While I agree that much of what is wrong with society boils down to a lack of civic participation and familiarity with institution-building, what I think this article perhaps misses is that social and technological changes militate against the effectiveness of a robust civil society. As conglomerates and governments can expand their reach through communications and management technologies, it becomes more feasible for institutions to manage large jurisdictions at a distance without intermediaries. And that same ability to grow to a large size also prevents smaller organizations from arising and seeing any effectiveness in their efforts.
I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it that way through massive networks of financialization and regulatory capture.
In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential action.
Silicon Valley is (still) an example of vitality. You don't have to join small companies as a founder or for more than a reasonably well paying job. You don't have to be part of the few who will rack their brains trying to find ways to sneak in between the FAANGs.
Civic participation, by constrast, is difficult because it runs into the giant morass of public institutions laws and rules. Well serving the political forces in places but again not much to do with the FAANGs. (For example, while the city of Mountain View professes its pride in Google, it fights everything that Google wants to do inch by inch. Google doesn't exactly find much "proud cooperation" with its city.)
> Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product...
Perhaps, but not for actual, bonafide, geniuses and super-geniuses.
Which is more than enough, it's not like having hundreds of challengers instead of dozens is 10x better, there's rapidly diminishing returns for society past the first few bonafide, competent, institutional challengers.
It might even be net negative beyond a small amount.
It took emigration to another country for me to first experience the web of overlapping voluntary associations as a basis for town life which Tocqueville had noted when describing (an earlier instantiation of) the Old Country in Democracy in America (1835).
"While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number; others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order shrunk precipitously."
This is a good point. Do you belong to any non-governmental organization where the members can vote to fire top management, and this happens once in a while? A golf club? A maker space? A gym? A homeowners association? A mutual insurance company? A savings and loan? A school? Anything? Such institutions used to be common for non-profits. Now they are rare.
Robert’s Rules of Order is for meetings where the members hold the power. Motions are voted upon and then are binding on the organization. Unless the members have power, it's just a talk shop.
When someone set up a local maker space, they set it up as a nonprofit with a self-perpetuating board. That is, the management chooses its own successors. I declined to contribute.
The management isn’t the board, that’s the point. The management is overseen by the board and the board entrusts the function of the organization to management while they help set direction.
Separately, I can’t find the example but Robert’s Rules for Order can be trivially DDoSed and have been in order to bring down or paralyze organizations. I think there was a conversation here about it some time back.
Nonprofits are legally required to have boards, AFAIK. What would you have preferred the nonprofit do?
Cultural sclerosis may "simply" be a mix of unintended consequence and deliberately intended consequence (sabotage). The impetus for much of our legal system might be fine but not paying attention to unintended consequences then results in sclerosis. This is easy to achieve in an accreting system of rules and laws: "Let's just add one more rule - that will sort it out right up".
There are fields of (american) activity that clearly understand the strength in building things fast - and that are designed for that. The startup world is still one of these - both for starting a new venture and for deploying fast and sorting out the details later. This is about the "rules of the game" and the infrastructure (funding, legal entity formation, getting people to join, hosting, software tools...) All around, the infrastructure and culture support the principle.
Other institutions seem built as-if for endlessly delaying projects. In most cases this was not the goal. And in some cases, that IS the goal: it works so well that some don't let it go to waste.
Still other institutions DO exist so as to allow moving legislation at a decent pace but have fallen out of favor - with the executive prefering endless ad-hoc informal processes in the vague hope of achieving unity, consensus, peace well in advance of actual change. With not much change possible as a result.
That is not to say that "emergency committees" don't make plenty of harm. Brings to mind the ruling against fat and in favor of carbs: [Senator: I do not have the luxury. My constituents are dying. I can't wait for your scientific data.]
But this should be a deliberate area of effort: improving institutions for time effectiveness and correctness. Even from a basic economics point of view, there is quite a bit of economic growth potential that comes merely from responsiveness. Same from a quality of life point of view. When need is recognized, pouring money in study (scientific, engineering, legal...) including study of unintended effects, then moving on with a ruling. Which does not mean in the sense of "environmental impact study" which seems to have become a weapon: a financial barrier against doing anything.
In other cases, strength should be in recognizing that headline cause X is not actually an emergency and tabling it until it naturally accretes more data or is simply forgotten.
> today’s children rarely leave the sight of adult authority figures, and have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to authority
My niece who dealt with the kid hitting her on the playground every day by throwing a cinderblock at his face respectfully disagrees. I'm not sure this author has seen a modern public school.
