The Science of Hippie-Punching

Hi, I'm Josiah Neeley. You might remember me from such blog posts as The Libertarian and the Union Organizer Can Be Friends (Maybe) and Corporate Personhood: Why It's Awesome. But today I would like to talk to you about an important issue facing our nation: hippie-punching.*

For those not in the know, "hippie-punching" refers to when someone (usually but not always on the center-left) attacks someone farther to their left as a means of gaining credibility and support with the general populace. The term appears to date from 2007, but the practice itself is far older. Bill Clinton, for example, was an expert hippie-puncher, and the term itself seems to be an oblique reference to the 1968 Democratic convention, when anti-war protesters battled Chicago police under the control of Democratic mayor Richard Daley (the nearest right-wing equivalent to the term "hippie-punching" is "that time when William F. Buckley kicked the Birchers out of the conservative movement").

Hippie-punching is generally used in a derogatory manner, implicitly suggesting that punching hippies is somehow a bad thing. Yet scientific research suggests that hippie-punching may in fact play a positive role in our political process.

For example, last year Chris Mooney looked at the so-called "radical flank effect" whereby the existence of individuals and groups pushing for radical action on an issue makes people more willing to deal with moderates on the issue. For the flanking effect to be positive, however, it is necessary that moderates and radicals not get lumped together in public perceptions. If that happens, the radical flank effect can turn negative, inspiring a backlash and tainting even moderate action on an issue with the actions of the radical fringe:

one of the critical factors in determining whether a radical flank effect will be positive or negative is the way moderates and activists relate to one another. “How clearly are the moderates and radicals differentiating themselves?” asks Carleton College’s Devashree Gupta. This, as Gupta notes, shapes media coverage and the thinking of politicians and policymakers who may be calculating whether helping the moderates will ease the headaches the radicals create for them.

One way for moderates to differentiate themselves from radicals is to engage in a little hippie-punching now and again. And while it may not feel that way to those on the receiving end on such attacks, they are actually providing a valuable service by helping empower moderates to moving policy in their preferred direction:

The sad irony here is that the activists don’t get what they want. In the end, they merely get to help out the moderates. But that’s the nature of the positive radical flank effect.

*All references to violence in this post are purely metaphorical. No hippies were harmed during the production of this blog post. 

How normal people see macroeconomics

Most of the time, econ bloggers and columnists write as if we were speaking to an audience that has taken a few econ classes. But the more widely read our posts and columns become, the more our real audiences fail to fit this ideal. Most people who read us are smart and educated. But smart and educated non-economists ("normal people", if you will) see econ - and especially macro - in fundamentally different ways from economists.

I've been thinking about these differences for a while, and I've reached two major conclusions:

1. Normal people see macro as inherently political.

2. Normal people see macro as being mostly about redistribution rather than about efficiency.

The first of these tendencies can be seen in this video. The video features Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post interviewing Miles Kimball and three economics writers. The interview itself is very interesting and informative (Umair Haque's ramblings notwithstanding). Miles especially does an excellent job of putting macro ideas in simple terms. Mark Gongloff is also solid.

But scroll forward to the 10 minute mark. Mike Sacks, certainly an educated and intelligent guy, admits how little he understands macroeconomics. This amuses him so much that he starts laughing at himself. Groping for the rudiments of an understanding, he instinctively tries to label economic philosophies as "liberal" and "conservative". At the end of the video, he reads Miles Kimball's bio, and finding Miles to be a political independent, moderate, and maverick, declares that Kimball is his favorite sage among those present (a very good choice, I must say, for more reasons than just the one Sacks gives).

Americans in particular have come to understand almost everything through the lens of the left-right divide in American politics. Science has obviously not been exempt from this trend, as the fights over evolution, climate science, cosmology, vaccination, and GMO crops have shown (no word yet on whether Newton's Laws of Motion are commie scum or fascist bastards). Economics, with all its public policy implications, never had any chance of escaping the tribalist wave. Even basic economic numbers are subject to partisan disagreement...at least until people are paid to get them right. And then there's the partisan bias in economic forecasts.

