But imo it doesn’t pass the smell test. At least as *major* explanatory factor.
Because TODAY the people who are on average more anti-abundance are the more highly educated, on average less anti-immigrant left.
Where - populist and nationalist and more positive on tariffs and international trade restrictions notwithstanding - the on average more anti-immigrant right is generally much more favorably inclined towards economic progress. In both its pre- and post-Trump versions.
Of course, my argument is that the lower middle class writ large isn’t as racist and anti-immigrant as elites (left, center and right) portray them, so much as they are deeply anti-*illegal immigration*.
There is, of course, a notable minority who are indeed racist and anti-immigrant, period, but that tail is not wagging the dog on the right (again, despite leftist media claims to the contrary).
The much simpler, more logical answer is that the anti-progress movement has come from leftist socialism/Marxism/environmentalism (the last where so many of the leftist socialists and Marxists went in the 70s and 80s and 90s as it was clear that neoliberalism / capitalism had won on the pure economic front), which has more and more taken over the culture, via its friends in academia, the media and Hollywood (and perversely more recently, in Big Tech).
Open socialism has only shown up in the mainstream U.S. left since 2016, but the environmental movement you cite as a key source was where leftist energy was then, but is no longer exclusively the source of anti-abundance energy on the left.
IMO unlike the story that elites prefer to tell, populist nationalism and even anti-immigrant sentiment are at most an adjunct to the anti-abundance, anti-progress situation we have in the U.S.
The major truth is that the U.S. left and its leadership have abandoned abundance and economic progress. Narratives that don’t address that truth head-on are unlikely to succeed.
And seem to me more like the case of the person who lost his keys in the unlit dung field preferring to look for them in the unlit parking lot, because it is “less icky” to be looking over there, while the idea of looking in their own dung field is unseemly.
Isn't there a difference between decades when immigrants are mainly legal or illegal? And even more salient: isn't there a difference between decades when most immigrants are net taxpayers instead of net tax consumers?
So your graph is based on measurements that count apples and oranges together.
Also, many people think the 70s and 80s were less blighted decades than the 90s or 2000s. So looking at your graph, they would see a golden age in the low immigration decades.
To be clear, leaving aside the Biden mass invitation to and importation of illegal immigrants, where the reality is far less clear, most immigrants - including even illegal immigrants, in toto - have not in fact been net consumers of taxpayer cash.
Illegal immigrants with children might be the exception.
But like you I do agree that illegal immigration is the highly problematic part.
Whatever is happening is a bit more complicated then that graph would imply. The backlash started in the 1970s. But the stampede into wall street and investment banking started in the early 1980s. So people didn't become materially complacent or complacent about money. Instead we are seeing the rise of the middle class billionaire. People want money but not neccasarily what money can buy.
I don't think immigration has a lot to do with it. It's more about whether economic growth and innovation have been making people's lives better or worse on the balance. The industrial revolution increased the supply of goods, but most people led more miserable lives until political violence and protest forced the ruling class to share some of the goodies. 20th century industrialization produced even more, but its centralization, political power, militarization, pollution and the like produced new problems that were addressed somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s. Now we have the internet and AI revolutions that offer so much but produce wretched, demanding jobs and crappy products with no user recourse.
Productivity may have increased, but very little of it led to improved living conditions. GDP per capita may have increased by a factor of three since the 1980s, but the value of an hour of labor in those terms dropped to one third. You have to be dumb, blind and stupid to think that the AI being rammed down one's throat at work is going to get one an iota of a better life.
It was one thing when Prometheus gave man fire, but it was another when he started setting the world afire.
30 per cent of Australians were born overseas and lots more have at least one overseas born parent. THe environmental movement is at least as strong here as in the US, and we are much keener on safetyism (gun laws, road safety, I think also OSHA). But this isn't really felt as an anti-tech backlash. We don't produce much new technology but (at least until AI) we were always keen to adopt it.
Thanks for noting the coincidental timing of Earth Day. You're a Californian, though, so maybe, instead of positing it as a near non sequitur you could try remembering some of what actually inspired it: you know, those images of oil covered sea gulls in Santa Barbara a couple years earlier ? Or maybe the false promise of triumph in Vietnam put forth by that Ford Corp wunderkind McNamara? On a funnier leve perhaps one might allow for the Edsel and the Corvair making solid contributions to that unfortunate groundswell of Luddite sentiment as well. But, yeah, kinda puzzling, really. Fortunately the widespread adoption of planned obsolescence has helped keep those manufacturers who spread out from the USA in search of cheaper labor afloat. Where would Century 21 be without it?
I think the crime/white flight wave of 1960-90, amplified by new media that publicized it heavily (i.e. television) might be relevant. If neighborhood change creates a risk of increased random violence and neighborhood collapse, that will create a culture of safetyism and NIMBYism.
Another take: the broad political trends don’t matter.
No decade has a usual amount of smart people, or ambitious, or more or less entrepreneurial. Lots of fluctuation but not so much as to cause wild swings in net progress activity.
Instead you have the dual challenges of real physical limits and regularity inhibition.
Why the 1970s? That is when the burden that started in the 30s and accelerated in to 40s with the total war having basically a centrally planned economy finally caught up. Prior eras had various laws but didn’t accumulate the whole apparatus of the administrative state. The key point I’m making is that the burden is cumulative. Some regulation helps, too much leads to either complete distinction or strong black markets. But just enough, slows things down. Not enough to stop general growth but enough to stop ambitious projects without clear, near term ROI. This has happened everywhere. Even in less regulated markets it has been difficult to build up capital structures to finance long term, high risk ventures. Especially when lower risk options are available with decent returns.
You couple this with the difficulties in smaller groups making deep tech innovations. Only in the past decade has computer simulation and additive manufacturing made it once again feasible. Our options prior have mostly been in electronics, software and pharmaceuticals. Areas with much more innovation that they often get credit. Even if you compare something like supersonic passenger jets to the A320, it isn’t clear to me that building the logistics and technical innovations needed to fly 100x more people at 1/10 the cost is all that less innovative. But sure they aren’t flying in suborbital rockets or personal drone taxis. But that seems to be valuing the different over improvement as a measure of progress. We should try to quantify each to compare.
One example, I’ve heard many times, that I think sums up my view: “where is my flying car?” Inventors have actually built a variety of types of flying cars! But the problems all have been practical. Costs to buy and operate. Skills require to pilot. Infrastructure. Convenience. A more Wild West environment might have brought a few of these to market- but they wouldn’t have been very successful. Likewise and more involved state could have sponsored research and subsided them. But that would have had high costs, especially relative to things like buses or even just cars with our existing oil and road subsidies. But now that we do have more practical approaches, such as drone based taxis with computerized navigation, something not feasible 20 or 40 years ago, china is allowing trials and the US is not yet. Though we are with self driving cars, with much lobbying to craft custom rules. Again the legal environment will allow for the innovation it just acts as a rate limiter, which compounds any existing technical limits which makes it hard to boostrap a new approach
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. The big problems are that they're noisy, need special spots to land, and have to stay well away from each other.
Interesting story.
But imo it doesn’t pass the smell test. At least as *major* explanatory factor.
Because TODAY the people who are on average more anti-abundance are the more highly educated, on average less anti-immigrant left.
Where - populist and nationalist and more positive on tariffs and international trade restrictions notwithstanding - the on average more anti-immigrant right is generally much more favorably inclined towards economic progress. In both its pre- and post-Trump versions.
Of course, my argument is that the lower middle class writ large isn’t as racist and anti-immigrant as elites (left, center and right) portray them, so much as they are deeply anti-*illegal immigration*.
There is, of course, a notable minority who are indeed racist and anti-immigrant, period, but that tail is not wagging the dog on the right (again, despite leftist media claims to the contrary).
The much simpler, more logical answer is that the anti-progress movement has come from leftist socialism/Marxism/environmentalism (the last where so many of the leftist socialists and Marxists went in the 70s and 80s and 90s as it was clear that neoliberalism / capitalism had won on the pure economic front), which has more and more taken over the culture, via its friends in academia, the media and Hollywood (and perversely more recently, in Big Tech).
Open socialism has only shown up in the mainstream U.S. left since 2016, but the environmental movement you cite as a key source was where leftist energy was then, but is no longer exclusively the source of anti-abundance energy on the left.
IMO unlike the story that elites prefer to tell, populist nationalism and even anti-immigrant sentiment are at most an adjunct to the anti-abundance, anti-progress situation we have in the U.S.
The major truth is that the U.S. left and its leadership have abandoned abundance and economic progress. Narratives that don’t address that truth head-on are unlikely to succeed.
And seem to me more like the case of the person who lost his keys in the unlit dung field preferring to look for them in the unlit parking lot, because it is “less icky” to be looking over there, while the idea of looking in their own dung field is unseemly.
Isn't there a difference between decades when immigrants are mainly legal or illegal? And even more salient: isn't there a difference between decades when most immigrants are net taxpayers instead of net tax consumers?
So your graph is based on measurements that count apples and oranges together.
Also, many people think the 70s and 80s were less blighted decades than the 90s or 2000s. So looking at your graph, they would see a golden age in the low immigration decades.
To be clear, leaving aside the Biden mass invitation to and importation of illegal immigrants, where the reality is far less clear, most immigrants - including even illegal immigrants, in toto - have not in fact been net consumers of taxpayer cash.
