The Coming Wave

[T]he entirety of the human world depends on either living systems or our intelligence. And yet both are now in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, an unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged. Starting to crash around us is a new wave of technology. This wave is unleashing the power to engineer these two universal foundations: a wave of nothing less than intelligence and life... defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them. From where we stand today, it appears that containing this wave — that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it is not possible.... Even as we worry about their risks, we need the incredible benefits of the technologies of the coming wave more than ever before. This is the core dilemma.

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

Labor is one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

Ambrose Bierce

 

I resist what I cannot change
Own it in your own way
I wanna find what can't be found

Pain, The War on Drugs

Keynes on Money

The main tenet of liberal socialism is that the state should cut the cord between money and time by taking over as much as three quarters of a country’s capital, bringing the frantic activities of saving and investment that plague capitalist societies under public ownership and control. In tandem with low interest rates and prohibitions on individuals’ and firms’ taking their money out of the country, the state’s management of savings and investment would achieve four goals. First, it would create full employment, which Keynes believed a capitalist economy could not bring about. Second, by funding investments in housing, transportation, and energy, the state would meet social needs that had long been neglected because greater profits were to be had elsewhere. Third, the state would end the scarcity of capital. Keynes thought that the possessor of capital was a social parasite, a “functionless investor” who was able to make money simply because only he had it to lend, much like a feudal landlord in possession of land. The capitalist also had “cumulative oppressive power,” issuing verdicts of life and death to workers and dictating policy to states. Because scarcity was the source of the capitalist’s parasitic power, ending that scarcity would lead to the “euthanasia of the rentier.”

Last, the worthiness of the state’s investments would not be measured by their rate of return but by their contribution to social well-being. Though Keynes imagined a variety of public goods that the state would bring about through its investments, the most important of those goods, for him, was the Smithian virtue of social intercourse:

Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth.

Keynes has long been accused of waging a war of economism against politics, elevating the economist above the statesman and thinking that the moral and political disagreements of a democratic society could be sidestepped or overcome by economic technicians and technocratic solutions.

... Keynes conceded that planning of the sort he was proposing “should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share [the planner’s] own moral position.” Yet he knew that his moral vision of an economy of cultural greatness and aesthetic excellence was not widely shared. ... Perhaps that’s why he found himself ... retreating to a position long familiar to philosopher-kings, calling for planners whose power could be safely exercised because they were “rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue” and because citizens had been reeducated according to the principles of “right moral thinking.”

... Keynes set out a second path for the future, one that he hoped would diminish the importance not just of money but of economic concerns altogether, without making any assumptions about what people believed or wanted from life. It was a vision of abundance and plenty, a world beyond scarcity, which made the hard power and hard choices of liberal socialism, as well as the requirement of democratic agreement about ultimate ends, unnecessary.

Corey Robin, The Trouble with Money (The New York Review, December 22, 2022)

Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind…. dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion. 

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

How stands it between God and your soul now?

John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

Educating the electorate in the limits of executive power. No one wants to believe it. And anyway, in a democracy there's always an opposition to tell them that anything is possible.

P.A. James, A Taste for Death

Someone else’s fool is a joke, your own fool a calamity.

A folk proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn.

Umberto Eco on nationalism

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion…. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco on religion

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco on conspiracy

Who knows how many ... people in this world still think they are being threatened by some conspiracy? Here's a form to be filled out at will, by each person with his own conspiracy.... What does everyone desire, and desire more fervently the more wretched and unfortunate they are? To earn money easily, to have power (the enormous pleasure in commanding and humiliating your fellow man) and to avenge every wrong suffered (everyone in life has suffered at least one wrong, however small it might be).... But why; everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit..... [T]he explanation for their failure. It was some one else... who planned your ruin. 

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

Origins of our American culture

American culture in this early period [the 17th and early 18th Centuries] becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system.

This whole world ... was a borderland, a part of the expanding periphery of Britain's core culture; and its inner quality derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland two hundred years earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists' own time, and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies formed a typically disordered border country in which ... "violence [was] a way of life." Concentrating, as American historians have done, on the origins of a later American civilization, and hence viewing the colonial world as a frontier -- that is, as an advance, as a forward and outward-looking, future-anticipating progress toward what we know eventuated, instead of as a periphery, a ragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-looking diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment --looking at the colonies in this anachronistic way, one tends to minimize the primitiveness and violence, the bizarre, quite literally outlandish quality of life in this far-distant outback of late seventeenth-century Britain.

Partly this wildness, extravagance, and disorder were simply the products of the inescapable difficulties of maintaining a high European civilization in an undeveloped environment. Partly, too, they were products of the hostility that developed between the Europeans and the native peoples. But in large part, too, they were products of the common European, and indeed British, conception of America as an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilization -- a place where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society -- heretics, criminals, paupers--could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion, those fragile integuments which even in England could barely contain the savagery of life.... This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture, and we must struggle to comprehend it.

What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America

Patience under duress is rarely appreciated by the politically immature.

Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings

Popular delusions occur when appealing but baseless stories spread contagiously from one person to another. Some ideas are more virulent than others: people have been found to react most enthusiastically to narratives of fear.

Edward Chancellor, "Waiting to Deflate" New York Review (August 19, 2021)

Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.... Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Henry Adams

The market could only reward ideas that turned a profit. Nobody stood to profit from clean parks; they were just nicer to live with than dirty parks. But if nobody made the political judgment that clean parks were better, a society organized around profit incentives from production alone would almost automatically end up with dirty parks. The market was not an impartial guide to the beliefs of the public, and some of its verdicts were crazy…. When public goods fell into disorder or neglect, people found them unpleasant and satiated their desires with what the market had to offer…. The economic organization of society was devoted not to maximizing social comfort and harmony but to satisfying the consumer desires created by advertising and production itself. And that in turn was hampering society’s ability to grapple with poverty. 

Kenneth Galbraith, according to Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

Keynes had come to believe that the problem was really much simpler: Unemployment was a breeding ground for fascism. It created dangerous political instability and a source of anger that could easily be weaponized. The terms of trade might help or hurt efforts to establish international goodwill, but tariffs or no tariffs, the legitimacy of an international economic order depended entirely on whether it did, in fact, provide for mutual prosperity.

Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

According to Keynes

Uncertainty about the future—not irrationality or stupidity—makes crowds prone to calamity in both finance and politics, particularly under conditions of significant anxiety. Markets are no more self-correcting than a mob hailing a demagogue.

Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.

 
John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, as quoted by Zachary D.Carter in The Price of Peace

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince