Tag Archives: History

Keynes’ Forager Future

By Robin Hanson · February 23, 2012 10:00 pm · Comments (12)

Suresh Naidu pointed me to a fascinating 1930 essay (excerpts below) by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes on the long term future. Consideration of the far future put Keynes into a very far mode, where he upheld far ideals against near practical constraints. While Keynes accepted that farmer ideals of work, property, and saving for the future were needed to maintain economic growth, he detested such ideals, and looked to a future roughly a century hence when, humanity’s absolute material needs being satisfied, we embraced forager ideals for sharing material goods, living in and enjoying the moment, and just doing what feels right.

Now Keynes did note that humans also seek relative status, but he seemed to assume that humans would coordinate to suppress such urges, and to keep just enough farmer habits to preserve material wealth. In his far idealistic mode, he didn’t even seem to consider the possibility that nations would still compete for relative status, and promote farmer norms for that purpose, or that individuals would still work full time seeking personal relative status.

We are now only eighteen years shy of Keynes’ 2030 forecast date. While there has certainly been a weakening of farmer ideals, especially on fertility, we are far from embracing forager ideals overall. We still work hard for material wealth. Our lower classes have moved furthest, more rejecting marriage, religion, and full-time work, via relying heavily on the sharing of others, and this is considered a big problem. Give us another century of similar economic growth, and this lower class malaise might well infect most everyone. But it is far from clear that this would settle at a stable rich no growth equilibrium, rather than economic and population collapse.

In any case, even we preserve farmer norms enough to support continued growth, material wealth per person will only be high until we find new techs to increase population faster than we increase wealth. While in theory-overconfident far mode, Keynes’ is tempted to see his forager-value future as lasting indefinitely, it would in fact only be temporary. The em transition that I envision within a century or two should quickly return most people (i.e., most ems) to near subsistence income, and put a huge premium on reviving farmer-like norms and ideals. And even if that doesn’t happen, growth must slow in the very long run.

Is my summary fair? Judge for yourself; here are excerpts from Keynes’ essay: Continue reading "Keynes’ Forager Future" »

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The History of Inequality

By Robin Hanson · January 29, 2012 3:45 pm · Comments (5)

I recently posted on how cities and firms are like distributed as a Zipf power law, with a power of one, where above some threshold each scale holds roughly the same number of people, until the size where the world holds less than one. Turns out, this also holds for nations:

Log Nation Size v Log Rank

The threshold below which there are few nations is roughly three million people. For towns/cities this threshold scale is about three thousand, and for firms it is about three. What were such things distributed like in the past?

I recall that the US today produces few new towns, though centuries ago they formed often. So the threshold scale for towns has risen, probably due to minimum scales needed for efficient town services like electricity, sewers, etc. I’m also pretty sure that early in the farming era lots of folks lived in nations of a million or less. So the threshold scale for nations has also risen.

Before the industrial revolution, there were very few firms of any substantial scale. So during the farming era firms existed but could not have been distributed by Zipf’s law. So if firms had a power law distribution then, it must have had a much steeper power.

If we look all the way back to the forager era, then cities and nations could also not plausibly have had a Zipf distribution — there just were none of any substantial scale. So surely their size distribution also fell off faster than Zipf, as individual income does today.

Looking further back, at biology, the number of individuals per species is distributed nearly log-normally. The number of species per genera:

and the number of individuals with a given family name or ancestor:

have long been distributed via a steeper tail, with number falling as nearly the square of size:

This lower inequality comes because fluctuations in the size of genera and family names are mainly due to uncorrelated fluctuations of their members, rather than to correlated shocks that help or hurt an entire firm, city, or nation together. While this distribution holds less inequality in the short run, still over very long runs it accumulates into vast inequality. For example, most species today descend from a tiny fraction of the species alive hundreds of millions of years ago.

Putting this all together, the number of species per genera and individuals per families has long declined with size as a tail power of two. After the farming revolution, cities and nations could have correlated internal successes and larger feasible sizes, giving a thicker tail of big items. In the industry era, firms could also get very large. Today, nations, cities, and firms are all distributed with a tail power of one, above threshold scales of (three) million, thousand, and one, thresholds that have been rising with time.