As for my second observation - that people understand arguments for redistribution but don't understand efficiency arguments - I have no hard data to back that one up. My observation comes from long experience and countless interactions with friends and relatives and strangers in cafes, blog commenters and op-ed writers and EconoTrolls. Among the things I've noticed are:

1. Normal people talk about economic "schools" much much more than do economists.

2. When normal people talk about the consequences of stabilization policy (monetary and fiscal policy), they often talk about the impact on the rich and poor, the benefits to big banks, and the "fairness" of the policies. In contrast, economists rarely talk about these things.

In a certain sense, the normal people's approach makes more sense than that of the economists. We are an incredibly rich economy - the world's richest large economy by far. This means there are relatively few efficiency gains to be had, but the impact of any redistribution of our titanic wealth will be enormous. Economists usually try to be impartial, shrugging and saying "Rent is rent!" when confronted with questions of distribution, or pooh-poohing welfare analysis as the province of philosphers and dorm-room discussions. They focus on efficiency because a Pareto improvement is something that everyone can get behind (in fact, that's how it's defined). In the process, they ignore the main issue that is usually on the mind of someone thinking about the economy: "What's in it for me?"

So most normal people seem to see macroeconomics as political (even if most economists don't!), and see redistribution as the main question. The result is that public discussions of macro, on the blogs and elsewhere, usually break down into tribal camps, and thinkers are often seen more as tribal champions than as technocratic advisors or sources of intellectually interesting ideas. Many people see the "-isms" of macro - "New Keyneisanism", "New Classicalism", etc. - as political advocacy rather than as dispassionate scientific attempts to explain the world around us.

If monetarists or New Keynesians (is there a difference?) suggest monetary expansion, for example, a lot of readers see it instead as a liberal attempt to use inflation to redistribute money from rich creditors to poor debtors, while a few see it as a conservative attempt to boost the profits of big banks. Only a small minority seem to consider the question of whether monetary expansion is a Pareto efficient response to the business cycle. Because of this, monetarists like Scott Sumner often spend a lot of time "punching hippies" on every issue other than monetary policy, trying to avoid being tarred as hippies themselves for their lack of fear of inflation. (Note to Sumner: This strategem has quite noticeably failed to convince most conservatives to support anything remotely resembling NGDP targeting.)

(Update: Sumner pleads not guilty to hippie-punching. Perhaps the direction of Sumner's punching is determined more by path-dependent stochasticity, and less by game theory, than I had assumed. Sumner then accuses me of strategic Sumner-punching. I also plead not guilty; I would only Sumner-punch for the sake of pure entertainment. I have my principles, after all!)

In other words, econ, like everything else in modern America, seems to have been caught up in the great war of Tribal Realities that has rent apart everything in our society. Even the most powerful and brilliant individual intellectual is like an ant compared to those titanic forces. And until the great War of the Tribes is over, our feeble attempts to show off our scattered, tiny, incomplete insights into Extant Reality will be lost amidst the tossing maelstrom of Tribal Reality. But in addition, it also means that most macroeconomists are ignoring the question most people care about - the question of "Who benefits from stabilization policy?".

Of course, I could be wrong about this. Much of my "data" is just anecdotal, after all. There's a serious selection bias at work, since those stirred by tribal passions will be more likely to leave a shrill comment on a blog, or start an argument at dinner.

What do you think?

Rise of the cyborgs

People have been requesting that I do more futurist posts, so here's a bit of holiday optimism.

A lot of recent futurist discussion in the media and blogosphere has revolved around either the technological stagnation thesis, or the question of whether robots will replace humans. Elsewhere, people are toying with the implications of more far-out technologies like brain emulation and desire modification, or following the ongoing mini-booms in natural gas fracking and 3-D printing.