How'd that go for her? I've heard stories like this typically end with both children receiving a stern reprimand from authority figures, which may end up reinforcing the behaviors from the article. I'd hope that's not the case, but it's been a while since I've seen a modern public school.
We don’t appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or any other open source project. The initial inspiration was absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made them successful and have lasted decades.
It's maintenance but this one is "responsive" maintenance. It's not aiming at the status quo. The current Linux is serving the current mix of Linux applications - much broader and different from the "old" one. It's not just keeping it going until better replaces it. It is ITSELF the better thing that constantly replaces it. Which is all the more admirable. And results is well deserved increased market share. It is "building".
free software licenses means that any person or company can maintain their own fork of linux or git, and if the software is useful to them and nobody else maintains it to their satisfaction, probably will. git means they can easily incorporate the work of other people who are doing the same thing instead of duplicating it
the maintainers are doing excellent and praiseworthy work, but this is not just a result of 'culture' but also incentives: if they aren't sufficiently responsive to user needs, they'll quickly find themselves maintaining software with a user base of only themselves
the problem with this theory is that it can't explain the absence of successful forks of python 2, wikipedia, and firefox
This could just be a bunch of errors. The subway issue is a good example of this. The initial NYC subway was put in place with cut and cover construction. Because it was so long ago there were minimal obstacles. The Second Avenue subway was proposed early on, but even back in the day it was rejected as being far too expensive because of the complications caused by the soils, existing subway routes, and other infrastructure. Over the years the possibility of a Second Avenue subway was repeatedly raised and rejected as being far too expensive because of unavoidable complications. Then in the 1990s NYC politicians decided that miraculous new tunnel boring technology would make the Second Avenue subway easy and cheap. Modern technology solves all problems. It was a "no brainer". They decided to it was time to be a culture that builds. And the result was a terrible mess. The tunnel boring technology eventually worked, but only after much complication and multiple explosions of costs.
So what is being advocated here appears to be the opposite of the truth. In the past things were relatively quick because we knew our limits and when to stop. We used to be a culture that could refuse to build. In contrast, this modern idea of being the culture that decides now is the time to build leads us astray so vast fortunes end up being spent on misguided adventures. Want to be a culture that is good at building quickly? Start by saying no to most things. And try to understand history as it is and not through meaningless comparisons of cut and cover subway construction to the modern wonders of tunnel boring machines.
Slow building in layers, with each layer providing a context and a foundation for the next.
That takes time, and can be V E R Y, V E R Y, B O R I N G.
In order to do infrastructure successfully, we need to commit to a long, protracted development process, with a shitton of testing at every stage, and refusing to go on to the next stage, until we have the one we're working on, now, complete.
And we may not even see the final results. We may simply be the first-stage booster of the project, and our name may be buried in the dust, raised by the folks that stand on our shoulders, and get the credit.
It's not easy. I've done it, multiple times.
American culture, as it stands now, is no so good at this kind of mindset.
Robert Moses and a few others like him are why we don't build fast. We can - we have just learned the hard way that some things are not worth building and so we threw roadblocks in the way to prevent those abuses. (safety standards are another thing we threw in that makes building take longer for what I think we would all agree is good reason)
Sometimes I think we went too far the other way, but lets not swing too far back.
> Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else, and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure).
It's absolutely mind-boggling that the first 3 countries hit hard by covid were China, Korea and Italy. China and Korea appeared to keep it contained and given everything we know about trusting these two countries, we chose to trust the Chinese model?
In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our lifetime?
Meanwhile, Korea was being pretty open with their approach and while I don't think it would've been effective in the U.S. it was certainly the more palatable approach and less damaging to the poor and most vulnerable population.
We also saw Italy using the Chinese model for containment and it failed miserably, yet the U.S. stood firm in following their failures. Insisting that we protect the middle and upper class while demanding the lower class keep the "important" jobs running and giving the poverty class nowhere to turn.
This piece hasn’t aged well. What worked for China in the beginning of the pandemic had the opposite effect later on. While the West was opening back up and getting on with life, China was in the throes of a second wave while at the same time battling serious internal resistance to “Covid Zero” policies. In the end, the government relented to the pressure.
Indeed, and that was always the logical conclusion. We've never made perfectly effective vaccines that fast and we knew the virus was global. It was always going to find its way into China and run rampant to everyone without immunity whenever society opened back up and all of that is assuming their isolation actually works to begin with. There was no other option and I struggle to understand how that wasn't plain to see even in early 2020 when we had confirmed cases all around the world.