My next post will discuss what these historical trends suggest about the future.

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Hail John Watkins

By Robin Hanson · January 19, 2012 1:20 pm · Comments (14)

In the 1911 Ladies Home Journal, railroad engineer John Watkins offered unusually insightful predictions for a hundred years hence. His example seems a great place to learn lessons on sources of insight, and systematic biases, in forecasting. Yet while many have commented recently on Watkin’s forecasts, I haven’t seen any drawing lessons.

I see these as Watkins main mistakes:

  1. Overestimating coordination capacities. Watkins said we’d cut underused letters like C,X,Q from our alphabet, eliminate mosquitoes and house-flies by ending their breeding grounds, put all city traffic below or above ground, and accept many American republics into the USA union. All of these require far more coordination than we seem capable of.
  2. Underestimating wealth indulgence and signaling. Watkins said we’d adopt an engineer’s efficiency attitude toward food preparation and personal fitness. People unable to walk ten miles at a stretch would be weaklings, and we’d use central cooking instead of personal kitchens. But rich folks don’t want to work that hard, and humans have long asserted wealth and autonomy via personalized vs. communal dining. Institutional communal food, such as in dorms, ships, military bases, boarding-house, etc., has long been avoided a sign of low status.

Added 10a: The institutional food that is cheapest, and lowest in status, makes you eat where they say, when they say, and what they say. Yes of course a restaurant is “institutional” in some ways, but it costs more because it offers customers more flexibility in time, location, and food.

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Hatin’ On Farmers

By Robin Hanson · January 8, 2012 9:00 am · Comments (33)

Zahavi’s seminal book on animal signaling tells how certain birds look high status by forcing food down the throat of other birds, who thereby seem low status. While this “altruism” does help low status birds survive, they rightly resent it, as their status loss outweighs their food gain.

In our society, “sympathy” by high status folks for low status folks usually functions similarly — it affirms their high status while giving little net benefit to the low status. For example, the latest New Yorker reviews several books on the Roman empire, including one on the lives of ordinary Romans:

Much of what we know about the Roman emperors is based on myth and misunderstanding. But even that much can’t be said for the vast majority of their subjects, whose way of life has barely left a trace in the historical record. …

[It is] an overwhelmingly dark picture. “Invisible Romans” is full of anecdotes and quotations that speak volumes about Roman attitudes toward women, slaves, and the cheapness of life in general. … In general the lot of the ordinary Roman was no different from that of the vast majority of human beings before the modern age: powerlessness, bitterly hard work, and the constant presence of death. The thing that strikes Knapp most about Roman popular wisdom is its deep passivity in the face of these afflictions, which feels so alien to moderns and especially to Americans. The Romans, he writes, had no concept of progress … A slave might dream of manumission but hardly of abolition. For women, “there were no alternative lifestyles and aspirations either offered or considered … Even the amenities of the ‘Roman world, like the famous public baths, lose their lustre … “baths offered not only social interaction but a lack of hygiene schooling even to contemplate.” (more)

It almost seems as if this author feels it would have been better if these pathetic creatures had never existed, if not for their eventually giving rise to worthy creatures like him. So sad, he muses, that they didn’t bother to even imagine the future changes that could justify their miserable existence. He probably thinks it only a coincidence that his disgust affirms his lofty status among all the humans who have ever lived.

Sigh. The lives of ordinary folks in the Roman empire might not have been as nice as this author’s, nor as nice as yours. Yes they sometimes had pain, hunger, and sickness, but even so they were mostly lives worth living, with much love, laughter, engagement, and satisfaction. Poor folk do smile.

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Nostalgia Example

By Robin Hanson · November 28, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (28)

Both magic and nostalgia are common, arise more when we feel threatened, and comfort us in such situations. … Both … rely especially heavily on wishful thinking – magic presumes we are especially able to influence events important to us, while nostalgia presumes that our previous social orders were especially functional, moral, good to people like us, etc. The fact that fantasy tends to combine both magic and nostalgia suggests that some readers have an especially strong tolerance for wishful thinking, and/or demand for comfort, and fantasy targets that audience. (more)

As I’ve enjoy some science fiction by John C.Wright, I found it interesting to read the nostalgia that energizes him:

High Fantasy rests for its paramount appeal on nostalgia: the longing for a world once known, now lost. An Uzi is a more efficient killing machine than the great sword Excalibur, but the Uzi is never to be described in words [as poetic as] these: … The sewers and streets of New York are cleaner than the crooked lanes of Athens, but New York is famed neither for her acropolis nor her philosophers. … Anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important, has no heart and no taste for High Fantasy.

The difference between a culture that respected and reveres the virginity of the maiden fair and the bravery of the warrior prince, and the cult that reveres the bravery of the transgendered community and protects the crooked penis of a presidential adulterer with comically ferocious self-righteousness, is not merely a difference between an ape and a man, a savage and a savant. … The Middle Ages may have been evil and cruel and dirty in many things, but they were never held Mutually Assured Destruction by thermonuclear annihilation to be a work of wise political policy. …

The only tales ever told in the history of the world without any element of magical or the supernatural were those told in the modern age. … There is a common thread linking speculative fiction with romances and epics and fairy tales of old. That thread is an acknowledgement that the world is wider and wilder and weirder than we suspect, and that there are fields beyond the fields we know where elves might dance in moonlight or demons rage in flame or angels clothed in brightness soar at their lord’s command on errantry to deeds immense of which we mortal men hear no slightest fame. …

The current world in which we live, the current age of darkness, rests on certain assumptions which High Fantasy undermines: the assumption that might makes right, the assumption that man is the master of his own fate, the assumption that the universe is a machine and everything in it (including man) is merely a raw material to be exploited in the restless search for pelf and pleasure. … The assumptions of the modern world, … Low Fantasy undermines them by showing the reader a glimpse of a world where the strength of a man’s arm decided the triumph or downfall of cities, and the honor of his word and the courage of his heart decided the strength of that arm. (more; HT David Brin)

Wright’s skill with words shows me the depth of his feelings, even though such feelings fail to resonate with me – his nostalgia still seems to me mostly wishful thinking. Yes, modernity is missing something, and stories of other eras can highlight what we lack. But some of what we lack is impossible, and so is missing everywhere. And every time and place is missing something; there are so many tradeoffs.

But let me make a prediction. In the future, stories will be told that are set in forager worlds, in farming worlds (where most of our fantasy is set), in industry worlds (like our world), in em worlds, perhaps in further worlds we can now only dimly imagine, and finally in worlds of a vast stable future lasting for trillions of years. My prediction is that in that vast stable future, when they tell nostalgic stories about other eras, they’ll tell more stories set in industry worlds than in farming or forager worlds.

John C. Wright can’t see the romance of our era, compared to farming era romance, but I doubt the first farmers could see much romance in their world, compared to forager worlds. But eventually story tellers will find many fine ways to see our dream-time era conflicts as engaging. For a cosmologically brief time, everything changed rapidly, anything seemed possible, and its mostly rich residents indulged in a great many real-life fantasies.

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Historical Heresy

By Robin Hanson · October 9, 2011 10:00 pm · Comments (19)

Famed Historian Angus Deaton:

It is sometimes supposed … that rich people have always lived healthier and longer lives than poor people. That this supposition is generally false is vividly shown by Harris who compares the life expectancies at birth of the general population in England with that of [rich] ducal families. From the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century, there was little obvious trend in general life expectancy. For the ducal families up to 1750, life expectancy was no higher than, and sometimes lower than, the life expectancy of the general population. However, during the century after 1750, the life prospects of the aristocrats pulled away from those of the general population, and by 1850–74, they had an advantage of about 20 years. After 1850, the modern increase in life expectancy became established in the general population. Johansson tells a similar story for the British royals compared to the general population, though the royals began with an even lower life expectancy at birth. …

Men die at higher rates than women at all ages after conception. Although women around the world report higher morbidity [= sickness] than men, their mortality [= death] rates are usually around half of those of men. … Women get sick and men get dead. … Biology cannot be the whole explanation. The female advantage in life expectancy in the US is now smaller than for many years, 5.3 years in 2008 compared with 7.8 years in 1979, and it has been argued that there was little or no differential in the preindustrial world. The contemporary decline in female advantage is largely driven by cigarette smoking; women were slower to start smoking than men, and have been slower to quit. (more)

This is a provocative hypothesis, but I don’t believe it. That is, I don’t believe that in general status and gender were unrelated to mortality until the industrial revolution. Chimp females live longer than chimp males, and I’ll bet that holds for foragers too. I’ll also bet that in both chimps and foragers high status tends to correlate with lower mortality.