But it occurs to me that people may be overlooking something big: another technological revolution that is right under our noses, about to change our world in a big way. I'm talking about the rise of biomechanical engineering...or, to use a more catchy term, cyborg technology. The cyborg revolution is not a far-future sci-fi conjecture; it is upon us even as I write these words.

For a taste of how cyborg technology may soon change our world, check out this BBC article. The key technology is the integration of human brains with computers. Here are some extrapolations of technologies that currently exist:

1. Direct mental control of machines (also called Mind-Machine Interface, or MMI). Non-invasive ways of controlling machines with one's mind have already been developed and will soon be commercialized. The biggest benefit of this, of course, will be for physically impaired people, but it will also probably allow us to write a lot faster; just think words, and they appear on the page. Writing speed is probably a significant constraint on productivity, so MMI may have the potential to raise service-industry productivity, which has been lagging in recent decades. Of course, MMI may also be a much easier and more fun way to play video games, control your mobile devices, etc., than punching buttons.

Another aspect of this is mind-internet interface. Obviously, this is scary, since you don't want your brain getting hacked by jerky teenagers halfway around the globe. So I'm not sure if this will ever be done, especially because sight is already a very fast way to assimilate information from the net.

2. Augmented intelligence. Artificial intelligence is one of the most-talked-about technologies, but if you think about it, it's probably easier and more natural to begin with the intelligence we already have, and simply augment it with computers. The BBC article I cited discusses experiments in which artificial devices have already served as functioning brain structures in rats, in particular as artificial memory centers; expect this technology to improve rapidly.

If we can store human memories in artificial brain structures, the implications are enormous. First of all, it would vastly expand the knowledge base and expertise of a human knowledge worker; if we could store vastly expanded amounts of knowledge, we would no longer be constrained to specialize in one incredibly narrow field. This might unlock huge innovative potential, as individual humans could do the kind of creative work that now require teams of humans.

If these artificial brain structures can be exchanged between people (a nontrivial task, obviously!), then we get human memory transfer, and the possibilities are even more enormous. Instant education, as expertise is copied and transferred from human to human. Functional immortality, as full sets of memories are transferred to cloned brains (Note: This is an idea I got from Miles Kimball; he explains it in this post). Etc.

Artificial brain structures might also allow boosted cognitive ability. Imagine humans with the processing power of computers at their beck and call. This, of course, is a more speculative technology...but maybe not so speculative, to wit:

3. Augmented learning. This sounds very pie-in-the-sky, until you read the BBC article and find that it is already real and may even be available over the counter:

Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) is a way of running electrical current through the brain with electrodes attached to the outside of the skull. The US Defence Advanced Research Agency (Darpa) currently uses tDCS to improve the learning speed of snipers, claiming it cuts the learning curve by a factor of 2.5. There are issues, though. "They learn more quickly but they don't have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why,” says Vincent Clark, neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico. 

Such devices were initially expensive, but now GoFlow sells a DIY kit for $99, which consists of two electrodes, cables and a 9-volt battery. So, in theory, everybody can try and tune his or her own brain at home. But if it is not applied correctly, anything could happen – from enhancing intelligence (intended), rewiring our brains (who knows?) through to electrocuting ourselves (not intended). Neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh from Oxford University says he wouldn’t buy the DIY kit, because he thinks it is premature to distribute it to non-experts. “People might feel like they should stimulate their brain as much as they want, but just as buying a medicine on the counter, you need to know when to use it, how often, in what conditions and in what cases you should not take it.”

There is no word to describe this except for "amazing". I fully expect other bloggers to buy the kit, try it out, and tell me how it goes...

Of course, another possible application of this exact same type of technology is:

4. Mood modification. We already know how to stimulate certain emotions with direct brain stimulation; noninvasive methods, of the type currently being developed for artificial learning, would revolutionize the applications of this technology. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy currently relies on human attention and vigilance to replace negative thoughts with positive ones (thus alleviating depression and anxiety); if this process could be automated, it could help cure some of the great psychological scourges of modern society.

