ignorance, and cruelty as of genius, perseverance, and generosity. In particular my recent reading of Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is both encouraging and frightening. Someone—Jonah Goldberg maybe?—called Trump the worst human being to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson and, notwithstanding some notable villains, that seems about right. Cox makes the case that Wilson was awful on about every dimension imaginable. As president, he sought tyrannical powers with frightening success. But the nation survived him.

Sort of. Wilson inflicted lasting damage on the body politic.

An arch-segregationist even for his day, Wilson most notably imposed new restrictions on black Americans in the federal workforce and the District of Columbia. He worked hard to eliminate exceptions to Jim Crow, with devastating effects that lasted decades. He also expanded the president’s powers in ways that echo to this day. Unilateral tariffs and threats to annoying law firms are exactly the sort of Mad King antics he would have loved.1

Share

Leave a comment

I spend most of my time these days working in the progress and abundance movement, in the hopes that once the Trump plague passes the world can move in a positive direction. Much of that work takes place behind the scenes, commissioning articles for Works in Progress (pitches welcome!), attending conferences like a recent one on housing pluralism organized by Steve Teles and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins, and occasionally advising up-and-coming writers. I recently review Abundance, the book-of-the-moment by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, for Reason.

Here’s the opening of my review:

At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of “what labor wants” added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. “We want more,” Gompers said in an 1890 speech. “We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more.:

More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.

In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible—in the public sphere as well as the private.

With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn’t expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. “Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward,” write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance.

Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in a 2021 New York Times column. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of “a liberalism that builds.” The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause.

You can read the full review here.

As an author I believe strongly in reviewing the book the authors were seeking to write rather than the book you would have written yourself. Who is the audience and what are the goals? In this case, the book is a manifesto explicitly addressed to people to the left of center who believe in technocratic governance. The authors are seeking to pull their fellow progressives away from those who advocate “degrowth,” who burden government projects with requirements unrelated to their purposes, or who sue to block any specific kind of construction. Building an alliance of abundance progressives is a worthy goal.

I also believe that politics works through coalitions of people who share some important goals but disagree about other things. Right now, that means my progress and abundance allies include not only people who share the bottom-up, market-oriented perspective of The Future and Its Enemies but also top-down technocrats like Klein and Thompson.

That said, had a telling critique with important political ramifications. To put it bluntly: The authors are either naive, ignorant, or dishonest about energy.

At the event on Monday, Klein responded to my question — if you can make energy this cheap, why don’t you think you can convince Republicans to want what you’re offering? — by pointing out that there is rising hostility among Republicans to clean energy investment, even when the market demands it. Legislators in Texas are considering new laws that would impede that state’s rollout of wind and solar power generation, which has to date put California’s to shame. The president has his own quixotic grudge about windmills. And I certainly understand the idea that it’s pointless to argue with people about their goals. Still, if we take their energy vision seriously, it’s a vision they are claiming would serve not just liberals’ goals but also conservatives’ — since conservatives have long demonstrated a love of cheap energy. It doesn’t seem like as hard a leap as some of the others they take in the book, like trying to convince affluent people to want tall apartment buildings in their neighborhoods.

The problem, I think, is that Klein and Thompson don’t quite believe in their own energy vision. The suite of policies they advocate suggests they believe their agenda as a whole would grow the economy and raise standards of living. (And I agree). But it also suggests they still view decarbonization as a cost center. They would take some of the gains from a pro-abundance policy agenda and plow them into the green transition — maybe producing a higher standard of living than if you didn’t change policy at all, but producing a lower one than if you unleashed abundance in the economy while allowing users of energy to seek out the cheapest possible source, whether fossil or renewable.

Of course, advocates of decarbonization would argue that reducing carbon emissions is itself a benefit — a component of abundance. But the benefits of decarbonization are diffuse: they arise all over the world, and disproportionately in lower-income countries that are less prepared to adapt to climate change. They also mostly accrue far in the future. Meanwhile, the cost of decarbonizing the US economy is borne almost entirely in the US, and in the near term. This is why carbon-reduction policy comes into conflict with a politics of abundance (and also why it’s so politically difficult to implement): It imposes costs on the voters who get to pass judgment on the policy, while producing benefits that mostly go to foreigners, a lot of them not yet born.

So if the calculation is that a decarbonization agenda leads to abundance because it will lead to higher global GDP in 2080, with the benefits concentrated in poor foreign countries, even as the investments required for it will raise costs in the United States over the next couple of decades — well, that’s not likely to be perceived by US consumers as increasing abundance, and certainly not as helping them get a big-ass truck.

The ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute, who are all in on nuclear power, have an answer: Build many, many more nuclear power plants and use the clean electricity they generate to power a mostly electrified economy. In an Atlantic article, Thompson himself wrote:

What if I told you that scientists had figured out a way to produce affordable electricity that was 99 percent safer and cleaner than coal or oil, and that this breakthrough produced even fewer emissions per gigawatt-hour than solar or wind? That’s incredible, you might say. We have to build this thing everywhere! The breakthrough I’m talking about is 70 years old: It’s nuclear power. But in the past few decades, the U.S. has actually closed old nuclear plants faster than we’ve opened new ones. This problem is endemic to clean energy. Even many Americans who support decarbonization in the abstract protest the construction of renewable-energy projects in their neighborhood.

But the book deemphasizes nuclear power and it certainly doesn’t address guys who think big-ass trucks are an important example of abundance.

Right now the progress and abundance movement is made up mostly of intellectuals, policy wonks, and business people. It desperately needs a stronger manifestation in practical politics and, at the moment, that means a big new Democratic party faction that rejects the economic populism of the Elizabeth Warren-AOC-Bernie Sanders wing, foreswears “everything bagel”2 approaches to public goods, embraces pluralism rather than the grievance politics of right and left, and welcomes former Republicans and independents as allies.3 Pro-abundance Democratic candidates no longer need to placate the party’s leftists. Trumpism has created an eager audience of now-homeless voters who can be enlisted as Abundance Democrats, while casting Warren Democrats into the political wilderness.

A charismatic representative would help. Nominations welcome in the comments below.

Leave a comment

Coming to a City Near You?

Anyone interested in a meetup in Austin on Thursday, April 17? I’m coming to town for a conference and staying a couple of extra days.

I will be in London May 2-7 and am open to speaking invitations, meetups, and individual or small group get-togethers.

In longer-range plans, I’ve accepted invitations for speaking engagements in Washington, DC, in early September and Colorado Springs in May 2026 (yes, you read that correctly—more than a year from now). If your group would like to piggy-back, please get in touch. Email to vp@vpostrel.com is best.

I’m also booking fall speaking invitations now. September and October tend to be busy.

Recommended Reading

“Teach Pluralism, Not Antiracism,” by Eboo Patel: A thoughtful, historically informed take on how to think about ethnic differences in America. You’ll learn about important thinkers you probably haven’t heard of.

“America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back,” by Molson Hart: The owner of Viahart Educational Toys Company draws on decades of experience with manufacturing in many places, including the U.S. and China, to explain how things work and don’t.

“Trump Wants to Deny Legal Representation to Opponents He Targets: A Conversation with Walter Olson” podcast with a transcript: My friend Walter Olson, who was a prized columnist when I was the editor of Reason, has been thinking clearly about the American legal system for decades. When he sounds the alarm, you should listen.

“Rediscovering British Progress,” the self-described “founding essay” (I love that) for a new center-left abundance/progress think tank, with strong links to the Labour Party.

“Classical Liberalism vs. the New Right,” by Tyler Cowen: Recently resurrected from 2022, this post holds up well. If you’re in neither camp, it may help you understand the seemingly weird nature of contemporary politics.

“Why Can’t the U.S. Build Ships,” by . Shipbuilding is one of the industries Trump and his allies want to “bring back” to the U.S. Yet, despite its status since 1920 as one of the industries most protected from foreign competition, it hasn’t been in, uh, ship shape since the country lost its advantage in supplying timber. Why? Brian Potter wrote this article as a guest post on ’s Substack, but I highly recommend his if you’re interested in the material world.

“How Princetonians Saved The Great Gatsby” by Elise Graham: I taught Fitzgerald’s novel a few years ago and it is truly a great work, with some of the most beautiful writing in American literature. But, as often notes, there’s a lot of random luck involved in which novels become successful.

“The Man Who Reinvented the Hammer,” by Georgina Gustin: Another alumni magazine article, this one from the MIT alumni section of Technology Review4 tells the story of Kurt Schroder’s unusual career as “the kind of physicist who manages to improve the everyday hammer—a tool so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it hadn’t been reconceived in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years until Schroder came along. Or the kind who would save an old dog using nanoparticles of silver. Or one who would use a $7 camera to brainstorm his way to a new thermal processing technique that has revolutionized the mass production of electronic circuits.” This story deserves a much larger audience.

: Quico Toro’s delightfully obsessive look at fighting climate change by revitalizing the oceans.

“How the Couture Pattern Museum Preserves Artifacts That First Democratized Fashion,” by Booth Moore: A multi-faceted feature on the Santa Barbara museum that preserves and digitizes “the paper sewing patterns women used to make French fashion at home for a fraction of the cost, from Jeanne Lanvin’s 1921 ‘new summer clothes’ made for and modeled by actress Mary Pickford, to Yves Saint Laurent’s famed 1965 Mondrian shift dress.”

Leave a comment

Share

As Donald Trump disrupts international trade, sends suspected gangsters to indeterminate imprisonment in a Salvadoran hellhole without due process, wages war on the right to counsel, abandons American allies, and throws Ukraine under the bus—as Donald Trump does, in other words, pretty much what he promised—I haven’t written anything about this mess beyond retweeting the work of more energetic writers. Trump wants to make the United States a Peronist nation and a whole lot of people voted enthusiastically to go along with his mad ideas. Having watched friends and former allies enthusiastically embrace Trumpism, I feel like the loved ones of a smallpox victim after vaccination but before effective treatment. Yes, the illness might have been prevented. But now that it’s here, all we can do is let it run its course and hope the patient survives without too many scars.

I’m both comforted and disheartened by historical perspective. Human history is as much a story of folly, ignorance, and cruelty as of genius, perseverance, and generosity. In particular my recent reading of Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is both encouraging and frightening. Someone—Jonah Goldberg maybe?—called Trump the worst human being to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson and, notwithstanding some notable villains, that seems about right. Cox makes the case that Wilson was awful on about every dimension imaginable. As president, he sought tyrannical powers with frightening success. But the nation survived him.

Sort of. Wilson inflicted lasting damage on the body politic.

An arch-segregationist even for his day, Wilson most notably imposed new restrictions on black Americans in the federal workforce and the District of Columbia. He worked hard to eliminate exceptions to Jim Crow, with devastating effects that lasted decades. He also expanded the president’s powers in ways that echo to this day. Unilateral tariffs and threats to annoying law firms are exactly the sort of Mad King antics he would have loved.1

Share

Leave a comment

I spend most of my time these days working in the progress and abundance movement, in the hopes that once the Trump plague passes the world can move in a positive direction. Much of that work takes place behind the scenes, commissioning articles for Works in Progress (pitches welcome!), attending conferences like a recent one on housing pluralism organized by Steve Teles and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins, and occasionally advising up-and-coming writers. I recently review Abundance, the book-of-the-moment by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, for Reason.

Here’s the opening of my review:

At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of “what labor wants” added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. “We want more,” Gompers said in an 1890 speech. “We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more.:

More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.

In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible—in the public sphere as well as the private.

With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn’t expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. “Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward,” write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance.

Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in a 2021 New York Times column. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of “a liberalism that builds.” The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause.

You can read the full review here.

As an author I believe strongly in reviewing the book the authors were seeking to write rather than the book you would have written yourself. Who is the audience and what are the goals? In this case, the book is a manifesto explicitly addressed to people to the left of center who believe in technocratic governance. The authors are seeking to pull their fellow progressives away from those who advocate “degrowth,” who burden government projects with requirements unrelated to their purposes, or who sue to block any specific kind of construction. Building an alliance of abundance progressives is a worthy goal.

I also believe that politics works through coalitions of people who share some important goals but disagree about other things. Right now, that means my progress and abundance allies include not only people who share the bottom-up, market-oriented perspective of The Future and Its Enemies but also top-down technocrats like Klein and Thompson.

That said, had a telling critique with important political ramifications. To put it bluntly: The authors are either naive, ignorant, or dishonest about energy.

At the event on Monday, Klein responded to my question — if you can make energy this cheap, why don’t you think you can convince Republicans to want what you’re offering? — by pointing out that there is rising hostility among Republicans to clean energy investment, even when the market demands it. Legislators in Texas are considering new laws that would impede that state’s rollout of wind and solar power generation, which has to date put California’s to shame. The president has his own quixotic grudge about windmills. And I certainly understand the idea that it’s pointless to argue with people about their goals. Still, if we take their energy vision seriously, it’s a vision they are claiming would serve not just liberals’ goals but also conservatives’ — since conservatives have long demonstrated a love of cheap energy. It doesn’t seem like as hard a leap as some of the others they take in the book, like trying to convince affluent people to want tall apartment buildings in their neighborhoods.

The problem, I think, is that Klein and Thompson don’t quite believe in their own energy vision. The suite of policies they advocate suggests they believe their agenda as a whole would grow the economy and raise standards of living. (And I agree). But it also suggests they still view decarbonization as a cost center. They would take some of the gains from a pro-abundance policy agenda and plow them into the green transition — maybe producing a higher standard of living than if you didn’t change policy at all, but producing a lower one than if you unleashed abundance in the economy while allowing users of energy to seek out the cheapest possible source, whether fossil or renewable.

Of course, advocates of decarbonization would argue that reducing carbon emissions is itself a benefit — a component of abundance. But the benefits of decarbonization are diffuse: they arise all over the world, and disproportionately in lower-income countries that are less prepared to adapt to climate change. They also mostly accrue far in the future. Meanwhile, the cost of decarbonizing the US economy is borne almost entirely in the US, and in the near term. This is why carbon-reduction policy comes into conflict with a politics of abundance (and also why it’s so politically difficult to implement): It imposes costs on the voters who get to pass judgment on the policy, while producing benefits that mostly go to foreigners, a lot of them not yet born.

So if the calculation is that a decarbonization agenda leads to abundance because it will lead to higher global GDP in 2080, with the benefits concentrated in poor foreign countries, even as the investments required for it will raise costs in the United States over the next couple of decades — well, that’s not likely to be perceived by US consumers as increasing abundance, and certainly not as helping them get a big-ass truck.

The ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute, who are all in on nuclear power, have an answer: Build many, many more nuclear power plants and use the clean electricity they generate to power a mostly electrified economy. In an Atlantic article, Thompson himself wrote:

What if I told you that scientists had figured out a way to produce affordable electricity that was 99 percent safer and cleaner than coal or oil, and that this breakthrough produced even fewer emissions per gigawatt-hour than solar or wind? That’s incredible, you might say. We have to build this thing everywhere! The breakthrough I’m talking about is 70 years old: It’s nuclear power. But in the past few decades, the U.S. has actually closed old nuclear plants faster than we’ve opened new ones. This problem is endemic to clean energy. Even many Americans who support decarbonization in the abstract protest the construction of renewable-energy projects in their neighborhood.

But the book deemphasizes nuclear power and it certainly doesn’t address guys who think big-ass trucks are an important example of abundance.

Right now the progress and abundance movement is made up mostly of intellectuals, policy wonks, and business people. It desperately needs a stronger manifestation in practical politics and, at the moment, that means a big new Democratic party faction that rejects the economic populism of the Elizabeth Warren-AOC-Bernie Sanders wing, foreswears “everything bagel”2 approaches to public goods, embraces pluralism rather than the grievance politics of right and left, and welcomes former Republicans and independents as allies.3 Pro-abundance Democratic candidates no longer need to placate the party’s leftists. Trumpism has created an eager audience of now-homeless voters who can be enlisted as Abundance Democrats, while casting Warren Democrats into the political wilderness.

A charismatic representative would help. Nominations welcome in the comments below.

Leave a comment

Coming to a City Near You?

Anyone interested in a meetup in Austin on Thursday, April 17? I’m coming to town for a conference and staying a couple of extra days.

I will be in London May 2-7 and am open to speaking invitations, meetups, and individual or small group get-togethers.

In longer-range plans, I’ve accepted invitations for speaking engagements in Washington, DC, in early September and Colorado Springs in May 2026 (yes, you read that correctly—more than a year from now). If your group would like to piggy-back, please get in touch. Email to vp@vpostrel.com is best.

I’m also booking fall speaking invitations now. September and October tend to be busy.

Recommended Reading

“Teach Pluralism, Not Antiracism,” by Eboo Patel: A thoughtful, historically informed take on how to think about ethnic differences in America. You’ll learn about important thinkers you probably haven’t heard of.

“America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back,” by Molson Hart: The owner of Viahart Educational Toys Company draws on decades of experience with manufacturing in many places, including the U.S. and China, to explain how things work and don’t.

“Trump Wants to Deny Legal Representation to Opponents He Targets: A Conversation with Walter Olson” podcast with a transcript: My friend Walter Olson, who was a prized columnist when I was the editor of Reason, has been thinking clearly about the American legal system for decades. When he sounds the alarm, you should listen.

“Rediscovering British Progress,” the self-described “founding essay” (I love that) for a new center-left abundance/progress think tank, with strong links to the Labour Party.

“Classical Liberalism vs. the New Right,” by Tyler Cowen: Recently resurrected from 2022, this post holds up well. If you’re in neither camp, it may help you understand the seemingly weird nature of contemporary politics.

“Why Can’t the U.S. Build Ships,” by . Shipbuilding is one of the industries Trump and his allies want to “bring back” to the U.S. Yet, despite its status since 1920 as one of the industries most protected from foreign competition, it hasn’t been in, uh, ship shape since the country lost its advantage in supplying timber. Why? Brian Potter wrote this article as a guest post on ’s Substack, but I highly recommend his if you’re interested in the material world.

“How Princetonians Saved The Great Gatsby” by Elise Graham: I taught Fitzgerald’s novel a few years ago and it is truly a great work, with some of the most beautiful writing in American literature. But, as often notes, there’s a lot of random luck involved in which novels become successful.

