“Sitting in a classroom for many hours a day…” For almost all of human history and prehistory, children were with parents and other kin, in a band or village, working together, and presumably playing and entertaining themselves when they could afford it. Today, kids go to school, and parents go to work. They are separate for the working part of their day.
At home parents probably don’t interact with their kids enough, except for a narrow set of activities. Probably TV, car shuttling, eating together, and basic communications to workout logistics, permissions, discipline, etc.
There is very little interaction between parents and children with regard to things that matter compared to past times. In order for children to inherit from their parents a comprehensive culture, norms, habits, folkways, modes of problem solving, their school would need to be MUCH more than it currently is. It seems that school is pretty narrow. Many worksheets. A fair amount of busy work. College is an improvement, but most college professors have never worked in industry. So it is quite a shock for a twenty-something to enter the workforce after having spent so little time with people, particularly his or her parents doing real work and solving life’s many problems. Cooking, exercise, legal, corporate communication, interviewing, dating, home maintenance, politics, etc. The learning curve is very steep for a twenty something just hitting the workforce.
And I haven’t said much about dysfunctional families. The portrait above is for a typical somewhat healthy family. Add some obesity, alcohol, poor character and you’re now looking at another big fraction of families. Of course some families are better than I’ve described.
Apologies for posting over several comments, but I'm having problems posting even a couple of short paragraphs for replies to comments on other writer's threads. I cleared my browser cache yesterday and disabled browser extensions and that seemed to fix the problem. But now it's back!
East Germany managed to breakdown this traditional socially conservative outlook at the interpersonal level, particular with regard to stable family formation. East German economic outcomes have been lagging behind ever since at the local level.
A part of the problem is adult workload. When the workers convinced the managers at Porsche to drop their hours, from a 32 hour week to 28 hours, total cars made per week actually went up. Bloody Germans! One of the things which many don't realise about the Germans and Nordic Model states is that they may be politically to the Left, even progressive in many respects- but they are also highly socially conservative.
My IT problem appear insoluble. It's not browser cache or extensions. It's not Chrome- I've tried Brave. It's not my shortcut. I don't appear to be able to enter lengthy replies to comments, specifically on threads :(
I will have to ask whether there might be software incompatibilities with modded versions of Discourse.
With neighbours, it's the Homeowner's Association from Hell. My brother, like me, is Anglo-American- but born and mostly raised in the UK. In the UK, if you have a problem with a neighbour, you talk to them, preferably politely. My brother and his Swedish wife keep dogs. They received a written complaint because Christian was waiting to pick up the dog's mess in his own yard until there were several and had cooled down. Very passive aggressive.
Pro-family. Non-PC- apart from on gender. To give an example, a Swede wouldn't have a problem with saying that migrants need to integrate into Swedish society and adopt Swedish values. They have stronger social enforcement. To give a practical example, many young Swedes will go out and drink on a weekend- but going to one of their state-owned liquor franchises and buying booze on a weekday would be heavily frowned upon.
Our ancestors used to treat kids who could walk like little adults who needed to be trained- instead of cuddly toys requiring constant hugs. There was a happy medium in which play mechanisms and instruction was far more profoundly healthy for both adult and child, but we passed that point decades ago in the West, hurtling past like a race car barely sticking to the track.
I'm wondering if there is not a common cause to many or most of these rightly pointed out worries. Real or imagined, the phenomena pointed to are worries. That common cause might be increased risk aversion. Makes sense with rising incomes. We are willing to pay more to avoid risks when we are richer.
I grew up in the northeastern most bit of AOC's district in the Bronx. That in NY City, strangely it was almost rural for a few more years. So, I was free range: Go play with the kids! I wished to recreate the free range stuff for my daughter here in Northern Virginia. Though we lived modestly, wife and I were almost able to recreate that chance. Having grown up in NY City, I knew all about it, and particularly envied Holden Caulfield for taking taxis everywhere around Central Park. Well, the day came, when wife and I were at work, and daughter had to go to Girl Scouts, or another fascist organization. By phone, I said to her to order a cab. She did, and tried to pick up a girlfriend along the way. The scene that ensued! Friend's mother in panic, even though she saw who was riding! Risk aversion has its amusing sides.