But why stop there? People with phobias could get rid of the phobias by counteracting fear responses at high speed; as soon as you see the thing you fear (a dog, or an enclosed space), a computer will see your fear response spiking and stimulate feelings of safety and security instead. Poof, phobia gone! Not to mention social anxiety; imagine how easy it would be to talk to cute girls at parties if your mobile device could zap you with artificial self-confidence every time you started to get scared.

Of course, at this point, mood modification becomes a rudimentary form of my "holy grail" technology of Desire Modification. The thing to understand is that non-invasive external stimulation of emotional responses is not very far away; we're talking a few years, not a few decades.

5. Artificial sensory input. This already exists and is on the market, in the form of cochlear impants (artificial ears) and visual prostheses (artificial eyes). The technology is improving very rapidly. At the point where artificial senses become as good as (or better than!) natural ones, whole new worlds of possibility open up.

For example: artificial eyes and ears would replace all input devices. You would never need a television screen, a phone, Google Goggles, or a speaker of any kind. All you would need would be your own artificial eyes. You could play video games in perfect, pure augmented reality. Imagine the possibilities for video-conferencing, or hanging out with friends half a world away!

And why stop there? If you wanted, you could perceive the buildings around you as castles, or the inside of a spaceship. The whole world could look and sound however you wanted.

(Of course, brain chips that could feed artificial input to the sensory perception centers of the brain - the technology of The Matrix - could accomplish this task even better. But this might be farther away.)


OK, time to stop. Of course, I haven't come close to encompassing the full set of possibilities available from brain-computer interface, but I think I've shown that many cyborg technologies that currently exist have the potential to quickly and dramatically reshape human life. I leave it to you to fill out the list.

What will this mean for the economy? Well, unlike media and information technologies (which can usually be copied without cost), biomechanical technologies are good old manufactured goods; their inclusion into the economy will show up in the GDP statistics, unlike Facebook or Craigslist. And because these technologies have the potential to vastly improve the human experience, we can expect them to become near-universal consumer goods, provided our legal institutions allow it.

Also, cyborg technologies have the potential to improve human productivity quite a bit, as my examples above have hopefully shown. Humans who can store vast amounts of knowledge and expertise, who can directly interface with machines, and who can make themselves more well-adjusted and motivated at the touch of a (mental) button will be valuable employees indeed, and will prove useful complements to the much-discussed army of robots.

All this means that cyborg technologies, if they become widespread, will do much to quiet the fears of the stagnationists. But this, of course, requires institutions that allow these technologies to become universal. Currently, I feel that institutions like the FDA and the health care system are biased toward treating the "sick", and place way too little value on technologies to improve the average human experience above its baseline (witness how we push antidepressants on everyone, but ban even weak recreational pleasure drugs like marijuana). I fear that our society will collectively decide that anything that improves on "natural" humanity is unsafe for public consumption. This would sacrifice huge amounts of growth potential on the altar of what is essentially a pointless, semantic distinction (Isn't it "natural" for old men to become impotent? But we still allow Viagra...).

In any case, the cyborg revolution is upon us. Pay attention, futurists. This could be very, very big.


Update: Just to clarify, I think that: A) cyborg technologies that affect the mind are going to be far, far more important than ones that affect mainly the body, and B) Noninvasive methods of brain-computer interface definitely count as "cyborg" technology; you don't have to have robot parts in your head to be a cyborg.

Update 2: In this must-read piece, io9's George Dvorsky lists 16 science fiction predictions that actually came true just in 2012. Cyborg technology dominates the list; see items 1, 3, 10, 13, and 15. The cyborg revolution is upon us!

Update 3: A TED talk on cyborgs just came out. Like I said, this is bigger than anyone realizes, and is right now in the process of exploding into the public consciousness.

Update 4: Futurist Ramez Naam has an article in Forbes summarizing a lot of the new cyborg tech and speculating about where it might take us.

I get what you get in ten years, in two days

"I get what you get in ten years, in two days."
- Chris Brown, "Look at Me Now"


Plenty of folks have turned out to attack Greg Mankiw's essay, "Defending the One Percent". Most of them have focused on Mankiw's numbers and factual assertions. I thought I'd take a different approach, because at its core, Mankiw's differences with the bulk of the economics world are more about values than facts.

The usual economist case for income redistribution is based on utilitarianism; the idea is that $1000 matters more to a poor person than to a rich person. Mankiw wants to ditch this idea in favor of a value system based on "just deserts":

An alternative to the social insurance view of the income distribution is what, in Mankiw (2010), I called a “just deserts” perspective. According to this view, people should receive compensation congruent with their contributions. If the economy were described by a classical competitive equilibrium without any externalities or public goods, then every individual would earn the value of his or her own marginal product, and there would be no need for government to  alter the resulting income distribution.

Here is that 2010 Mankiw essay, which is very similar to the recent one.

Now, value systems are subjective; what the government should or shouldn't do is a matter of opinion. But I think it's worthwhile to think through the implications of Mankiw's "just deserts" value system.

To do this, let's do a thought experiment, and compare two imaginary people - just for fun, let's make them two American white males in their mid-40s. The first let's call Brad CEO. He's the CEO of a big company and makes $30 million a year, which is just a tad less than the CEO of Phillip Morris made in 2012. The second let's call Mike Clerk, who works at Wal-Mart, earning the average Wal-Mart wage of $12.40 an hour, or a bit over $25,000 a year. Mike is hardly unusual, income-wise; in fact, somewhere between 20% and 25% of American households make less than Mike. Furthermore let's assume that taxes are zero; this is a world where everyone gets his "just deserts" (Note that because of elasticity, this means that Brad CEO actually takes home more than the CEO of Phillip Morris would take home in the absence of taxes; so perhaps Brad is more accurately compared to the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch).

In 10 years, Mike gets $250,000. That is about what Brad gets in three days (not two; sorry, Chris Brown).

Now let's imagine that Mike wants to buy something big - say, a new Honda Civic (disclosure: I drive a Honda Civic). That costs about $18,000. So Mike has to save up to afford it (sure, he can just finance it, but then he has to make payments, which amounts to much the same thing). How long does it take him to save up $18,000? Let's suppose that Mike is an extraordinarily thrifty man (following the advice of blogger Noah Smith), and lives well under his means - eating cheap fast food or low-quality grocery store food without much meat content, living in a small studio apartment, biking to Wal-Mart each morning, etc. By these heroic efforts, he manages to put aside 25% of his income - over eight times the average household savings rate in America today - just to buy that Honda. (Assume the risk-free rate of return is around zero, as in America today).

It takes Mike about 5,800 hours of work to afford the Honda Civic. That is about three years of full-time work.

So Mike works and works and works, for three years. Stocking the stockroom. Punching the cash register. Dealing with angry customers. Putting boxes up on shelves. Hour after hour. Day after day. Biking home to eat his low-quality vegetarian meals in his tiny studio apartment. At the end of those three years, Mike's hands are a little more wrinkled, his hair a little grayer, his back a little stiffer. Those three years represent about 4% of Mike's entire lifetime. But he finally does it. Three years after he decided he wanted one, there it is, in his parking lot: a beautiful brand-new Honda Civic.



Now let's go over and look at Brad. Suppose Brad randomly sees Mike's new Civic in a parking lot and decides that he wants the same car. Like Mike, he decides to set aside 25% of his income to buy it. At this rate, assuming a 40-hour workweek and 50 weeks of work per year, Brad will have to work a little less than 5 hours. That's slightly more than half of one working day. Go to a couple meetings, send some emails, and the Civic is his.