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Fertility Fall Myths

By Robin Hanson · September 25, 2011 3:00 pm · Comments (19)

In the latest JEL, Tim Guinnane does a nice job debunking misconceptions about the great fertility fall associated with the industrial revolution. For example, “The decline in French fertility began in the late eighteenth century,” and fertility declines were not uniform across Europe:

Mortality decline doesn’t work as an explanation for fertility declines:

Fertility in the United States declined for decades before any noticeable decline in mortality.

Nor does new contraception tech:

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, withdrawal and abstinence remained the primary approaches used by married couples. Since these technologies had been available, essentially, throughout human history, it is unlikely that the condom and similar new methods played a strong role in the fertility transition. … Methods available even prior to the fertility transition were sufficient to produce voluntary reductions of the magnitude we observe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nor do child labor laws:

Most [child-labor] measures either did not apply to agricultural work, or did so in a more relaxed way. … German restrictions did not successfully limit the role of children in production at home, which remained important throughout the nineteenth century. And in every case, the restrictions’ impact would depend both on enforcement measures and parents’ desire to evade them. Finally, if child-labor restrictions were introduced when they were mostly irrelevant, …

Nor do new social insurance programs:

Economic ties between parents and children varied dramatically across the societies in question before the fertility transition. … At the other extreme, rural laborers’ children in England would, from at least the early-modern period, leave home for good in their early to mid teens. … social-insurance systems introduced at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were usually replacing earlier schemes. Thus there is no clear “before.” … The broad patterns also do not make it likely that social insurance alone is central to the story. The two forerunners, France and the United States, were laggards in developing social insurance.

Still in the running, he thinks, are increases in urbanization, female employment, and gains to schooling:

Several studies document the existence of fertility control among small groups as early as the seventeenth century. These “forerunners” were usually urban elites or members of minority groups such as Jews. More generally, research based on either sub-national aggregates or micro data often find earlier fertility declines than in national data. The Princeton studies report earlier fertility declines in cities, for example. … Most studies find that urban fertility was lower than rural fertility in the nineteenth century, … Once the fertility transition began, fertility usually fell first in urban areas, with rural areas then catching up. …

Cross-sectional regressions for U.S. states in 1840 show that fertility is negatively correlated with measures of nonfarm labor-market opportunities. Once such proxies are introduced, land prices have no influence on fertility. … Crafts … finds a consistent, negative correlation between women’s [1911] local labor-force opportunities and marital fertility. …

Goldin and … Katz … find that the return to an additional year of [1915 Iowa] high school or college then was, for males, on the order of 11–12 percent. Mitch estimates the present value of acquiring literacy in Victorian Britain for a representative child. The present value of the cost of acquiring literacy would be about £4. At a wage premium of 5 shillings per week for literacy, the present value of the higher wages for a 35-year work life would be over £200.

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IP+ Like Barbed Wire?

By Robin Hanson · July 21, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (50)

“Without barbed wire the Plains homestead could never have been protected from the grazing herds and therefore could not have been possible as an agricultural unit.” (1931) …

English common law made livestock owners responsible for damages by roaming livestock, assigning the responsibility to fence in livestock. In contrast, the American colonies adopted legal codes that required farmers to fence out others’ livestock. Without a “lawful fence,” farmers had no formal entitlement to compensation for damages by others’ livestock. …

From 1880 to 1900, the introduction and near-universal adoption of barbed wire [in the US west] greatly reduced the cost of fences, relative to the predominant wooden fences, especially in counties with the least woodland. Over that period, … average crop productivity increased relatively by 23% in counties with the least woodland, controlling for crop-specific differences among counties and crop-specific statewide shocks. The increased productivity was entirely among crops more susceptible to damage from roaming livestock. … This increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers’ increased ability to protect their land from encroachment. (more)

Before the invention of barbed wire, it just didn’t make sense to build fences around farms in areas with little wood. Thus, it didn’t make as much sense to farm, near where others raised livestock. If you farmed, nearby livestock might just come and eat or trample your crops. In such times and places, many ranchers probably thought that “natural law” favored ranching, not farming, and favored property in animals more than property in land.

