We have no counterexamples or causal experiments. We have at best guesses at why things happened when they did, or at all.
I think it’s fascinating that the forager → farmer → industrial → modern “progression” has included some return to forager values, and some brand-new directions that probably just wouldn’t work without the level of wealth and automation we’ve managed. I literally can not predict the future direction at any distance—it seems likely that it’s mostly-consistent over a single generation, but can change pretty radically over 3-4. In EITHER direction. Or in both directions—some attitudes and institutions become stronger, some become weaker, and some of each are considered “good” or “bad” by various constituencies.
> We have no counterexamples or causal experiments.
That is the nature of politics / economics / culture. There are no ways to conduct meaningful experiments on policies, but we still need to make policy decisions, so we need to have other ways to build causal models of the world. There’s a bunch of literature around how to do that. Daron Acemoglu won the 2024 nobel prize in economics for innovating some of these methods (specifically in the context of “institutional selection”)
> the forager → farmer → industrial → modern “progression” has included some return to forager values, and some brand-new directions that probably just wouldn’t work without the level of wealth and automation we’ve managed.
This is a really interesting point, can you expand on it more?
We have no counterexamples or causal experiments. We have at best guesses at why things happened when they did, or at all.
I think it’s fascinating that the forager → farmer → industrial → modern “progression” has included some return to forager values, and some brand-new directions that probably just wouldn’t work without the level of wealth and automation we’ve managed. I literally can not predict the future direction at any distance—it seems likely that it’s mostly-consistent over a single generation, but can change pretty radically over 3-4. In EITHER direction. Or in both directions—some attitudes and institutions become stronger, some become weaker, and some of each are considered “good” or “bad” by various constituencies.
> We have no counterexamples or causal experiments.
That is the nature of politics / economics / culture. There are no ways to conduct meaningful experiments on policies, but we still need to make policy decisions, so we need to have other ways to build causal models of the world. There’s a bunch of literature around how to do that. Daron Acemoglu won the 2024 nobel prize in economics for innovating some of these methods (specifically in the context of “institutional selection”)
> the forager → farmer → industrial → modern “progression” has included some return to forager values, and some brand-new directions that probably just wouldn’t work without the level of wealth and automation we’ve managed.
This is a really interesting point, can you expand on it more?