Now suppose Mike goes to Greg Mankiw and asks: "Dr. Mankiw, why is it right and just that it took me 4% of my entire lifespan to buy this car, with all my heroic efforts and harsh self-denial, when it took that Brad CEO guy less than a day? I put in every bit as much effort as he does, day after day. Why does he deserve to get things with so much less effort than I put in?"

Dr. Mankiw responds:

I am more persuaded by the thesis advanced by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (2008) in their book The Race between Education and Technology. Goldin and Katz argue that skillbiased technological change continually increases the demand for skilled labor. By itself, this force tends to increase the earnings gap between skilled and unskilled workers, thereby increasing inequality...The story of rising inequality, therefore, is not primarily about politics and rent-seeking but rather about supply and demand... 

If Goldin and Katz are right that the broad changes in inequality have driven by the interaction between technology and education...then it would seem an unlikely coincidence that the parallel changes at the top have been driven by something entirely different. Rather, it seems that changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.

"OK," Mike says. "But why, then, is Brad CEO so much more productive than I am? Where does his $30 million productivity come from?"

Dr. Mankiw responds:

[T]he intergenerational transmission of income has many causes beyond unequal opportunity. In particular, parents and children share genes, a fact that would lead to intergenerational persistence in income even in a world of equal opportunities. IQ, for example, has been widely studied, and it has a large degree of heritability. Smart parents are more likely to have smart children, and their greater intelligence will be reflected, on average, in higher incomes. Of course, IQ is only one dimension of talent, but it is easy to believe that other dimensions, such as self-control, ability to focus, and interpersonal skills, have a degree of genetic heritability as well.

"So let me get this straight," Mike says. "Brad deserves to be so much richer than me because of ability he was born with? People who are lucky enough to be born with high skills deserve to be able to get a Civic in half a day, while people who were born with fewer skills deserve to have to slave away for years if they want a Civic?"

Anyway, Dr. Mankiw's answer is not forthcoming, and Mike cannot leave a comment on Mankiw's blog, due to the no-comments policy. So our story continues.

Mike falls off of a ladder one day (he's in his late 40s by now, and less coordinated than he used to be). He's able to work, but only with greatly increased pain. In the old days, before Mankiw's "just deserts" theory gained widespread acceptance, Mike would have been able to collect Social Security disability; now, however, the government tells him that he does not deserve disability payments - they constitute an unfair transfer of income from the productive to the unproductive - and so he must continue to work. Additionally, Mike cannot go to physical therapy because he cannot afford health insurance, and Medicaid was canceled because Medicaid payments do not constitute the "just deserts" of the unproductive.

So Mike continues working for a short time, until his company is forced to downsize by changes in the global economy. Wal-Mart closes Mike's store and lays him off. In the old system he would collect unemployment insurance payments, but now the government tells him that unemployment payments are not his "just deserts".

Anyway, this tale is getting a bit maudlin, so I will abandon it in the middle; if you want stories about poor people that actually have endings, go read Charles Dickens. But hopefully by now I've made my point. It's easy to say that people deserve to get whatever they can manage to get in a "free" market. But when you start to actually think about the consequences of such a system, you realize that it probably doesn't fit very closely with most people's concept of the term "just deserts".

Like I said, moral values are just statements of opinion, and Greg Mankiw is certainly entitled to his own. But I somehow doubt that his opinion of "just deserts" will be able to win over a majority of Americans, even among the intellectual classes.

What is right with modernity?

In my debate with "neoreactionary" blogger Michael Anissimov, we briefly touched on the question of whether modernity or traditional life was better, but we didn't really go into it. Now Michael has posted a list of things he thinks are wrong with modernity, so, being a guy who generally likes modernity, I thought I would respond.

Some of the items on Michael's list I think aren't problems at all. For example, he claims that the murder rate has only decreased because of medical advances, and is now 40 times as high as in 1900. That's almost certainly specious, since other forms of violent crime (forcible rape, assault, etc.) have also decreased by as much or more than murder in recent years, and medical science is not responsible for those declines. Also, Michael worries about public debt being high, but I'm not exactly sitting here leading a sucky life because of the national debt, and hopefully neither are you - if the debt can be contained to a manageable level (which it looks like it can), then it'll never be a problem.