But the kinds of property and activity that makes sense depends on the available institutions and technology. Before barbed wire, it make less sense to farm, or to enforce property rights in land against roaming animals. But after barbed wire, farming and land property rights made a lot more sense.

Similarly, the kinds of innovation activities and intellectual property rights that make sense depend on available institutions and technologies. I’m happy to admit that today intellectual property (IP) is not obviously a good idea. Such property can create large “anti-commons” transaction and enforcement costs that greatly raise the cost of combining old ideas into valuable new ideas. Such costs often outweigh the social benefits of the incentives to create IP, in order to sell it. Today, it is often better to rely on other social incentives to innovate, incentives that don’t require such expensive support.

But if true, this is a sad fact about our limited abilities, not a fundamental natural law or right. You have no fundamental right to enjoy the innovations produced by others without compensating them. You owe them, at least your gratitude. Yes for now it may be best to let you take innovations freely without paying, since the alternative seems too expensive. But you have no right to expect that situation to last forever, any more than ranchers had a right to expect they could forever let their animals trample nearby farms.

Just as farmers developed barbed-wire, someday I expect IP advocates will develop better forms of intellectual property, and better technologies for marking, sharing, and enforcing such property. Using such innovations, I expect we will allow more and stronger intellectual property, and more of the world economy will focus on developing such property. Which, like barbed-wire, will mostly be a good thing.

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Why Magic + Nostalgia?

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2011 11:00 pm · Comments (27)

I don’t usually care for fantasy, though I like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Rewatching the first Harry Potter movie, I was reminded of the puzzling correlation in fiction between magic and traditional social orders. Even though the wizards in Harry Potter live among modern folks, they still prefer Victorian era garb and interior decoration. More generally, stories with magic tend to be nostalgic – containing and accepting older social orders. Why?

I went looking for clues and found:

The core thing about fantasy tales is that, after the adventure is done and the bad guys are defeated… the social order stays the same. It may be the natural genre … but should we be proud of that? Science fiction, in sharp contrast, considers the possibility of learning and change. (more) Continue reading "Why Magic + Nostalgia?" »

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Self-Indulgence Stinks

By Robin Hanson · March 7, 2011 1:00 pm · Comments (41)

As industry has made humans rich, we have become more self-indulgent. But while we might each prefer to be self-indulgent, we are less thrilled by the self-indulgence of those around us. For example, Kay Hymowitz on her book, “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys”:

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. …

What has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn’t bring out the best in men. … “A guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends. … They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.” …

Large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. … We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere. … But it seems that men didn’t much like the arrangement either. … They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. … What explains this puerile shallowness? … The qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete. … Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven.

This makes sense, except that Hymowitz seems to unfairly exempt women from criticism:

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers, and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. … They are more likely than men to be in grad school. … In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

And why exactly should society celebrate women’s college GPAs more than men’s high PlayStation scores? After all, college is mostly a wasteful signaling game. And men still out-earn women on average at all ages, mostly because women tend to choose self-fulfilling majors and careers over high paying ones. So those higher fem GPAs are more a sign of self-indulgence than social contribution, at least if we measure contribution by income.

And even if women did earn more, are folks devoted to working to pay for high fashion or travel really any less self-indulgent than those who hone guitar skills? Let’s not forget that our vast fall in fertility seems due more to the changing preferences of women (vs. men) for a fun life unencumbered by kids.

This needn’t be a gender issue. Can’t we just all admit that we’ve all become more self-indulgent as we’ve grown rich, and that, like our icky odors, our own self-indulgence smells better than that of others?

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