What determines our visions of the future, and how those visions change over time? How is politics shaped by conflicting visions of the future? What did the old mid-century vision of a Jetsons-style future get wrong — and what did it get right that we are now struggling to rediscover? What are the roots of technological pessimism, and how can we encourage the growth of a culture that valorizes scientific and technological advance? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, author Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Enemies, The Fabric of Civilization, and more) joins the Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindsey to discuss the ongoing and ever-changing struggle between the forces and champions of dynamism and progress and those that favor the status quo or an imagined past.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Welcome to The Permanent Problem podcast. I’m your host, Brink Lindsey, a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. Each episode, we take a deep dive into the messy and uncertain transition from mass affluence to mass flourishing, exploring what I call capitalism’s triple crisis and the potential for rising above it.
My guest today on The Permanent Problem is the author and my longtime friend, Virginia Postrel. You can read her these days on her “Virginia’s Newsletter” Substack, and she’s a contributor at the worthy new publication Works in Progress. She’s the author of several excellent books, including most recently The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Virginia, thanks for joining me.
Virginia Postrel: Great to be with you.
Lindsey: So I like to start off these interviews by getting into a little bit of biographical detail, but this time there are so many other things I want to discuss with you. I’m going to boil this section of the interview down to one question.
Postrel: Okay.
Lindsey: Something not everybody knows about you is that you, like I, were born and raised in the South. You were born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina. I come from Tallahassee, Florida. But both of us left the Southeast to go to school and never went back. Neither of us has much of a Southern accent anymore. But I’m guessing there’s still some stamp of Dixie on you. So tell me what, if anything, does your Southernness explain about you as a writer and a thinker?
Postrel: Yeah. So, first of all, minor correction. I actually was raised in Greenville, but I was born in Asheville, North Carolina.
Lindsey: Okay.
Postrel: We moved around a lot before I was three, all in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. But I think two things at least. One is that I think it does make me more conscious of the importance of dynamism and of growth and of development out of poverty. I very much am a product of the New South. My family’s been into the New South ever since there was a New South. It goes back to people who settled in Atlanta after the Civil War and were part of bringing that city up to prominence.
And so, that’s one part of it. I don’t buy into this argument that back in the ’50s everything was wonderful. I don’t even believe that back in the ’50s, everything was wonderful for white working-class men, because where I come from, it’s true that if you were Black or a woman, there were a lot fewer opportunities for you. But even if you were a white working-class man, that meant you worked in a textile mill, and those were, as to play on what Bill Clinton used to say, bad jobs at bad wages. So there’s that aspect.
Then the other thing is I was born in 1960 and the civil rights movement was a big part of my early years. My parents, while they were anything but activists, were supportive of the civil rights movement when that was actually a minority view among their peers.
Lindsey: Sure.
Postrel: And so, that was part of my consciousness growing up, that things could change and change radically and for the better.
Lindsey: Good. So we’ve known each other for 30-plus years now. When we met, you were the editor of Reason, the libertarian opinion magazine, and I was a young lawyer doing international trade regulation who did not want to be a lawyer forever. So on nights and weekends, I was writing policy pieces for op-ed pages and opinion magazines. In the fall of 1990, I contacted you. I don’t know how. I must’ve written you a letter, and then you called me back, and 1 successfully pitched to you on a book review of Agents of Influence by Pat Choate.
Postrel: Yeah. Actually I remember this vividly because it was so unusual. In fact, it’s the only example of this that I can think of. You sent in an article, a person none of us had ever heard of, and it was fantastic. Now it’s not the first time that Reason ever accepted an unsolicited article. That happened many times in my years there, both when I was editor and before, but usually they were articles that had a kernel of something and they needed a lot of work.
But you just sent this book review and over the transom, and it … I mean I don’t know if we changed anything. It was beautiful. And of course, because you were a lawyer at the time, it was even beautifully typed.
Lindsey: So this was at the height of protectionism and Japanophobia, and the book was about how Japan’s economic takeover of our country was being facilitated by a fifth column of lawyers and lobbyists. So that was the first of many pieces I wrote for Reason when you ran the shop there. I became a contributing editor and we became friends and have stayed in contact over the years.
We might have met a decade earlier. I was two years behind you at Princeton. So we were on campus together for a couple of years. But I do not believe our paths ever crossed there.
There are so many questions I could ask you and so many things we could talk about, but it seems like a good way to get the ball rolling is to talk about the future, the visions of the future that were dominant in the culture and how they change over time, how the dominant vision from our childhood collapsed in fairly short order, how the future today looks very different from when you wrote a book about the future a quarter century ago.
So your first book, which came out in 1998, was called The Future in Its Enemies. It’s about how politics is shaped by conflicting visions of the future. In your analysis, a “dynamist” vision, on the one hand, that prioritizes learning and growth and, thus, incessant and often unpredictable change, versus a “stasist” vision, from stasis, that prioritizes stability and control.
In your book, stasism comes in two varieties, traditionalist, which longs for the good old days and resists change generally, and technocratic, which wants change carefully directed and managed from the top down.
So your book starts off with a description of the late ’90s’ overhaul of Tomorrowland in Disneyland, away from the mid-century Jetsons space-age chic of all glass and steel and chrome. That vision had two rather glaring omissions. There was no place for nature in it and there was no place for the past in it. By contrast, the new Tomorrowland had lots of greenery and lots of neo-Victorian steam punk design accents.
