At least five interesting things: No, You're Wrong edition (#70)

Hi, folks! I haven’t done one of these roundups lately, so I’m overdue!

Econ 102 is moving to one episode every two weeks, since Erik is very busy starting his new job at a16z. But never fear, I have some other projects in the works, for those of you who enjoy hearing my voice. In the meantime, here’s one Econ 102 episode, which itself was delayed due to legal issues switching the podcast over to a16z.

Manufacturing's Future, The Electric Tech Stack, and Automation Turpentine Episode

Anyway, on to this week’s list of interesting things, which is mainly just me telling people they’re wrong about stuff.

1. Doomerism is so passé

I don’t see nearly as many pessimistic screeds these days as I did a couple of years ago. But every once in a while, one pops up on my screen, and it’s invariably just as maudlin and overwrought as they all are. The latest example is an essay in the New York Times by Andreas Reckwitz from Berlin, entitled “The West is Lost”.

Why is the West lost? Well, fairly predictably, he starts out with climate change:

The most dramatic loss is environmental. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, disappearing habitats and the ruination of entire regions are eroding the conditions of life for humans and nonhumans alike. Even more threatening than present damage is the anticipation of future devastation — what has aptly been termed climate grief. What’s more, mitigation strategies themselves promise losses: a departure from the consumer-oriented lifestyle of the 20th century, once celebrated as the hallmark of modern progress.

Look, climate change is obviously a bad thing, but let’s not exaggerate. The notion that runaway climate change was going to make the Earth uninhabitable was always highly dubious; in 2021, the author of The Uninhabitable Earth wrote an article entitled “After Climate Alarmism”, in which he embraces more balanced, reasonable forecasts. Thanks to the amazing progress in renewable technology, and China’s gung-ho willingness to scale that technology rapidly, the world will probably be spared the worst. And the idea that climate change is going to be solved — or even meaningfully altered — by pious Europeans eschewing modern consumer lifestyles is just numerically illiterate. Technology is solving the problem while German intellectuals wring their hands.

Next up, Reckwitz tells us that we’re experiencing economic devastation:

Economic changes have also brought loss. Entire regions once defined by prosperity — Rust Belt America, the coal fields of northern England, small-town France, eastern Germany — are now locked in decline. The optimism of the mid-20th century, when upward mobility seemed the natural way of things, has proved exceptional rather than typical. It was, it turns out, a historical interlude. Deindustrialization and global competition have fractured societies into winners and losers, with large segments of the middle class seeing their security erode.

I wrote a whole post debunking the notion that globalization hollowed out the American middle class:

Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class Noah Smith · May 8 Read full story

In fact, middle-class wages have risen almost as strongly in the “neoliberal” era as they did in the glorious three decades after WW2: