Another essay that I like is Will Wilkinson’s Public Policy After Utopia; it’s technically more “politics” than “life advice”, but to the extent that people want to devote their lives to pushing society in a better direction, it seems important:
Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next?
The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. [...]
The fact that all our evidence about how social systems actually work comes from formerly or presently existing systems is a huge problem for anyone committed to a radically revisionary ideal of the morally best society. The further a possible system is from a historical system, and thus from our base of evidence about how social systems function, the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would work if it were realized. And the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would actually work, the more likely we are to be mistaken that it is more free, or more equal, or more socially just than other systems, possible or actual.
Indeed, there’s basically no way to rationally justify the belief that, say, “anarcho-capitalism” ranks better in terms of libertarian freedom than “Canada 2017,” or the belief that “economic democracy” ranks better in terms of socialist equality than “Canada 2017.” [...]
You may think you can imagine how anarcho-capitalism or economic democracy would work, but you can’t. You’re really just guessing—extrapolating way beyond your evidence. You can’t just stipulate that it works the way you want it to work. Rationally speaking, you probably shouldn’t even suspect that your favorite system comes out better than an actual system. Rationally speaking, your favorite probably shouldn’t be your favorite. Utopia is a guess. [...]
… expert predictions about the the likely effects of changing a single policy tend to be pretty bad. I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve followed the academic literature about the minimum wage for almost twenty years, and I’m an experienced, professional policy analyst, so I’ve got a weak claim to expertise in the subject. What do I have to show for that? Not much, really. I’ve got strong intuitions about the likely effects of raising minimum wages in various contexts. But all I really know is that the context matters a great deal, that a lot of interrelated factors affect the dynamics of low-wage labor markets, and that I can’t say in advance which margin will adjust when the wage floor is raised. Indeed, whether we should expect increases in the minimum wage to hurt or help low-wage workers is a question Nobel Prize-winning economists disagree about. Labor markets are complicated! Well, the comprehensive political economies of nation-states are vastly more complicated. And that means that our predictions about the outcome of radically changing the entire system are unlikely to be better than random. [...]
The death of ideal theory implies a non-ideological, empirical, comparative approach to political analysis. That doesn’t mean giving up on, say, the value of freedom. I think I’m more libertarian—more committed to value of liberty—than I’ve ever been. But that doesn’t mean being committed to an eschatology of liberty, a picture of an ideally free society, or a libertarian utopia. We’re not in a position to know what that looks like. The best we can do is to go ahead and try to rank social systems in terms of the values we care about, and then see what we can learn. The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index is one such useful measurement attempt. What do we see? [...]
Every highlighted country is some version of the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state. Evidently, this general regime type is good for freedom. Indeed, it is likely the best we have ever done in terms of freedom.
Moreover, Denmark (#5), Finland (#9), and the Netherlands (#10) are among the world’s “biggest” governments, in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP. The “economic freedom” side of the index, which embodies a distinctly libertarian conception of economic liberty, hurts their ratings pretty significantly. Still, according to a libertarian Human Freedom Index, some of the freest places in on Earth have some of the “biggest” governments. That’s unexpected. [...]
Though libertarianism is of personal interest to me, I want to emphasize again that my larger point has nothing to do with libertarianism. The same lesson applies to alt-right ethno-nationalists dazzled by a fanciful picture of a homogenous, solidaristic ethno-state. The same lesson applies to progressives and socialists in the grip of utopian pictures of egalitarian social justice. Of course, nobody knows what an ideally equal society would look like. If we stick to the data we do have, and inspect the top ranks of the Social Progress Index, which is based on progressive assumptions about basic needs, the conditions for individual health, well-being, and opportunity, you’ll mostly find the same countries that populate the Freedom Index’s leaderboard. [...]
The overlap is striking. And this highlights some of the pathologies of ideal theory: irrational polarization and the narcissism of small differences. [...]
For me, the death of ideal theory has meant adopting a non-speculative, non-utopian perspective on freedom-enhancing institutions. If you know that you can’t know in advance what the freest social system looks will look like, you’re unlikely to see evidence that suggests that policy A (social insurance, e.g.) is freedom-enhancing, or that policy B (heroin legalization, e.g.) isn’t, as threats to your identity as a freedom lover. Uncertainty about the details of the freest feasible social scheme opens you up to looking at evidence in a genuinely curious, non-biased way. And it frees you from the anxiety that genuine experts, people with merited epistemic authority, will say things you don’t want to hear. This in turn frees you from the urge to wage quixotic campaigns against the authority of legitimate experts. You can start acting like a rational person! You can simply defer to the consensus of experts on empirical questions, or accept that you bear an extraordinary burden of proof when you disagree.
What we need are folks who are passionate about freedom, or social justice (or what have you) who actively seek solutions to domination and injustice, but who also don’t think they already know exactly what ideal liberation or social justice look like, and are therefore motivated to identify our real alternatives and to evaluate them objectively. The space of possibility is infinite, and it takes energy and enthusiasm to want to explore it.
Another essay that I like is Will Wilkinson’s Public Policy After Utopia; it’s technically more “politics” than “life advice”, but to the extent that people want to devote their lives to pushing society in a better direction, it seems important: