About What Am I Optimistic and Pessimistic?

I think you intentionally listed pessimisms before optimisms, and I appreciate you having done so.

I am optimistic that in 100 years the world will find a new economic system.

I am optimistic that this system wont resemble capitalism or socialism at all.

Ah interesting!

But I suggest that a different electoral system might make democracy work better. Some kind of proportional representation could produce a cluster of smaller parties instead of two big ones. There might be a religious conservative party, a realist centre-right party and a stronger libertarian party taking the place of Republicans, for example.

On point one–lack of economic understanding. I see this all the time. A friend just got scolded for buying a Honda. I agree with you in that, I don’t see this changing. I used to think it would be good to push public schools to teach econ with the same priority that they teach math but I changed my mind. I’m affraid that, left to the government, such a class would be turned into a class on how and why capitalism is bad and the governmment needs to control everything.

The only way to do it would be for an organization like the Cato Institute to come into public schools and teach econ for free–saving the school distric money, so the superintendant has more to squander. Superintendants love having more money to squander, so it might be possible to use this carrot to sneak real education into the schools. Of course, such an organization would need deep pockets to pay for all the carrots. They would have to pay off the union somehow too. Perhaps by having the private teacher join it or at least pay dues.

Hey, what about cryonics? I am suprised that hanging out with Robin didn’t convert you to this path!

Bryan,

To what extent are “bad” policies really just benign, in the sense that they do not do much damage (see your optimisms regarding quality of life), and perhaps play a necessary ideological/appeasing role?

@Brandon Reinhart

I read “determinism” in context as something like what was called naturalism about 60 years ago. The idea that everything is a result of natural laws and chemical processes (some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t yet).

A lot of people nod at that and agree at how scientific it sounds, until they realize that it means that there is no free will, consciousness is nothing more or less than self-deception, all choice is an illusion, and nothing could possibly be otherwise than it is.

Of course, if naturalism/determinism is the truth there really isn’t anything we can do about it, since we can’t do anything about anything since we, and the thoughts we “think” are just a meaningless byproduct of a chemical reaction.

If it isn’t true, and people do make choices (as opposed to simply believing they make them), then it is the ultimate pessimistic mistake.

What a strange attitude. If meaningful events can happen as the byproduct of chemical reactions, then that doesn’t make the events meaningless, it makes the sum of reactions meaningful.

There’s no need for the “if” and “then” in that sentence, either. It’s easy to verify the first clause’s truth, since we can produce changes in people’s thoughts by experimentally adding to or reducing the levels of various chemicals in their brains.

So given those observations, perhaps it would help to formulate a better definition of “free will”? Lots of people have a vague notion that it can’t be deterministic (i.e. uniquely determined by initial conditions) and it can’t be partly random (i.e. not uniquely determined by initial conditions), but such restrictions wouldn’t just contradict observation, they would contradict each other.

As a step in the right direction: there is no contradiction between the idea of “we can decide to do something” and “our decision is predetermined”. That’s not even a uniquely materialist viewpoint; the Calvinists (and any other believers in divine omniscience) had to wrestle with the apparent paradox long ago.

Rohit writes:

I am optimistic that this system wont resemble capitalism or socialism at all.

Perhaps, if everything goes to hell we might end up with a primitive barter system.

#1: We are all part of the equilibrium, but not equal parts. One dollar one vote. That’s why relative poverty matters. Some of us a so small a part of the equilibrium that we are destined to be passive participants in it. I think the antidemocratic attitudes of Masonomists (and their rejection of one-man[sic]-one-vote) can only amplify this phenomenon.

#4: Wouldn’t the possibility of life extension for future generations be cause for optimism? Assuming life extension is something desirable in the first place, anyway. You’d think a basher of materialism and moral skepticism (your paleo is showing) would absolutely embrace mortality. Or at least celebrate enhanced longevity in from a less blatantly self-interested perspective.

#9: Masonomism is about as counterculture as dressing conservatively. It speaks on behalf of the business Establishment.

Re #3 and #5: “Social democracy” and “major war on earth will be an unthinkable as a major war in Europe is today.”

Any chance those two things are related?

5. It’s possible that technological progress will eventually eliminate subsistence poverty in a material sense for anyone with some brains, but in the absence of a welfare state some people will always be poor. Jesus was right.

7. Lack of major wars is more a function of unipolarity than anything else. It’s possible that China or the UN would take the place of the declining US in that regard, but the jury is still out on China and the UN’s influence is wholly a function of its members…imagine if the SC were made up wholly of poor countries instead of the world leaders of 1950.

“..islamic birth rates”

How high are they? A Pew Forum report recently estimated that the Muslim population of Europe will rise over the next 20 years from 6% today to 8%. We’re meant to be worried? No! Already fertility rates in North African Arab states are around or below replacement rate, as are the rates in Iran, Bosnia, etc. Muslims are heading along the demographic transition like everyone else.

Since nationalism was a major cause of two 20C world wars, the prediction that nationalism would hold sway sits uneasy with the prediction of no major wars.

‘Errors of materialism’

What are they?

Bryan Caplan: 7. I am an optimist about peace. In a hundred years, a major war on earth will be an unthinkable as a major war in Europe is today. There will be no major nuclear exchange or world war along the way.

I really hope you’re right. But this strikes me as wildly optimistic.

The end of big European wars coincided with the rise of the USA as the dominant military power at the end of WWII. That’s unlikely to be a matter of luck: since that event, it has simply been infeasible for any nation in Europe to gain much by military aggression against any other. Likewise for much of the rest of the world. We’ve been living in the Pax Americana.

But over the next few decades we will see the return of a ‘multi-polar world’ in which regional powers contend for dominance. The U.S. portion of global military spending is falling, as is its dominance in military technology. Already the Chinese are making a big push toward the ability to thwart U.S. intervention in any Asian war, and China’s neighbors are reacting with plans to beef up their own defenses as they become less confident in U.S. protection. There’s even been talk of Japan developing nukes.

More power centers means more people living at the edges between them where aggression may be feasible.

Nukes and their delivery systems have been the ultimate weapons for the last half century. They were in the control of a relative handful of powerful nations whose interest in global stability and their own survival outweighed any desire for territorial gains. As these weapons become much more widely available, the old “mutually-assured destruction” balance of terror has essentially disappeared, and it hasn’t really been replaced. Some of the nations currently racing toward completion of WMD and delivery systems have openly advocated their use to destroy neighboring peoples and/or the USA, and their leaders speak in apocalyptic terms that suggest they may regard destruction of their own people as an acceptable cost.

Frankly, I’ll be relieved if we haven’t seen a nuclear attack somewhere in the world in the next decade, much less the next century. And the probability that one occurs in a given year will continue to rise with time.

This is going to sound trivial, but that is most likely because the readers of this blog do not live in relative poverty. I think there is another thing to be optimistic about:

Fast food quality.

People who live in bad neighborhoods eat a lot of fast food, a lot of which isn’t great. Take a look, however, at the how bad it was 20 years ago. A continuation of this trend, and the highly competitive market for these goods, will probably lead to better tasting, healthier, and cheaper food for people. The effects this has on quality of life can be fairly large.

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