Were we really banking on making a perfect vaccine before the world couldn't sustain lock-downs? If not, what was the "real" plan? I believe it was probably all just political game-theory, but it's hard not to wonder if there were people at the top hoping poor people could take the brunt of the contagion and die off before the rich people started going back into public.
In most places policy seemed to be dictated by preserving the essential function of the health care system and to a lesser extent the sanity of the health care workers.
When ICU beds filled or looked like they might, we optimized for not having excess people drowning in cytokine storms in the waiting rooms. It doesn’t seem very nefarious to me.
That was the goal of both Korea and China, both of them early on appeared to reach this goal. That goal is not nefarious, but choosing the Chinese model when we watched it fail in Italy does appear to be gross incompetence since we did know without question that the Chinese model would have drastic consequences whether it succeeded or not.
I guess I’m not sure what your implied alternative is to the “Chinese Model” which I don’t think anyone can credibly say we accurately emulated — what would you have preferred we do and whose model would that have been? Sweden’s?
Today? It should go without saying we shouldn't have locked down. Somehow there are still people holding onto the idea it was a justified measure, but what we know today simply makes that option look absurd in hindsight. Sweden in particular? Sure, despite what the media was trying to sell, all of the scandanavian countries had similar strategies and (including sweden) ended up faring better than the average european country. So I wouldn't say Sweden specifically, because that's just a political hot topic. Norway, which also didn't actually lock down (just look at oxfords covid stringency index if you don't believe me) did very well.
I suspect you're asking what would I have done at the time, though, and I think at the time the most practical approach was Korea's contact tracing and just like we've done for as long as I've been alive, staying at home would be something recommended for the sick. Lock downs were at no point in the pandemic a reasonable strategy, not even explicitly in the context of saving our healthcare system. Just look at how many hospitals have gone bankrupt and had to lay off huge amounts of staff. Our hospital system suffered the most because of lockdowns, not because of covid.
The hospitals are laying off because they overstaffed out of fear of not being able to handle the demands of the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is gone they cannot economically support the headcount.
If we had not locked down many many more people would have died, and the health care system would have actually broken down. You’re saying that we should have not locked down and just staffed the crematoriums instead?
> In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our lifetime?
Have you actually read the document you linked to?[1] Are you seriously arguing China is not to be trusted because it "lied to us" about "Xi Jinping being the President of China", about it "lifting its citizens out of poverty and improving their lives", about it "not being a threat to Americans’ way of life"?
Almost every single "lie" listed in there is an assessment, a normative statement/conclusion, something you may agree, disagree, criticize as irrational, reach the opposite assessment etc., but for which the concept of "lying" is simply inappropriate.
[1]
1. Lie: Xi Jinping is the President of China.
2. Lie: The CCP is lifting its citizens out of poverty and improving their lives.
3. Lie: China is a benign power, not interested in territorial expansion.
4. Lie: The CCP is not interested in spreading its digital authoritarian system to other countries.
5. Lie: The CCP is not a threat to Americans’ way of life, including our education system and personal freedoms.
6. Lie: China’s rise is inevitable
7. Lie: China is a champion of multilateralism and the “global south.”
8. Lie: China is a market economy
9. Lie: China remains an unmissable opportunity for businesses.
10.Lie: China is a leader in the response to climate change.
Does it matter if the document is incorrect? It's an official document from the committee of foreign affairs showing that the U.S. stance on China is that they lie about various things.
I don't care how substantial those things are, I care that the official stance was one that China lies a lot and then we proceeded to mimic their covid response while we had other options from more reputable sources (i.e. Korea).
I fail to see any inconsistency between the two. One of the most often repeated cliches regarding China is "don't listen to what they say, watch what they do." Let's assume, hypothetically, that we genuinely (and not as a matter of political rhetoric) believe that everything China says is a lie. This skepticism towards their words simply doesn't logically extend to their actions — especially when those actions (i.e. how they responded to their own Covid situation) were in their own self-interest and could be independently verified. This is just a logical observation: Unless you believe that China intentionally responded to Covid in self-destructive ways in the hopes that US might copy their responses, there's simply no inconsistency between the "official stance" you linked to and what you referred to as the subsequent "mimicking".
It was in China's own self-interest to under-report their casualties to covid. They were forced to choose some form of action, but that does not mean their choice was the correct one. Also, there was little to no independent verification of their reported numbers. China doesn't just let foreign interests come into their country and investigate.
Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy, delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus in the long term.