Other items on Michael's list are real problems, but don't obviously seem to be more of a problem recently. For example, suicide is on the rise lately, but it's also very common in some traditional societies like rural India. Drugs like heroin are more of a problem today, but I bet a lot more people drank themselves into an early grave back in traditional societies. Michael mentions "perennial recession", but what he really means is stagnation (slow growth), and by that definition we were stuck in perennial recession from the dawn of time until sometime in the 1800s - in fact, "traditional society" is arguably defined by permanent stagnation.

But some of the things on Michael's list strike me as real problems. For example, obesity is certainly higher than in the past, as is overmedication. Social isolation seems to be a much bigger problem too. Family breakdown has also become more prevalent in America in recent decades, though it's not clear how it compares to long ago. Actually, I think Michael left a couple of things off of his list, like the increase in clinical depression.

So yes, there are ways in which modern life is worse than life in the past. In fact, it would be surprising if there weren't! But any list of problems deserves a countervailing list of advantages, and I think there are many more ways in which modern life is better than traditional life. Technology is obviously the big one here - you like being able to flush your toilet and not die in childbirth, right? - but I think we can go beyond that. For example:

* There's just a lot more to do. Modern life includes a lot of leisure time, which many of us don't just spend vegging out in front of the TV. More leisure + more technology = more stuff to do. We can rock-climb, or visit Cambodia, or play Final Fantasy, or write a blog, or...well, anything, really. There's great music and cool fashion and fun sports and neat games and all sorts of awesome stuff.

* Most of us don't have to go to war. My grandfathers and great-uncles all fought in World War 2. They told me the stories. As they would be the first to tell you, it SUCKED. And I doubt the Thirty Years' War was much more fun. War used to be a fixture of life, and now it's not. Advantage: modernity.

* There is less conflict between groups. My ancestors were Jewish peasants in Lithuania. Michael's were Cossacks in Russia. In other words, his ancestors probably spent a lot of time beating up my ancestors (except for that one guy in Fiddler on the Roof). Now, large-scale conflicts between people of different ethnicities and backgrounds and religions are very rare in rich countries. In Philadelphia in 1844 there were huge riots against Irish immigrants. There have been no such riots against (or by) Mexican immigrants in modern times. Advantage: modernity.

* You can meet a lot more people. Marx wrote about the "idiocy of rural life", but the word he used might have just meant "isolation". The fact is, in traditional society, most people didn't meet a lot of other people in their lives. Now, we meet a lot. That doesn't mean we form more close relationships than in the past (or fewer!), but it is interesting, stimulating, and perspective-widening to meet people from a lot of walks of life. And many inhabitants of modern societies today have traveled internationally and met people from other countries, which is something that used to be very rare.

* We know a lot more. With Wikipedia, I have more knowledge at my fingertips than anyone in a traditional society ever could have dreamed of. My sheer breadth and depth of knowledge almost certainly exceeds that of savants and sages of yore, but I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that regard.

* You can keep in touch with your old friends. For those people in traditional societies who did leave their hometowns, the price was the destruction of most or all of their human relationships. In 1963, Bob Dylan wrote a song about missing his old friends and never being able to see them again. Even in the 1980s, my parents weren't in close contact with their college and high school friends. Now I just open up Facebook, and there they are! Needless to say, this also applies to keeping in touch with your family.

* Most jobs are a lot more interesting. Professoring is about the same as it was in ages past, and service jobs are probably about the same as well, but most people have far more interesting jobs than their ancestors. In the past, most people were doing mindless repetitive farm work (I've done it for one summer, and trust me, you don't want to do it for more than one summer) or manufacturing work. Now, a huge chunk of the populace works in mentally engaging jobs that give them some space for individual initiative, creativity, and expression.

