5 ms·

Pinker has found a fun niche like many authors before him; write books that only the well off and mostly content folks will buy and read and tell them what they

by ebbv 9y ago

Pinker has found a fun niche like many authors before him; write books that only the well off and mostly content folks will buy and read and tell them what they want to hear. (Gladwell and many other authors popular among upper middle class and wealthy people play the same game.) And I'm not saying Pinker lies or anything, but he just gives a point of view that is comforting if you're wealthy. His spiel comes down to; "Everything's mostly great, it's not just you, don't worry so much about how great you have it vs the suffering of others. Everything is getting better just as it is." I know that's very reductionist, but to me it's kinda what it boils down to. Gladwell pulls the "The complex issues that people around you tell you are complex? Well they have easy secret answers!" game. I find it all very anti-intellectual and it's disappointing to me that these authors are so popular and widely praised.

api 9y ago
I've heard them called "court intellectuals." The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that it's wrong. If you look at aggregate statistics everything is getting better. The problem is that the distribution of that wealth is shifting toward an extreme hockey stick. A rising tide no longer lifts all boats. Those realities don't show up in aggregate statistics. You get what you measure. In fact it's even worse than that. In certain cases a rising tide sinks many peoples' boats. Case in point: exploding asset prices. The savings of the extremely wealthy are re-invested in issuing more private debt, which in turn inflates the cost of things like real estate and college tuition which makes these basic things less affordable to ordinary people. One person can't afford a house because someone else's money has been parked in real estate. Then there's the fact that advancing technology keeps raising the bar for entry level labor. Eventually the bar gets raised so high that someone with a merely average IQ or who is too young to possess the required experience is no longer profitably employable, leading to mass youth and lower class unemployment. Basically it doesn't matter if everything is getting better for someone else. It matters if it's getting better for you. The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. The latter creates a huge amount of stimulus spending that creates a lot of jobs and effectively redistributes wealth to the working class. Without either forcible redistribution or war, wealth seems to just accumulate at the top due to network effects until the richest 0.01% own everything.
- Findeton 9y ago
  The rich 0.01% can’t own everything in a free market because they still need to profit by selling their products and services to the rest of humanity. And for that to happen, the rest of humanity still needs to be earning money. The market will solve this by itself, if governments don’t fuck it up. If everything is owned by a small group of people (which communists say it’s the government) that’s communism not capitalism. Capitalism requires people making transactions in order to achieve the main goal of generating profits.
  - api 9y ago
    The majority of humanity can work for subsistence level wages. The primary economic activity of the rich can be gambling, which typically takes the form of repeated inflation of asset and financial instrument bubbles. The rich can also make money selling luxury goods to one another and to an upper middle (professional) class. That class would still exist but would be relatively small like the priestly and knight classes of feudal Europe. This isn't optimal from an economic perspective nor does it result in the greatest wealth for the rich or anyone else, but it seems to be how things unfold. All we need is powdered wigs and merkins and we'll be in 17th century France. The problem is that the rich are human and humans don't respond to Skinner boxes any differently from rats. The lower classes generally can't lose themselves in Skinner boxes because they must engage in something resembling productive work to survive. The rich on the other hand are untethered from this demand and will naturally find whatever Skinner boxes present themselves. Financial speculation, literal gambling, hedonism (Trump with his porn stars etc.), and palace intrigue (which in the modern age takes the form of political maneuvering or media/celebrity drama) are all Skinner boxes that deliver those dopamine hits with escalating spacing between doses that we're wired to become addicted to. Super-wealthy people who engage in productive work (e.g. Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk) are so notable because they're rare. Maybe they have some inborn or conditioned resistance to Skinner boxes that most people lack.
- RoutinePlayer 9y ago
  -> The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. Really? Is the democratic socialism practiced in most of Europe totalitarian and authoritarian?
FabHK 9y ago
Hogwash. His spiel is not "don't worry". His spiel is "don't despair, don't be paralysed. Things have gotten better, and with determination and sensible policies we can hopefully keep making it better." You are right that there are "intellectuals" whose spiel is doom and despair, and Pinker demonstrates (as others before him have) just how misguided they are. Your misinterpretation is one of many that Pinker explicitly anticipates and answers, for example here: > The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. > So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.

by ebbv 9y ago

api 9y ago

I've heard them called "court intellectuals." The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that it's wrong. If you look at aggregate statistics everything is getting better. The problem is that the distribution of that wealth is shifting toward an extreme hockey stick. A rising tide no longer lifts all boats. Those realities don't show up in aggregate statistics. You get what you measure. In fact it's even worse than that. In certain cases a rising tide sinks many peoples' boats. Case in point: exploding asset prices. The savings of the extremely wealthy are re-invested in issuing more private debt, which in turn inflates the cost of things like real estate and college tuition which makes these basic things less affordable to ordinary people. One person can't afford a house because someone else's money has been parked in real estate. Then there's the fact that advancing technology keeps raising the bar for entry level labor. Eventually the bar gets raised so high that someone with a merely average IQ or who is too young to possess the required experience is no longer profitably employable, leading to mass youth and lower class unemployment. Basically it doesn't matter if everything is getting better for someone else. It matters if it's getting better for you. The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. The latter creates a huge amount of stimulus spending that creates a lot of jobs and effectively redistributes wealth to the working class. Without either forcible redistribution or war, wealth seems to just accumulate at the top due to network effects until the richest 0.01% own everything.

Findeton 9y ago
The rich 0.01% can’t own everything in a free market because they still need to profit by selling their products and services to the rest of humanity. And for that to happen, the rest of humanity still needs to be earning money. The market will solve this by itself, if governments don’t fuck it up. If everything is owned by a small group of people (which communists say it’s the government) that’s communism not capitalism. Capitalism requires people making transactions in order to achieve the main goal of generating profits.
- api 9y ago
  The majority of humanity can work for subsistence level wages. The primary economic activity of the rich can be gambling, which typically takes the form of repeated inflation of asset and financial instrument bubbles. The rich can also make money selling luxury goods to one another and to an upper middle (professional) class. That class would still exist but would be relatively small like the priestly and knight classes of feudal Europe. This isn't optimal from an economic perspective nor does it result in the greatest wealth for the rich or anyone else, but it seems to be how things unfold. All we need is powdered wigs and merkins and we'll be in 17th century France. The problem is that the rich are human and humans don't respond to Skinner boxes any differently from rats. The lower classes generally can't lose themselves in Skinner boxes because they must engage in something resembling productive work to survive. The rich on the other hand are untethered from this demand and will naturally find whatever Skinner boxes present themselves. Financial speculation, literal gambling, hedonism (Trump with his porn stars etc.), and palace intrigue (which in the modern age takes the form of political maneuvering or media/celebrity drama) are all Skinner boxes that deliver those dopamine hits with escalating spacing between doses that we're wired to become addicted to. Super-wealthy people who engage in productive work (e.g. Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk) are so notable because they're rare. Maybe they have some inborn or conditioned resistance to Skinner boxes that most people lack.
RoutinePlayer 9y ago
-> The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. Really? Is the democratic socialism practiced in most of Europe totalitarian and authoritarian?

FabHK 9y ago

Hogwash. His spiel is not "don't worry". His spiel is "don't despair, don't be paralysed. Things have gotten better, and with determination and sensible policies we can hopefully keep making it better." You are right that there are "intellectuals" whose spiel is doom and despair, and Pinker demonstrates (as others before him have) just how misguided they are. Your misinterpretation is one of many that Pinker explicitly anticipates and answers, for example here: > The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. > So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.