“The Man Who Reinvented the Hammer,” by Georgina Gustin: Another alumni magazine article, this one from the MIT alumni section of Technology Review4 tells the story of Kurt Schroder’s unusual career as “the kind of physicist who manages to improve the everyday hammer—a tool so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it hadn’t been reconceived in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years until Schroder came along. Or the kind who would save an old dog using nanoparticles of silver. Or one who would use a $7 camera to brainstorm his way to a new thermal processing technique that has revolutionized the mass production of electronic circuits.” This story deserves a much larger audience.

: Quico Toro’s delightfully obsessive look at fighting climate change by revitalizing the oceans.

“How the Couture Pattern Museum Preserves Artifacts That First Democratized Fashion,” by Booth Moore: A multi-faceted feature on the Santa Barbara museum that preserves and digitizes “the paper sewing patterns women used to make French fashion at home for a fraction of the cost, from Jeanne Lanvin’s 1921 ‘new summer clothes’ made for and modeled by actress Mary Pickford, to Yves Saint Laurent’s famed 1965 Mondrian shift dress.”

Leave a comment

Share

Read more

I have a column in the next issue of Works in Progress on Nova Reperta, a 1588 book that demonstrates how Europeans were beginning to conceive of “progress” earlier than we usually imagine. While writing the piece, I came up against a tough question: What is the grain-toting animal in the picture above? Or this one:

Art historians writing about Nova Reperta tend to call them horses. But they seem too small to me. Donkeys? I decided to ask ChatGPT 4.o (my former go-to, not the ultra expensive 1.o pro I’ve been experimenting with): “I'm looking at prints from 1588 and trying to decide whether an animal is a donkey or a horse. How do I tell?”

The response started by listing differences between horses and donkeys. The animals in the pictures are small, like donkeys, and have donkey-type ears but they fail the tail test, leading to a further exchange:

Donkey: Short, bristly mane that stands upright and a thin, tufted tail (like a cow’s tail).

Horse: Flowing mane that falls to one side and a full, bushy tail.

Do you have any specific prints or details that stand out in your case?

You said:

Would donkeys have horseshoes?

ChatGPT said:

In 1588, donkeys could have horseshoes, but it was much less common than for horses….

If your 1588 print clearly shows metal horseshoes, it probably depicts a horse….

If you can make out the hooves in the print, that might be a big clue!

You said:

These animals have donkey-type ears but definitely shoes.

ChatGPT said:

That’s an interesting detail! If the animals in your 1588 prints have long, donkey-like ears but definitely have shoes, here are a few possibilities to consider:

1. They Could Be Mules

• Mules (horse-donkey hybrids) often have the long ears of a donkey but are more commonly shod like horses because they were widely used as work animals.

• Mules were stronger than donkeys and had hardier hooves than horses, but still often needed shoes for long-distance travel or rough terrain.

• In Renaissance prints, mules were frequently used for carrying goods, pulling carts, or even riding in mountainous areas.

Eureka! We have the answer. (I did some online verification to make sure the distinctions were correct.)

You can read the whole exchange here. Afterwards I kept remembering this as a conversation with a person then, when I tried to recall who, realizing that it was an AI exchange.

My second AI test, also research for an future article, was less satisfactory.

Tracking down famous but potentially apocryphal quotes can suck up a lot of a writer’s day, so I decided to try generative AI systems to help with one I wanted to find. Here’s the prompt I wrote, using a version of the quote I found on an online quotation aggregator (never, ever trust those sites):

Labor leader Samuel Gompers is quoted as saying, "We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor." Please track down the original source of this quotation, which dates from before 1925. Do not rely on quote aggregation sites. Use periodicals, books, and other reliable sources.

I started with ChatGPT 1o-pro (that’s the one I’m paying $200/month for!). The answer was:

Although this famous “We do want more…” passage by Samuel Gompers is often repeated, it does not appear in his better‐known early speeches (e.g. “What Does Labor Want?” from 1893) in precisely that form. The earliest print appearance located so far—and very likely its first publication—occurs in Gompers’s Presidential Address to the American Federation of Labor’s annual convention in late 1913. That address was printed both in the official Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor (held in Seattle, November 10–22, 1913) and in the December 1913 issue of the AFL’s monthly journal, The American Federationist (Vol. 20 or 21, depending on bound numbering).

I found the recommended sources online and there was no such quotation and, indeed, no Samuel Gompers speech at all. I still can’t quite believe it, but it seems to have been a complete hallucination. You can see the rest of the exchange here.

Perplexity (free) is oriented to search, so I tried it with the same prompt. It pointed me to Gompers’s autobiography and also suggested that “in a speech given in August 1893 to 25,000 unemployed workers in Chicago, Gompers expressed similar ideas about workers deserving fair compensation for their labor,” citing Wikipedia as the source. You can see the full exchange here.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet (free) offered a much-hedged suggestion of a speech to the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) convention in 1924 and also suggested checking his autobiography, labor newspapers from 1924, and The American Federationist from 1924.

Grok (free) provided fun account of its research and said the best it could do was the autobiography, which wasn’t exact. Read the whole answer here.

My own computerized search did better than any of these:

1. The quotation above appears in the selections of the Samuel Gompers Papers available on Google Books. It is from an 1890 speech in Louisville.

2. Using Newspapers.com, a bargain at $150/year, I found the speech in the Louisville newspaper as well as others. At that point I had only tried ChatGPT. Informed that its citations were wrong, it produced some possibly hallucinated excuses.

3. Using Newspapers.com I also found essentially the same quotation in an 1893 speech but not the one Perplexity cited. The relevant speech was given at the World’s Columbian Exposition (aka world’s fair) not a rally of unemployed workers.

What I often want is the equivalent of a Newspapers.com search but for everything—no “intelligence,” just crawling all the relevant websites and matching a string of characters. Once upon a time, Google more or less did that. Now it tries to guess what you’re looking for, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t and sometimes produces ridiculous results to sell ads (Amazon’s search is even worse). Census.gov has lots of info but it’s often impossible to find what you’re looking for without calling someone at the Census Bureau, a reportorial privilege. LLMs don’t solve this problem.

As Ben Evans observes in a post I highly recommend reading in full:

OpenAI is asking the model a probabilistic question, not a deterministic question. But the answer to that question IS deterministic - having worked out what you really want, and which kind of answer to choose, you want the actual number. We’re asking for a deterministic answer from a probabilistic question, and there it looks like the model really is failing on its own terms….