* You can speak your mind. In the past, if you criticized the government, some thugs might come to your door and beat you to within an inch of your life. Now, if you live in a modernized, developed country, you can write "Barack Obama eats poop!" on your front door, and the only negative consequence will be that your neighbors think you are tacky. Advantage: modernity.

* You can be whatever religion you want. In ancient times, unless you lived under Genghis Khan (a pioneer in religious tolerance, believe it or not), you could easily be tortured and killed for having the wrong religion. For example, take the Spanish Inquisition, which, contra Monty Python, everyone kind of expected in one form or another. In fact, in many non-modern societies today, you can still be persecuted for believing in non-officially-approved details about the omnipotent being who may or may not have created the universe. Advantage: modernity.

* Everything is a lot safer. Thanks to our highly annoying but also highly effective modern legal system, you don't have to worry about toxic meat, unsafe cars, or collapsing buildings nearly as much as in the past (though these dangers are not entirely gone). That strikes me as a big plus.

* You can get ahead. In lots of traditional societies it was very hard to get ahead if you weren't an aristocrat (again, unless you lived under Genghis Khan, who abolished aristocracy and implemented meritocracy; this reform lasted until precisely 0.07 milliseconds after his death, but oh well). In modern society, the combination of capitalist meritocracy and technology allows ambitious people to get ahead regardless of their circumstances of birth. (Luck, of course, still plays a big role.)

* There's no slavery. Well, almost none. But in the past, a lot of people were turned into personal property for most or all of their lives. Being someone's property really sucks. In modern society, it is highly illegal to do that to someone. Advantage: modernity.

* Being a woman doesn't suck as much. In traditional societies, if you were a woman, you usually had to stay home. Now you can go out and do stuff and be a real human being. Also, you are in far less danger of being raped if you do. If you decide to have an affair - which I'm not saying is a nice thing to do, but neither is trolling people on the internet, and we all have our vices - your husband can no longer legally slaughter you. If you want to have 10 kids, you certainly can (and very few of them will die in infancy), but if you don't want to have any kids, you're free to do that too. Etc. etc. Women happen to comprise just over half of the human population, so this seems like a big deal to me.

* There's a lot less chance of people punching you in the face. I covered this above, but as further support I cite the complete works of Mark Twain, which I take to be an accurate description of life in the 1800s, and which involves lots of random fist-fighting. Now you may think that fist-fighting is all in good fun, but actually if you did the homework assignment from Fight Club - i.e., randomly picked street fights - you would quickly discover otherwise, as moviemaker Harmony Korine did.

* Viagra. Just sayin'.

The fact is, all of these awesome improvements in the day-to-day lives and long-term well-being of humankind are due to generalized liberalism - to "classical liberalism" (i.e. economic freedom), to "cultural liberalism" (i.e. tolerance), and to civil liberties. Even the technological advances were mostly made possible by generalized liberalism - the Soviets had some of the world's best scientists, but they didn't have Final Fantasy (or Viagra).

You see, generalized liberalism basically just tries to allow people to do whatever they want, to the greatest degree possible. That's not always going to work. There are externalities, and our government and our culture will inevitably fail to fully remedy some of these. There are information asymmetries. There are times when people want things that they don't end up liking or appreciating. But by and large, when people can do more of what they want, they feel better off. That, in a nutshell, is why modernity trumps tradition.

This is something that most people realize. It's not a difficult concept, and it's not an original concept. Liberalism as an idea is boring by now. So there's a temptation to say "Hey, we've tried this long enough, let's try something else." And there's also the temptation to imagine that by discarding liberalism, we could fix all the problems with modern life without incurring any of the costs that our ancestors paid - that we could paste all of the (often exaggerated) benefits of tradition on top of a basically modern framework and get a purer, more moral, more right-feeling society.

But I think that's an illusion. Liberalism has such demonstrable, clear, enormous benefits that I predict very few people will abandon it once they have tasted its fruits. They may complain about the flaws, but they will not throw the baby out with the bathwater.