You listed “Cost Disease” as one of the problems, then started with the word “Environmental” under Candidate Explanations.
Yet strikingly you did not include “environmentalists” as a prime candidate for Cost Disease, as their activism and the judges and bureaucrats - and in some cases, likely, Congress - that enable them seems a blindingly obvious one when it comes to large projects.
Of course, the case of high speed rail in CA is probably the rare one that the delays are a good thing in that it is preventing throwing away even more taxpayer money on a terrible investment.
P.S. I cheer your P.S. as explaining quite a lot. Leftist monoculture.
This is a great conversation to spark and I hope researchers search for correlations to help build these or other hypotheses.
Another idea I've heard from Robert Hanson is the idea of cultural drift which is an analogy to genetic drift and he hypothesizes that the tendency towards a global monoculture might reduce competition between cultures and we might go down cultural deadends without any counterpressures (his main question is declining fertility): https://archive.is/AqdBK
One proposed cause of problems that has some credibility for me is the consumption of polyunsaturated fats, as in margarine and many vegetable oils. Chemically these may be subject to oxidative breaking of their double bonds, followed by cross-linking of carbon chains to produce molecular snarls that can't easily be broken down. This shift seems to have been motivated partly economically, but partly by official propaganda about the perils of saturated fats.
Regarding allergies, the Hygiene Hypothesis suggests that reduced childhood exposure to microorganisms has led to the rise in allergies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis). It seems that the extent of that effect is debated, but that the idea that childhood exposure to allergens reduces later allergic reactions to them is more robust. E.g. regarding peanut allergy: https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/EVIDoa2300311.
Regarding the frequency of autism diagnoses, this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1857871534402187325 shows that symptoms of autism diagnosees are less severe than those of the past, which corresponds to a change diagnostic practices.
I would like to propose another candidate- soft cost inflation caused by system dynamics and elite overproduction. A simpler way of putting it would be 'too many chiefs...'
It applies particularly to infrastructure, especially large infrastructure. Basically the political realm creates a regulatory franchise which other elites can parasitize. It happens with nuclear, but one can also see the effects of this trend with the increasingly fuzzy definition of what constitutes infrastructure. This doesn't mean certain types of infrastructure aren't innately inadvisable white elephants- high speed rail would be a prime example.
Politicians imagine high speed adds to national prestige and will encourage inward investment from the business/investor class. It's certainly something to flatter as a means of pursuing a lobbying interest- but countries or states which have built high speed recently tend to be the global locations worth avoiding in investment terms. All the money is flowing to countries which can build nuclear quickly, cheaply and safety- to Asian emerging markets.
Good post, personally I’m largely agnostic on the fundamental causes of various modern pathologies etc. but the most probable ones that come to mind are: obesity caused by wealth/maladaptation, behaviour modifying pathogens, cultural drift, mutational load, differential fertility, government/law, cultural liberalism, schooling, bad food, non government institutions etc. Some are definitely more scary than others, if mutational load is correct dysfunction will just accumulate and require significant changes to correct, and something like cultural drift seems impossible to fundamentally fix, you would just have to wait it out.
Mutational load is less scary if you assume that technological progress will give us new tools to deal with it. The obvious one is selective abortion, which gets more effective the better we are identifying a fetus with significant adverse mutations. IVF with multiple embryos and genetic testing before choosing which to implant takes the same approach farther, and becomes easier as genetic technology improves and we become better at IVF. If we can separately select on sperm and egg that becomes a much more powerful version. Eventually we may have genetic engineering, be able to fix defective germ cells.
IIRC Razib Khan did object to some of the claims Johnathan Anomaly was making about mutational load, seemingly based on the fact that the miscarriage rate is probably very high and increases with maternal age, Sebastian Jensen has also argued against it (https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/taking-mutational-load-seriously).
But supposing it is genetic, I'm personally not very optimistic about the prospects for biotech eugenics, that as best as I can tell from my fellow Zoomers they are just really averse to the even the most liberal implementations of the tech, maybe if social elites adopted it, they would follow, but seems more likely to just ban it and disregard the future.
Are your fellow zoomers unwilling to abort a Downs fetus or equivalent or only unwilling to talk about it? That's the lowest cost and lowest tech version of biotech eugenics, aside from selective infanticide of newborns, illegal in the US but probably happening here and elsewhere.