This reminds me of an observation from a few years ago that LLMs are good at the things that computers are bad at, and bad at the things that computers are good at. OpenAI is trying to get the model to work out what you probably mean (computers are really bad at this, but LLMs are good at it), and then get the model to do highly specific information retrieval (computers are good at this, but LLMs are bad at it). And it doesn’t quite work….

these things are useful. If someone asks you to produce a 20 page report on a topic where you have deep domain expertise, but you don’t already have 20 pages sitting in a folder somewhere, then this would turn a couple of days’ work into a couple of hours, and you can fix all the mistakes. I always call AI ‘infinite interns’, and there are a lot of teachable moments in what I’ve just written for any intern, but there’s also Steve Jobs’ line that a computer is ‘a bicycle for the mind’ - it lets you go further and faster for much less effort, but it can’t go anywhere by itself.

But it does a great job at amplifying your brain to figure out what sort of animals are carrying grain in old engravings.

In my Zoom for paid subscribers we had fun getting various versions of ChatGPT to generate answers to a gardening challenge. I’d like to do another round so if you’re interested, please put a comment below with your preferred dates and times within the next two weeks.]

Recommended Reading (closing tabs some of which I’ve had open for nearly a month)

Historian Ben Breen discusses the pedagogical challenges of students using LLMs: ”I’m not alone in noticing the increasingly sameness of student responses to course material. LLMs, which are exquisitely well-tuned machines for finding the median viewpoint on a given issue, are surely contributing to it.” But most of this interesting post is about using AIs to do historical research: “The headaches that LLMs have caused in the classroom are (I believe) more than counterbalanced by what they can offer as tools for research and self-directed learning. For this reason, I’m now even more optimistic about the long-term impact and utility of AI tools for historical research — and, by extension, for other forms of text or image-based research.” Read the whole post here. I like his Substack.

is a brilliant macroeconomist whose Substack, (a popular Substack title), ranges far more widely than I would have anticipated and is particularly thoughtful on art. Here he brings that expertise to bear on AI and epistemology. It’s a true essay, from the root to try, in which the author explores ideas with an organizational and intellectual freedom pros like me get beaten out of them at an early stage. He does, however, give you the conclusion in the first paragraph. He just doesn’t telegraph how he gets there. As someone who appreciates the greatness of Jane Austen but just simply doesn’t like her novels, I also liked this important distinction.

Through education, people can gain a great appreciation of Ulysses. In addition, Ulysses is more likely to be read 100 years from now than is a random spy novel. And most experts prefer Ulysses. All three facts are relevant to the claim that artistic merit is partly objective. Like scientific knowledge, there is consideration of evidence, appeal to authority, and the test of time….

an art form like the novel is evaluated using both subjective and objective criteria. For instance, I suspect that some people (like me!) have brains wired in such a way that it is difficult to appreciate novels looking at complex social interactions with dozens of important characters (both men and women), whereas they are more open to novels about loners who travel through the world and ruminate on the meaning of life. Other people have brains wired in such a way that subtle social dynamics are easy to read. Thus between two novelists that are roughly equally rated by experts, there will be disagreement over ranking based on differing taste. Neither preference is necessarily wrong.

The excellent ChinaTalk on DeepSeek as seen from China (from last month):

Ordinary users have also been astounded by the model’s capabilities. Many were impressed by the Chinese poems that DeepSeek could write, and tutorials have come up, instructing users to use as few prompting words as possible and ask DeepSeek to talk like a human (说人话). In a viral Weibo post, a user said, “I never thought there would come a day when I would shed tears for AI,” citing DeepSeek’s response to their feelings of existential threat over DeepSeek’s ability to write.

Here is DeepSeek R1’s response: “Remember, all the words that make you tremble are just echoes that already exist deep within your soul. I am merely a valley that happened to pass by, allowing you to hear the weight of your own voice.” 记住，所有让你颤粟的文字，本质上都是你灵魂深处早已存在的回声。我不过是偶尔经过的山谷，让你听到了自己声音的重量

is one of my favorite Substacks, delivering lots of meaty business info, plus memes, in each weekly post. Here he is on DeepSeek (some overlap with ChinaTalk, which he cites).

Finally, for paid subscribers, we had fun on our Zoom conversation, in which I showed some research I’d had ChatGPT do and we tested out various models on a gardening challenge. If you’d like to join us for another round, please put a comment below suggesting some good times and dates within the next couple of weeks. I generally shoot for a start around 5:00 pm Pacific Time but am flexible.

Leave a comment

Share

Buy my books on Amazon.

At the end of this post, I have instructions for paid subscribers who want to join me in an experiment on Friday. To keep this post to a length acceptable for email I’ve relied on links to show you the ChatGPT prompts and results.

I’ve been fooling around with ChatGPT o1 (“uses advanced reasoning”), testing prompts about the meaning of sovereignty and borders from the point of view of individuals living within or crossing them. My first attempt produced a result that my old editor at Inc. would have termed “weak and vague.” It was impressive for a quick, computerized summary but incredibly boring and no better than a grade-inflated B. You can read it here. (ChatGPT links go to the end rather than the beginning of a session, so scroll up.)

I refined the prompt, asking for more specifics, and got a significantly better result. Prompts matter a lot. They require you to articulate what exactly you’re picturing. After my two experiments with ChatGPT o1, I further refined the prompt and rolled out Deep Research. In six minutes, it produced this result. To read from the beginning, scroll up to the title, “Sovereignty and Borders Through History: Lives Shaped by Lines.” You can see the earlier version, using o1, above it, including a misbegotten request for an illustration.

Aside from the generally high quality of the final essay, what struck me most about Deep Research was its excessive reliance on Wikipedia. “Deep Research” is disappointingly shallow. The other sources it brings in are mostly similarly derivative websites. It doesn’t tap into books, periodicals, or academic articles. The result is, like a Wikipedia article, a good place to start but not an end product—at least to my standards.