Illegal immigrants with children might be the exception.
But like you I do agree that illegal immigration is the highly problematic part.
Whatever is happening is a bit more complicated then that graph would imply. The backlash started in the 1970s. But the stampede into wall street and investment banking started in the early 1980s. So people didn't become materially complacent or complacent about money. Instead we are seeing the rise of the middle class billionaire. People want money but not neccasarily what money can buy.
I don't think immigration has a lot to do with it. It's more about whether economic growth and innovation have been making people's lives better or worse on the balance. The industrial revolution increased the supply of goods, but most people led more miserable lives until political violence and protest forced the ruling class to share some of the goodies. 20th century industrialization produced even more, but its centralization, political power, militarization, pollution and the like produced new problems that were addressed somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s. Now we have the internet and AI revolutions that offer so much but produce wretched, demanding jobs and crappy products with no user recourse.
Productivity may have increased, but very little of it led to improved living conditions. GDP per capita may have increased by a factor of three since the 1980s, but the value of an hour of labor in those terms dropped to one third. You have to be dumb, blind and stupid to think that the AI being rammed down one's throat at work is going to get one an iota of a better life.
It was one thing when Prometheus gave man fire, but it was another when he started setting the world afire.
30 per cent of Australians were born overseas and lots more have at least one overseas born parent. THe environmental movement is at least as strong here as in the US, and we are much keener on safetyism (gun laws, road safety, I think also OSHA). But this isn't really felt as an anti-tech backlash. We don't produce much new technology but (at least until AI) we were always keen to adopt it.
Thanks for noting the coincidental timing of Earth Day. You're a Californian, though, so maybe, instead of positing it as a near non sequitur you could try remembering some of what actually inspired it: you know, those images of oil covered sea gulls in Santa Barbara a couple years earlier ? Or maybe the false promise of triumph in Vietnam put forth by that Ford Corp wunderkind McNamara? On a funnier leve perhaps one might allow for the Edsel and the Corvair making solid contributions to that unfortunate groundswell of Luddite sentiment as well. But, yeah, kinda puzzling, really. Fortunately the widespread adoption of planned obsolescence has helped keep those manufacturers who spread out from the USA in search of cheaper labor afloat. Where would Century 21 be without it?
I think the crime/white flight wave of 1960-90, amplified by new media that publicized it heavily (i.e. television) might be relevant. If neighborhood change creates a risk of increased random violence and neighborhood collapse, that will create a culture of safetyism and NIMBYism.
Another take: the broad political trends don’t matter.
No decade has a usual amount of smart people, or ambitious, or more or less entrepreneurial. Lots of fluctuation but not so much as to cause wild swings in net progress activity.
Instead you have the dual challenges of real physical limits and regularity inhibition.
Why the 1970s? That is when the burden that started in the 30s and accelerated in to 40s with the total war having basically a centrally planned economy finally caught up. Prior eras had various laws but didn’t accumulate the whole apparatus of the administrative state. The key point I’m making is that the burden is cumulative. Some regulation helps, too much leads to either complete distinction or strong black markets. But just enough, slows things down. Not enough to stop general growth but enough to stop ambitious projects without clear, near term ROI. This has happened everywhere. Even in less regulated markets it has been difficult to build up capital structures to finance long term, high risk ventures. Especially when lower risk options are available with decent returns.
You couple this with the difficulties in smaller groups making deep tech innovations. Only in the past decade has computer simulation and additive manufacturing made it once again feasible. Our options prior have mostly been in electronics, software and pharmaceuticals. Areas with much more innovation that they often get credit. Even if you compare something like supersonic passenger jets to the A320, it isn’t clear to me that building the logistics and technical innovations needed to fly 100x more people at 1/10 the cost is all that less innovative. But sure they aren’t flying in suborbital rockets or personal drone taxis. But that seems to be valuing the different over improvement as a measure of progress. We should try to quantify each to compare.
One example, I’ve heard many times, that I think sums up my view: “where is my flying car?” Inventors have actually built a variety of types of flying cars! But the problems all have been practical. Costs to buy and operate. Skills require to pilot. Infrastructure. Convenience. A more Wild West environment might have brought a few of these to market- but they wouldn’t have been very successful. Likewise and more involved state could have sponsored research and subsided them. But that would have had high costs, especially relative to things like buses or even just cars with our existing oil and road subsidies. But now that we do have more practical approaches, such as drone based taxis with computerized navigation, something not feasible 20 or 40 years ago, china is allowing trials and the US is not yet. Though we are with self driving cars, with much lobbying to craft custom rules. Again the legal environment will allow for the innovation it just acts as a rate limiter, which compounds any existing technical limits which makes it hard to boostrap a new approach
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. The big problems are that they're noisy, need special spots to land, and have to stay well away from each other.