Other versions I discuss require IVF, which is difficult and expensive. Do your fellow zoomers oppose IVF for couples who can't produce children naturally?
I honestly couldn't find a single person among my peers who were pro "genetic enhancement" with regards to embryo selection or CRISPR. That at least taking what they said at face value, most were willing to try to eliminate mendelian diseases or select against the far left tail etc. but didn't even regard aging to be a disease, or seem to realize how truncation selection would move the mean phenotype and how arbitrary the threshold for diseases are.
That I could In fact find several people whose views were only moderately more subtle/complex than being pro abortion EXCEPT in cases where the baby has Downs. I'm aware that this is a classic example of social desirability bias, and that the people I was discussing this with were trying to balance the moral intuitions about women's bodily autonomy and the eugenics "ick".
But ultimately given that politics is basically just social signaling and the kind of incentives lawmakers face etc. there is the real potential to end up in bad equilibrium where the tech is banned even if significant people would like to use it. We're not at peak Bioleninism yet, but the vast majority of people have internalized the eugenics bogeyman.
Both Sweden and Iran have been subject to lots of international pressure for rejecting the consensus view of lockdowns and organ sales respectively, hard to predict the future but whatever the cause of cultural barriers to eugenics they seem hard to overcome and maybe getting worse.
But more importantly even if there is some space for it to be practiced, absent widespread adoption most of the word just degenerates, which coupled with differential fertility between populations doesn't give a optimistic picture.
“Sitting in a classroom for many hours a day…” For almost all of human history and prehistory, children were with parents and other kin, in a band or village, working together, and presumably playing and entertaining themselves when they could afford it. Today, kids go to school, and parents go to work. They are separate for the working part of their day.
At home parents probably don’t interact with their kids enough, except for a narrow set of activities. Probably TV, car shuttling, eating together, and basic communications to workout logistics, permissions, discipline, etc.
There is very little interaction between parents and children with regard to things that matter compared to past times. In order for children to inherit from their parents a comprehensive culture, norms, habits, folkways, modes of problem solving, their school would need to be MUCH more than it currently is. It seems that school is pretty narrow. Many worksheets. A fair amount of busy work. College is an improvement, but most college professors have never worked in industry. So it is quite a shock for a twenty-something to enter the workforce after having spent so little time with people, particularly his or her parents doing real work and solving life’s many problems. Cooking, exercise, legal, corporate communication, interviewing, dating, home maintenance, politics, etc. The learning curve is very steep for a twenty something just hitting the workforce.
And I haven’t said much about dysfunctional families. The portrait above is for a typical somewhat healthy family. Add some obesity, alcohol, poor character and you’re now looking at another big fraction of families. Of course some families are better than I’ve described.
Alcohol and poor character are not new, so don't explain recent problems.
True.
Apologies for posting over several comments, but I'm having problems posting even a couple of short paragraphs for replies to comments on other writer's threads. I cleared my browser cache yesterday and disabled browser extensions and that seemed to fix the problem. But now it's back!
See my comment above. Create a short comment, then edit it to your heart's content.
I have had the same problem and found the same solution.
East Germany managed to breakdown this traditional socially conservative outlook at the interpersonal level, particular with regard to stable family formation. East German economic outcomes have been lagging behind ever since at the local level.
A part of the problem is adult workload. When the workers convinced the managers at Porsche to drop their hours, from a 32 hour week to 28 hours, total cars made per week actually went up. Bloody Germans! One of the things which many don't realise about the Germans and Nordic Model states is that they may be politically to the Left, even progressive in many respects- but they are also highly socially conservative.
Interesting. In what ways are they highly socially conservative?
My IT problem appear insoluble. It's not browser cache or extensions. It's not Chrome- I've tried Brave. It's not my shortcut. I don't appear to be able to enter lengthy replies to comments, specifically on threads :(
I will have to ask whether there might be software incompatibilities with modded versions of Discourse.
Is this the problem I found where typing too long a comment pushes the CANCEL and REPLY buttons into the next comment where they can't be clicked?
Someone told me you can enter a short comment, then edit it and it expands properly.