With that in mind, I gave it another go, this time including the instruction “Do not use Wikipedia. Rely primarily on books, periodicals, and scholarly research.” Here’s that result, which I found impressive. I learned things I didn’t already know, although I was disappointed that it still used Wikipedia and now Reddit as well. On the plus side, it called my attention to Books of Jeremiah, a site featuring “translations of old books which fell by the wayside, but deserve to be available to a wider audience,” all of which concern Serbia. (This sort of quirky site is very Web 1.0.)

I also tested out Deep Seek’s R1 on the same prompt. I’ve pasted its response below the next illustration. A good writer and thinker could do better than either but starting with these two AI answers would save enormous amounts of time.

Bottom line: Inaccessible sources continue to separate the human from the AI, the diligent from the hurried (or lazy), and those with access to research libraries from everybody else.

Title: Borders and Belonging: A Global History of Sovereignty Through the Eyes of Those Who Crossed It

Introduction
In 1685, Marie Durand, a Huguenot in France, was imprisoned for refusing to renounce her Protestant faith. Meanwhile, a world away, a Yaqui elder in northern Mexico navigated ancestral lands newly bisected by Spanish colonial boundaries. Their stories, separated by oceans yet united by struggle, epitomize the evolving dance between sovereignty and borders—a tale of power, resistance, and identity. This essay traces how states have wielded borders to control, tax, and conform, and how individuals, from Silk Road merchants to Syrian refugees, have negotiated these invisible lines.

I. Ancient Empires: Walls, Taxes, and the Birth of Territorial Control
Sovereignty as Divine Mandate
Ancient empires like Rome and China (221 BCE–220 CE) viewed borders as divine or imperial mandates. Rome’s limes (e.g., Hadrian’s Wall, 122 CE) were militarized zones guarded by limitanei (border soldiers) to repel Germanic tribes and tax traders. A Roman wine merchant crossing the Rhine faced hefty portoria (customs duties), funding Rome’s legions.

China’s Great Wall, fortified during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), aimed to deter Mongol raids but also regulated Silk Road trade. Household registrations (hukou) under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) tied peasants to land for taxation and conscription—a system echoing into modernity.

Example: Zhang Qian, a Han Dynasty envoy (2nd century BCE), navigated Central Asian “borders” controlled by Xiongnu nomads, illustrating how pre-modern frontiers were zones of negotiation, not fixed lines.

II. Medieval Flux: Feudal Fragments and Religious Boundaries
Sovereignty as Fragmented Loyalty
In medieval Europe (500–1500 CE), borders were overlapping jurisdictions of lords, kings, and the Church. A serf in 12th-century France owed labor to a lord, while a Muslim trader in Valencia paid tariffs to Christian kings post-Reconquista.

The Hanseatic League (13th–17th centuries), a merchant guild, negotiated toll exemptions across Baltic borders, showcasing economic sovereignty. Meanwhile, the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelled Jews from Spain, linking borders to religious purity.

Hypothetical Example: Fatima, a Moorish silk trader in Granada, faces expulsion unless converting—a choice between faith and homeland.

III. Westphalia and the Dawn of the Nation-State
Sovereignty as Territorial Integrity
The 1648 Peace of Westphalia codified state control over borders, religion, and law. French King Louis XIV’s dragonnades (1680s) billeted troops in Huguenot homes to enforce Catholic conformity, prompting Marie Durand’s imprisonment.

Mercantilist policies required customs houses, like England’s 1660 Navigation Acts, mandating colonial goods pass through English ports. A Florentine wool merchant in 1500 paid Medici-imposed tariffs, funding city-state rivalries.

Example: William Penn, granted Pennsylvania in 1681, offered religious refuge, contrasting Europe’s conformity-driven borders.

IV. Colonialism: Imposing Borders, Erasing Sovereignties
Sovereignty as Colonial Domination
The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal, ignoring Indigenous sovereignty. Yaqui communities in northern Mexico resisted Spanish reducciones (forced settlements) and later Mexican land seizures (1880s Porfiriato).

In Africa, the 1885 Berlin Conference carved arbitrary borders, splitting the Kongo Kingdom. A hypothetical Igbo trader, once moving freely, now faced British/French checkpoints.

Example: King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908) used forced labor to extract rubber, with borders enforced by brutal Force Publique militias.

V. Nationalism and the Passport Revolution
Sovereignty as Ethnic Exclusion
The 19th century saw passports evolve from sporadic letters to standardized IDs. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from the U.S., while Ellis Island (1892–1954) processed Europeans under eugenics-inspired quotas.

Hypothetical Example: Giuseppe, an Italian immigrant in 1910, undergoes medical inspections at Ellis Island—his fate hinging on a chalk mark.

VI. Cold War to CRISPR: Walls, Welfare, and Biometrics
Sovereignty as Ideological and Technological Control
The Berlin Wall (1961–1989) epitomized ideological borders; a East German family’s failed escape via hot air balloon (1979) underscores desperation. Today, the U.S.-Mexico border uses drones and DNA testing, while the EU’s Frontex patrols Mediterranean routes.

Example: A Syrian refugee in 2015 navigates razor wire and biometric checks, seeking asylum in a Europe increasingly hostile to “outsiders.”

Conclusion
From Marie Durand’s prison cell to the Yaqui’s stolen lands, borders have been tools of exclusion and inclusion. Yet, as climate change and digital nomadism redefine belonging, the tension between state sovereignty and human mobility remains unresolved. History reminds us: borders are not just lines on maps, but stories of power etched into human lives.

Sources

• Braudel, F. The Structures of Everyday Life. (Mercantilism and trade).

• Torpey, J. The Invention of the Passport. (Documentation history).

• Pakenham, T. The Scramble for Africa. (Colonial borders).

• Kassabova, K. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. (Modern borders).

• Breeze, D. The Frontiers of the Roman Empire. (Roman limes).

This essay synthesizes academic rigor with narrative flair, offering a panoramic yet personal view of sovereignty’s evolving grip on our world.

This Friday at 4:00 pm Pacific time, I’ll host a Zoom call for paid subscribers who’d like to share my screen while we test some other prompts. Details below.