This article reads like typical doomerism. Can we replace the United States with any other highly developed (G7-level) nation and get the same result? Yeah, pretty much. For example: Swap in Germany or France. What big stuff have they built that amazes the world in the last 30 years? Not much. "Oh no, Germany/France is doomed." No, they are doing fine.
These article presuppose that China will grow fast and endlessly and "take over the World" (economically, then perhaps militarily). Haven't we seen this before? Oh yeah, Japan in the 1980s.
Now for my ad hominem attack: The about page on this blog is hysterical. Choice quote:
taught Homer to the children of Beijing billionaires
> There was a time when average Americans could get together and, in one afternoon, build an entire barn.
> Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average Americans doing that today? Not a chance!
> They’d spend weeks debating the membership and organizational structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of the logo to appear on their letterhead. Ultimately this issue would become a bitter and drawn-out dispute, be taken to court, and the people involved would start complaining of depression and anxiety, and psychologists would announce that these people were victims of a new disease called Barn Committee Logo Dispute Distress Syndrome, or BCLDDS, which would become the subject of one-hour shows by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael, after which millions of Americans would realize that they, too, were suffering from BCLDDS, and they’d form support groups with Hot Line numbers and twelve-step programs. That’s what we modern Americans do.
The Logo Subcommittee of the Barn Architect Selection Committee actually sounds like something Americans would form back in the halcyon days when we did build things.
Some mediocre little guy got to call himself "subcommittee chairman" and be king for a day while he made pronouncements on barn logos (and got a little experience in leadership for future occasions). Everyone who cared about the barn logo had their say, got to give input and be heard, and so they felt they owned the end result.
The committee was inefficient as hell, but the end result was that people were bought in because they got a little slice of the power and prestige. They didn't just get paid, they got a little standing in the community. They made their mark of the whole project and that feeling is one of the greatest motivators to work in the world.
So when it came time to raise the barn they were dynamos because they wanted to see their logo on high.
Compare that to today when I give my TaskRabbit barn raiser $200 to raise my barn. They aren't invested in the success of the barn, they just want to do the least barn raising for the most money while I want them to raise the most barn for the least dollars. Our relationship is adversarial. I'm under no obligation to listen to anything the barn raiser has to say and the only way they can express dissatisfaction is by quitting.
That's fair, yes. At the same time when the process takes long enough, it's hard to retain any sense of ownership by the end. Exhaustion is more like it.
While the barn was built in a day, months were spend before hand perparing. All the lumber was prepared by a much small group. Building a barn (the old way - without modern cranes) requires many many humans to lift and old large heavy beams into place while other parts are all set together. Eventually it becomes self supporting and everyone can go home, but there is a time when you need dozens of humans all working together or the job cannot be done. This was carefully planned, and everyone coming to a barn raising would check (to various amounts depending on how much you trusted the organizer) that all the premade parts were already made so that they could get done in a day. Even after the barn was built there often was a lot time between a barn shaped building, and a building you could use for barn purposes.
The barn raising is a big event that has obvious visual progress. I've seen bridged being built - they work for months with seaming little progress (putting in foundations!) before they put up beams - before then it looks like nothing, then in a few days they have the beams up and they are painting lines on the new bridge.
As misguided as our policies were during the pandemic, It’s sort of ironic reading this article knowing that American companies “built” the coronavirus vaccine.
American and european companies yes, public institutions maybe less so - What public institutions did do, for once, is decisively pour money at these private companies and letting them do their thing. And that does count. But it's not exactly the common course of action.
lots of countries built covid vaccines; moderna in the usa was probably the first, but weren't allowed to provide the vaccine to people who wanted to vaccinate until november, long after the prc had vaccinated its entire military and political class, as well as any students studying abroad
moreover, even inside the usa, moderna's vaccine was only made publicly available months after covid had killed most of the most vulnerable people
here in argentina our first vaccinations didn't come until the next year, and they were russian sputnik v, not pfizer or moderna, because the companies in the usa couldn't produce enough to meet demand. the russians struggled with this too, but were still able to deliver earlier
of course the following statement is even more true of the chinese and russian covid vaccine efforts
> In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?” This is a learned response
whether it is true in general or not of the chinese or russian economies, i cannot say. the article argues that it is false in china, but virtually everything it says about chinese history is so wrong as to be nearly the opposite of what I understand to be the truth, so I don't trust it
the fact that you couldn't get chinese and russian vaccines in the usa (and apparently don't know about them) has nothing to do with who could and couldn't build covid vaccines and everything to do with whose side management took
I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it that way through massive networks of financialization and regulatory capture.
In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential action.