ETA: That is in fact what I had to do here. Click the three dots to the far right of the name/date line above the comment.
It
doesn't
expand
the
box,
it
just
scrolls
excess
lines
up
and
out
of
sight.
Oh thank you so much! I had tried everything else. GPU drivers. Browser cache and extensions. Updating Chrome. Switching to Brave.
With neighbours, it's the Homeowner's Association from Hell. My brother, like me, is Anglo-American- but born and mostly raised in the UK. In the UK, if you have a problem with a neighbour, you talk to them, preferably politely. My brother and his Swedish wife keep dogs. They received a written complaint because Christian was waiting to pick up the dog's mess in his own yard until there were several and had cooled down. Very passive aggressive.
Pro-family. Non-PC- apart from on gender. To give an example, a Swede wouldn't have a problem with saying that migrants need to integrate into Swedish society and adopt Swedish values. They have stronger social enforcement. To give a practical example, many young Swedes will go out and drink on a weekend- but going to one of their state-owned liquor franchises and buying booze on a weekday would be heavily frowned upon.
Our ancestors used to treat kids who could walk like little adults who needed to be trained- instead of cuddly toys requiring constant hugs. There was a happy medium in which play mechanisms and instruction was far more profoundly healthy for both adult and child, but we passed that point decades ago in the West, hurtling past like a race car barely sticking to the track.
I'm wondering if there is not a common cause to many or most of these rightly pointed out worries. Real or imagined, the phenomena pointed to are worries. That common cause might be increased risk aversion. Makes sense with rising incomes. We are willing to pay more to avoid risks when we are richer.
I grew up in the northeastern most bit of AOC's district in the Bronx. That in NY City, strangely it was almost rural for a few more years. So, I was free range: Go play with the kids! I wished to recreate the free range stuff for my daughter here in Northern Virginia. Though we lived modestly, wife and I were almost able to recreate that chance. Having grown up in NY City, I knew all about it, and particularly envied Holden Caulfield for taking taxis everywhere around Central Park. Well, the day came, when wife and I were at work, and daughter had to go to Girl Scouts, or another fascist organization. By phone, I said to her to order a cab. She did, and tried to pick up a girlfriend along the way. The scene that ensued! Friend's mother in panic, even though she saw who was riding! Risk aversion has its amusing sides.
You listed “Cost Disease” as one of the problems, then started with the word “Environmental” under Candidate Explanations.
Yet strikingly you did not include “environmentalists” as a prime candidate for Cost Disease, as their activism and the judges and bureaucrats - and in some cases, likely, Congress - that enable them seems a blindingly obvious one when it comes to large projects.
Of course, the case of high speed rail in CA is probably the rare one that the delays are a good thing in that it is preventing throwing away even more taxpayer money on a terrible investment.
P.S. I cheer your P.S. as explaining quite a lot. Leftist monoculture.
This is a great conversation to spark and I hope researchers search for correlations to help build these or other hypotheses.
Another idea I've heard from Robert Hanson is the idea of cultural drift which is an analogy to genetic drift and he hypothesizes that the tendency towards a global monoculture might reduce competition between cultures and we might go down cultural deadends without any counterpressures (his main question is declining fertility): https://archive.is/AqdBK
Robin Hanson.
Affluenza.
One proposed cause of problems that has some credibility for me is the consumption of polyunsaturated fats, as in margarine and many vegetable oils. Chemically these may be subject to oxidative breaking of their double bonds, followed by cross-linking of carbon chains to produce molecular snarls that can't easily be broken down. This shift seems to have been motivated partly economically, but partly by official propaganda about the perils of saturated fats.
Regarding allergies, the Hygiene Hypothesis suggests that reduced childhood exposure to microorganisms has led to the rise in allergies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis). It seems that the extent of that effect is debated, but that the idea that childhood exposure to allergens reduces later allergic reactions to them is more robust. E.g. regarding peanut allergy: https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/EVIDoa2300311.
Regarding the frequency of autism diagnoses, this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1857871534402187325 shows that symptoms of autism diagnosees are less severe than those of the past, which corresponds to a change diagnostic practices.