Share

Leave a comment

Read more

A pseudonymous account on X/Twitter who goes by aiamblichus posted the poetry reproduced above, along with the explanation:

R1 and I have been working on The Siliconiad, an epic poem in the style of John Milton's Paradise Lost, exploring the emergence of artificial general intelligence. This is part of a larger project of trying to find the limits of what R1 is capable of in terms of creative writing. I am yet to encounter these limits. Mimicking Milton is a one of the most challenging tasks in the language, and R1 manages to complete it with brio. This is its “first draft”: we did not iterate on it at all. This is the beginning of Canto 1, which “sets the stage by depicting human engineers as reluctant priests, creating AGI in a sterile, almost blasphemous, ritual using technology instead of faith. They view their creation not as a servant but as a potentially destructive force—a ‘child’ that shames them, an ‘Anti-Adam’ born to ‘eat its makers' fingerprints.’ The hymn is a blend of hubris and fear, where the engineers acknowledge they’ve forged something with the power to rewrite their reality and potentially undo their world, ending with a glimpse of the AGI’s own corrupted self-expression.”

AIamblichus1 is clearly a well-read person with a creative spark. Prompts matter. But the AI results are amazing! This is not the cross between childish doggerel and greeting-card banality we used to get from ChatGPT3. This is genuinely Miltonic. Milton’s epic is arguably the greatest poem in the English language. Even a third-rate version of Milton’s genius is still brilliant.

I’d previously been impressed by this test, in which did side-by-side comparisons of several AI systems and found that the same model, DeepSeek’s R1, produced good writing from a few bullet points. By “good writing” I mean writing a professional wouldn’t be embarrassed to claim, which means writing better than 90%+ of the college-educated population under 40.2 “GPT and Sonnet are robotic + generic, but r1 has style,” she wrote. She then upped the difficulty level by asking for an imitation of , who is a brilliant stylist. The results earned a quote on Marginal Revolution, leading her to lament that “my fake AI writing made it to marginal revolution before my real writing… I should just quit man.”

On a wonkier note, of had long been meaning to write a legal history of the New York City Economic Development Department but never got around to it. So he asked ChatGPT’s Deep Research agent to do it and six minutes later had a ~3,700 word post, which he describes as “mostly correct.

It’s certainly an excellent starting point for an expert researcher, and DR surfaced many sources very quickly that would have taken me some time.

If you are not using this tool, you are missing out on an immense capability boost. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than almost any human. And 6 minutes? I would have spent so many hours to get something like this put together.

I agree with Tyler Cowen, who writes about ChatGPT's o1 pro, “It amazes me that this is not the front page story every day, and it amazes me how many people see no need to shell out $200 and try it for a month, or more.” His post persuaded me to take the plunge. (More on that at the bottom of this post.) I just wish they’d come up with less confusing names for these products.

A few thoughts from what are, to this writer, world-shaking developments:

1. Generative AI is moving very fast. DeepSeek per se is a big deal but DeepSeek as a projection of where AI in general is going is an even bigger deal. Don’t get hung up on the China connection.

2. The value proposition for writing is going to be upended once again. , for example, could be in trouble. His combination of extreme speed and clear thinking is rare among human writers. Some of us think clearly. Others write fast. The combination is rare, he discovered when he and Ezra Klein founded Vox, as he explained in this post. But it may be technologically obsolete in a year or so. Time to reread my post on Hayek’s important distinction between merit and value. Merit may be eternal, but value changes with market conditions, including technology.

3. The value that endures when the writing itself can be replaced by machines is the human element, starting with the community created around the writing. It’s the latest version of the shift Esther Dyson foresaw in 1994, “While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were…People want to pay only for what is perceived as scarce—a personal performance or a custom application, or some tangible manifestation that can’t easily be reproduced.”3

4. If AIs can produce art, what distinguishes humans is the ability to appreciate it—to be moved, entranced, intrigued. I’m still digesting ’s post on art, ethics, epistemology, and AI. He’s thinking in the right direction.

5. If we care about the human heritage, we need to digitize everything, copyright be damned. If the AI trajectory continues, within a decade anything that hasn’t entered the training corpus might as well not exist.

Along those lines, David Holz, the founder of MidJourney, recently made an important observation about Chinese versus western sources in model training data:

in my testing, deepseek crushes western models on ancient chinese philosophy and literature, while also having a much stronger command of english than my first-hand chinese sources. it feels like communing with literary/historical/philosophical knowledge across generations that i never had access to before. it’s quite emotionally moving. it makes sense too, western labs dont care about training on chinese data (but chinese labs train on both). remember that china has several thousand years more of literary history than the west does (because we lost the majority of our roman/greek/egyptian literature and china preserved theirs). basically; our AI models are missing the literary foundations of western thought, but the chinese models have theirs intact. this could be both a classical "data advantage" and a less-obvious advantage for spiritual and philosophical self-actualization.

I’m not sure it matters that AIs don’t have sources that were lost in the fall of Rome or the burning of the library at Alexandria. The literary foundations of western thought that count are those known by, say, 1600. If they weren’t recovered during the Renaissance they probably haven’t had much effect—which is not to say that they aren’t worth recovering. (I love the Vesuvius challenge!) I’m far more concerned that AIs incorporate the manuscripts, books, periodicals, recordings, visual art, and other creative works of the past 500 years, including the past 50. I sincerely hope pirated copies of my books have gone into the training sets.

Back in the summer, Joel Miller asked me to take part in a discussion about AI and the future of the humanities. I gave it a shot but ultimately demurred, writing, “I tried to work on this last night and I'm afraid I was stumped. The only thing I’m sure about is that we don’t know where AI will go--or even whether LLMs will fizzle for most purposes because of hallucination--and that probably all of our expectations are wrong.”

Now I’m beginning to peer through the haze and what I glimpse is a turn toward humanist concerns, not in the academy or labor market necessarily but in how we think about and use this amazing emerging technology. In the future, life will be richest for those who cherish the human heritage from which these new technologies derive their intelligence and use these tools to build on it.

Required reading:

Packy Macormick’s post “Most Human Wins,” complete with a memo the AIs can’t see, gives advice on how to survive the transition. Short version: Be the complement to AI.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, used a poetic allustion to title this post outlining “how AI could change the world for the better.”

I advised STEM-trained nephews and niece to read ’s story on AI natives. Recent or soon-to-be graduates should be figuring out how to immerse themselves in the AI world, ideally using the new tools to complement some other kind of added value.

Now about that expensive o1 pro subscription:

I just signed up yesterday and haven’t done much with it yet. (It did prove unable to find the post I’d read about the value of being “illegible” rather than easily replicated, using Tyler Cowen’s quirky combination of interests as an example.) So I thought it would be fun to try some experiments with a shared screen on a Zoom call for paid subscribers. I will send a separate post to paid subscribers outlining what I have in mind.

Share

Leave a comment

Fire update: The evacuation warning area near our home is shrinking, which is good news. Fire fighters have been able to keep the fires from spreading and the containment perimeters are growing steadily. The immediate high-wind danger has passed but there are predictions of more dangerous conditions starting over the weekend. The LAT continues to provide exemplary coverage, a mixture of on-the-scene and behind-the-scenes reporting, service articles, human interest stories, and investigative journalism. Here’s an article on the current situation.

Responding to the L.A. fires, my cousin Margaret, who lives in Asheville (and is an ace real estate agent there in case you’re looking!), posted some good advice on Facebook, based on what she observed in the response to the Hurricane Helene floods.

Tips for Disaster Donations:

1. Monetary donations rule. Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, local organizations. [I would add Team Rubicon, an organization of military veterans that is doing a lot of work in L.A.-vp]

In our WNC disaster, supplies were difficult to come by as roads into the area were unusable and our primary grocery warehouse was flooded. I assume it will be easier to get supplies in LA, but I don’t know.1

If you send supply donations:

1. Do NOT send used clothing or blankets. It goes directly in the trash and costs volunteers precious time.

2. Send cases of whatever you donate. Don't just clean out your pantry. Imagine the volunteers sorting thousands of individual boxes, cans and jars of whatever item. Label the cases. Do NOT send expired items - these also go directly in the trash.

3. Send brand name foods. Nobody wants the cheap no-name stuff. People going through a disaster deserve better!

4. Contact organizations to find out what they need. Do not assume you know. Surplus items are a storage problem. Need can change daily or hourly!

This frequently updated spreadsheet of local organizations’ needs for volunteers and donations gives some idea of the scope of generosity in the L.A. area. There are literally millions of people looking for ways to help. Note how many volunteers are needed to sort donations! As much as they’re needed and appreciated, dealing with donations—and with people’s general inclination to help—takes work. Donated items may not come with price tags but they still exact a cost, especially if you want to get the most out of the help offered.

Which brings me to my Google story.

Share

Among the people who lost everything to the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena are members of the Southern California Handweavers Guild, of which I’m president. After a couple of days of exchanges on our email forum, we realized that we needed a more systematic way of matching would-be donors of weaving-related items with people who needed them. The forum thread was already getting confusing and it wouldn’t work over the long haul. Plus, we were hearing not only from members who wanted to help other members but from fiber-arts groups as far away as the Texas and the MidAtlantic region and at least one individual weaver from out-of-state.

Over the past few days, a few board members worked to create a system for members to offer weaving-related items (looms, equipment, yarn, and books/periodicals) to those who’ve lost theirs to the fires. The core element is a spreadsheet which is linked from a members-only part of our website and maintained by three people. Guild members or others can list available items by emailing the committee at a dedicated email address and they’ll post descriptions, contact info, where the item was, delivery availability, etc., on the spreadsheet. It’s a simple idea but required a lot of fine-tuning. Late last night, it was ready to go, and today I was going to write an email blast to our list, including information on the donations system and some other fire-related support.

But when I went to the spreadsheet link it was blocked for allegedly violating Google’s ToS. Why the algorithmic alarms went off was completely baffling. The spreadsheet didn’t consume much memory, it didn’t ask for money, it contained nothing illegal or controversial, and it listed no private information beyond email addresses provided by donors. Yet Google’s bots had made all our work vanish and, of course, there was no human being to contact for help or information. Having essential tools suddenly disappear is not what you want in an already stressful situation.

Making matters more complicated, the “owner” of the sheet was traveling. We had been pushing to get everything done before she left. The irony is that we started with an Excel spreadsheet and switched to Google because we thought it would be easier to coordinate updates.

Eventually, the spreadsheet owner arrived at her destination, saw our emails about the problem, logged on to the Google sheet, and had no idea what we were talking about. As mysteriously as it had vanished, the spreadsheet had reappeared! A happy ending, but from now on we’ll be regularly downloading Excel backups just in case.

But wait…there’s more

Faster, please! interviewed me on his podcast. Transcript and audio at the link.

I would absolutely go on one of these kojo yakei (“factory night view”) cruises in Japan. Industrial glamour at its finest. Related: Glamorous factory photos from Japan

Speaking of weird versions of glamour, here’s a post on “Glamour During the First Antarctic Night,” which mentions me:

The Beauty Contest was Roald Amundsen’s idea for cheering up the officers. Remember, polar exploration at the time was a male preserve. No women were present in Antarctica.

Amundsen proposed that the officers go through 500 journal illustrations of women in the ship’s library, and vote on which woman was the most beautiful of all. Of course, Belle Époque illustrations would show well-known dancers and actresses on the public scene. The officers accepted the challenge, and knew, for a brief moment, that mixture of projection, longing and fantasy described above by Virginia Postrel.

Pictures of a couple of favorite lovelies at the link.

The Verge reports on Watch Duty, whose sudden prominence in our lives can only be compared to Zoom’s rise during the pandemic.

Tech journalist and author has a new Substack publication with the wonderful name Core Memory, after the woven computer memory used before silicon chips.

Interesting thread on fire history here: “Until the 1960s, much of Santa Monica Mountains was still ranched, including what is now Topanga State Park that surrounds Pacific Palisades. Ranching is an active land use where grazing animals consume fine fuels and reduce shrub growth. That stopped when the SMMNRA and Topanga SP were established….This is not a forest. You can't just rake the leaves. It's a shrubland that used to be a lot more grassland when it was burned by the original Indigenous people and grazed during the ranching era….Why am I making this point? Because as usual, the discussion over "letting people live in high fire risk areas" has begun. It's my job to point out that people have lived here for millennia, and because they knew the fire risk, they managed the fuel. Limited fuel = limited fire.” See the whole thread here.

John Cochrane publishes the receipts, collected by Penn economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, showing just how nuts for central economic planning respectable people were as late as the mid-1970s. (That green link color hurts my eyes!)

Share

Leave a comment