Earlier this year I read a very interesting essay, “The Age of Decadence”, by NY Times columnist Ross Douthat. The essay is adapted from his recently published book The Decadent Society – How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. This long essay covers a lot of ground, from technology and innovation to politics and religion. The essay was published in early February, before Covid-19 spread across the US. I’ll discuss the original essay, but I do wonder how it would have been modified to reflect the impact of the pandemic.
“The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation,” wrote Douthat. “Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.”
“But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet?,” he asked. What if we really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which new developments in science and technology consistently undercover; in which we’re comfortably aging, “no longer optimistic about the future… [while] growing old unhappily together.” What if “Our civilization has entered into decadence.”
Decadence is generally associated with moral and/or cultural decline as well as with self-indulgent behavior. But Douthat says that he simply uses decadence as a description of the current state of society: economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural exhaustion despite a high level of material prosperity. “The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success,” he noted.
But, it’s hard to interpret decadence, stagnation, decay, and exhaustion as anything other than a pessimistic view of society. Every historical era can be described from a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full point of view. Perhaps Douthat just means to articulate the glass-half-empty view, which he does quite eloquently. So, even though it may come across as pollyannaish in these troubled times, let me attempt to make the case for my more optimistic, longer term glass-half-full view.
Have we stopped solving big problems? “We wanted flying cars – instead we got 140 characters,” is how PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel succinctly described his belief that we’re no longer solving big problems. According to Douthat, “the peak of human accomplishment and daring” was the Apollo Program that put humans on the moon 50 years ago. While acknowledging that “the internet economy is still as real as 21st-century growth and innovation gets,” he wonders if “21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.”
How can we compare the Apollo program, the culmination of industrial-age big-problem-solving, with the Internet, – the engine driving our 21st century digital economy? Most everyone will agree that the Internet, smartphones, and related digital technologies have had a far bigger impact in people’s daily lives than the moon landing. Digital infrastructures have played a major role in keeping nations and economies going during Covid-19. And, over time, the highly complex problems that they enable us to address, – in healthcare, public health, education, energy, the environment, and so on – will positively transform the lives of billions around the world.
Has innovation been slowing down? Douthat references Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, who’s extensively argued that over the past few decades there’s been a fundamental decline in innovation and productivity. Perhaps our digital technologies, exciting as they might be, aren’t as transformative as the innovations from the period between 1840 and 1970, – e.g., modern sanitation, electricity, cars, planes, the telephone, radio and TV, antibiotics, – when we experienced high productivity growth and a rising standard of living.
In a 2014 article, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee argued that the innovations of our digital age are fundamentally different from the physical industrial age innovations of the past two hundred years. Digital innovation is recombinant in nature, based on building blocks and platforms. In this view, “Each development becomes a building block for future innovations. Progress doesn’t run out; it accumulates. And the digital world doesn’t respect any boundaries. It extends into the physical one, leading to cars and planes that drive themselves, printers that make parts, and so on.”
How about the slow productivity and economic growth? As we’ve learned over the past two centuries, there’s generally been a significant time lag between the broad acceptance of a major new transformative technology and its ensuing impact on companies, governments and other institutions. It generally takes several decades for new technologies and business models to be widely embraced across economies and societies, and for their full benefits to be realized. The more transformative the technology, the longer the time lag.
For example, productivity growth didn’t increase until 40 years after the introduction of electric power in the early 1880s, because It took until the 1920s for companies to figure out how to take advantage of electric power with new manufacturing innovations like the assembly line.
Over time, the transition from the industrial economy to our emerging digital economy is likely to be as transformative as the 18th century transition from the agrarian to the industrial economy, when advances in science and technology led to radical changes all around the world. We can expect the full impact of digital technologies on productivity, the economy and society to play out over the next several decades.
Are we really becoming a decadent, stagnant society? Let me close by referencing two recent publications. First is Andy McAfee’s book More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next.
“For just about all of human history our prosperity has been tightly coupled to our ability to take resources from the earth. So as we became more numerous and prosperous, we inevitably took more: more minerals, more fossil fuels, more land for crops, more trees, more water, and so on. But not anymore. In recent years we’ve seen a different pattern emerge: the pattern of more from less.”
What has been radically transformed is the very nature of technological progress, wrote McAfee. “We invented the computer, the Internet, and a suite of other digital technologies that let us dematerialize our consumption: over time they allowed us to consume more and more while taking less and less from the planet. This happened because digital technologies offered the cost savings that come from substituting bits for atoms, and the intense cost pressures of capitalism caused companies to accept this offer over and over.”
The second publication I’d like to reference is a January 2019 WSJ article, “The World is Getting, Quietly Relentlessly Better,” by its chief economics commentator Greg Ip. “The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year,” wrote Ip in his opening paragraph. “Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and illiteracy, disease and deadly violence are receding. These things don’t make headlines because they are gradual, relentless and unsurprising.”
Ip’s article is mostly based on insights from Our World in Data, an initiative at the University of Oxford that quantifies the evolution of our global living conditions over the past few centuries. The article cites a number of statistics underlying his world-is-getting-better view: average life expectancy – 50 years in 1960, 71 years in 2018; under-5 child mortality rate – 18% in 1960, 4.3% in 2015; people living in extreme poverty – 44% in 1981, 10% in 2015. Lots of similarly positive statistics can be found in the Our Word in Data website.
“The problems the world faces are far smaller than those it has already overcome and can be solved the same way: not by betting on miracles but by patiently applying knowledge and tools we already possess,” wrote Ip in conclusion. “If we can solve global poverty, we can solve other problems like climate change.” Hopefully, we will also learn how to prevent future global health crises like Covid-19.