In the book, you’re presenting this update of the future as a salutary one, one more accommodating of pluralism and diversity, more of a rambling English garden and less of a carefully manicured, soulless French one. But in recent years, we’ve seen a wave of renewed longing for the old mid-century ideal, sparked, I think, by Peter Thiel’s line, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” J. Storrs Hall’s book, Where’s My Flying Car? caused a stir. From there, there’s been this growing movement around “progress studies” or an “abundance agenda.”
But you wrote a recent essay called “Stop the Jetsons Nostalgia,” which points out the limitations of the old mid-century conception of the future, what you might call progress glamour. So spell out that critique, but, if you can, give the devil its due as well. Were there positive features of that vision that we’re missing today?
Postrel Right, yeah. So, first of all, let me preface this by saying that for the most part I see the progress movement or whatever you want to call it as being something I’m allied with. But I think partly because they’re younger, mostly because of their cultural backgrounds, they get some certain things badly wrong that are likely to take us off the rails. I’m in the process of writing a piece for Works in Progress about progress glamour, so some of this will be from that.
So if you go back to the 20th century, the glamour of progress, it was the future, the world of tomorrow, of the 1939 World’s Fair, going forward into the mid to late ’60s. I think there were three different groups that that notion of the future as something glamorous appeal to.
One, and the most important and numerous one, was just the everyday person, the everyday person who was living on a farm or in a crowded city, who wanted modern conveniences, as they were called, who wanted an escape from drudgery. Glamour is … Because I wrote another book called The Power of Glamour, which is about glamour as a form of rhetoric, glamour is always promising some sort of escape and transformation.
So in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, there was a huge constituency of people who could see the world getting better and could see new kinds of luxuries that got cheaper over time as opposed to luxuries like diamonds and country houses that were dependent on scarcity, and could picture themselves in a different better life in the future. And so, that gives you this mass grassroots of people. Those are not the most culturally influential or politically powerful people, but they’re the most numerous.
The second group, which is the most culturally influential and politically powerful, are people whose vision of the future is clean and orderly. It’s the opposite of the jumbled cities and slums. This is what you see in a lot of the visual depictions of the glorious future. It’s freeways that are smoothly flowing, it’s streamlined trains, it’s high rise buildings. Everything is white, gleaming. And there’s that notion that these are people who, in a perfect world, would want to start from scratch. They want to redesign the world along rational lines. These are some of the ancestors of the technocrats I write about in The Future and Its Enemies.
Then the third group are people who take the kind of glamour that used to be associated with explorers or cowboys, pioneers on the western frontier. I think of it as Ulysses glamour – Ulysses, the Tennyson Ulysses, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It’s this almost Victorian notion of glamour. I mean these people project that onto now astronauts and scientists, and that’s the nerds. I mean I would put myself in this group as a child.
Lindsey: I bet. It came out of the Victorian imagination of Jules Verne and people like that, right?
Postrel: Well, it comes out of a general Victorian … I mean if you want to do a whole analysis, you’re going to get into ideas about colonialism and stuff. But it’s this notion of exploration and discovery and boldness and great ventures. It is Promethean to use the term.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: So what happens by the late 1960s is you get the counterculture. The counterculture, I know you’ve written about it as like why did the … It’s perfectly rational that we became more concerned about the environment because we were richer and that follows, but it took this anti-Promethean turn, and it took an anti-Promethean turn because the environmental component was only one small component of a broader critique, which was against technocracy, a word that is used a lot in The Makings of a Counter Culture, a book that was the first one to point-
Lindsey: I think it’s in the subtitle, right?
Postrel: Yeah, yeah. It’s in the subtitle. It’s a rebellion against rationality to western science, and it’s very-
Lindsey: Yeah. Hippie romanticism, right?
Postrel: Yeah, it’s a version of romanticism. It seems a lot like Rousseau, but it has this twist, because this is a product of affluence. These are the people, these are the kids who grew up in the world of tomorrow. All the things that their parents longed for, they take for granted. So the things that used to be exciting about the future are just like life and seemed banal and in some cases coercive, but sort of repellent.
I think … I always talk about that the scene that captures what was going on is not in some science fiction movie. It is in the number one box office hit of 1967, which also won a lot of Oscars and made Dustin Hoffman a star, and that is The Graduate. So Dustin Hoffman plays this new college graduate, probably a Berkeley graduate, maybe UCLA. It’s definitely a California setting. He’s very promising, but he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.
There’s this scene where his parents are throwing him a graduation party and they’re living in this modern house. They have a pool. It’s Tomorrowland. It’s a glamorous future.
This guy, one of their friends comes up to him and he says, “I have something really important to tell you,” and they have to go out by the pool where it’s quiet so he can hear. He says, “I have one word to tell you.” He’s like, “What’s that?” He says, “Plastics.” Ben is like, “What? I’m sorry? Pardon me?” and he says, “Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.”
To the adult giving him the advice, first of all, just the idea of having a successful, prosperous career is appealing. Secondly, plastics are high tech and cool to this guy, whereas to the younger person, it sounds like corporate drudgery, and plastic is a synonym for fake. It’s just repellent and it’s also funny. I mean to the audience, it’s funny. And so, I think you see there the shift. It’s not a-
Lindsey: Yeah. I wrote about how you could see the shift two years before in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, with Charlie’s subversive decision to get a live tree instead of an artificial tree. That turned out to be more in line with the true meaning of Christmas.