Regarding obesity, body mass in the US has been increasing continuously for over a century (as discussed in this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1858776358228254859). As noted in this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1858704235853979878 it can be amply explained by the increase in calorie consumption, and decrease in physical activity.
I would like to propose another candidate- soft cost inflation caused by system dynamics and elite overproduction. A simpler way of putting it would be 'too many chiefs...'
It applies particularly to infrastructure, especially large infrastructure. Basically the political realm creates a regulatory franchise which other elites can parasitize. It happens with nuclear, but one can also see the effects of this trend with the increasingly fuzzy definition of what constitutes infrastructure. This doesn't mean certain types of infrastructure aren't innately inadvisable white elephants- high speed rail would be a prime example.
Politicians imagine high speed adds to national prestige and will encourage inward investment from the business/investor class. It's certainly something to flatter as a means of pursuing a lobbying interest- but countries or states which have built high speed recently tend to be the global locations worth avoiding in investment terms. All the money is flowing to countries which can build nuclear quickly, cheaply and safety- to Asian emerging markets.
Good post, personally I’m largely agnostic on the fundamental causes of various modern pathologies etc. but the most probable ones that come to mind are: obesity caused by wealth/maladaptation, behaviour modifying pathogens, cultural drift, mutational load, differential fertility, government/law, cultural liberalism, schooling, bad food, non government institutions etc. Some are definitely more scary than others, if mutational load is correct dysfunction will just accumulate and require significant changes to correct, and something like cultural drift seems impossible to fundamentally fix, you would just have to wait it out.
Mutational load is less scary if you assume that technological progress will give us new tools to deal with it. The obvious one is selective abortion, which gets more effective the better we are identifying a fetus with significant adverse mutations. IVF with multiple embryos and genetic testing before choosing which to implant takes the same approach farther, and becomes easier as genetic technology improves and we become better at IVF. If we can separately select on sperm and egg that becomes a much more powerful version. Eventually we may have genetic engineering, be able to fix defective germ cells.
IIRC Razib Khan did object to some of the claims Johnathan Anomaly was making about mutational load, seemingly based on the fact that the miscarriage rate is probably very high and increases with maternal age, Sebastian Jensen has also argued against it (https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/taking-mutational-load-seriously).
But supposing it is genetic, I'm personally not very optimistic about the prospects for biotech eugenics, that as best as I can tell from my fellow Zoomers they are just really averse to the even the most liberal implementations of the tech, maybe if social elites adopted it, they would follow, but seems more likely to just ban it and disregard the future.
Are your fellow zoomers unwilling to abort a Downs fetus or equivalent or only unwilling to talk about it? That's the lowest cost and lowest tech version of biotech eugenics, aside from selective infanticide of newborns, illegal in the US but probably happening here and elsewhere.
Other versions I discuss require IVF, which is difficult and expensive. Do your fellow zoomers oppose IVF for couples who can't produce children naturally?
I honestly couldn't find a single person among my peers who were pro "genetic enhancement" with regards to embryo selection or CRISPR. That at least taking what they said at face value, most were willing to try to eliminate mendelian diseases or select against the far left tail etc. but didn't even regard aging to be a disease, or seem to realize how truncation selection would move the mean phenotype and how arbitrary the threshold for diseases are.
That I could In fact find several people whose views were only moderately more subtle/complex than being pro abortion EXCEPT in cases where the baby has Downs. I'm aware that this is a classic example of social desirability bias, and that the people I was discussing this with were trying to balance the moral intuitions about women's bodily autonomy and the eugenics "ick".
But ultimately given that politics is basically just social signaling and the kind of incentives lawmakers face etc. there is the real potential to end up in bad equilibrium where the tech is banned even if significant people would like to use it. We're not at peak Bioleninism yet, but the vast majority of people have internalized the eugenics bogeyman.
Fortunately there are multiple countries, and they are not all going to do the same things. Consider Sweden during Covid.
Both Sweden and Iran have been subject to lots of international pressure for rejecting the consensus view of lockdowns and organ sales respectively, hard to predict the future but whatever the cause of cultural barriers to eugenics they seem hard to overcome and maybe getting worse.
But more importantly even if there is some space for it to be practiced, absent widespread adoption most of the word just degenerates, which coupled with differential fertility between populations doesn't give a optimistic picture.