Postrel: Right. I thought that was a brilliant observation, although I think that that is actually harkening back, because Charles Schulz has a lot of Christian concepts in his comic strips. That always reminded me of my father not only wanted a real Christmas tree when they became available, he wanted one that he could then plant in the yard.
Lindsey: Okay.
Postrel: And so, that’s what we had when I was a kid, because my dad really loved trees. So, anyway, the bottom line is I think … Oh, another piece of the technocrat thing, which is very important. When I say the counterculture was a rebellion against that, it wasn’t just the counterculture. Another hugely important thing which united people on the left, like the socialist sociologist Herbert Gans with libertarians like Martin Anderson, who many years later would go on to serve in the Reagan administration, was the appalling conduct of urban renewal, where whole neighborhoods were seized under eminent domain and bulldozed and turned into, I mean I hate to say it, at best, high-rise public housing, which didn’t age well.
Lindsey: Often converted into horrible hell holes.
Postrel: Yes, exactly. But often into brutalist civic plazas where no one went except for the office workers who worked for the city. It was making the cities look like the pictures. They look like the Futurama at the World’s Fair, except at the Futurama, it’s like an airplane view. It’s a God’s eye view. It’s not a street view. When you take those pictures, those things that look good in the architectural drawings, to people who are longing for cities that are clean and well-kept, and you turn them into real buildings and you drive out the neighborhood-
Lindsey: And you don’t see any kind of human scale at all.
Postrel: Yeah, and you drive out the history and life, it creates a backlash. That backlash took a lot of forms, but we’re living with it today, because one thing that happened was that once people finally woke up to the idea that this was a bad idea, they didn’t just stop doing urban renewal. They started putting in lots and lots of procedural-
Lindsey: Yeah, let’s not build anything anymore.
Postrel: … hearings and veto, and environmental impact statements where environmental impact is very distant from pouring toxins in the river. It’s more like, “Oh, this might cast a shadow on my single-family home,” or whatever. And even if you lost, it was a delay. And so, that’s how we get to this can’t-building-anything world.
Lindsey: Yeah, we veered from the Scylla of Robert Moses to the Charybdis of NIMBYism.
Postrel: NIMBYism, yeah. So I think the impulse … I mean there’s a lot going on in this loose progress movement, but I think a lot of it comes from the desire to do things without being told that you can’t. I’m very sympathetic to that desire, and that’s what The Future and Its Enemies is about, as long as the price signals and people’s preferences are in there and the feedback is in there, all those things, because what we don’t want is the return to the Robert Moses world and-
Lindsey: Right. Yeah. I mean I think that the backlash in the ’60s and ’70s against technology and progress was fairly massively overdetermined. I mean, in high culture, it has deeper roots. It goes all the way back to trench warfare in World War I, and then the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear war. I feel like the-
Postrel: What’s interesting, though, is we don’t get in the US the same backlash that occurred in Europe in the ’20s.
Lindsey: Right, because we didn’t live through trench warfare, right?
Postrel: Exactly. Exactly.
Lindsey: So it’s understandable, but still something was lost. There is a time-boundness to visions of the future. What one generation will find captivating about possibilities in the future is going to depend upon its current conditions. You talk about living in cramped, squalid cities, envisioning clean, open vistas, and so forth. But the idea that once you get rich, you just stop caring about technological progress at all, it becomes boring and cringe or sinister and exploitative and harmful. That didn’t have to happen. If that’s inevitable, then progress is self-subverting, right, and it’s unsustainable?
Postrel: Right. So I don’t think that happened because … Exactly, because people got rich. I think they ceased to long for the things that their parents longed for because they were rich, because they already had those things. The counterculture wasn’t just about technology. It was about free love and the altered states of consciousness and different clothes and long hair. There’s a lot of other things about it and-
Lindsey: Completely alternative paradigm-
Postrel: Right. Stewart Brand is part of the counterculture, and he’s a wonderful pro-future person. Steve Jobs is part of the counterculture. In fact, the whole idea of personal computing comes out of the counterculture. But a lot of what people were rebelling against was bigness and control, which manifested itself in a lot of ways. Of course some things, you have to have large organizations in order to accomplish them.
And so, I mean way back in the ’80s, and from ’84 to ’86, I worked for Inc. Magazine, which was a small business magazine, which celebrated its fifth anniversary while I was there. So it was a relatively new thing. The whole idea of entrepreneurship by the late ’70s was a glamorous, sexy idea, partly out of the countercultural longings for smaller, easier to understand –
Lindsey: Just look at the 1984 Macintosh commercial.
Postrel: Yeah, right.
Lindsey: It’s rebelling against the man, rebelling against the establishment and the system.
Postrel: Right. Then of course I didn’t even mention the Vietnam War, which is of course a major technocratic enterprise. Robert McNamara is like the ultimate technocrat.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: So there’s a lot of things going on there. I also think that one thing that disturbs me about the current progress, the nostalgic version of progress, is that it gets certain things just factually incorrect. So the idea that in the ’50s and ’60s, we had … In popular culture, science and technology were portrayed positively. Well, I can point to some enduring examples of that. There is in 1968 2001 Space Odyssey. There is the very short-lived Star Trek series. But what was much more common were lots of horror movies about radiation run amuck, or other kinds of science run amuck. So there’s Them!, giant ants-
Lindsey: Yeah, Godzilla.
Postrel: There’s Forbidden Planet, which is a great movie, but Monsters of the Id. The problem is not the technology exactly. The problem is the people and what’s in them … But there are lots and lots of these kinds of things, and scientists are portrayed as weird and important, but you wouldn’t want to be one or marry one. I mean there’s actually a study that Margaret Mead and another … I forget who, but another social scientist did of Americans’ attitudes towards scientists.
That’s the bottom line. They ask people’s attitudes towards scientists, and they’re just sort of like, “Well, without science, we would be living in caves. This is really important. But, ick, they’re weird.” They asked everybody if they would like to be a scientist and it’s like no. Then they asked only the girls or women, young women, if they would marry a scientist and again no. So we have this nostalgia because of these pictures, which-
Lindsey: No, we grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. We know that nerds weren’t cool back then. That happened later.
Postrel: They were totally not cool. Yeah. Yeah.
Lindsey: I’ve got the scars to prove it.
Postrel: Yeah. So there is this false narrative. I don’t know whether it is dangerous. I think it is a little dangerous because it brings out the inner authoritarian in some people. They want to … I mean if you’re just in that third smallest group of … Going back to the technocrats, the average person, and the, let’s call them, nerds. Your idea of a good future is a world that suits you specifically, that can become very intolerant very quickly.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: I’m always very aware of how weird I am. And so, I want a world that is hospitable to me without having to conform to me, because we don’t want a world where Virginia Postrel is the dominant life form.
Lindsey: So I understand that and I’ve, over the years, come to recognize that I have very niche tastes and I’m not like everybody else. But I think you can be so liberal to not take your own side in the argument, that you refrain from saying what I think we ought to say, which is that our culture took a wrong turn and that there are some bad values that are pervasive as a society today and we ought to be in opposition to them.
Postrel: Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I call the book The Future and Its Enemies for a reason. Some people will say, “Oh, you’re so mean. You call them enemies.” But, yeah, I think it is an enemy of trying to control or go back and stamp out this sort of thing is an enemy of learning of better lives, of human flourishing. But if you want to get support for … First of all, I am not so sure that people reject technological progress. I think there is a lot of political thumb-sucking on the subject, but if you-
Lindsey: It certainly turned against nuclear power, that’s for sure.
Postrel: Yes, and that was really bad. If you could make one thing … Oh, and another thing about growing up in South Carolina, we weren’t against nuclear power.
Postrel: We were all for it. People who were in more fortunate classes than I in elementary school got to go on field trips to the nuclear power plant. I never … Also, they went to the sewage plant. So that tells you something about field trips in the ’60s in South Carolina. But, yeah, that was definitely a huge mistake, and it would’ve made a big difference. I think the J. Storrs Hall’s book Where Is My Flying Car? is … It’s a very odd book in the way it’s organized, but I think his fundamental argument that we basically decided not to use energy, or I mean to expand our energy use, rather than finding new or safer, cleaner ways of producing energy, I think that’s a very valid critique and in fact-
Lindsey: And one that he persuaded me of, I think. Before, if you had shown me that chart of energy consumption per capita that plateaus in the early ’70s and then just stops growing, I would’ve thought, “Aha, the dematerialization of economic life.”
Postrel: “Progress!”
Lindsey: “A triumph of … We’re in the information age.”
Postrel: Yeah.
Lindsey: Whereas … That’s true, right? So good things have happened and we are dematerializing. But I think something was lost and he was right to point it out.
Postrel: I think the other thing that was lost, and I understand why, but it should not be a widespread concept that chemical equals toxic. That was one of the most toxic ideas that got out there. As you mentioned, I wrote this book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Every chapter has a theme, and a theme on the chapter on dyes is about how the history of dyes is the history of chemistry.
One of the points that I make in the chapter, and really make when I talk to various fiber arts groups, is that it’s a complete myth that dyeing was … as long as it came from natural dyes, was this environmentally benign process and that only became a problem when synthetic dyes were developed, and that’s totally wrong. I mean going back to ancient dyes, the …
I mean, first of all, they are chemicals. That’s why the history of dyes is the history of chemistry. The other thing is the way people dealt with externalities, with the stink and the pollution, was they would want it to be done elsewhere, outside of town or in an … In ancient Tyre, there’s an ancient record of saying it’s basically a horrible place to live because of all the dye works, but the people are really rich because of that.
And so, it’s true today, we may be concerned about spillovers, but that’s not because spillovers are new. It’s because the volumes are up and also because we’re more sophisticated about how to curb the negative effects.
Lindsey: So what might work to bring back a culture that celebrates technological progress? Right now it feels like we’re in this tug of war between amazing new technological capabilities and deepening cultural dysfunctions. What our technological prowess gives us on one hand, our messed up culture takes back with the other.
Case in point, recently, the mRNA vaccine miracle. We invented a cure to a pandemic in a weekend, but still hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly because they swallowed some crazy conspiracy theory and didn’t believe in vaccines. So not to focus specifically on vaccines-
Postrel: Yeah, no, that is a mystery.
Lindsey: … but broadly, yeah. How do we build a healthier cultural relationship with technology?
Postrel: Yeah, that is a very disheartening example, because that really was a modern miracle. I don’t think any of us expected to be able to get out from under the pandemic so quickly, because nobody expected it to be possible to design a vaccine so fast.
There were several aspects of the response that made that negative effect more likely. First is this is Trump’s great, fabulous success that he did not take credit for. And so, it didn’t get the Trump people on board. So that was a problem.
Then the other one … So that’s like the Red State problem. Then the Blue State problem was that once we had vaccines, we should have lifted … The kids should have been back in school in person. We should have lifted a lot of the restrictions that were there to keep the emergency rooms from being flooded. And so, there were policy errors all around, and-
Lindsey: The Republicans had it in their hand.
Postrel: They had it in their hand.
Lindsey: The Democrats are the lockdown guys. We’re the miracle cure guys.
Postrel: Yeah, yeah. But part of it is people want to feel smart and they want to feel in control. This is people in general, and yet we … Inevitably, all these great technological wonders come from specialized knowledge. And so, when there is something new that you can’t see the immediate positive effects of, you have to take somebody’s word for it.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: I mean I still think the internet is a really good thing, but one effect of our abundant information is that there’s an abundance of quackery too, and it can appeal to people’s sense of agency and their sense of pattern-making.
And experts make mistakes. I mean my husband got a shingles vaccine some years ago. It’s not the current vaccine. It’s the earlier version. And the next day he had shingles. And so, I used my reporter hat to go out and find out, is this a known complication?
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: Yeah, textbook case. I mean my doctor brother said this actually looks like the pictures in the textbook. I talked to a guy at Kaiser Permanente who did studies with giant panels, because they have a million patients that they have, and he said, “No, this never happens. The only times that this has happened is it actually turned out to be a different strain.” Fast forward a few years later, now it’s a known possible side effect.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: I mean we’re always ignorant to some degree. And so, the question is how do you interpret that ignorance? Do you interpret it as, well, experts obviously don’t know what they’re talking about or do you interpret it as we have to learn? It’s very hard for people to take that on board when it’s … Especially if it’s their bodies and it’s their children and anything like that.
So I do think that what’s really disturbing about this particular example is that one reason in the mid 20th century that people were so positive toward technological progress had to do with vaccines.
Lindsey: Sure.
Postrel: You got a vaccine against polio. That was huge. Then people didn’t get polio, and people could see that. And so-
Lindsey: My grandmother lost two of her brothers to the great influenza. Her mother was so sick from it that she couldn’t go to her kids’ funeral. So it’s-
Postrel: Yeah. My grandmother lost one of her-
Lindsey: When it came along, they weren’t skeptical.
Postrel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean my grandmother lost her brother to diphtheria. I as a child, I mean I was never in danger of death, but I was terribly ill with mumps. I missed several weeks of school and I was really, really sick. I mean I had really high fever for a long time.
Also, in 1964, when there was the last great rubella outbreak, and there are many people who … I remember when that class was entering Gallaudet University, I don’t know how to pronounce it, but the school for the deaf … and hard of hearing in Washington, that was their biggest class in a long time, because if you were pregnant and you got rubella, there was a very good chance of your child having birth defects, and that was one of the major ones. Actually my mother was pregnant. This is the bottom line. My mother was pregnant during the rubella epidemic. Fortunately, my brother and I had really bad colds and she kept us in and we were not exposed to the other kids. So my brother is fine.
But, yeah, so I think part of the problem is this historical memory, and I don’t know what you do about that, because if people don’t hear stories from their grandparents and their parents about what things used to be like and they get … I mean we see this in the economic realm a lot. People think that in the 1950s people lived like Don Draper. Even in the context of the show, Don Draper is rich, and his house is not that nice by comparison.
Lindsey: There’s lots of people these days laboring under the idea that we were living in uniquely terrible and straitened circumstances.
Postrel: Yeah, yeah. But I do think … And you and I have corresponded a little bit about that. I do think that we need to think about what is it that people are longing for today and that’s different from what they longed for in the ’50s and in the ’30s and in the previous ’20s? I think a lot of it has to do with a sense of efficacy, a sense that you are capable, that you can do things, you can take care of it.
Part of the appeal of these conspiracy theories is that they give people a sense of being in control and they have secret knowledge. I mean that’s always been the appeal of conspiracy theories. And so, I think … I mean I don’t have a simple solution for what you offer people, but I do think, if you look at one of the wonders of the age is YouTube, where you can learn how to do basically anything, maybe not make a nuclear bomb, but pretty much everything else-
Lindsey: Yeah. As someone who has basically no intuitive skills dealing with matter … YouTube is a huge lifesaver for me. Yeah.
Postrel: In the process of researching The Fabric of Civilization, I learned to weave, which is a funny hobby for me to have because it does not play to my strengths at all, which is that I am very handicapped in spatial relationships, and there’s a lot of spatial relationships in weaving, which is why I learned to weave in the first place because I couldn’t understand from descriptions in books. But you do see like, wow, we can watch this video. Every time we have to do this process, if we just watch this video while we’re doing it, eventually we’ll learn. I mean I don’t think we … When we mention the wonders of the age, we may mention YouTube in the context of Khan Academy. You can learn something to help you on your own.
Lindsey: Yeh it’s the how-to stuff, the know-how-
Postrel: Yeah. But the idea that people just take YouTube for granted as something that if they want to fix their plumbing or they want to … whatever, they can do it. I mean my nephew is a very fine woodworker, very gifted. Instead of going to college, he went to a community college and studied woodworking. So he has a formal education in it, but he also has a lot of YouTube education in it.
Lindsey: So let me switch gears here a little bit. A quarter-century ago, when you wrote The Future and Its Enemies, you defined and analyzed the enemies as you saw them at that time. What are the enemies of dynamism today? How does that look in 2024 compared to 1998?
My enemies list has changed. So certainly some kind of species of top-down control – process-obsessed, precautionary principle-oriented – is an important force for stasism, and of course outright reactionaries of both the left and the right. There’s plenty of them.
But while your book presents the enemies of the future as more self-conscious and ideological – that is, that the main enemies were bad ideas about technological and economic progress – to me the biggest threats now feel more diffused and unintentional, just sort of broad cultural loss-aversion and complacency, lack of interest with physical reality and solving problems in the real world and achieving greater mastery over nature, social disintegration that is undermining our capacity for ongoing innovation.
So less “The Future and Its Enemies” and more “Progress and its inner demons.” It’s less that we’re being misled by wrong ideas about progress and more the progress isn’t even on our minds anymore. We’re obsessed with other things, with hierarchies of victimhood and inventing new genders. So tell me how things look to you today.
Postrel: So things look different to me. I mean all of what you say is true, so maybe this is just a matter of emphasis, but I look at what’s going on today and I mean the immediate future for the next couple of years is terrifying, actually. But if I look at the intellectual ferment that’s going on, I see a lot of positive left-right crossover alliances in favor of progress. You see this the most on housing.
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: I just recently recorded something with Jim Pethokoukis and Marian Tupy, where we were supposed to put three plans for what to do to rekindle the spirit of progress. Mine was all about housing. My colleague and, in some sense boss, Sam Bowman at Works in Progress has this article, “The Housing Theory of Everything.” He’s writing from the point of view of Britain, but I think he’s absolutely right. If you want regular people to feel like progress is possible, the first thing you need to do is make it possible for them to have a place that they can call their own. Whether they’re renting or buying, that’s not important. What’s important is that they have a home that they feel is their own, where they can establish their little world and their family. It’s incredibly important. Of course it has economic ramifications too because right now we’re in a situation-
Lindsey: And yet not only do we have this metastatic cancer of NIMBYism, but also we have this just spectacularly weird phenomenon of decades of negative productivity growth in construction.
Postrel: Yeah. But most of the cause is in the land, plus the right to build, not in the cost of construction.
Lindsey: Right, agreed. But-
Postrel: I mean you could do things in construction, and there are people who write quite cogently on possibilities of construction, but that’s the least of our worries-
Lindsey: Right.
Postrel: I mean once you have the right to build, you’re two-thirds of the way there.
Lindsey: Of course that’s the biggest problem.
Postrel: Yeah. I think that burden-
Lindsey: Minimum lot sizes, all kinds of things conspire to make-
Postrel: Yeah. So reducing minimum lot sizes, allowing higher construction, higher … Like LA, there’s this notion … I’ve been watching this for decades, this notion that either everybody has a single-family house on a quarter acre or they have high rises that are like Manhattan, midtown Manhattan.
Lindsey: Right.
Postrel: If you were to just allow every street in LA, or even just the big streets, to have six or seven-story buildings with … mixed-use buildings, if they want retail on the lower level and housing above, we would solve our housing problem overnight, basically.
And so, when you have this situation where young people can’t imagine themselves having a place that they’re comfortable living … And where people who are living in low-productivity areas of the country cannot move to high-productivity areas because they are not in the highest paying jobs.
So it used to be if you were a bartender in, say, Cleveland, and that was a low-productivity area, and San Francisco was a high-productivity area where wages were higher, you could move from Cleveland to San Francisco and tend bar. You didn’t have to be super high paid, top 1 or 2% kind of employee, and you would still have a net gain in your living standards. Now, even though your wage would be higher, you’d have a net loss in your living standards. So people stay put.
Lindsey: Yeah. One of the most arresting facts on that score is, from 1995 to 2000, which was the height of the internet boom, the biggest gold rush of my lifetime, the native-born population of metropolitan San Jose declined.
Postrel: Of course that’s partly because they … In absolute numbers or in percentages?
Lindsey: Absolute numbers declined.
Postrel: Absolute. That’s interesting. Yeah. So people-
Lindsey: Population went up because of immigration.
Postrel: Yeah. The longer term residents sold their homes to the tech folks and moved out, yeah.
Lindsey: So let me switch gears and move on to this set of quarter-baked ideas that I’ve been noodling over, that I refer to as economic independence. Just to set it up, I’m regularly overwhelmed with how ironic it is that I’ve come to this point of view, since I’ve spent my entire professional career defending and celebrating what Hayek called the extended order, the large-scale division of labor made possible by markets in the rule of law.
I was a free trader as a lawyer and a policy wonk. I wrote a book defending globalization. I wrote another one about how mass affluence in consumer society transforms politics and culture for the better, another one on how the rising complexity of modern life expands cognitive challenges and sharpens our wits. So to turn around now and say, Emily Litella-style, oops, we’ve overshot, we need to unwind, to some degree at least, our dependence on the division of labor and the prominence of consumerism in our motivations. Anyway, I didn’t see that coming at all.
But here’s the basic pitch. Mass mobilization in the labor market and consumerism has got us stuck in what I call the middle flourishing trap. So we have a middle-income trap in development where you get out of poverty and you get into the middle-income area, and the institutions that succeeded in getting you out of poverty aren’t good enough to get you rich, but they’ve developed such buy-in because of what they’ve accomplished that you can’t change them. And so, you get stuck.
So, likewise, we’ve now gotten to a point where, grading on the historical curve, we’re doing better than any people ever in history. We’ve got more people capable of a real shot at self-realization and developing their capabilities and living challenging, interesting, fulfilling lives than ever before. But I think we’re stuck, and the prospect of having society become more and more inclusive doesn’t look very promising to me in the medium term.
So the labor market is great, I think, now for the top 25 or 30%. But, realistically, I don’t think it’s going to serve as an arena for human flourishing for most people. For most people, it’s a trial to be endured, and in many cases, it’s a trial that’s becoming less pleasant rather than more challenging, more controlled from the boss and less autonomy.
So if that’s the case, if you think, well, the mass labor market is not a promising future for near-universal human flourishing … We haven’t had it for that long. Maybe we won’t have it forever. Maybe there are alternatives. So maybe we can make things so cheap that you only want to work 15 hours a week like John Maynard Keynes’s prophesied, or work in your 20s and 30s and retire early. Then also we can make it easier to work from home, whether in business or as a remote employee. Then from there, you can encourage some level of household and community self-sufficiency in childcare and schooling and elder care, gardening, rooftop solar energy, et cetera.
For any of this to happen, though, for threshold earning to really take off so that technological progress made people withdraw from the labor market because they have enough, for people to actually develop local self-sufficiency with arrangements of community DIY, there would have to be a genuine countercultural turn and one that I don’t see in the offing today. So instead of consumerism, call it “producerism,” valuing competence and self-reliance and making stuff in the physical world.
In our private correspondence, you’ve told me something along the lines of, these ideas that I’ve been working on respond to real yearnings, and you see those, but perhaps I’m not facing up to the costs of partial demobilization.
Postrel: Yeah. So I think there is among some people … First of all, work, the idea that work is a way you get flourishing and that mass flourishing can come from work, that is a super new idea.
Lindsey: Correct.
Postrel: That is like 30 years old, maybe.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: I mean … You know. The other thing is I would disagree … It is true that there are certain kinds of monitoring that are easier today, but if you look at the shift in low-wage work, let’s call it, or away from factory work, the much lamented shift away from factory work, that is a shift toward more control, more sociability in one’s workplace, and away from being regimented.
If you think about the difference between somebody working on an assembly line and somebody working a cashier at Target, there are a lot of people who, if given that choice, even if the assembly line paid more, would pick being a cashier at Target, because they can have a conversation with coworkers, they can chat with the customers, whereas factory work is very, very regimented and noisy. There’s a lot to it that has gotten lost. And boring. It’s boring. So I think we-
Lindsey: I never romanticize industrial era of blue-collar life.
Postrel: Yeah, I know you don’t.
Lindsey: Yeah, but that era gave the working class a cultural status and, therefore, a cultural self-image. I mean there was a whole gigantic worldwide movement that said the working man was the protagonist of world history.
Postrel: Right.
Lindsey: There was the fanfare for the common man. There was the …art deco kind of glamorization of industry and working class. There’s no romanticism for Walmart greeters. So once upon a time, people had hard, brutal, rigidly controlled work lives, but they also knew that what they were doing was existentially important, and that they made American might go, and, collectively, if they stopped working, they could raise issues of national security. So none of that exists anymore, right?
Postrel: Right.
Lindsey: So just the social significance of non-professional/managerial work is not respected in the way that it was in the past.
Postrel: I think you’re probably right, but not by me. I respect everybody who works. I mean I really do. I think that idea that … Well, I mean we did see this in the pandemic. We had this class of people who were called essential workers, and they really were essential. I mean all the people who delivered stuff or who worked in supermarkets, who kept things open, they probably didn’t get the full cultural value that they should have gotten.
I’ve written about this problem. Hayek wrote about the problem of merit versus value, something that can be meritorious but not be economically valuable at a given point, because economic value is just supply and demand, and there’s a million things that change that, including technology. One of the things that technology is likely to do is make a lot of white-collar work obsolete-
Lindsey: Yes.
Postrel: … or a lot of white-collar jobs-
Lindsey: AI in particular, right?
Postrel: … because of AI.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: I mean I get a bazillion press releases every day, because now that they no longer have to mail them or call you on the phone, they just email an enormous list they’ve generated. I always picture the person who’s writing this thing is a 25-year-old college graduate, female definitely, who majored in psychology and can write okay. Well, that person is going to be out of a job. So what are they going to do?
This is where your question comes to … It’s like maybe we do go to doing things in the physical world, higher-end things. We do have this younger generation of people who have grown up in a very visual environment. I mean they’re posting everything.
Steve Jobs didn’t realize that the killer apps of the iPhone would all be about photography and video. But I don’t know where that fits in because it’s not physical. It’s, by definition, virtual. But it’s a group of skills that have turned out to be quite culturally important.
I mean I just get the backyard steel mill thing vibe off of this idea. It’s too … It’s also not what I … When I picture, what would mass flourishing look like? Well, for many people it might include gardening. I mean there are people who really, really love gardening. If they had more time to do gardening, they would do it.
Then in The Future and Its Enemies, I have a chapter about play, which is very much about flow, things that give people flow, and gardening is one example of that. But having to raise crops and depend on them without the expertise of farmers, having to cook all your own food. I mean one of the things that gets left out in the nostalgia for the earlier era is when they say, “Oh, in the good old days, a family could depend on one income.” Well, one thing was like they never went out to eat.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, anyway, I have no clear idea how far anything could be pushed, or what direction it would go if it went farther than it is now. There’s nothing in me that’s anti-market or anti-commerce-
Postrel: Right. I have this saying that any valid social critique is an entrepreneurial opportunity. And so, I don’t take your description as to be anti-market in any way. I think it could be-
Lindsey: Yeah, although I think, to some degree, we need to do more stuff for ourselves and outsource less of it to the market end state than we do now. And we need to do it together in a way that we depend on each other so that our relationships have purpose and, therefore, they have stick-to-itiveness. So a possible transition sequence is-
Postrel: Have you discussed this with many of your female friends? Because that’s what always happens. More work for mother.
Lindsey: We don’t have time to talk about something that I was going to get into, which is the fertility crisis and the prospects of declining population. But unless we get to a more equitable division of labor between the sexes, we’re not going to have a very bright future at all because we’re not going to make very many people.
But here’s a possible transitional sequence that starts with things we have today. You start with leaning into work from home, which is something there was a real revealed hunger for during the pandemic, start with facilitating home-based businesses, particularly internet-based ones that are location-independent. But there’s all kinds of home-based businesses that are illegal now because of zoning. You go to Japan, all throughout Asia, you have shop houses where people live, where they work.
Postrel: It’s the traditional way of having a shop. I mean the same thing is true actually in England.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Postrel: I mean people would open the shop in basically their living room and they would open it to the public.
Lindsey: Right. Then once you get to the extent where work and living are reconnected more than they are today, then you have the possibility of co-living arrangements, where a whole bunch of people who like each other or are related to each other live around each other. We can’t do that now because we’ve got to optimize our location for our work. But if work is location-independent, you can optimize for sociality, sociability.
Then once you’re living together with people that you like or trust, you have all kinds of possibilities for cooperation on joint tasks and care of kids and care of older people. All kinds of homeschooling pods originated during COVID, and I think could be massively aided by AI technologies. So you have seeds of this stuff right now. You also have a techie maker movement that’s out there in the world.
Postrel: Yeah, yeah. It’s been going on for a while-
Lindsey: If all of that somehow or another fused and became self-conscious, then that’s what I’m talking about.
Postrel: Yeah. Well, we definitely go back to the housing theory of everything, because the key to all of this is making the use of buildings much more flexible so people can create these kinds of communities. I mean somebody might do it as a developer or an entrepreneurial idea, but what you’re envisioning is people could just decide, “I want to have this. I’m going to get some of my friends and we’re going to live in the same apartment building and use these different- “
Lindsey: It’s not rare in Germany.
Postrel: Yeah, right.
Lindsey: They call them Baugruppen.
Postrel: Yeah. I thought about this in terms of … As I’m aging, I think it’s like, boy, the worst … So if you look at an assisted living kind of thing where … I’m not talking about care for dementia. I’m talking about just like where my mom lives. She basically has a one-bedroom apartment and she has her meals on site. They’re provided. It’s basically a dorm with singles. You don’t have roommates.
Well, that should be a very appealing way to live in your old age. But what’s not appealing about it is the other people. I mean they may be wonderful, but they’re not your friends. It’s like you go to this place and you have to make new friends and you don’t … And unlike when you’re in college, you don’t necessarily have anything in common with them other than you live in the same town.
So I would love to see some of that. I’ve also long thought that they should mix the ages in those places a little bit, like have subsidies for young artists to live there or something like that so that it’s not … I mean one of the depressing things about that is even if every individual old person is an interesting, spry person, it’s still a whole place where everybody’s old, which is depressing.
Lindsey: That’s what the whole planet’s going to look like before too long.
Postrel: Yeah, right, right. So I’m friendly to this in so far as it’s about intentional communities. I think that part of that is that people pick and choose what things they want to leave to the market and what things they want to do themselves, so that they don’t see the idea of a self-sufficient community as being the goal, but rather as-
Lindsey: Yeah. But doing some stuff on their own.
Postrel: Yeah. Because I think if you have a group of people who are sociable and are living in proximity to each other, they will do things together. I mean that’s just the nature of people, when you don’t have to make an appointment to drive across town to see somebody and you can just walk down the hall and see them or whatever …
Lindsey: Okay. We’ve gone over an hour now. There’s a whole bunch of other things I’d like to talk about, but I think we’ll stop here.
Postrel: Maybe I’ll start a podcast and have you on.
Lindsey: Very good. Virginia, great talking to you. Thank you so much for being on the program.
Postrel: Thanks.
Lindsey: Thanks for listening to The Permanent Problem podcast. Check out my essays on The Permanent Problem over on Substack, as well as at the Niskanen Center website. Be sure to catch all our episodes on Substack, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you love tuning in. Until next time, I’m Brink Lindsey signing off.